The Covid-19 Vaccines
Circling the Drain of Truth
What is the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines? Are they as safe and effective as their proponents claim? Or are they ineffective and fraught with troublesome and dangerous side effects? Or does the truth exist somewhere between these two extremes? There must exist thousands of claims, both for and against, scattered across the four winds of the internet. How are we supposed to evaluate these claims? How are they to be weighed and tested?
With the Biden administration’s recent decision to implement vaccine mandates by trying to deprive the unvaccinated of employment suddenly the whole controversy over the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines has taken on momentous proportions. Tens of millions of Americans who, for various reasons, regard the vaccines with suspicion, may be forced to choose between keeping their jobs and succumbing to a vaccination that could inflict upon its victims a lifetime of undiagnosable and appalling maladies, if not worse! With so much at stake, the last thing anyone would want is to languish in ignorance. It is imperative that before agreeing to a Covid-19 vaccination, we should have at least some understanding of what is at stake in so difficult and troubling a decision.
What can be said on behalf of these vaccines? The entire raison d'être behind mass vaccination ultimately stems from the assumption that the Covid-19 pandemic is a big deal. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a dangerous disease that has already killed four and a half million people world-wide and over 800,000 in the United States. Hence the awful necessity of inflicting an untried “experimental” virus on the population at large. These vaccines have undergone very intense clinical trials involving large numbers of people. While they are not entirely free of nasty side effects, they are—or so we have been told—significantly less dangerous than a Covid-19 infection. A CDC study claims that the unvaccinated are ten times more likely to die and eleven times more likely to be hospitalized than those who had been fully vaccinated. While the VEARS reporting system has chronicled 19,532 deaths, of which about half (8,986) occurred in the United States. Assuming the VEARS data is correct (which admittedly is a large assumption), that means only about .005 percent of those fully vaccinated in the U.S. have died from the vaccine (total vaccinated is 194.7 million. Compare that to the percentage of those who die from a reported Covid-19 infection—which stands at .2 percent. If these figures are correct, that would mean that the death rate for Covid-19 is 44 times higher than the death rate for the vaccine (i.e. .2 percent is roughly 44 times greater than .005 percent). Any death is a tragedy, but when dealing with a virus that poses as great a threat to public safety and the fragile health system as Covid-19, it could be argued that some level of sacrifice must be necessary. If a handful of people die from taking the vaccine and a larger handful are permanently maimed by it, that is preferable to the millions who would otherwise die at the hands of the virus. Those who have in some way been harmed by vaccination could be said to have taken one for the team. But through their sacrifice many lives have been saved and a path has been opened to a much desired return to normal. So, in any case, would enfold a rational and honest case on behalf of Covid-19 vaccination.
Yet before continuing, we must confront some very serious issues in the datasets derived from VAERS. There are two huge problems, each operating in opposing directions. In the first place, it must be acknowledged that not all deaths reported in the VAERS system can be attributed to the Covid-19 vaccines, for the simple reason that correlation does not prove causation. Hence the problem of “background” deaths—that is, deaths would have occurred whether there had been a vaccination or not. The legendary baseball figure Hank Aaron died only months after receiving his vaccination. Did he pass away because of the vaccine? Almost certainly not. Hank Aaron was 87 years old and hardly in the best of health. The tendency of Covid-19 vaccine advocates, including the CDC, is to attribute nearly all the deaths reported in VAERS to background deaths. The problem with this assumption isn’t it doesn’t jive with some of the data. If all the deaths associated with the vaccines had nothing to do with vaccination, you would expect mortality not to spike around the time of vaccination. In the VAERS database, one finds incidences of death spiking directly after vaccination, and then slowly receding:
It is therefore very unlikely that all or even most of fatalities reported in VAERS can be explained away by declaring them as “background deaths.” But at least some of the deaths must be related to vaccination. How many? For our purposes, we will guess about half. That gives us a figure of 4,493 vaccine deaths in the U.S. But now we have an additional problem to reckon with—the issue of underreporting in VAERS. Estimates of underreporting vary from about a factor of five (Dr. Peter McCullough) to well over a hundred. Steve Kirsch estimates a factor of 41. For our purposes, we’ll choose the ultra-conservative figure of five. That puts the death count at 22,465—or .01 percent of the fully vaccinated.
That still might seem like a diminutive figure. It is roughly twenty times higher than the death rate for Covid-19. But there are additional issues which have to be factored into our analysis, the most important of which is the differentiated risk factor for various groups in society. Healthy young people have a very low risk profile, which means that even the death rate from vaccination is extremely low, it may be close to their mortality rate for Covid-19. This becomes especially true when we factor in the issue multiple doses, which seem ever more necessary as the efficacy of the vaccines declines rapidly within a few months.
The pro-vaccine camp seems very reluctant to speak candidly of the disadvantages, even if they should prove very rare, of vaccination. This patronizing lack of candor undermines the credibility of those seeking to make the best case possible for the vaccines. The fact is, the biggest problem with the so-called “vaccine hesitancy” is not the spread of “misinformation.” It stems rather from an issue of trust—or the lack thereof. The entire ruling class, including the political, media, intellectual and academic establishments, have been guilty of various degrees of dishonesty and bad faith. They seemingly lie about everything, whether relating to politics, war, climate, or health. Even the so-called “scientific” establishment, which should know better, has dabbled in deceit. Consider, as just one particularly egregious example, the notorious Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor the the President, is the ruling elite’s front man for the battle against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In 2014 the NIAID, while under Fauci’s directorship, approved a $3.1 million grant for a project entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” A portion of that grant ($599,000) was sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for research into “gain-of function” capabilities—which in layman’s terms means: research into making viruses more dangerous and/or infectious. When Senator Rand Paul questioned Fauci about the possibility that the NIH might have helped to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology gain of function research, Fauci strenuously denied it. The NIH, he claimed, “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” To claim otherwise, he insisted, was “demonstrably false.”
Fauci’s declarations contradict documents which, in the words of Dr. Richard Ebright, “make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
The reason why this is such a damaging lie is because it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is the consequence of that very gain-of-function research undertaken by the Wuhan Institute of Virology—which leads us to Fauci’s second big lie. In January of 2020, Fauci was warned by NIH scientist Kristian Andersen that the SARS-CoV-2 virus looked “potentially engineered”—that in other words, it may have been produced through intentional and malicious design. Yet several months later, during testimony in front of Congress and during official White House Task Force briefings, Fauci several times insisted that the virus could not have been manufactured by a lab. Fauci’s testimony was used to justify censorship by the major social media monopolies—Facebook, Google, and Twitter—of anyone who speculated that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab. In other words, Fauci’s lies were being used by Big Tech as the pretext to censor speculation about the Wuhan Lab in China that are probably true.
Next we must deal with Fauci’s lies about masks. In the early stages of the pandemic, Fauci advised against wearing masks, claiming they were ineffective at stopping the virus:
There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
And:
The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. I do not recommend that you wear a mask to travel by air.
A few months later Fauci would reverse course and begin supporting masks, presumably on the basis of the following CDC recommendation:
We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms ("asymptomatic") and that even those who eventually develop symptoms ("pre-symptomatic") can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity—for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing—even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms. In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.
Even though this CDC recommendation mentions the word “evidence,” it is noteworthy by its conspicuous absence. What we get instead is a classic non sequitur. The fact that people in close proximity can spread the virus in no way demonstrates that masks provide protections against the spread of the disease. A recent government study concluded that
There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.
The entire establishment—federal, local, and state governments, the media, corporations, and of course Dr. Fauci—all strenuously supported various mask mandates. They insisted that masks were necessary to save lives and they used both social and political coercion to enforce them. It was all a big lie. They never had credible scientific evidence that plastering pieces of cloth across everyone’s face helped prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus. But, per usual, they didn’t care. In spite of the evidence, they insisted on the use of these suffocation devices all the same. Fauci, of course, knew better, but didn’t have the guts to speak the truth.
Sometimes the dishonesty is not quite so blatant. Instead of outright lying, we have “spin.” Prior to Biden’s election, many in the media were concerned about the insane speed at which the vaccines were being developed. In September of 2020, CNN reporter Jen Christensen wrote:
Vaccine experts are warning the federal government against rushing out a coronavirus vaccine before testing has shown it's both safe and effective... When the vaccine making process has been rushed, there have been bad outcomes... Decades of history show why [this is] right.
This skepticism about the vaccines was fairly common during Trump’s Presidency—nor did the Big Tech companies seek to censure expressions of it. But after Biden defeated Trump in November of 2020 we saw a complete one-eighty among the establishment lickspittles. Concerns about the speed of the development and the novelty of mRNA technology were casually brushed aside as being entirely irrelevant. Typical in this respect is Professor Teresa Foley, who rationalized her support of the experimental vaccines as follows:
A lot of individuals are concerned about how quickly the vaccines were developed. They feel like it was a rushed process, as it typically takes about 73 months to develop a vaccine and this was done in 14 months. I ask them to think about it in terms of a group project. Yes, it may seem it was developed faster than usual. But never before has the entire world been working on the same group project at the same time. Out of 326 trials and 111 vaccine candidates worldwide, only 14 have been approved by at least one country. That shows the process is working. As a scientist myself, I trust it.
As a scientist, Professor Foley’s demonstrates a surprising ineptitude at basic logic. The fact that the vaccines have been subjected to 326 trials world-wide is nothing to the purpose. The testing period for these trials was still limited to a few months at most. Pfizer’s Phase Three trials, for example, covered only a two month period. Nor is the fact that these studies involved tens of thousands of participants in the least relevant. The safety and effectiveness of these products cannot be established in only a few months of testing and development. Rushing the vaccines to market meant that they were never used on animals and never tested for long-term effects. Professor Foley, by sedulously ignoring these obvious issues, is clearly engaging in spin—which hardly serves to inspire confidence in her “scientific” credentials.
When they aren’t spreading misinformation and lies, the establishment elites are going out of their way to muzzle their critics. The politicians of the Democrat Party, along with the most perfervid members of their base, have been especially shameless in their calls for censorship. As the Congressman Adam Schiff, notorious for his lies about Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Russia, tweeted:
Vaccine hesitancy stands between us and the end of this pandemic. And companies like @amazon and @facebook must do far more to tackle the viral spread of misinformation online. We need transparency. And we need accountability. Lives are on the line.
This tweet constitutes a veiled threat, a shot over the bow to amazon and Facebook indicating the need to conform to the government’s narrative or else. It is a perfidious threat incompatible with the spirit of science and open debate. If Schiff were confident in the truth of his views, there would be no need for him to silence those who had the temerity to disagree with him. By enlisting private companies in his cause of censorship, he has essentially made a dangerous end run around the First Amendment. Using private companies to stifle dissent is hardly distinguishable from using the police or the judiciary. The end result is pretty much the same.
The lack of self-awareness that the denizens of the prevailing ruling elite (such as Congressman Schiff) exhibit is marvelous to behold. They really don’t understand that all their efforts on behalf of mass vaccination are counter-productive and ultimately self-defeating. Censorship is always bad persuasion. It undermines any sense of trust, and no argument based on “science” is persuasive where trust is lacking. An appeal to science is an appeal to authority, and all such appeals rest on a logical fallacy—namely, the argumentum ad verecundiam. Such appeals to authority therefore cannot be regarded as “rational.” They are based, not on “logic” or “reason” or “evidence,” but on trust—on trust that the experts, the constituted authorities, know what they’re doing and can be relied upon to tell the public the truth. Once these authorities, through their arrogance, their contempt for open debate, their multiple misprognistications, and their outright lies, betray the public trust, they can no longer be cited as credible sources. They have essentially forfeited their status as authoritative experts. They are little more than shills for the rich and the powerful.
There are three main issues at stake when it comes to assessing the medical establishment’s contentions that the Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective: (1) Suppression of therapeutics; (2) Claims about natural immunity; (3) Claims about harmful side effects from the vaccines. Let’s examine each of these in turn.
Suppression of therapeutics. Those who have been keeping abreast of the mainstream narrative know that according to “science,” making use of such drugs as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which have been touted by many doctors, needs to be thoroughly discouraged and even condemned. According to the establishment narrative, these medications are ineffective and potentially dangerous.
The controversy over hydroxychloroquine first erupted when President Donald Trump suggested the medication might prove useful in treating victims of Covid-19. This precipitated an immense push by the mainstream media to malign the drug as useless and dangerous. In the spring of 2020, three “studies” came out in so-called scientific journals claiming that clinical trials conclusively demonstrated the inefficacy of the medication as a treatment for Covid-19. A peer reviewed article published in the prestigious The Lancet went so far as to claim that hydroxychloroquine led to a dangerous increase in heartbeat irregularities and a lower hospital survival rate. The media spread the results of this study far and wide, rejoicing that the contentions of Donald Trump on behalf of hydroxychloroquine had been so thoroughly routed. Yet within weeks of the publication of this study, The Lancet was forced to issue a complete retraction. All the article’s contentions against hydroxychloroquine were based on fraudulent data. A similar fate occurred to a second article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Then appeared a third article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which supported its pretensions against hydroxychloroquine through a blatant act of criminal sabotage. As Dr. Simone Gold explained:
In the case of the JAMA study, the scientists gave up to 2.5x lethal dosage of the medication. Unsurprisingly so many patients died they halted the study early. They also cherry-picked patients [for the study.] JAMA knew of these problems and published the study anyway. Various scientists have demanded its retraction, and even now, with civil and criminal investigations into these deaths, the study is still not retracted. And the headlines around this study blame the drug, not the fact that old, sick, hospitalized, compromised patients were given toxic doses of a drug.
A similar controversy has arisen over ivermectin, with each side in the debate pointing to various clinical trials that either prove or disprove the drugs effectiveness as a therapeutic to combat Covid-19. In trying to make sense of these scientific squabbles the public is forced to choose between competing experts, each citing multiple studies that support their side in the controversy. For the layperson unqualified to analyze the evidence, it really comes down to which set of experts comes off as least untrustworthy. The anti-ivermectin contingent enjoys the advantage of having the broad support of the medical establishment and America’s ruling elite. Unfortunately, this advantage has been abused in ways that undermine its legitimacy. Instead of open debate, the medical establishment has sought to censor the advocates of ivermectin on Facebook and YouTube.
Consider the fate of Dr. Pierre Kory who, on December 8, 2020, testified in front of the US Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin. Journalist Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author, described how the media, in cahoots with Big Pharm, sought to censor and discredit Dr. Kory and other advocates of ivermectin:
A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain [wrote Capuzzo]. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.
Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters.
Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and remove the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries.
In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.
Why are so many establishment figures in politics, medicine, and the media so intent on silencing the advocates of ivermectin? Why are they opposed to using open debate to settle the scientific question of ivermectin’s effectiveness? Why are they so quick to dismiss out of hand the evidence that has so far been accumulated on behalf of this inexpensive medication? And what are we to think of the asymmetry of political and social power between the two sides in the debate? Prima facie, if you have a conflict between two groups of professional doctors and scientists on a pressing medical issue and one side insists on censoring and persecuting the other, how does that reflect on the credibility of the side that resorts to coercion to put its point across? Since when does censoring one’s opponents increase one’s credibility?
Another way to approach this issue is to inquire into the motives behind the censorship of ivermectin’s advocates. The usual justification for muzzling proponents of alternative treatments is to prevent the dissemination of “misinformation.” But since when does one side in the debate get to decide what qualifies as misinformation? By equating advocacy of ivermectin with misinformation, isn’t the medical establishment assuming the very point at issue? And since when is truth determined by whoever has the most power?
In any discussion of power and medicine, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Big Pharma. Take the pharmaceutical companies out of the equation and there really isn’t any reason why the medical journals should have published three straight fraudulent studies on hydroxychloroquine, or why Google and Facebook should be censoring the efforts of doctors to promote ivermectin to treatment for Covid-19. The establishments’s mania to discredit these therapeutics only makes sense in the context of Big Pharma’s eagerness to reap the profits of mass vaccination. Since the vaccines were developed with such haste, the FDA could not in conscience give them their stamp of approval. These experimental vaccines could only be put to general use though an EUA (i.e., an emergency use authorization). Now an EUA can only be issued if there are no effective alternative treatments available. If either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin were shown to cure the vast majority of those with serious Covid-19 infections, an EUA could not, by law, have been extended to the vaccines, and Big Pharma would have lost tens of billions of dollars. With so much money on the line, is it any wonder that the medical establishment has been so eager to discredit both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments for Covid-19?
It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the economic and political power of Big Pharma.The pharmaceutical companies are worth $1.3 trillion en toto, which is two and half times the worth of Big Tobacco and nearly a hundred times the worth of the NFL. With so much cash at its disposal, Big Pharma has, over the last twenty years, spent $4 billion on lobbying Congress. That is more than all the gas companies, the defense industry, and aerospace combined.
With so much influence and economic power at its disposal, it should come as no surprise to find Big Pharma hard at work corrupting science for their own nefarious purposes. As Dr. Kamran Abbasi executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote in a chilling editorial:
Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.
Two of the most prestigious medical journals are The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). According to the testimony of Dr. Dousty-Blazy, the former French Health Minister:
The Lancet’s boss … said … the pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today and are able to use such methodologies as to have us accept papers which … in reality manage to conclude what they want ... I have been doing research for 20 years of my life. I never thought the boss of The Lancet could say that. And the boss of the NEJM too. He even said it was “criminal.”
Dr. Ben Goldacre, a British physician and academic, wrote in his 2012 book Bad Pharma:
Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all. [Bad Pharma, xi]
According to Dr. Goldacre, “industry-funded trials are more likely to produce a positive, flattering result than independently-funded trials.” The differences are often dramatic:
[I]n 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry?1 They found over five hundred trials in total: 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50 percent of the government-funded trials were. That’s a very significant difference.
In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefit of a statin. These are cholesterol-lowering drugs which reduce your risk of having a heart attack, they are prescribed in very large quantities, and they will loom large in this book. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. Once the researchers controlled for other factors (we’ll delve into what this means later), they found that industry-funded trials were twenty times more likely to give results favouring the test drug. Again, that’s a very big difference. [1]
With its vast influence and power, Big Pharma can reach its tentacles even into the very bowels of health and regulatory agencies like the FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO). One of the reasons why the use of ivermectin has been restricted is because WHO insisted that more clinical trials are needed before they would be willing to give the medicine their stamp of approval. When Dr. Jackie Stone, a physician practicing in Zimbabwe, was asked about this, she replied:
I find it very hard to understand how [WHO] can say that there is not sufficient evidence [for use of ivermectin]. There are three thousand patients plus in, I think, twenty-four trials where they demonstrate an over 75% reduction in mortality. Those figures fit exactly with what we have seen.
Dr. Tess Lawrie, a participant of a meta-analysis of clinical trials supportive of ivermectin, when asked to explain WHO’s animus to the drug, suggested it may have had something to do with the fact that a primary source of funding for WHO comes from the pharmaceutical industry. “The pharmaceutical industry will earn billions of dollars from vaccines and from expensive patented treatments,” wrote journalist Nadya Swart, “that gives them an incentive to shape the narrative about ivermectin to their own purposes.”
Claims about natural immunity. Ever since the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines, the U.S. medical establishment has insisted that individuals with “natural immunity” (i.e, those who have gained immunity from a Covid-19 infection) should nonetheless succumb to vaccination. The CDC provides the following two reasons for getting vaccinated:
Research has not yet shown how long you are protected from getting COVID-19 again after you recover from COVID-19.
Vaccination helps protect you even if you’ve already had COVID-19.
The first reason makes no sense. While it might be true that researchers don’t know exactly how long natural immunity might last, the exact same thing can be said about the immunity provided by the vaccines. The second justification is just as baffling. There is only one study (and a flawed study at that) which supports the CDC’s contention that vaccination helps “protect” even those with natural immunity. Meanwhile, there are at least 15 studies that support the opposite conclusion. As Marty Makary of the John Hopkins School of Medicine argued in The Washington Post:
More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.
When Anthony Fauci was asked by CNN’s Sanjay Gupta whether those who have natural immunity to Covid-19 should get vaccinated, the director of the NIAID replied, “I don't have a really firm answer for you on that. I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously."
Isn’t this something that should have been discussed months ago, before the CDC decided to push the vaccines on those with natural immunity? Again, they keep giving us reasons not to trust them. It’s almost as if they are doing it on purpose.
Claims about safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. It is not clear that the medical establishment has any idea, or any interest, in thoroughly examining the evidence relating to the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. Here’s what CDC notes about potential long term side effects from Covid-19 vaccination:
Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccine monitoring has historically shown that side effects generally happen within six weeks of receiving a vaccine dose. For this reason, the FDA required each of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines to be studied for at least two months (eight weeks) after the final dose.
What the CDC is conveniently ignoring is that these vaccines, particularly the so-called “RNA” vaccines, make use of entirely new technology that makes them significantly different from traditional vaccines. They have no idea what the long-term effects of these vaccines might be because they have only been tested for a few months (as the CDC itself admits).
While the vaccines have allegedly been submitted to exhaustive clinical trials for short term effects, the trials are actually run by the manufacturers of the vaccines. How is this not a conflict of interest? The raw data from these trials has never been made public. All we know about the trials is what these companies care to tell us. Meanwhile, the internet is rife with stories of people who have suffered severe side effects—i.e., neurological damage, paralysis, autoimmune disorders, death—after taking the vaccines.
The only source of data we have on vaccine side effects (other than anecdotes spread on the internet and through gossip) comes from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The VAERS database is itself subject to a fair amount of controversy, with the pro-Covid-19 vaxxers claiming that VAERS over-reports injuries (because supposedly anyone can file a report), and vaccine skeptics claiming it underreports injuries (because VAERS is cumbersome to use and many doctors prefer to ignore it). Without an accurate source of information concerning the side effects of the Covid-19 vaccines, the American public is operating in the dark. Given that tens of millions of Americans have been vaccinated without apparently suffering any severe short-term effects, it could be argued that vaccines are relatively safe for most people at least in the first few months after vaccination. The debate arises over the margins. Even if the short-term risks of the vaccine producing catastrophic results are extremely small, they could still be relevant. Covid-19 is a disease that does not target everyone in precisely the same way. It tends to prey on individuals with comorbidities, while having little if any impact on the young and healthy. So even if the vaccines turn out to be relatively safe, it's still possible that for certain groups of people (i.e., those at very low risk from Covid-19) vaccination could prove the more risky alternative.
A recent study undertaken by U.S. researchers and published in medRxiv uncovered evidence suggesting that young boys might be more at risk from the vaccines than from a Covid-19 infection. According to their study,
Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself… Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period. Most children who experienced the rare side-effect had symptoms within days of the second shot of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, though a similar side-effect is seen with the Moderna jab. About 86% of the boys affected required some hospital care, the authors said.
Another point of concern is the medical establishments' seeming indifference to those who have suffered catastrophic side effects at the hands of the vaccines. Consider the fate of Maddie De Garay, a twelve year old girl who took part in the phase three Pfizer trials. After receiving the second dose of the vaccine, Maddie developed severe abdominal and chest pains; she felt as if her heart was being ripped through her neck. As her condition worsened, she struggled to digest her food and had to be fed with a tube. She experienced difficulty walking and wound up in a wheelchair—effectively crippled for life. When Maddie’s parents tried to inform the Pfizer representative in charge of the clinical trial about their daughter’s condition, they were treated with contempt. "The response with the person that's leading the vaccine trial has been atrocious," noted Stephanie De Garay, Maddie’s mother. "We wanted to know what symptoms were reported and we couldn't even get an answer on that. It was just ‘we report to Pfizer and they report to the FDA.’ That's all we got."
In some ways, the response of Pfizer and the medical establishment to Maddie’s condition is more alarming than the condition itself. No vaccine is perfect, and there will likely always be people who are harmed by vaccination. But the victims of vaccines should not be shunned like lepers. Efforts should be made to help them and to understand what went wrong in their vaccination. The knee jerk response of the medical establishment was to claim that Maddie’s paralysis was caused by anxiety. Maddie was in a wheelchair because she worried too much and had allowed herself to become a hysteric. That such a diagnosis is grossly implausible hardly seemed to matter. The vaccine had to be vindicated at all costs, even if it meant throwing a twelve year old girl under the vaccination bus.
There is something else of grave importance that can be drawn from Maddie De Garay’s experience with the experimental Covid-19 vaccine. Maddie’s injuries were incurred as part of a clinical trial. As such, they should have been recorded as evidence of potentially serious side effects caused by the Pfizer jab. But that’s not how they were set down. Pfizer completely ignored what their product did to Madde De Garay. This is a blatant act of fraud—quite possibly a criminal act (or at least it should be). It makes us wonder what other potential vaccine injuries may have been ignored.
Since the FDA is charged with the responsibility of regulating the pharmaceutical companies and keeping them from engaging in fraudulent and criminal practices, perhaps a quick glance at this government bureaucracy is warranted. As exhibit A, let us begin with the booster shot controversy. On August 22, 2021 the FDA approved the use of a single booster dose to be administered to the “immunocompromised.” This included “individuals 65 years of age and older” and “individuals 18 through 64 years of age at high risk of severe COVID-19.” What is most astonishing about this is that Pfizer’s clinical trials for the booster tested only twelve people over the age of 65 and only 56 people with comorbidities. The FDA apparently did not regard these woefully small sample sizes for the trials as insufficient for approval of the booster jab. On the contrary, they went ahead and authorized use of the vaccine on the very groups that were Pfizer underrepresented in its trials!
If that isn’t bad enough, consider the FDA’s even more controversial decision to give their seal of approval to Pfizer’s so-called “Comirnaty” vaccine. This approval of Comirnaty opens the way to government imposed vaccine mandates—to essentially enabling the federal government to force vaccination on the entire population. But there was always a catch. If one of the vaccines gained FDA approval, the EUA would have to be withdrawn from every other Covid-19 jab-jobs in use. The approval of Pfizer’s vaccine meant that all of Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines would immediately have to be withdrawn from public use. This was not considered a viable option, so instead the FDA engaged in a blatant trick. They approved a version of the Pfizer vaccine (i.e., “Comirnaty”) that was not yet available to the public. Because Comirnaty was not ready for use, the FDA could justify keeping the EUA for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in place. But it has an even more sinister consequence. By the very fact that the approved Comirnaty vaccine remained unavailable, this meant that anyone who, under the threat of losing their employment, succumbed to the vaccination, would end up getting, not the specific vaccine mandated by the Biden administration, but one of the EUA vaccines—which is to say, one of the vaccines that cannot by law (because it’s under an EUA) be mandated. In short, it’s all a cheap ruse to bully the public into submitting to experimental vaccines not ready for prime time use. A government that engages in such trickery is not a government that can be trusted. The people running in this country and promoting these vaccines are little distinguishable from common criminals. They have no business telling people what chemicals they must inject in their bodies.
A government that would engage in such underhanded chicanery to force vaccination on its citizenry is also a government that would not scruple to lie about the effectiveness of the vaccines. In August the CDC released a study claiming that unvaccinated people were twenty-nine times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19, and five times more likely to be infected, than the fully vaccinated. “These infection and hospitalization rate data indicate that authorized vaccines were protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe COVID-19 during a period when transmission of the Delta variant was increasing,” the CDC maintained.
The problem with these assertions is that they are almost certainly wrong. Huge data samples from Israel are showing virtually no difference in infection rates between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. According to Dr. Kobi Havi, the medical director of Israel’s leading center for respiratory care, the vaccinated account for 85-90% of hospitalizations and 95% of “severe” cases at Herzog Medical Center in Jerusalem. This is in line with some the statistics that have emerged from the huge spike in Covid-19 infections which swept over Israel during the summer:
Iceland is one of the most thoroughly vaccinated countries in the world, but its population is suffering through a spike in new cases very similar to what Israel is undergoing:
What the experiences of Israel and Iceland, two of the most vaccinated places on the planet, demonstrate is a clear tendency for the vaccines to lose their effectiveness in a few months after injection. If the CDC keeps insisting that the vaccines are more than ninety percent effective against Covid-19, they are either deeply confused or they are lying. In either case, they cannot be trusted.
Either through their own incompetence or dishonesty, establishment elites have misinformed the public about the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, therapeutics, natural immunity, and the vaccines. While it is true that many prestigious doctors and scientists have come out in favor of the vaccines, there are authorities (i.e., doctors, scientists, etc.) on the other side who have opposed mass vaccination and have issued calls for it to stop. We have competing sets of experts vying for the public’s attention. If it were a matter of a simple headcount—i.e., the side with the most experts “wins”—then the pro-vaccine contingent would have a clear advantage. But truth isn’t determined democratically. The only reason why the establishment has a significant advantage in numbers is because it doesn’t play fair. Elites, by censoring and persecuting their critics, have rigged the game in their favor, rendering their superior numbers null and void. Those confident in their own case aren’t overly eager to bully and censor their opponents. Nor do they engage in misinformation, lies, and dirty tricks. The pro-vaccine establishment has done little if anything to earn the public’s trust.
Vaccination against Covid-19 might make sense if (1) it provided lasting immunity against the virus and (2) we could be sure that the risks of the a Covid-19 infection were greater than the risks of vaccine side-effects. Given the data coming out of Israel, Iceland, and Great Britain, we can say with near certainty that the vaccines don’t meet the first of these two criteria. As for second, we are still very much in the dark, nor can the scientific medical establishments be trusted to enlighten us any time soon. Not in the least—they seem only too eager to leave us in the dark. The VAERS vaccine adverse reports database chronicles 66,642 hospitalizations, 7,267 heart attacks, 20,789 permanently disabled, and 28,168 severe allergic reactions. Whether these numbers are under or over reported no one knows for certain. What can be said with some measure of confidence is that further inquiry is very much needed. Accurate information on short term negative side effects is absolutely necessary going forward, and for a very important reason. The fact that the vaccines lose their efficacy after a few months will necessitate the administration of booster shots. The Pfizer booster shot is supposedly the same as the Pfizer second dose—which means it can be expected to exhibit the same risk profile. Each additional booster shot will increase the risk of serious injury by an unknown amount. If we assume that VAERS data is correct, a fully vaccinated person has a one in 11,000 chance of perishing from the jab and a one in 8,300 chance of being permanently disabled. A third dose could increase those odds to one in 5,500 and one in 4,300 respectively. By the tenth shot you’re looking at a potential death rate of .08 percent and a disability rate of .12 percent. Now if the VAERS database under-reports vaccine injuries (as some believe) by a factor of ten, those figures would be .8 percent and 1.2 percent respectively. This is why accurate data of vaccine side effects is so important. If we go down the path of booster shots every six to eight months, very quickly we could find ourselves maiming and killing more people with the vaccines than were ever harmed by the virus. That’s the inevitable path of piling one dose on top of another. Yet because none of our data on the adverse side effects of the vaccine is fully reliable, we have no idea how many doses it would take to render a vaccination for Covid-19 more toxic than the disease itself. Is it three doses, five doses, ten doses? Nobody knows—and what is worse, the medical and political establishment have proven themselves blithely uninterested in finding out.
If we were governed by competent rulers, the vaccine mandates would immediately stop and only those high at risk of developing a severe Covid-19 infection would be given the option of vaccination. But we are not governed by competent rulers, and so hundreds of thousands, if not more, may wind up suffering at the hands of these potentially dangerous experimental injections.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.