Stick A Fork In It: Vaccines
TL;DR - There's no such thing as risk-free reward; there's only tradeoffs and consequences
There are those who believed that public health followed evidence-based science, that there were no alternatives to lockdowns, that covid was exceedingly deadly, that masks were helpful and harmless, that the benefits of preserving the healthcare system outweighed the costs to all social and economic activity, that there were no effective treatments, that natural immunity was not attainable or desirable, and that dissidents were in denial. To those who believed these to be true, it’s understandable how a vaccine could have been seen as an absolute necessity for overcoming covid. However, had they approached this topic with some healthy skepticism, they might not have been so eager to “just get vaccinated.”
Calls for a vaccine arose mere days into the initial lockdowns, even before much was known about the true nature of covid. Tempering expectations, on March 31, 2020, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) published a reminder about past issues with rushed vaccines, urging both patience and caution with covid vaccine development. Similarly, in July 2020, then-CEO of Merck, Ken Frazier, whose company has brought more new vaccines to market in the last quarter century than all other pharmaceutical companies combined, told Harvard Business School, “I think at the end of the day, we don't want to rush the vaccine before we've done rigorous science… We don't have a great history of introducing vaccines quickly in the middle of a pandemic. We want to keep that in mind.”
Commenting on the development timeline, Dr. Gregory A. Poland, director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group, said “from the creation of the idea to having a marketable vaccine is usually seven to 10 years or more.” This timeline was echoed in testimony to US Congress in May 2020 by Dr. Rick Bright, who later became a member of President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, when he said “normally, it takes up to 10 years to make a vaccine.” In April 2020, Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at Dr. Fauci’s NIAID, not only reiterated that the typical vaccine development timeline is eight to 10 years, but worryingly, she added that an accelerated process would involve “not looking at all the data.” A lengthy diligence process is important to minimize harms, ensure long-lasting benefits, and assess risks, some of which can take years to emerge and be understood. Prudently, Dr. Poland added, “if we aren’t deliberate and careful, we could harm people. We have to remember that.”
“If you take [a vaccine], and then a year goes by and everybody's fine, you say, OK, that's good, now let's give it to 500 people. And then a year goes by and everything's fine. You say, well then, now let's give it to thousands of people. And then you find out that it takes twelve years for all hell to break loose – then what have you done?”
For context, the AAMC explained how the initial measles vaccine in the early 1960’s didn’t protect children from measles, but made symptoms worse when they were infected, often resulting in hospitalization. Similarly, children vaccinated for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in the 1960’s developed an enhanced form of the disease. Sharing the same sentiment as the AAMC, CNN cautioned their readers in September 2020 that “when the vaccine making process has been rushed, there have been bad outcomes.” Among their chosen examples, they cited the initial polio vaccine from 1955, where 20% of the 200,000 injected children became infected because the vaccine contained a live virus, which killed ten and left hundreds with paralysis. They also described how in 1976, President Gerald Ford was convinced by ‘experts’ that there was a swine flu pandemic – a pandemic that never materialized – prompting him to mandate a hastily assembled vaccine. The vaccine, which did not prompt any immune response, was given to 40 million people, causing some to develop Guillain-Barre syndrome. Alas, these problems are not relegated only to the distant past.
In November 2019, the Associated Press reported that more new cases of polio in four African countries were caused by vaccines than by the wild virus. And then in March 2023, the Associated Press reported that Burundi declared a polio outbreak due to a new strain of the virus which, once again, originated from a vaccine. Even though these used an oral live virus vaccine, as opposed to the non-live vaccines offered in most developed nations, it’s frightening how 70 years since the initial polio vaccine debacle, the exact same mistake continues to occur again and again.
Looking at the impact of vaccines over extended timelines, in 2018, Danish researchers published the results of a study analyzing 30 years’ worth of records from Africa related to the inactivated Diphtheria–Tetanus–Pertussis (DTP) vaccine. What they discovered was shocking. Although the vaccine proved effective versus DTP, vaccinated children were ten times more likely to die from other health issues compared to unvaccinated children. They concluded that this DTP vaccine was associated with higher mortality, constituting a clear danger signal. What this revelation makes clear is, in the same way covid restrictions missed the forest for the trees by attempting to stop a single virus at the expense of all other determinants of health, vaccines must also be assessed in greater context. To minimize unintended consequences and ensure that the targeted benefits of vaccines markedly outweigh their broad potential costs, it is imperative that their long-term impacts are studied and compared to a control group; to the unvaccinated. With other similar danger signals emerging and confidence in vaccines declining globally, health authorities would be well-advised to thoroughly investigate this topic, lest their inaction be interpreted as a form of wilful ignorance.
As this relates to the covid vaccines, if there are many instances of vaccines initially believed to be safe and effective, which subsequently had issues after their rollouts, then why give a brand new covid vaccine the benefit of the doubt? Why rush to give it to anyone besides the vulnerable when harmful effects may be imperceptible in the short-term, taking years to materialize, and studies examining long-term risks are not available? Furthermore, why disparage and alienate anyone volunteering to remain unvaccinated, since they are the unintentional yet vital control group that will ultimately illuminate the covid vaccine’s true safety and efficacy? While it is a noble endeavour to develop products that protect against harmful viruses, there is no such thing as risk-free reward. As a category of product deemed “unavoidably unsafe” by both the US Congress and the US Supreme Court, there are undeniable costs to vaccines, and they warrant as much scrutiny as their potential benefits.
“Many people are asking, ‘Well why do we have to test the vaccines? Why don’t we just make the vaccines and give them to people?’ Well the world has learned many lessons in the mass use of vaccines and there’s only one thing more dangerous than a bad virus, and that’s a bad vaccine. We have to be very, very, very careful in developing any product that we’re going to inject into potentially most of the world population.”
– Dr. Mike Ryan, execute director of WHO Health Emergencies Programme. April 1, 2020.
In response to the early demands for a covid vaccine, on April 29, 2020, President Donald Trump offered up ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to expedite the “speed of science.” Despite the rushed timetable, many health practitioners and public officials maintained that the trials lived up to expected standards. To their discredit, in February 2023, Liberal Minister of Parliament (MP) Anthony Housefather explained why this could not possibly be the case. When opposition MPs asked to view the contracts signed by the government with vaccine manufacturers, he said “these documents were signed at the beginning of the pandemic when everybody was desperate for vaccines, when companies were being told to rush vaccine production and do testing in an unprecedented way, in a way they normally don’t do it… They didn’t do the type of testing that normally takes these drugs years to come to market.” Predictably, this ‘move fast and break things’ approach – popularized by entrepreneurs with an appetite for risk and a willingness to exchange integrity for expediency – was not well suited to vaccine development.
The first red flags appeared during the trials. After Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca (AZ), and Johnson & Johnson published their vaccine trial protocols in September 2020, former Harvard medical school professor, Dr. William A. Haseltine, explained the implications of the trial designs. He pointed out that “prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint,” but that “prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines.” This was subsequently confirmed by Christina Antoniou, Pfizer’s director of corporate affairs, in October 2022 when she replied to the Toronto Sun, saying “trials were not designed to evaluate the vaccine’s effectiveness against transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” Even if it was hoped that they would prevent transmission, it should have been obvious to all that they didn’t with the epidemic of so-called “breakthrough” cases shortly after the vaccines were rolled out to the public. For example, eight players on the ‘fully’ vaccinated New York Yankees caught covid in May 2021. If only one or two players caught covid, perhaps a “breakthrough” case could have been considered rare, but with over 30% of the team catching it at once, it should have been readily apparent that these vaccines were utterly incapable of stopping spread.
On the topic of reducing severe disease, Dr. Haseltine wrote, “we all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols – Moderna, Pfizer, and AZ – do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease, only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.” Crucially, he also noted that “none list mortality as a critical endpoint.” Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), also observed this, writing in October 2020 that “none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.” In other words, the vaccines did not test for the reduction of severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death. If the trials did not test for them, then on what basis did public health officials and medical practitioners claim that vaccines stopped spread, reduced symptoms, or reduced deaths? Why were they so confident promoting this product when the evidence supporting its alleged efficacy was non-existent?
Upon completion of the Phase 3 trials in late 2020, the manufacturers claimed that the vaccines were 95% effective. You may recall how that figure was parroted by every major news outlet and celebrated by the healthcare community. What wasn’t widely shared, however, was that it referred to the vaccine’s relative risk reduction (RRR). Leaving aside the technical explanation of the term, the FDA guidebook, Communicating Risks & Benefits: An Evidence-Based User’s Guide, explains how “patients are unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.” In other words, according to the FDA, it is misleading to present the RRR to the public for the purpose of decision-making. And yet, that’s exactly what was done. Even worse, the recommended format for quantifying efficacy, absolute risk reduction (ARR), was a measly 0.84%. Why didn’t regulators or doctors catch this sleight of hand, which substituted RRR for ARR, and alert the public to ensure they made an informed decision about the vaccine? How many people would have taken the vaccine if they understood that it offered less than a 1% benefit?
“These studies seem designed to answer the easiest question in the least amount of time, not the most clinically relevant questions.”
– Peter Doshi, associate editor of British Medical Journal. October 21, 2020.
Shortly after the launch of Operation Warp Speed, on May 12, one official for the project spoke with the journal Science on the condition of anonymity, expressing concern that it was “heavily weighted” towards two candidates, including one made with messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding the coronavirus surface spike protein. The official acknowledged that mRNA technology had never led to an approved vaccine for any other disease. This was also noted by BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to create one of the mRNA vaccines for covid, in their December 2021 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, they cautioned that “mRNA drug development has substantial clinical development and regulatory risks due to limited regulatory experience with mRNA immunotherapies,” and that “mRNA product candidates represent an entirely new therapeutic modality.” That being the case, why was this technology favoured? Why was it believed to be well suited to combat covid? What mechanism of action made it compelling?
The active components of traditional vaccines are typically dead or weakened virus particles. Upon injection, they are meant to mimic a natural infection and prompt the body to mount a natural immune response. In effect, this method is predicated on the known benefits of natural immunity. The same is not true of mRNA technology. As explained on the CDC website, “mRNA vaccines use mRNA created in a laboratory to teach our cells how to make a protein – or even just a piece of a protein – that triggers an immune response.” For covid, the mRNA protein in question are spike proteins, which are a piece of the virus that facilitate the entry of viruses into our cells. In effect, the mRNA vaccines instruct our bodies to create lab-engineered virus particles, meaning the body’s response to the vaccine is manufactured, not natural. Could any unintended side effects result from such a novel process?
The rationale for this approach was outlined in an August 2020 study in Nature. It explained that vaccine induced spike proteins are designed to provoke an enhanced immune response compared to the wild virus spike proteins. Although the scientific community was understandably excited at this prospect, they may have gotten ahead of themselves because there was no mention of the spike protein’s potential downsides of this novel approach. And it wasn’t until late 2020, around the time that the vaccines began rolling out to the public, that evidence of harms from spike proteins emerged. For instance, in April 2021, one of America’s most prestigious independent research institutes, the Salk Institute, explained how the spike protein damages cells and plays a key role in illness. While their report made a point of differentiating between the wild covid spike protein from the vaccine induced spike protein, the safety of the latter appears to have been taken for granted, likely because research into it tends to focus on the benefits of vaccine induced spike proteins, not its potential drawbacks. Additionally, the safety of the lipid nanoparticles (LNP), which facilitates delivery of the mRNA into our cells, is also unsettled. There is reason to believe they may be highly inflammatory. When it comes to the safety of mRNA vaccines, authorities are not talking about the elephants in the room.
“It was counterintuitive because Pfizer was mastering, or let’s say we had very good experience, with multiple technologies that could give a vaccine… mRNA was a technology that had never delivered a single product until that day. Not a vaccine, not any other medicine, so it was very counterintuitive, and I was surprised when they suggested to me that this was the way to go.”
On October 22, 2020, Dr. Steve Anderson, director of the FDA’s office of biostatistics and pharmacovigilance, presented the FDA’s plan for monitoring covid vaccine safety. The presentation reviewed several safety surveillance strategies, including their intent to monitor the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-managed by the CDC and FDA. It also featured a working list of 22 adverse outcomes that they planned to monitor for, including:
Guillain-Barré syndrome
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM)
Convulsions/seizures
Stroke
Acute myocardial infarction
Myocarditis/pericarditis
Autoimmune disease
Pregnancy and birth outcomes
Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)
Venous thromboembolism (VTE)
Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C)
Vaccine enhanced disease
Deaths
Many of these effects were mocked as conspiratorial or unrelated to the vaccine by media and health officials, but based on this presentation, the FDA had reason to suspect they could be linked from the start. Furthermore, their partner in monitoring for adverse events, the CDC, seemingly expected a high volume of reports. In August 2020, the CDC contracted General Dynamics, an aerospace and defence company, to handle the VAERS reports for covid vaccines. The contract anticipated upwards of 1,000 reports per day, with 40% being serious in nature. By March 2021, they were so backlogged that the contract was expanded to increase capacity to over 3,500 per day. This was not disclosed to the public during the vaccine rollout, and was only revealed in December 2022 after Josh Guetzkow, law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published the relevant documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. If the vaccines were as safe as advertised, then why did the CDC expect an influx of adverse events reports? Why were those specific adverse events being monitored for by the FDA? Did VAERS or other safety monitoring systems detect rises in those specific adverse events after the vaccination campaign began?
“Remember: You’re giving this vaccine, likely, to healthy people – who are not the people typically who are dying from this infection, so you better make sure that you are holding it to a high standard of safety.”
VAERS is by no means a perfect tool; it is merely intended to be an early warning system. To that end, it is difficult to dispute that the publicly available data contained red flags. For instance, during the five years preceding the covid vaccines, VAERS recorded an average of 492 deaths from vaccines per year. In 2021, that number increased by a factor of 45, to 22,386, with another 12,482 in 2022. There were also pronounced increases in reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis, pericarditis, stillbirths, miscarriages, and more. What is most telling about the data was that these figures increased and receded in unison with the number of doses administered, suggesting a correlation.
VAERS critics often downplay this data on the basis that submissions can be made by the public, who may produce false or misleading reports. While there have been rare instances of this, it is punishable by law to submit false claims, so there is a disincentive to do so. Additionally, false claims do not negate all the honest reports by health care providers, who are required by law to submit adverse event reports to VAERS. Unless critics are suggesting that most reports submitted by health care providers are false, the VAERS data is at worst a noisy signal warranting further investigation, such as an analysis from January 2023 by Professor Guetzkow.
If “ongoing reports of serious cardiac adverse events” was enough to revoke the EUA for a time-tested drug like HCQ, shouldn’t more than 22,000 reports of death – even if some are misattributed – be enough to at least pause vaccines with novel mechanisms of delivery and action, especially given the well-documented history of rushed vaccines? If an automobile airbag defect resulting in three deaths is enough to warrant an urgent warning to car drivers, and if chocolate can get recalled due solely to the possibility of salmonella contamination, and if cheese can get recalled due to possible listeria contamination resulting in zero confirmed illnesses, then why not vaccines? The answer: liability.
Unlike producers and service providers in every other industry – including prescription drugs – who are required by law to compensate consumers for harms caused by their products, only vaccine manufacturers get a free pass on liability. This is true of both covid vaccines and all routine vaccines. Apparently, vaccine manufacturing is the one and only exception to the rule that there’s no such thing as risk-free reward. Except, that’s not entirely true. The risks still exist, but they’re not borne by the vaccine manufacturers, nor by the governments who purchase them, nor by politicians who mandate them, nor by the public health officials who market them, nor by the regulators who approve them, nor by the doctors who administer them. Instead, the risks are transferred onto members of the public every time they roll up their sleeves.
“There are a lot of examples of vaccines in the past that have stimulated the immune system, but ultimately didn't confer protection. And unfortunately, there are some cases where it stimulated the immune system and not only it didn't confer protection, but actually helped the virus invade the cell because it was incomplete in terms of its immunogenic properties. We have to be very careful.”
– Ken Frazier, then-Chief Executive Officer of Merck. July 13, 2020.
On April 8, 2021, Dr. Seema Marwaha, a Toronto-based internal medicine specialist and editor-in-chief of Healthy Debate, told the Globe & Mail, “this is the first time I’ve been really scared during the pandemic. What I’m seeing... is younger people getting sicker in a more unpredictable way, in a way that’s more difficult to trace in much higher numbers.” Although it was not her intent, her statement implied certain inconsistencies in the predominant covid and vaccine narratives. In revealing that she was not “really scared” prior to that point, it could reasonably be inferred that there was less to fear from covid than had been advertised by health authorities. By describing how “younger people are getting sicker,” it could reasonably be inferred that the vaccine rollout, which was expected to be a boon to health, curiously coincided with a rise of sudden and unexpected illness among those who were least vulnerable. Lastly, in saying that sickness began occurring “in a more unpredictable way, in a way that’s more difficult to trace,” it could reasonably be inferred that with covid there was an established order to symptomatic covid illness, but that the effects from this outburst were more indiscriminate. So, are the covid vaccines responsible for this surge of unpredictable illness? Between the checkered history of vaccine rollouts, the rushed trials, the novel mechanisms of action and delivery, the known possibility of adverse effects, and in lieu of any other suspected causes, it would be irresponsible to rule this out.
Consider the Pfizer trial for those aged 12-15. The trial only had 2,260 participants. Half were vaccinated (the treatment group) and half received a saline injection placebo (the control group), meaning the trial was not designed to discover the risks of serious adverse events if they occurred at a frequency greater than one in 1,200, because less than 1,200 trial participants were given the vaccine. Yet sadly, the trial did find a serious adverse event, which struck a girl named Maddie De Garay. According to her mother, within hours of her second dose Maddie developed major health issues, including severe abdominal pain, swollen extremities, chest pain, tachycardia, mysterious rashes, reflux, gastroparesis, vomiting, dizziness, convulsions, menstrual changes, decreased vision, tinnitus, memory loss, extreme fatigue, and more. Are any of these the “unpredictable ways” adolescents were getting sick in early 2021?
Per the trial, Pfizer diagnosed Maddie as having experienced “functional abdominal pain,” and the investigator hired by Pfizer said he didn’t “feel” like the vaccine caused Maddie’s injury, even though she was in good health immediately prior to her second shot. Despite Maddie having to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, fed through a feeding tube, the FDA took Pfizer at their word, blindly accepting the investigator’s conclusion without doing any of their own due diligence. If Pfizer was willing to downplay the severity of Maddie’s reaction and the FDA was unwilling to investigate it, then what else might have they omitted or misled the public about?
Regarding the adult trials, Pfizer released its six-month report on vaccine safety and efficacy in September 2021. Leaving aside their questionable decision to unblind the study and vaccinate 19,525 of the 21,728 members (89.9%) of the control group before the planned completion of the trial in 2023, the company proudly touted a 91% reduction of positive cases. While that sounds helpful, cases are not indicative of actual symptomatic illness. More importantly though, the study revealed that vaccine recipients had a 300% increase in adverse events and 75% increase in severe adverse events compared to the control group. Moreover, there were more deaths in the vaccinated group (15) than in the control group (14), and that’s before the trial was unblinded. Another five died in the vaccinated group after unblinding. In other words, the treatment group had more illness and death than the control group. It seems reasonable that regulators would have known about this information, which Pfizer buried in the trial’s supplementary index, and subsequently alerted the public, but they either missed it, proving their incompetence, or kept silent, proving their complicity.
Adding more credence to the notion that covid vaccines might not be safe, in August 2022, an independent study published in Vaccine, a prominent medical journal for vaccines, re-analyzed both the Pfizer and Moderna trial data. The study received no funding and was authored by several noteworthy scientists, including the BMJ’s Dr. Peter Doshi. It discovered that the actual frequency of serious adverse events was one in 800, which is very high. Putting the puzzle pieces together, if there is reason to suspect that vaccines cause severe adverse events in at least one out of every 1,200 children and one out of every 800 adults, and that the vaccines can cause unexplained and unpredictable illnesses, then why aren’t more healthcare professionals expressing doubts about the vaccine? Why is it inconceivable to many that the vaccines could be causing harm?
Sadly, many doctors and healthcare professionals, as well as policymakers and politicians, prematurely jumped to the conclusion that a return to “normality” would be dependent on vaccines as early as April 2020. In effect, they bet their reputations on vaccines as the solution prior to having a sound understanding about either the virus or the vaccines. By blindly staking their credibility on a vaccine prior to completing the work required to prove its suitability, cognitive dissonance impairs them from criticizing and re-evaluating the vaccines’ presumed safety and efficacy. This cavalier ‘shoot first and don’t ask questions later’ mentality seems even more dubious since it’s been discovered that vaccine manufacturers, abetted by sluggish regulators, withheld consequential trial data. A FOIA request seeking the public disclosure of all 451,000 pages of trial data related to the Pfizer vaccine was made in August 2020, but the data was not released until January 2022, when many were already taking their third doses. With so much material data wilfully withheld from the public, how could any vaccine recipient possibly have given informed consent? Tragically, they couldn’t have.
“We’ve never had such an important clinical trial — or series of clinical trials — in recent history. Everything should be transparent.”
– Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research. September 13, 2020.
In the months and years following the mass vaccination campaign, sentiment towards vaccines has waned as experts and laymen alike have come to better understand its risks. With the benefit of hindsight, some influential voices who previously advocated for covid mRNA vaccines have completely changed their tune. To name just a few examples:
Dr. John Campbell, an independent health researcher and educator who has a YouTube channel with over 2.7 million subscribers, called to “pause the current covid-19 mass vaccine rollout program due to the risks associated with the vaccines.” He also apologized for misleading his viewers on vaccines, and admitted to being too trusting of scientific authorities and publications.
Dr. Drew, an American internist and media personality with more than 2.6 million Twitter followers, said about his vaccine advocacy, “I want to, as effusively as I can, fall on my sword… I was dismissive… I was as wrong as I can be.”
Dr. Retsef Levi, an MIT professor, former Israeli intelligence officer, and expert in risk management and health systems, said, “all covid mRNA vaccination programs should stop immediately. They should stop because they completely failed to fulfill any of their advertised promises regarding efficacy, and more importantly, they should stop because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented levels of harm.”
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a prominent British cardiologist who promoted the vaccine on the BBC as a medical expert during covid, said “I can’t think of any drug, anything that we have ever used in medicine that has efficacy that is this poor… In the trial, you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from the vaccine… than you were to be hospitalized with covid during the original Wuhan strain… This vaccine should never have been approved for a single human in the first place."
There are many more doctors, scientists, analysts, researchers, pundits, and even politicians, who have re-evaluated the data and recanted their support for the covid vaccines. Even the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Poland, a respected vaccine expert, is calling for further investigations because he is one of over 16,000 people reportedly suffering from tinnitus – a life-altering condition – due to these vaccines. To his dismay, he found the CDC to be “unconcerned” by the tinnitus reports, prompting him to publicly ask, “why has the CDC not done all of the research that they should do on this and published it?” Dr. Poland also said he believes the spike protein from the vaccine may be a contributing factor, as it is with other adverse events, which further calls into question the wisdom of instructing our bodies to create them via mRNA technology.
It may be tempting to deride skeptics and critics of these vaccines as agents of misinformation – reverting to the type of inflammatory rhetoric typical of the intellectually insecure – but an honest intellectual ought to take a genuine interest in their concerns and question them accordingly. Why did they re-visit their assumptions about a product they previously believed to be vital? What evidence persuaded them to change their minds about its safety and efficacy? Questions could also be posed to those who remained unvaccinated. Why did they approach the covid vaccines with such caution? Why didn’t they trust the so-called “scientific consensus” or the regulators? Moreover, an honest person might look in the mirror to reflect on their own assumptions and actions. Was the gratuitous promotion of vaccines, and coercion for their uptake, truly justified? Was information about vaccine trials, safety, and efficacy, transparent and straightforward? Has any new information come to light, which may not have been available during the initial rollout, which would have changed the risk-benefit analysis? Have health outcomes and mortality rates improved since the vaccines were administered? Barring any sincere introspection and reconciliation of the truth, the hubris of vaccine proponents may deservedly prompt a wholesale re-evaluation of all vaccines, not just the covid shots, as those whose trust they lost seek truth wherever else it may be forthcoming.
“Good science requires rigor, discipline, and deliberate caution. Any medical therapy approved for public use in the absence of extensive safeguards has the potential to cause harm, not only for COVID-19 prevention efforts and vaccine recipients, but also for public trust in vaccination efforts worldwide.”
This post is part of an article called Stick A Fork In It: The Barbecue Rebellion & The Rude Awakening, which is available in its entirety on my Substack:
