No one silences experts because they have a great product
‘People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.’
Photo by Colin Maynard
Right now, internal critics of these agencies are focused on one issue above all: Why did the FDA and the CDC issue strong blanket recommendations for Covid vaccines in children?
The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.
“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes,” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”
That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children.
Formerly great institutions are being eaten from the inside:
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That doctor is hardly alone. At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.)
The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”
The data shows a 4% efficacy for Moderna in babies, nothing for Pfizer, and with no long term studies on side effects:
Using a three-dose vaccine in 992 children between the ages of six months and five years, Pfizer found no statistically significant evidence of vaccine efficacy.
Moderna’s results—they conducted a study on 6,388 children with two doses—were not much better. Against asymptomatic infections, they claimed a very weak vaccine efficacy of just 4% in children aged six months to two years. They also claimed an efficacy of 23% in children between two and six years old—but neither result was statistically significant.
Dr. Marty Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the author of The Price We Pay, and a medical advisor to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg is an epidemiologist affiliated with The Florida Department of Health who has published research on Covid-19 in schools in the CDC’s journal MMWR.
None of this would have got this far, if it weren’t for the failing of the legacy media. The journalists are as scared as the family doctors are. None of them want to publicly disagree with the sacred scientists at the FDA and CDC — the same ones who are also too scared to speak up.
Photo by Colin Maynard on Unsplash