JoNova

By Jo Nova

Good news: The vaccine narrative is unraveling

There’s been a string of stories about the downside of vaccines; how they might be fueling new variants, how the harms have been suppressed, how doctors have been silenced, and now how the advertising is “deceptive”. Personal stories are flowing forth.

Last weekend a whole new conversation has broken out online — Rassmussen reports found 57% of US voters want an inquiry into the CDC’s handling of vaccine safety. They also reported that some 7% of vaccinees told Rasmussen they suffered serious adverse effects. This meant there are something like 12 million Americans who felt they had suffered something quite bad from vaccination.

This sparked an admission that Elon Musk was in that club:

Musk had taken the vaccines so he could visit his factory in Germany. The next day Scott Adams of Dilbert cartoon fame declared “the anti-vaccers clearly won. I lost.” And he wasn’t joking.

Rassmussen’s survey has reached 29 million views and they credit Scott Adams and Elon Musk.

Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash

As far as I can tell, the big media breach started in early January with the Wall Street Journal asking: Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?” It’s been a long time coming.  We discussed these risks here twenty months ago: Leaky vaccines may trigger an arms race that makes Covid more dangerous. The WSJ story was a long feature article,  heavy with scientific lingo. Even if most readers missed the significance, editors would have noticed the unthinkable had quietly been said. The vaccines were boosting the wrong antibodies, and people who had more shots were more likely to catch new covid variants. Alyssia Finlay, the author and editor, was holding a box of scorpions, and the article was heavy because she was using peer reviewed papers and technical jargon as a shield to ward off the criticism she knew would come.

That Wall Street article generated nearly 3,000 very heated comments, and another 500 in The Australian. It was denounced as “irresponsible”, “fallacious” and “wrong” and misinformation (of course) but it was a turning point. Interspersed among the noisy critics were people telling their sad stories of injuries.

Perhaps for the first time there was a conversation

Commenters were astonished — Joseph Breton wrote:

“Will my account be suspended if I agree with the WSJ journalist?  Normally this type of truth-telling doesn’t sit well with the moderators.  Maybe they’ll just delete the whole article.“

Within days there were letters to the editor from doctors saying “Of course it fuels new variants“. The same author, Allysia Finley, went on to write about how the experts hid the dangers, rushed the process and didn’t do enough testing.

‘Experts’ Are Fueling Distrust in Vaccines

Jan 9th, 2023, The Wall Street Journal

The experts are responsible for vaccine skepticism because they aren’t honest about the potential risks.

With thousands dying each day, the FDA in December 2020 decided it couldn’t wait for an exhaustive study and authorized the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines after two large randomized controlled trials showed they were nearly 95% effective against symptomatic infection. But patients had been tracked for only a few months. The trials included too few participants to identify relatively rare adverse effects, especially among those of different age groups or with particular medical conditions. Public-health officials couldn’t conclude with any certainty whether the vaccines cause, for example, neurological symptoms in 1 of every 100,000 recipients or cardiac problems in 1 of every 10,000 young men.

Clearly Allysia Finley had been reading “the internet”:

The internet is full of stories of unexplained deaths that follow vaccines, many of which may be coincidence but some of which may not. The more the experts deny or ignore what people see with their own eyes, or what new evidence and experience show, the more people will ignore their counsel and be open to charlatans who undermine all vaccination.

The Majors and the media ignored the biggest protests in decades

It’s all still couched in generic pro-vaccination terms but suddenly people have a license to say “this vaccine is different”. Finley was called a “purveyor of dangerous public health disinformation”. But the comments kept coming, and the scientific debate has been unleashed.

Commenter Nathanial Haynes was delighted in the change:

” I must say, as someone who has been consistently skeptical of the covid vaccine charade it is a profound pleasure to read these comments. Where once the voices that were doubtful about the wisdom of giving people shots with very a VERY short track record, built on an untested platform and through force and coercion were few and far between it appears that common sense and sanity have prevailed. Perhaps we aren’t doomed after all?

Commenters who need to “Believe the Experts” are floundering and using the same old strategies of namecalling, platitudes and derision. You know the drill: all vaccines have risks; you’re just an anti-vaxxer; all these amateurs think they can do orthopedic surgery; does that mean you take your child to a barber for major surgery..? They are outnumbered and out flanked.

The latest Wall Street Journal story talks about “false advertising”:

The Deceptive Campaign for Bivalent Covid Boosters

Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal and The Australian

This is deceptive advertising. …

The problems are getting repeated and packaged up quickly now:

But three scientific problems have arisen. First, the virus is evolving much faster than the vaccines can be updated. Second, vaccines have hardwired our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralise variants targeted by updated vaccines. Third, antibodies rapidly wane after a few months.

Pfizer and Moderna claim their new vaccines are better but the studies are flawed, weak, done at the wrong time and the results are not good anyway:

The studies’ findings contradict November press releases from Pfizer and Moderna asserting that their bivalents produced a response to the BA.4 and BA.5 variants four to six times that of the original boosters. These claims are misleading. Neither vaccine maker conducted a randomized trial. They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and 4½ to six months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, 9½ to 11 months after recipients had received their third shots.

The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.

Finally fingers are being pointed at the right places:

The vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow, but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents.

Journalists are getting better at spotting the tricks junk medical studies do. But that means the hypocrisy has been noticed:

Many of the same experts who trashed observational studies supporting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin now flog intrinsically flawed studies on bivalent boosters.

Exactly. We’ve been fed a bunch of medical hocus both ways — to denounce safe treatments and cover up the dangers of forced ones. It’s not just heads that should roll, whole agencies need to be razed, whole companies need to be dismembered and their assets used to compensate their victims.

It’s great to see that conversation start.

h/t David Maddison, Another Ian, Scott of the Pacific.

Tunnel by Jo Nova, Photo of man By 10634669.