From New Dawn 191 (Mar-Apr 2022)
The following article, published in early 2022, is a reminder of how the “science” of the COVID-19 pandemic was relentlessly politicised which in turn subjected it to constant mutations to conform to official narratives.
One of the answers to the title of this article is: “trust” has to be earned. We “trust” the science that enables aviation because, in the overwhelming majority of cases, planes do not fall out of the sky. Theories of aerodynamics were tested and demonstrated in repeated experiments until they could be proven, as much as anything can be “proven.” This is not the case when it comes to the anti-COVID-19 injections and certain other public health measures.
Governments and health authorities marketed the jab as a necessary intervention to reduce hospitalisations, initially implying that being injected would end the pandemic. This is not how vaccines traditionally worked. Another answer to the title is that, in this pandemic, vaccinology has not been a “science.”
The definition of “vaccine” has been changed by health authorities, not merely to update the latest technologies but to change the meaning of the effect of vaccination and immunisation. Standard procedures for vaccine development, particularly the ten-year timeframe, have been abandoned. A small number of top-level, pro-injection scientists ignored by media have cheerfully described the jab and its implementation as an “experiment,” yet the same media that hide these scientists say that the injection is not an experiment.
Nationalistic propaganda has selectively demonised certain injectable products and favoured others, even though the alleged vaccines are similar in terms of development timeframes and efficacy rates.
After being told that the injection will allow the public to return to “normal,” governments and health authorities then introduced – and many imposed – a second injection, followed by a third, then a proposed fourth. With no large-scale clinical trials, people were told that they could “mix and match” the injectable products (e.g., an AstraZeneca first dose, a Moderna second, a Johnson and Johnson third. This is called “heterologous vaccination”).
With COVID-related hospitalisations continuing, along with mask-wearing and social distancing, many who chose to be injected, as opposed to being coerced, began to question the validity of government claims.
EYEING THE NEEDLE
So, who exactly doesn’t – or didn’t – trust the injection “science”? An October 2020 survey found that attitudes toward proposed vaccination varied significantly from country to country.
In 2020, only a third of adult Americans surveyed wanted a vaccine “as soon as possible.” Those who did had good reason. Most of them were over-65, i.e., in the most COVID-vulnerable category and had or had lived with someone with underlying health conditions. Four in ten respondents of all ages were split between those who would definitely get vaccinated and those who wanted to wait and see. Lumping “definitely” with “wait and see” is a strange way to tabulate poll data, but there it is. The pollsters found that 9 per cent of respondents would get the jab only if coerced (i.e., in order to continue their education or employment). Fifteen per cent said that they would never get injected. Unlike the “as soon as possible” group, the “never” cohort tended to be Republican (41 per cent to 25) and most had no higher education (53 per cent to 38). This paints refuseniks as reactionary rubes. But other polls show that vaccine hesitancy is high among PhDs, who also tend to be Democrat voters.
An online survey of five million people took place between January and May 2021, when the injections were rolled out. Hesitancy across all groups decreased from a quarter to 16 per cent. The hesitant reported fear of side effects as their main reason. It is also worth noting that for millions of people in our “capitalist” order, a missed workday can mean no pay or even the sack. The survey authors found a U-shaped curve; the least and most educated alike were the most injection-hesitant: 20.8 per cent of people with a “high school or less” education were reluctant, as were 23.9 per cent of PhDs, compared to 8.3 per cent who had master’s degrees and 18.3 who had “some college” education. Apparently, this revelation – that those in the “hesitant” cohort included so many people with PhDs – was too embarrassing for the PLoS journal to publish because it goes against the “trust the science” narrative. This information appears in the pre-print, but not in the final publication. It is not disputed or analysed but simply removed.
POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP
Science should be objective. Can an aeroplane travel at high altitudes repeatedly without falling, regardless of the politics involved? Does gravity act on an object regardless of the political affiliation of the person dropping the object?
People don’t “trust the science” of the alleged vaccine because it is politicised. In July 2020, 15 per cent of Americans said that an endorsement of the injection by US President Donald Trump would encourage them to take it. However, more than 30 per cent said that Trump’s endorsement would put them off.
In September 2020, US presidential candidate Joe Biden undermined public confidence by implying that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed had rushed the development of the jab in order to score political points. Even mask-wearing was politicised. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Dr Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden, and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told 60 Minutes, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak,” he continued, “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.” Three months later, after mask-wearing policies had been changed, Fauci told TheStreet that his flip-flop occurred because “it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” Fauci claimed he wanted to ensure health care workers received masks as a priority.
The same thing occurred during the US Democratic caucuses at the start of the pandemic. The advice of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was to stay home. Democrat-majority cities and states, including San Francisco and New York, didn’t wait for lockdown mandates. Yet, as the Democratic National Committee (which runs the Party) attacked Trump for minimising the seriousness of the virus, they also told their voters, poll workers, and volunteers to go to booths and elect left representatives; i.e., ignore the CDC advice and stand maskless close to elderly and ethnic minority voters and volunteers (i.e., the most vulnerable). Biden tweeted on 15 March: “If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of being exposed to COVID-19: please vote.”
Another reason people don’t “trust the science” is that media are blatantly partisan. For instance, in March 2020, Twitter Safety announced that it would censor misinformation concerning the pandemic. But the “misinformation” they censored tended to come from the political right. For instance, Biden’s lowering of public confidence in the jab and his violation of CDC guidelines by insisting people vote were not removed by Twitter: the company that, under pressure from the FBI, later deleted President Trump’s account.
VACCINE NATIONALISM
Either a “vaccine” works or it doesn’t. Science doesn’t care if the vaccine is American, British, Chinese, or Russian. Yet, the COVID-19 jabs have been demonised and discredited or promoted and canonised, according to their country of origin. The British Army’s psychological warfare unit, the 77th Brigade, has been targeting injection sceptics as possible enemies of the state linked to Russia. To pre-empt Russia’s success in producing the first COVID-19 jab, Western intelligence agencies claimed that Putin stole research from Western pharmaceutical companies. But if public health was the priority, not nationalistic point-scoring, wouldn’t the West happily share information with the East?
Nations rushed their purported vaccines to win the global battle of ideas and enjoy international prestige. Russia happened to get their first with Gamaleya’s Sputnik-V. The American journal Nature quoted vaccinologists as denouncing the Russian jab as “reckless.” The same criticism was applied neither to American companies nor to the UK and Sweden, which quickly rolled out their joint AstraZeneca jab under the same reckless circumstances. AstraZeneca used trial “volunteers” in poor countries like Brazil, one of whom died. Britain outsourced some of its vaccine production to its former colony, India’s Serum Institute. In November 2020, alleged links between the Institute and jab-induced neurological damage were reported. The Indian-produced version of the jab did not receive approval from the European Union’s Medicines Agency, meaning that the estimated five million Brits injected with the India-produced version of the AstraZeneca jab had to abide by EU quarantine rules when holidaying. Again, either a “vaccine” works or it doesn’t.
Intelligence agencies are concerned about industrial espionage and invoke vague and legally undefined notions of “national interest” to use surveillance to maintain national prestige. Just as the moon landing in the 1960s was America’s way of getting one up on the USSR in the court of global technological public opinion, the race to beat COVID with injections was largely influenced by prestige propaganda.
In April 2021, European Union member states exploded the 77th Brigade’s efforts to promote the “British jab” on behalf of AstraZeneca. The leading EU nations – Germany, France, Italy, and others – cited health concerns, particularly blood clots, as the reason for banning AstraZeneca’s (AZ) jab. Despite the jab being co-produced by a Swedish (i.e., EU) company, it is likely that the real reason for the ban was to punish the UK for its recent Brexit (leaving the Union). It is also possible that because BioNTech is a German company and Germany is the leading economy in the EU, the member states wanted to privilege the US-German Pfizer/BioNTech jab. We also don’t know what kind of lobbying against AZ occurred behind the scenes by rival companies like Pfizer. In addition, while the US approved AZ’s antibody products, it did not authorise the AZ jab.
This did not boost the confidence of “vaccine” sceptics. Either the AZ jab is safe or it is not. How come the AZ injection is safe for British people but not for Europeans or Americans?
WHAT DOES “SAFE AND EFFECTIVE” MEAN?
Vaccines take a decade to design, produce, test, and distribute for a reason. Humans are complicated beings who live in even more complicated societies, and much can go wrong. In a vaccine trial, some questions include the dose-to-antibody stimulation ratio according to age, comorbidities, and pregnancy. If a small dose of vaccine stimulates a large antibody response, this is one measure of efficacy. If the ratio of death and injury is considered by health authorities to be “acceptable,” another measure of efficacy can be added, such as: how much viral load is present in the vaccinated when contracting the given virus (“breakthrough cases”) compared to antibody numbers? This also relates to transmissibility among the vaccinated. If safety, dose-to-antibody ratios, breakthrough cases, and low transmissibility can be determined in large groups (typically tens of millions of people by the end of the trials), then the given vaccine can be said to be safe and efficacious: at least by pre-COVID vaccine standards. In addition to all of the above, these measurements must also be specific to the given virus strain.
These measures went out the window with the COVID jabs. Both peer-reviewed journals and mainstream media boasted that the biggest vaccine candidates – Pfizer, AZ, Gamaleya, etc. – were safe and effective. Even though the EU and US banned AZ over blood clots, the academic literature continued to vouch for the product’s safety. So: is the AZ product safe and merely a victim of vaccine nationalism and perhaps secret lobbying, or is it dangerous by pre-COVID vaccine standards?
The Lancet published an extraordinary paper on vaccine efficacy, which the mainstream media tried to discredit with their self-appointed “fact-checkers.” The study pointed out that when absolute risk reduction measures are added to the data of the major vaccine candidates, “efficacy” drops from the 70-90 percentiles claimed by other peer-reviewers down to literally point one or just above one per cent, depending on the “vaccine.”
Another factor in not trusting the “science” is that politicians were initially eager to promote vaccines as a way of ending the pandemic and “getting on with our lives.” But once it became clear that the alleged vaccines would not actually beat the virus (as vaccines are supposed to do), the “science” changed. Fauci not only lied about masks, he also kept changing his mind on herd immunity. Fauci initially said that vaccination rates among the population need to be 70 per cent for herd immunity to be achieved. A few months later, when it became clear that the injections were neither safe nor effective, Fauci said that 90 per cent injection would be required to achieve herd immunity. The “science” of who or what constitutes “vaccinated” also changed. Because politicians and health officials like Fauci were not clear from the outset that the public would likely need to be put on a vaccine schedule (i.e., to have more than one dose), people wrongly assumed that a single shot would suffice. It was then reported that a course would be required.
After some controversy over the necessary length of time between the two injections, the definition of “fully vaccinated” became someone who has had three doses: even though brands can be mixed and matched without large-scale clinical trials on the efficacy of heterologous COVID vaccination. For example, while the propaganda machine continues to claim that the Pfizer jab is “90 per cent effective” (again, what does that even mean?), the credible pre-print literature now concedes that the Johnson and Johnson jab, for example, is three per cent (more consistent with findings in The Lancet’s study noted above). How could one be fully vaccinated with two Pfizers and a near-zero efficacy J&J? All of this explains why we’ve gone from “get jabbed and get your life back” to “vaccines lessen severe symptoms but do not prevent symptoms or viral spread.”
From this, we can conclude that they are not real vaccines, as understood by the previously used definition. Another reason that people don’t “trust the science” is because most people have contracted or will contract COVID. As most cases are either asymptomatic or mild and confer better immunity than the injections, the question remains for most people: why risk the jab?
However, whatever they are, the jabs do seem to play an important role in reducing the risk of severe illness that requires ICU treatment. Patients must therefore make informed choices with a personal risk-reward analysis. Non-injection measures, such as vitamin D increase and monoclonal antibodies, might, depending on the patient, have the same or better results as the jabs. We can’t know because Big Pharma and government has favoured the blunt instrument of injection over the gentler measures of vitamins and therapeutics.
Is this Science?
Lies and nonsense continue, both in mainstream media and in the academic literature. For instance, the numbers presented in a recent peer-reviewed paper show a clear (though small) increase in early-pregnancy miscarriages in “vaccinated” women. But the paper’s words conclude that there is no such increase. Likewise, mainstream media lie about the risks of COVID to children. In October 2021, the New York Times retracted its claim that 900,000 American children had been hospitalised with COVID, when the real number was (still an awfully high) 63,000. Many media are sponsored by Pfizer. CNN even went as far as awarding Pfizer’s boss, Albert Bourla, its CEO of the Year 2021 award.
Pfizer’s media-buying power is such that in November 2021, NBC’s senior medical correspondent, Dr John Torres, had a Freudian slip. He said: “Last week, 118,000 children ended up with Pfizer…” Err, did he mean COVID? Torres either lied or got the numbers preposterously wrong. He went on to claim that “unfortunately, there have been 146,000 deaths, which according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, puts COVID now in the top-ten causes of death for children” in the US. People also don’t “trust the science” because the Twitter police did not remove NBC’s misinformation – that’s because NBC is part of the Democrat-supporting mainstream media. In reality, by January this year, over 120,000 children worldwide had died of/with COVID (or “Pfizer,” as Torres said). In the US, the number by December 2021 was 1,000: still appallingly high but nowhere near the 146,000 figure claimed by Torres.
It is rare but not unheard of that people need to follow a month or two-month-long vaccine schedule with two or even three injections, such as the hepatitis B vaccine. But four doses? At the point where the “vaccine” is most efficacious (again, meaning what?) Israel health officials privately warn that the body risks “immune system fatigue,” where the immune system has been so shot with attenuated virus, spike protein and/or mRNA, that it is worn out. Is this science or one big, pre-scientific, profit-driven experiment using a desperate and frightened public, coerced with mandates, as lab animals?
Footnotes
1. Amo Spiro, “Pfizer exec calls Israel ‘a sort of laboratory’ for COVID vaccines,” Times of Israel, 12 September 2021, www.timesofisrael.com/pfizer-exec-calls-israel-a-sort-of-laboratory-for-covid-vaccines/ and Dr. Eric Rubin, Food and Drug Administration Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Office of Vaccines Research and Review, 170th Meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, 26 October 2021
2. Liz Hamel, Ashley Kirzinger, Cailey Muñana and Mollyann Brodie, “KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: December 2020,” Kaiser Family Foundation, www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/report/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-december-2020
3. Wendy C. King et al. (2021) “Time trends and factors related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy…,” www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1.full.pdf
4. Wendy C. King et al. (2021) “Timeline trends…,” PLoS One: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260731
5. Joseph Ax, “Democrat Biden warns against rushing out coronavirus vaccine, says Trump cannot be trusted,” Reuters, 16 September 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden-idUSKBN2671NW
6. Ewen Callaway, “Russia’s fast-track coronavirus vaccine draws outrage over safety,” Nature, 11 August 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02386-2
7. Eduardo Simões and Ludwig Burger, “AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial Brazil volunteer dies, trial to continue,” Reuters, 21 October 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil-vaccine-idUSKBN2762MO
8. Sanjay Kumar, “‘Malicious and misconceived.’ Indian vaccine producer hits back at complaint from trial volunteer,” Science, 2 December 2020, www.science.org/content/article/malicious-and-misconceived-indian-vaccine-producer-hits-back-complaint-trial-volunteer
9. Schengen Info, “5 Million Britons With Indian-Made AstraZeneca Vaccine May Face EU Travel Ban,” 3 July 2021, www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/5-million-britons-with-indian-made-astrazeneca-vaccine-may-face-eu-travel-ban
10. Samantha McGrail, “European Countries Suspend Use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine,” PharmaNews Intelligence, 8 April 2021, pharmanewsintel.com/news/european-countries-suspend-use-of-astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine
11. Piero Olliaro et al. (2021) The Lancet: doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(21)00069-0
12. Barbara A. Cohn (2021) “Breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections in 620,000 U.S. Veterans, February 1, 2021 to August 13, 2021,” medRxiv, doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.13.21264966
13. Elyse O. Kharbanda et al. (2021) “Spontaneous Abortion Following COVID-19 Vaccination During Pregnancy,” JAMA, 326(16): 1629-31
14. Isaac Schorr, “New York Times Retracts Massive Exaggeration of Children Hospitalized by COVID-19,” National Review, 8 October 2021, news.yahoo.com/york-times-retracts-massive-exaggeration-163906675.html
15. UNICEF, “Child mortality and COVID-19,” January 2022
16. Jack Dutton, “Over 1,000 Children in U.S. Have Been Killed by COVID,” Newsweek, 16 December 2021, www.newsweek.com/over-1000-children-u-s-killed-covid-1660124
17. Isabel Kershner, “Israel Considers 4th Vaccine Dose, but Some Experts Say It’s Premature,” New York Times, 23 December 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-vaccine-4th-dose.html
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