Vaccine related Articles at Brownstone feature opinion and analysis of vaccines, Big Pharma, and policy including impacts on economics, public dialog, and social life. Vaccine related articles are translated into multiple languages.
Myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – had never been linked to vaccines before. So when 28 cases were reported to the U.S. vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in January 2021, it raised eyebrows. By February, the trickle had become a stream. VAERS received 64 more reports, including two deaths. Then in March, Israel and the military started reporting cases too.
Unfortunately, many of these examples are not becoming outdated. Mask mandates have returned in some places, including schools, despite no high-quality supporting evidence. Same for COVID vaccine booster recommendations for healthy people under 65. Many European countries, including Denmark, have altered their recommendations based on careful risk/benefit analyses. Once again, although it would seem obvious that U.S. leaders should have followed suit, that didn’t happen.
I could have submitted this letter to you, as usually done, and published it here, if rejected. However, I had tried to submit letters three times before and decided to reverse the order this time. Incidentally, my second rejected letter was submitted to The Lancet, and the point I have made there about residual confounding bias was recently exposed (by others) in a letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
There are literally thousands of peer reviewed studies on vaccine hesitancy and how the government can overcome it. In sum, there are over 6000 such studies on Pubmed. A more narrowly focused search on endnote pulled up about 1250 studies. These studies have a wide range of topics, but most focus on which groups of people are vaccine hesitant, statistics on these populations, as well as how to overcome vaccine hesitancy through propaganda, censorship, the law and behavioral control.
As a journalist, I cannot say much more than the best available facts suggest, but as has been clear for far too long, the mRNA vaccines were not beneficial and safe on a population-level for young, healthy men — yet the CDC and FDA didn’t care. Hopefully, “pro-vaccine publication[s]” may recognize the harm they helped perpetuate.
Taking a new Covid shot every winter has no empirical basis. The burden of proving effectiveness against death squarely rests on public health officials and anything short of a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial is unacceptable. And that applies to the flu shot as well.
In January 2021, in the absence of any human data in pregnancy, the CDC stated on its website that mRNA vaccines were “unlikely to pose a specific risk for people who are pregnant.” Behind the scenes however, Pfizer was scrambling to conduct a clinical trial of its vaccine in pregnant women. By February 2022, Pfizer revealed it still did “not yet have a complete data set.”
The Covid epoch was injection normativity on anabolic steroids. Injection makers and mandators asserted hegemony by popularizing their preferences as “normal.” They created power dynamics and hierarchy, social structures pressuring everyone toward compulsory protein production. They thereby stigmatized the “other” – the injection questioning and injection nonconforming.
