Much like a Bill of Rights, a principal function of any Code of Ethics is to set limits, to check the inevitable lust for power, the libido dominandi, that human beings tend to demonstrate when they obtain authority and status over others, regardless of the context.
Though it may be difficult to believe in the aftermath of COVID, the medical profession does possess a Code of Ethics. The four fundamental concepts of Medical Ethics – its 4 Pillars – are Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice.
Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice
These ethical concepts are thoroughly established in the profession of medicine. I learned them as a medical student, much as a young Catholic learns the Apostle’s Creed. As a medical professor, I taught them to my students, and I made sure my students knew them. I believed then (and still do) that physicians must know the ethical tenets of their profession, because if they do not know them, they cannot follow them.
These ethical concepts are indeed well-established, but they are more than that. They are also valid, legitimate, and sound. They are based on historical lessons, learned the hard way from past abuses foisted upon unsuspecting and defenseless patients by governments, health care systems, corporations, and doctors. Those painful, shameful lessons arose not only from the actions of rogue states like Nazi Germany, but also from our own United States: witness Project MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
The 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics protect patients from abuse. They also allow physicians the moral framework to follow their consciences and exercise their individual judgment – provided, of course, that physicians possess the character to do so. However, like human decency itself, the 4 Pillars were completely disregarded by those in authority during COVID.
The demolition of these core principles was deliberate. It originated at the highest levels of COVID policymaking, which itself had been effectively converted from a public health initiative to a national security/military operation in the United States in March 2020, producing the concomitant shift in ethical standards one would expect from such a change. As we examine the machinations leading to the demise of each of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID, we will define each of these four fundamental tenets, and then discuss how each was abused.
Autonomy
Of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, autonomy has historically held pride of place, in large part because respect for the individual patient’s autonomy is a necessary component of the other three. Autonomy was the most systemically abused and disregarded of the 4 Pillars during the COVID era.
Autonomy may be defined as the patient’s right to self-determination with regard to any and all medical treatment. This ethical principle was clearly stated by Justice Benjamin Cardozo as far back as 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”
Patient autonomy is “My body, my choice” in its purest form. To be applicable and enforceable in medical practice, it contains several key derivative principles which are quite commonsensical in nature. These include informed consent,confidentiality, truth-telling, and protection against coercion.
Genuine informed consent is a process, considerably more involved than merely signing a permission form. Informed consent requires a competent patient, who receives full disclosure about a proposed treatment, understands it, and voluntarily consents to it.
Based on that definition, it becomes immediately obvious to anyone who lived in the United States through the COVID era, that the informed consent process was systematically violated by the COVID response in general, and by the COVID vaccine programs in particular. In fact, every one of the components of genuine informed consent were thrown out when it came to the COVID vaccines:
Full disclosure about the COVID vaccines – which were extremely new, experimental therapies, using novel technologies, with alarming safety signals from the very start – was systematically denied to the public. Full disclosure was actively suppressed by bogus anti-“misinformation” campaigns, and replaced with simplistic, false mantras (e.g. “safe and effective”) that were in fact just textbook propaganda slogans.
Blatant coercion (e.g. “Take the shot or you’re fired/can’t attend college/can’t travel”) was ubiquitous and replaced voluntary consent.
Subtler forms of coercion (ranging from cash payments to free beer) were given in exchange for COVID-19 vaccination. Multiple US states held lotteries for COVID-19 vaccine recipients, with up to $5 million in prize money promised in some states.
Many physicians were presented with financial incentives to vaccinate, sometimes reaching hundreds of dollars per patient. These were combined with career-threatening penalties for questioning the official policies. This corruption severely undermined the informed consent process in doctor-patient interactions.
Incompetent patients (e.g. countless institutionalized patients) were injected en masse, often while forcibly isolated from their designated decision-making family members.
It must be emphasized that under the tendentious, punitive, and coercive conditions of the COVID vaccine campaigns, especially during the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” period, it was virtually impossible for patients to obtain genuine informed consent. This was true for all the above reasons, but most importantly because full disclosure was nearly impossible to obtain.
A small minority of individuals did manage, mostly through their own research, to obtain sufficient information about the COVID-19 vaccines to make a truly informed decision. Ironically, these were principally dissenting healthcare personnel and their families, who, by virtue of discovering the truth, knew “too much.” This group overwhelmingly refused the mRNA vaccines.
Confidentiality, another key derivative principle of autonomy, was thoroughly ignored during the COVID era. The widespread yet chaotic use of COVID vaccine status as a de facto social credit system, determining one’s right of entry into public spaces, restaurants and bars, sporting and entertainment events, and other locations, was unprecedented in our civilization.
Gone were the days when HIPAA laws were taken seriously, where one’s health history was one’s own business, and where the cavalier use of such information broke Federal law. Suddenly, by extralegal public decree, the individual’s health history was public knowledge, to the absurd extent that any security guard or saloon bouncer had the right to question individuals about their personal health status, all on the vague, spurious, and ultimately false grounds that such invasions of privacy promoted “public health.”
Truth-telling was completely dispensed with during the COVID era. Official lies were handed down by decree from high-ranking officials such as Anthony Fauci, public health organizations like the CDC, and industry sources, then parroted by regional authorities and local clinical physicians. The lies were legion, and none of them have aged well. Examples include:
The SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a wet market, not in a lab
“Two weeks to flatten the curve”
Six feet of “social distancing” effectively prevents transmission of the virus
“A pandemic of the unvaccinated”
“Safe and effective”
Masks effectively prevent transmission of the virus
Children are at serious risk from COVID
School closures are necessary to prevent spread of the virus
mRNA vaccines prevent contraction of the virus
mRNA vaccines prevent transmission of the virus
mRNA vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural immunity
Myocarditis is more common from COVID-19 disease than from mRNA vaccination
It must be emphasized that health authorities pushed deliberate lies, known to be lies at the time by those telling them. Throughout the COVID era, a small but very insistent group of dissenters have constantly presented the authorities with data-driven counterarguments against these lies. The dissenters were consistently met with ruthless treatment of the “quick and devastating takedown” variety now infamously promoted by Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins.
Over time, many of the official lies about COVID have been so thoroughly discredited that they are now indefensible. In response, the COVID power brokers, backpedaling furiously, now try to recast their deliberate lies as fog-of-war style mistakes. To gaslight the public, they claim they had no way of knowing they were spouting falsehoods, and that the facts have only now come to light. These, of course, are the same people who ruthlessly suppressed the voices of scientific dissent that presented sound interpretations of the situation in real time.
For example, on March 29, 2021, during the initial campaign for universal COVID vaccination, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky proclaimed on MSNBC that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” or “get sick,” based on both clinical trials and “real-world data.” However, testifying before Congress on April 19, 2023, Walensky conceded that those claims are now known to be false, but that this was due to “an evolution of the science.” Walensky had the effrontery to claim this before Congress 2 years after the fact, when in actuality, the CDC itself had quietly issued a correction of Walensky’s false MSNBC claims back in 2021, a mere 3 days after she had made them.
On May 5, 2023, three weeks after her mendacious testimony to Congress, Walensky announced her resignation.
Truth-telling by physicians is a key component of the informed consent process, and informed consent, in turn, is a key component of patient autonomy. A matrix of deliberate lies, created by authorities at the very top of the COVID medical hierarchy, was projected down the chains of command, and ultimately repeated by individual physicians in their face-to-face interactions with their patients. This process rendered patient autonomy effectively null and void during the COVID era.
Patient autonomy in general, and informed consent in particular, are both impossible where coercion is present. Protection against coercion is a principal feature of the informed consent process, and it is a primary consideration in medical research ethics. This is why so-called vulnerable populations such as children, prisoners, and the institutionalized are often afforded extra protections when proposed medical research studies are subjected to institutional review boards.
Coercion not only ran rampant during the COVID era, it was deliberately perpetrated on an industrial scale by governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment. Thousands of American healthcare workers, many of whom had served on the front lines of care during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 (and had already contracted COVID-19 and developed natural immunity) were fired from their jobs in 2021 and 2022 after refusing mRNA vaccines they knew they didn’t need, would not consent to, and yet for which they were denied exemptions. “Take this shot or you’re fired” is coercion of the highest order.
Hundreds of thousands of American college students were required to get the COVID shots and boosters to attend school during the COVID era. These adolescents, like young children, have statistically near-zero chance of death from COVID-19. However, they (especially males) are at statistically highest risk of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis.
According to the advocacy group nocollegemendates.com, as of May 2, 2023, approximately 325 private and public colleges and universities in the United States still have active vaccine mandates for students matriculating in the fall of 2023. This is true despite the fact that it is now universally accepted that the mRNA vaccines do not stop contraction or transmission of the virus. They have zero public health utility. “Take this shot or you cannot go to school” is coercion of the highest order.
Countless other examples of coercion abound. The travails of the great tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who has been denied entry into both Australia and the United States for multiple Grand Slam tournaments because he refuses the COVID vaccines, illustrate in broad relief the “man without a country” limbo in which the unvaccinated found (and to some extent still find) themselves, due to the rampant coercion of the COVID era.
Beneficence
In medical ethics, beneficence means that physicians are obligated to act for the benefit of their patients. This concept distinguishes itself from non-maleficence (see below) in that it is a positive requirement. Put simply, all treatments done to an individual patient should do good to that individual patient. If a procedure cannot help you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. In ethical medical practice, there is no “taking one for the team.”
By mid-2020 at the latest, it was clear from existing data that SARS-CoV-2 posed truly minimal risk to children of serious injury and death – in fact, the pediatric Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 was known in 2020 to be less than half the risk of being struck by lightning. This feature of the disease, known even in its initial and most virulent stages, was a tremendous stroke of pathophysiological good luck, and should have been used to the great advantage of society in general and children in particular.
The opposite occurred. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 causes extremely mild illness in children was systematically hidden or scandalously downplayed by authorities, and subsequent policy went unchallenged by nearly all physicians, to the tremendous detriment of children worldwide.
The frenzied push for and unrestrained use of mRNA vaccines in children and pregnant women – which continues at the time of this writing in the United States – outrageously violates the principle of beneficence. And beyond the Anthony Faucis, Albert Bourlas, and Rochelle Walenskys, thousands of ethically compromised pediatricians bear responsibility for this atrocity.
The mRNA COVID vaccines were – and remain – new, experimental vaccines with zero long-term safety data for either the specific antigen they present (the spike protein) or their novel functional platform (mRNA vaccine technology). Very early on, they were known to be ineffective in stopping contraction or transmission of the virus, rendering them useless as a public health measure. Despite this, the public was barraged with bogus “herd immunity” arguments. Furthermore, these injections displayed alarming safety signals, even during their tiny, methodologically challenged initial clinical trials.
The principle of beneficence was entirely and deliberately ignored when these products were administered willy-nilly to children as young as 6 months, a population to whom they could provide zero benefit – and as it turned out, that they would harm. This represented a classic case of “taking one for the team,” an abusive notion that was repeatedly invoked against children during the COVID era, and one that has no place in the ethical practice of medicine.
Children were the population group that was most obviously and egregiously harmed by the abandonment of the principle of beneficence during COVID. However, similar harms occurred due to the senseless push for COVID mRNA vaccination of other groups, such as pregnant women and persons with natural immunity.
Non-Maleficence
Even if, for argument’s sake alone, one makes the preposterous assumption that all COVID-era public health measures were implemented with good intentions, the principle of non-maleficence was nevertheless broadly ignored during the pandemic. With the growing body of knowledge of the actual motivations behind so many aspects of COVID-era health policy, it becomes clear that non-maleficence was very often replaced with outright malevolence.
In medical ethics, the principle of non-maleficence is closely tied to the universally cited medical dictum of primum non nocere, or, “First, do no harm.” That phrase is in turn associated with a statement from Hippocrates’ Epidemics, which states, “As to diseases make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.” This quote illustrates the close, bookend-like relationship between the concepts of beneficence (“to help”) and non-maleficence (“to do no harm”).
In simple terms, non-maleficence means that if a medical intervention is likely to harm you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. If the risk/benefit ratio is unfavorable to you (i.e., it is more likely to hurt you then help you), then it shouldn’t be done to you. Pediatric COVID mRNA vaccine programs are just one prominent aspect of COVID-era health policy that absolutely violate the principle of non-maleficence.
It has been argued that historical mass-vaccination programs may have violated non-maleficence to some extent, as rare severe and even deadly vaccine reactions did occur in those programs. This argument has been forwarded to defend the methods used to promote the COVID mRNA vaccines. However, important distinctions between past vaccine programs and the COVID mRNA vaccine program must be made.
First, past vaccine-targeted diseases such as polio and smallpox were deadly to children – unlike COVID-19. Second, such past vaccines were effective in both preventing contraction of the disease in individuals and in achieving eradication of the disease – unlike COVID-19. Third, serious vaccine reactions were truly rare with those older, more conventional vaccines – again, unlike COVID-19.
Thus, many past pediatric vaccine programs had the potential to meaningfully benefit their individual recipients. In other words, the a priori risk/benefit ratio may have been favorable, even in tragic cases that resulted in vaccine-related deaths. This was never even arguably true with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Such distinctions possess some subtlety, but they are not so arcane that the physicians dictating COVID policy did not know they were abandoning basic medical ethics standards such as non-maleficence. Indeed, high-ranking medical authorities had ethical consultants readily available to them – witness that Anthony Fauci’s wife, a former nurse named Christine Grady, served as chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a fact that Fauci flaunted for public relations purposes.
Indeed, much of COVID-19 policy appears to have been driven not just by rejection of non-maleficence, but by outright malevolence. Compromised “in-house” ethicists frequently served as apologists for obviously harmful and ethically bankrupt policies, rather than as checks and balances against ethical abuses.
Schools never should have been closed in early 2020, and they absolutely should have been fully open without restrictions by fall of 2020. Lockdowns of society never should have been instituted, much less extended as long as they were. Sufficient data existed in real time such that both prominent epidemiologists (e.g. the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) and select individual clinical physicians produced data-driven documents publicly proclaiming against lockdowns and school closures by mid-to-late 2020.These were either aggressively suppressed or completely ignored.
Numerous governments imposed prolonged, punishing lockdowns that were without historical precedent, legitimate epidemiological justification, or legal due process. Curiously, many of the worst offenders hailed from the so-called liberal democracies of the Anglosphere, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and deep blue parts of the United States. Public schools In the United States were closed an average of 70 weeks during COVID. This was far longer than most European Union countries, and longer still than Scandinavian countries who, in some cases, never closed schools.
The punitive attitude displayed by health authorities was broadly supported by the medical establishment. The simplistic argument developed that because there was a “pandemic,” civil rights could be decreed null and void – or, more accurately, subjected to the whims of public health authorities, no matter how nonsensical those whims may have been. Innumerable cases of sadistic lunacy ensued.
At one point at the height of the pandemic, in this author’s locale of Monroe County, New York, an idiotic Health Official decreed that one side of a busy commercial street could be open for business, while the opposite side was closed, because the center of the street divided two townships. One town was code “yellow,” the other code “red” for new COVID-19 cases, and thus businesses mere yards from one another survived or faced ruin. Except, of course, the liquor stores, which, being “essential,” never closed at all. How many thousands of times was such asinine and arbitrary abuse of power duplicated elsewhere? The world will never know.
Who can forget being forced to wear a mask when walking to and from a restaurant table, then being permitted to remove it once seated? The humorous memes that “you can only catch COVID when standing up” aside, such pseudo-scientific idiocy smacks of totalitarianism rather than public health. It closely mimics the deliberate humiliation of citizens through enforced compliance with patently stupid rules that was such a legendary feature of life in the old Eastern Bloc.
And I write as an American who, while I lived in a deep blue state during COVID, never suffered in the concentration camps for COVID-positive individuals that were established in Australia.
Those who submit to oppression resent no one, not even their oppressors, so much as the braver souls who refuse to surrender. The mere presence of dissenters is a stone in the quisling’s shoe – a constant, niggling reminder to the coward of his moral and ethical inadequacy. Human beings, especially those lacking personal integrity, cannot tolerate much cognitive dissonance. And so they turn on those of higher character than themselves.
This explains much of the sadistic streak that so many establishment-obeying physicians and health administrators displayed during COVID. The medical establishment – hospital systems, medical schools, and the doctors employed therein – devolved into a medical Vichy state under the control of the governmental/industrial/public health juggernaut.
These mid- and low-level collaborators actively sought to ruin dissenters’ careers with bogus investigations, character assassination, and abuse of licensing and certification board authority. They fired the vaccine refuseniks within their ranks out of spite, self-destructively decimating their own workforces in the process. Most perversely, they denied early, potential life-saving treatment to all their COVID patients. Later, they withheld standard therapies for non-COVID illnesses – up to and including organ transplants – to patients who declined COVID vaccines, all for no legitimate medical reason whatsoever.
This sadistic streak that the medical profession displayed during COVID is reminiscent of the dramatic abuses of Nazi Germany. However, it more closely resembles (and in many ways is an extension of) the subtler yet still malignant approach followed for decades by the United States Government’s medical/industrial/public health/national security nexus, as personified by individuals like Anthony Fauci. And it is still going strong in the wake of COVID.
Ultimately, abandonment of the tenet of non-maleficence is inadequate to describe much of the COVID-era behavior of the medical establishment and those who remained obedient to it. Genuine malevolence was very often the order of the day.
Justice
In medical ethics, the Pillar of justice refers to the fair and equitable treatment of individuals. As resources are often limited in health care, the focus is typically on distributive justice; that is, the fair and equitable allocation of medical resources. Conversely, it is also important to ensure that the burdens of health care are as fairly distributed as possible.
In a just situation, the wealthy and powerful should not have instant access to high-quality care and medicines that are unavailable to the rank and file or the very poor. Conversely, the poor and vulnerable should not unduly bear the burdens of health care, for example, by being disproportionately subjected to experimental research, or by being forced to follow health restrictions to which others are exempt.
Both of these aspects of justice were disregarded during COVID as well. In numerous instances, persons in positions of authority procured preferential treatment for themselves or their family members. Two prominent examples:
According to ABC News, “in the early days of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prioritized COVID-19 testing for relatives including his brother, mother and at least one of his sisters, when testing wasn’t widely available to the public.” Reportedly, “Cuomo allegedly also gave politicians, celebrities and media personalities access to tests.”
In March 2020, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine directed nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, despite warnings against this by trade groups. That directive and others like it subsequently cost tens of thousands of lives. Less than two months later, Levine confirmed that her own 95 year-old mother had been removed from a nursing home to private care. Levine was subsequently promoted to 4-star Admiral in the US Public Health Service by the Biden Administration.
The burdens of lockdowns were distributed extremely unjustly during COVID. While average citizens remained in lockdown, suffering personal isolation, forbidden to earn a living, the powerful flouted their own rules. Who can forget how US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke the strict California lockdowns to get her hair styled, or how British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defied his own supposedly life-or-death orders by throwing at least a dozen parties at 10 Downing Street in 2020 alone? House arrest for thee, wine and cheese for me.
But California Governor Gavin Newsom might take the cake. At first glance, given both his BoJo-esque, lockdown-defying dinner with lobbyists at the ultra-swanky Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry, and his decision to send his own children to expensive private schools which were fully open for 5-day in-school learning during the prolonged California school closures, one might think of Newsom as a COVID-era Robin Hood. That is, until one realizes that he presided over those same punishing, inhumane lockdowns and school closures. He was actually the Sheriff of Nottingham.
To a decent person with a functioning conscience, this level of sociopathy is difficult to comprehend. What is crystal clear is that anyone capable of the hypocrisy that Gavin Newsom displayed during COVID should not be anywhere near a position of power in any society.
Two additional points should be emphasized. First, these egregious acts were rarely, if ever, called out by the medical establishment. Second, the behaviors themselves show that those in power never truly believed their own narrative. Both the medical establishment and the power brokers knew the danger posed by the virus, while real, was grossly overstated. They knew the lockdowns, social distancing, and masking of the population at large were kabuki theater at best, and soft-core totalitarianism at worst. The lockdowns were based on a gigantic lie, one they neither believed nor felt compelled to follow themselves.
Solutions and Reform
The abandonment of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID has contributed greatly to an historic erosion of public trust in the healthcare industry. This distrust is entirely understandable and richly deserved, however harmful it may prove to be for patients. For example, at a population level, trust in vaccines in general has dramatically reduced worldwide, compared to the pre-COVID era. Millions of children now stand at increased risk from proven vaccine-preventable diseases due to the thoroughly unethical push for unnecessary, indeed harmful, universal COVID-19 mRNA vaccination of children.
Systemically, the medical profession desperately needs ethical reform in the wake of COVID. Ideally, this would begin with a strong reassertion of and recommitment to the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, again with patient autonomy at the forefront. It would continue with prosecution and punishment of those individuals most responsible for the ethical failures, from the likes of Anthony Fauci on down. Human nature is such that if no sufficient deterrent to evil is established, evil will be perpetuated.
Unfortunately, within the medical establishment, there does not appear to be any impetus toward acknowledgement of the profession’s ethical failures during COVID, much less toward true reform. This is largely because the same financial, administrative, and regulatory forces that drove COVID-era failures remain in control of the profession. These forces deliberately ignore the catastrophic harms of COVID policy, instead viewing the era as a sort of test run for a future of highly profitable, tightly regulated health care. They view the entire COVID-era martial-law-as-public-health approach as a prototype, rather than a failed model.
Reform of medicine, if it happens, will likely arise from individuals who refuse to participate in the “Big Medicine” vision of health care. In the near future, this will likely result in a fragmentation of the industry analogous to that seen in many other aspects of post-COVID society. In other words, there is apt to be a “Great Re-Sort” in medicine as well.
Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.
Patients should become highly proactive in researching which tests, medications, and therapies they accept for themselves (and especially for their children). They should be unabashed in asking their physicians for their views on patient autonomy, mandated care, and the extent to which their physicians are willing to think and act according to their own consciences. They should vote with their feet when unacceptable answers are given. They must learn to think for themselves and ask for what they want. And they must learn to say no.
Clayton J. Baker, MD is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
This week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky provided witness testimony to the House Committee on Appropriations responsible for overseeing the funding of various federal programs related to labour, health, education, and other related agencies.
But serious questions have been raised about the veracity of Walensky’s testimony.
Congressman Andrew Clyde (R-Ga) asked Walensky if her March 2021 public statement on MSNBC, in which she unequivocally said that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, they do not get sick” was accurate.
“At the time it was [accurate]” Walensky replied confidently.
She then proceeded to explain, “We’ve had an evolution of the science and an evolution of the virus” and that “all the data at the time suggested that vaccinated people, even if they got sick, could not transmit the virus.”
However, there was no such evidence at the time and it prompted criticism from scientists who said there weren’t enough data to claim that vaccinated people were completely protected or that they could not transmit the virus to others.
One of those critics was Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.
“Back then, Walensky didn’t know if it was true. It was just an irresponsible use of a bully pulpit as a CDC director to say something that she did not know for certain to be true at the time,” said Bhattacharya.
“Unfortunately, people used that information to discriminate against unvaccinated individuals and would certainly have been used as fuel for very destructive policies like vaccine mandates,” he added.
Notably, only days after Walensky made that statement to MSNBC, a spokesperson from her own agency had to walk back the comments saying, “Dr Walensky spoke broadly in this interview” adding that it was possible for fully vaccinated people to get COVID-19.
Walensky missed the memo
Walensky should have known that when mRNA vaccines were first authorised in 2020, the FDA listed critical ‘gaps’ in the knowledge base. One of them was the vaccine’s unknown effectiveness against viral transmission.
Also, in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s original pivotal trials, there were 8 and 11 people respectively, who developed symptomatic COVID-19 in the vaccine group, proving the vaccines never had absolute effectiveness, like Walensky had claimed.
Several months later, the FDA’s evaluation stayed the same. In a clinical review, the FDA wrote, “remaining uncertainties regarding the clinical benefits of BNT162b2 in individuals 16 years and older, include its level of protection against asymptomatic infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, including for the delta variant.”
Even today, the FDA remains clear that efficacy against transmission is unproven. The FDA’s website states, “While it is hoped this will be the case, the scientific community does not yet know if Comirnaty will reduce such transmission.”
Walensky says Cochrane summary ‘retracted’
Another astonishing falsehood made by Walensky was her response to Congressman Clyde’s question about the Cochrane review which found that wearing face masks in the community “probably makes little to no difference” in preventing viral transmission.
Walensky enthusiastically stated, “I think its notable, that the Editor-in-Chief of Cochrane, actually said that the summary of that review was…[stumble]..she retracted the summary of that review and said that it was inaccurate.”
However, the summary of the review was not retracted, nor have the authors of the review changed the language in the summary.
Misleading statements by New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci has likely led to this falsehood being repeated (which I cover in a previous article).
In response to Walensky’s comments, Tom Jefferson, lead author of the Cochrane study said, “Walensky is plain wrong. There has been no retraction of anything.”
“It’s worth reiterating that we are the copyright holders of the review, so we decide what goes in or out of the review and we will not change our review on the basis of what the media wants or what Walensky says,” remarked Jefferson.
Bhattacharya was also stunned by Walensky’s comments. “It’s irresponsible for her to claim that the Cochrane review [summary] was retracted when it was not. It damages her credibility and harms the scientific process, which requires public officials to be honest about scientific results,” he said.
Did Walensky lie to Congress or is she poorly informed?
Witnesses at these hearings are expected to provide truthful and accurate information to the committee and may be subject to legal penalties if they provide false information or knowingly make false statements.
But will Walensky be held accountable for misleading Congress? Unlikely.
On 24 Sept 2021, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky was asked if it was safe to receive a covid-19 vaccine while breastfeeding, her reply was unwavering:
“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.
“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, before you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby.”
But Walensky’s advice was not based on science. The safety studies had not been done.
It has been over a year since her comment, and a study published in JAMA found trace amounts of mRNA in the breast milk of mothers who’d received the Pfizer or Moderna covid-19 vaccine.
The researchers speculated that lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, once injected into the arm, are transported via the lymphatic system to the mammary glands and expressed into breast milk.
Yes, it was a small study, and the mRNA was only detected in expressed breast milk for up to two days, but the authors stated:
Caution is warranted about breastfeeding children younger than 6 months in the first 48 hours after maternal vaccination until more safety studies are conducted.
Caution is warranted?
Aaron Kheriaty, psychiatrist and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy, Washington DC, has been critical of the “jab first, ask questions later” approach.
He says Walensky’s insistence about the safety of mRNA vaccines in breastfeeding women was “completely reckless” in the absence of adequate safety data.
“We don’t have evidence that it’s harmful, but we also don’t have sufficient evidence that it is safe for your baby, so that’s the first thing that needs to be said when there’s an absence of evidence,” says Kheriaty.
There are still many unknowns. Oral ingestion of mRNA bound to lipid nanoparticles has no demonstrated safety, and the pegylated product (a design of the mRNA vaccines) when ingested, can be rapidly absorbed through the gut lining.
“The safety studies should’ve been done right out of the gate. Until you actually do the studies, you cannot, at the same time, come out and say, don’t worry, this is safe. We have to inform people of the state of the science, we should tell them that the evidence is not clear,” he adds.
Public health authorities argued that pregnant women and their babies would face a greater risk of harm from covid than from the vaccine, but Kheriaty says it was guesswork.
“We didn’t know any of that. It was a theoretical risk. Childbearing women were excluded from the clinical trials, so we did not have that data.”
Childbearing women were coerced
Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts, says vaccines have an important role to play in medicine, but admits that many of his patients have legitimate concerns about the unknown impact of covid-19 vaccines on pregnancy and breastfeeding.
“These women make good points. They should be listened to, and their judgement and decisions respected,” says Urato.
“After all, these vaccines are synthetic chemical structures. They are made in chemical manufacturing facilities. They aren’t ‘all natural’ substances. And, honestly, we just don’t know what all of the effects are going to be from using these vaccines during pregnancy and during breastfeeding,” he adds.
Urato rejects the media narrative that childbearing women are “victims of misinformation” if they have concerns about covid-19 vaccine safety.
“My patients are intelligent, they have good instincts and I think their concerns are valid. The idea that all of these women are misled, and uninformed ‘victims of misinformation’ is an insult to them,” he says.
When vaccine mandates were imposed across the globe, many pregnant and breastfeeding women were forced to get vaccinated under penalty of losing their jobs and those who declined, were accused of being anti-vaxxers.
“Pregnant women should be allowed to make personal health choices and decide what gets injected into their body, and the decision should be free from coercion,” says Urato.
Instead, doctors are being coached on ways to handle vaccine hesitancy. In Canada, for example, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario encouraged doctors to prescribe medication to manage anxieties about the vaccine or to recommend psychotherapy.
The precautionary principle
A recent article by British sociologist Robert Dingwall reminds us of the underlying principle of clinicians primum non nocere; the first duty of a doctor is to do no harm.
Dingwall writes that safety cannot be “assumed” but must be demonstrated. He says, “doing stuff just in case” or because “it might help,” is not sufficient.
“Emergency conditions do not justify the abandonment of the precautionary principle. If action is urgent, but benefits and harms are uncertain, then the actions or innovations must be temporary, provisional, and closely monitored with a view to withdrawing or halting them if their benefits are not proportionate to their harms.
Pandemic policies would have looked very different if the precautionary principle had been applied correctly.”
Urato agrees. He says that we will look back with regret at how public health authorities treated pregnant women.
“Vaccine mandates were a really cruel, uncompassionate, and inhumane way to treat pregnant women. The community needs to really learn from this awful episode and make sure nothing like this happens again.”
Last week, The Epoch Times reported that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), admitted the CDC had stopped monitoring the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines using a method of analysis called proportional reporting ratio (PRR).
Walensky promised to resume the monitoring.
What The Epoch Times missed is that PRR is a fraudulent measure of vaccine harm, designed by the CDC expressly for the new COVID-19 vaccines to disguise the devastation the vaccines are causing.
Why? Because PRR measures the pattern of different vaccine side effects, but it is indifferent to the number of people reporting those side effects.
If some completely new vaccine side effect appears with the introduction of a new vaccine, PRR will catch that.
But the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with huge numbers of people reporting side effects on an unprecedented scale — and, by design, PRR misses this completely.
For example, if one person in a million dies from vaccine A and one person in a thousand dies from vaccine B, then vaccines A and B can have exactly the same PRR score!
PRR is a single number that compares the variety of different side effects for a new vaccine to the variety of side effects from past vaccines.
Of course, there have been many vaccines with different side-effect profiles in the past, and it is difficult to stand out among such a diversity of profiles.
Where the new mRNA vaccines do stand out is the unprecedented number of bad outcomes, including deaths, reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Of all the reports in the 30-year history of VAERS, two-thirds of them were from the COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in the U.S. in December 2020.
This includes three-fourths of all deaths reported to VAERS and three-fourths of all hospitalizations.
Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, reports to VAERS have skyrocketed off the charts.
Credit: OpenVAERS
These numbers represent only the reports VAERS has processed and posted. Jessica Rose, Ph.D., has reported that VAERS is months behind in posting these reports because its staff has not increased, while its workload is roughly 50 times greater since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The sheer volume of VAERS reports, including deaths, should have set off alarm bells within weeks after the vaccines were introduced.
Reporting only PRR and not the actual count provided a convenient cover for “business as usual.”
I am grateful to Mathew Crawford for pointing this out in an article last year.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted organizational shortcomings on Fox News while deflecting blame toward predecessors for their lockdown recommendation.
“Many of those lockdowns pre-dated me at the CDC,” she said.
Walensky, who once used ‘Trust the science’ to persuade the public, carried a humbler tone while reflecting on her organization’s decisions.
“There were important decisions that we had to make in imperfect times, with imperfect data, and we always updated those decisions as those data were evolving…”
“So, I don’t really want to re-visit the questions of lockdowns that pre-dated me, but what I will say is, we’ve updated our guidance in the context of new information, and sometimes we have to make a decision before we have all the information that we want…”
Indeed, the CDC updated guidance by removing special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, effectively admitting that vaccination status is no longer relevant when it comes to infection or spread of the Covid virus.
In fact, on July 23, the CDC deleted a ‘fact’ from their “Facts about mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines”, and they did so without explanation. Last time I checked, facts don’t change — but apparently, they do for the CDC.
Walensky further stated that “[their] science” indicated hybrid immunity was superior to natural immunity. However, we’ve reported on a scientific study that accounted for more than 5.7 million people, which showed that natural immunity is just as effective as hybrid immunity.
To this point, Walensky’s usage of science in the possessive sense — by calling it “our science” — denotes a departure from “the science,” of which they’re either arbitrarily picking from or are completely unaware.
Between Fauci stepping down and Walenski pointing fingers, it appears the blame game has officially started.
While Twitter has suspended and permanently blocked numerous individuals for posting so-called “misinformation” concerning COVID-19 vaccines, it has not done so to “health” authorities – those who arguably should be held to an even higher standard – when they blatantly share inaccurate information.
On June 18, 2022, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky posted a tweet with a video of herself discussing the CDC’s recent recommendation of the COVID-19 shots for children under 5. In the video, Dr. Walensky made the following two claims:
“We now know based on rigorous scientific review that the vaccines available here in the United States can be used safely and effectively in children under 5.”
“We have taken another important step together on our fight against COVID-19 by making safe and effectivevaccines available for our little ones.”
But as Dr. Walensky should certainly be aware, in issuing Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs), the FDA has not(under its ridiculously low standards) made a finding that these vaccines are “safe and effective.” Instead, the grant of an EUA means only that the FDA has determined “it is reasonable to believe that [each vaccine] may be effective” and that “it is reasonable to conclude, based on the totality of scientific evidence available, that the known and potential benefits of [each vaccine] outweigh the known and potential risks of the vaccine.”
By claiming – two separate times – that these vaccines are “safe and effective,” Dr. Walensky is misleading the public by suggesting these vaccines have met the legal standard required for licensure.
Worse yet, because her tweet is “descriptive printed matter” that is both advertising and promoting Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, the tweet itself is in violation of both EUAs issued to these companies because it does not “clearly and conspicuously” contain the required disclaimer that these products have not yet been licensed as safe and effective by the FDA.
ICAN, through its attorneys, has sent Dr. Walensky a formal letter demanding that she immediately remove the misleading tweet and we will keep you posted on the CDC’s response.
Walensky also claimed she was unaware the shots might lose effectiveness over time. Yet she’s a highly qualified public health official, and even 15-year-old science students know that cold/flu viruses are prone to mutations, which go a long way to altering a vaccine’s effectiveness. It was quite galling to hear her talk about ‘waning jab efficacy’, then casually smile, shrug her shoulders and say: ‘Science is not black and white, it’s not immediate . . . science is grey’ i.e. that nobody could be certain.
Contrary to Dr Walensky’s position in spring 2022, throughout 2021, the US authorities (and elsewhere) were so certain of jab efficacy that they insisted that everyone had to get jabbed. Never mind the psychological pressure and moral blackmail, they threatened serious consequences: fines, imprisonment, ‘no jab, no job’ and ‘no jab, no school’ mandates. They were so certain about jab efficacy that they threatened peoples’ livelihoods, careers, businesses and education. They were certain enough to foment severe discord in society, creating disputes and anxiety that damaged, fractured and destroyed marriages, families and friendships.
They pushed the jabs this hard, but they had no real idea how well they worked. Now we know that they don’t work at all; we also strongly suspect that the jabs actually make infection levels and illnesses worse, and this does not include jab-related deaths, conditions and illnesses that should result in the total withdrawal of these chemicals.
The Walenskys of this world were so certain, yet it in reality they were so wrong, so her airy dismissal of these errors in her interview was absolutely breath-taking.
A few questions also spring to mind:
Dr Walensky has a BA in biochemistry and molecular biology and a masters in public health from Harvard. She is a scientist. How is it possible that someone with such qualifications, and holding a position of such responsibility, doesn’t know that cold/flu viruses mutate?
Dr Walensky is also a MD. Has she forgotten the ethics and principles of informed consent? We’ll return to this point.
Why was the director the CDC accepting information about a new drug from its manufacturer (Pfizer) via CNN? Should the CDC accept the manufacturer’s own assessment and then tell the whole population with certainty that it is ‘safe and effective’? Shouldn’t they be doing their own thorough investigations and evaluations? Especially since mRNA technology was so new and untested.
Did it not occur to Dr Walensky that if the new, ‘safe and effective’ mRNA-based jab was not ‘effective’, it might not be all that ‘safe’ either? Did the possibility that the drug’s emergency authorisation ought to be withdrawn not occur to her? If it didn’t, her competence must be questioned. If it did, and she discussed it, we need to know a lot more details. If it did, and she dismissed it, she ought to be asked a lot more questions.
With such evidence in front of Dr Walensky, why didn’t the CDC withdraw support for government mandates?
Why didn’t Dr Walensky tell President Biden that he might think again before dishonourably discharging members of the armed services for declining a jab?
Why didn’t the CDC inform the American public that claims about jab efficacy were completely and utterly unreliable? Had they known that being jabbed didn’t stop people getting C-19 or passing it on, then many people may well have decided to decline consent to be jabbed – at least to their second and third shots – and thereby avoid post-jab effects, serious medical problems or even death.
Was it not completely unethical for Dr Walensky to withhold this important information? Was she not expressly bound to inform the public that there are risks involved in accepting an untested synthetic compound – and that it did not work as intended anyway? Did she wilfully deprive them of information that would have facilitated ‘informed consent’?
Dr Walensky has also publicly discredited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-administered by the FDA and the CDC. Does she not know that VAERS has revealed that the Covid jabs are the most damaging ever created? How can she pooh-pooh these VAERS figures when they are supported by WHO statistics: 2,457,386 reports of adverse reaction to C-19 jabs 2020-21, against 6,891 adverse reactions after smallpox jabs 1968-2021. Of course, smallpox is/was a much bigger threat than C-19.
How can Dr Walensky not know these numbers? Why has she not halted the jab roll-out? No matter how well she is supported by the American authorities and the MSM – who insist that criticism is ‘misinformation’ – this isn’t going to go away, especially if they insist that more jabs are needed every year or every six months.
Surely Rochelle Walensky must resign. Given the damage that has been done to the physical, emotional and economic health of tens of millions, it’s not good enough to shrug one’s shoulders and say, ‘We weren’t sure’.
Well, it’s not that big of a deal, it’s only one of the most crucial concerns of the entire pandemic.
The CDC, whose literal one job is to track and report on the spread of diseases, whose advice has been religiously followed by corporations, colleges, politicians and local school boards, managed to get vaccine efficacy wrong.
How could this happen?
How would anyone ever be able to trust them again?
Well, there have been numerous examples of the CDC destroyingtheircredibility and eradicating whatever respect or confidence the informed public previously had for them and their conclusions.
Beyond the persistent misinformation on masks, the debacle of instigating contact tracing, the early testing failures, the remarkably useless county level metrics that were essentially made up out of thin air and the endlessly disgraceful “studies,” their inability to accept reality has led to unspeakable policies and purposeful, damaging discrimination all over the world.
Encouraging absurd and misleading percentages and estimates to be disseminated has and will continue to have far reaching and long term effects that we’ve only just begun to consider. Beyond the policies imposed as a result of their actions, there inevitably will be more erosion of trust in public health and resentment and anger towards institutions.
The CDC had one job to do. It failed. And there ought to be consequences for the damage they’ve inflicted on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, due to their profound, inexcusable incompetence.
What’s happened here is profoundly disturbing.
If you haven’t seen the video already, CDC director Rochelle Walensky recently spoke at the Washington University in St. Louis to discuss “lessons learned” from the pandemic and how her experience as an HIV expert prepared her for the challenges of COVID:
“We learned so much from HIV in terms of who gets care and access to care,” Walensky said. “We in infectious diseases have long known that infectious diseases go not to places of wealth but to places of poverty and places that lack access to care. The first people who brought SARS-CoV-2 to the United States were people who traveled on airplanes, people who traveled on cruise ships, people who had the resources to do those sorts of things. But then it became a disease of the more vulnerable.”
If she was so concerned with “who gets care and access to care” for HIV, how has she not issued a statement explaining that unvaccinated people should never be denied care or access to care based on personal health status? I would expect she is aware that many of the unvaccinated are from marginalized or disadvantaged communities — the CDC is obsessively concerned with equity, except when the inequities are focused on those who haven’t had this specific vaccine.
Her agency’s maddening mistake and subsequent demonization of “unvaccinated” individuals directly led to horrifying examples of patients denied transplants and treatments for the simple crime of not receiving a vaccine which we’ve learned does little to nothing to protect others.
In addition, her astonishing conclusions about the disease becoming prevalent among “the more vulnerable” are stupefying. The disease has affected and will continue to affect everyone. That is how endemic viruses behave. Everyone will be exposed to COVID, likely multiple times throughout their lives.
Of course COVID impacts the most vulnerable more severely, because almost everything impacts the vulnerable more severely. This is the reason that the only acceptable solution to the COVID problem is and was the Great Barrington Declaration, the set of guiding principles that she resoundingly rejected in favor of pseudoscience.
Protecting the vulnerable should have been the ultimate goal, but instead the CDC, led for over a year now by Rochelle Walensky, has done very little to focus specifically on the vulnerable, instead endlessly promoting boosters for healthy college students and unconscionably masking toddlers.
If she and the CDC were really so caught off guard by the fact that an incredibly infectious respiratory virus spread to those who were most vulnerable, they certainly must be replaced immediately.
If under her watch the CDC didn’t realize that their early advocacy for lockdowns, which moved white collar workers into their homes while insisting blue collar grocery story workers, delivery people, food service and other lower income professions continue to keep working would increase the burden on disadvantaged groups while temporarily providing (extremely limited) protection to the wealthier groups of society, she and the entire organization should be replaced immediately.
And most importantly, the videos below provide ample evidence that Walensky is completely unfit to lead the CDC, and that the organization is stunningly, hopelessly, inept:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has taken a lead throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to hold public health officials and agencies accountable if they’ve failed to provide accurate and timely information to the public for whom they work.
From masks, vaccines, and school shutdowns, to the origination of Covid-19, Johnson has been asking critical questions. However, he says he has received very few answers.
According to Johnson, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky is one of the public health officials who has been non-compliant with his requests.
To date, Johnson says he has made eight specific requests, directly of Walensky, that have gone unanswered.
In his most recent attempt to get data, he writes:
“In the midst of a pandemic, it is unacceptable that CDC would withhold relevant data on Covid-19 that could inform the public and potentially save lives. Moreover, it is grossly arrogant that your agency has repeatedly ignored Congressional requests.”
Read Senator Johnson’s latest letter to Director Walensky below:
March 1, 2022
Rochelle P. Walensky, M.D., MPH Director
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Dear Director Walensky:
Over the last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has failed to be transparent to the American people and their elected representatives. Specifically, CDC has not responded to my multiple requests for information about COVID-19. In addition, CDC has reportedly “withheld information” about COVID-19 from the public that “could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control.”1 In the midst of a pandemic, it is unacceptable that CDC would withhold relevant data on COVID-19 that could inform the public and potentially save lives. Moreover, it is grossly arrogant that your agency has repeatedly ignored Congressional requests.
To date, I have sent you numerous letters requesting information about COVID-19 including records and data on the virus, school guidance, and the vaccines. For the letters listed below, you have either failed to respond or your response was significantly incomplete:
May 19, 2021 – Requesting records relating to teachers’ unions and CDC guidance.
June 28, 2021 – Requesting information about COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.
July 13, 2021 – Requesting information on vaccine safety monitoring.
July 30, 2021 – Requesting data CDC used to create a slide deck on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.
August 22, 2021 – Regarding the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting.
September 15, 2021 – Requesting information on the effectiveness of natural immunity as protection from COVID-19.
October 5, 2021 – Requesting information on early treatments for COVID-19.
December 29, 2021 – Requesting information about vaccine lot variation data.1 Apoorva Mandavilli, The C.D.C. isn’t publishing large portions of the Covid data it collects, NY Times, Feb. 21, 2022.
CDC’s failure to respond to Congress appears to be one piece of the agency’s larger problem with public transparency. According to the New York Times, during the “[t]wo full years into the pandemic, the [CDC] has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected.”2 The CDC’s apparent indifference toward transparency during a pandemic is disturbing and shameful.
Throughout the pandemic, CDC and other health agencies have promoted inconsistent policies and recommendations regarding COVID-19. Many Americans who voiced concerns about these shifting policies have been subjected to ridicule, vilification, and censorship from the press. Rather than provide the public with complete access to relevant data to justify its COVID- 19 policies, the Biden Administration has apparently favored censorship over transparency.
In my continued effort to ensure that the American people have access to complete and accurate data about COVID-19, I renew my previous requests and call on you to immediately respond to all of my outstanding letters. Additionally, I would like you to brief my staff on whether CDC is withholding data from the public as reported by the New York Times and provide the names and titles of CDC officials who may have withheld the relevant information. I ask that this briefing occur no later than March 15, 2022. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
cc: The Honorable Xavier Becerra Secretary
Department of Health and Human Services
The Honorable Christi Grimm
Inspector General
Department of Health and Human Services
Sincerely,
Ron Johnson
United States Senator
Sharyl Attkisson is an American journalist and television correspondent. She hosts the Sinclair Broadcast Group TV show Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner, and a Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA) Edward R. Murrow Award recipient.
The New York Times assigned four of their top national political reporters to write a long story about Biden’s First Pandemic Year. The article is an unwitting case study in everything that is wrong with the Biden administration, the public health establishment, and the corporate media.
“Highly respected infectious disease expert(TM)” Rochelle Walensky knows almost nothing about viruses nor infectious disease
From the article:
Dr. Rochelle Walensky was stunned. Working from her home outside Boston on a Friday night in late July, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just learned from members of her staff that vaccinated Americans were spreading the coronavirus.
Vaccines had been the core of President Biden’s pandemic strategy from the moment he took office. But as Dr. Walensky was briefed about a cluster of breakthrough cases in Provincetown, Mass., the reality sank in. The Delta variant, which had ravaged other parts of the world, was taking hold in the United States. And being vaccinated would not, it turned out, prevent people from becoming infected with the variant or transmitting it.
It was a “heart sink” moment, Dr. Walensky recalled in a recent interview.
I am not a medical doctor nor scientist. But I’ve been warning since April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 was not a good candidate for a vaccine because it mutates too fast. This was known to everyone who paid even minimal attention to the data. There has never been a successful vaccine for the common cold nor HIV — and SARS-CoV-2 was engineered to have pieces of both of those viruses. And the flu vaccine, depending on the year, is often less than 50% effective (some years the effectiveness drops into the teens or even single digits). All of these vaccines fail for the same reason that coronavirus vaccines are failing — the virus mutates too fast.
Did Rochelle Walensky honestly not know the rate at which this virus was mutating?
It sounds like they never contemplated the possibility that the vaccines might fail.
That also likely means that Walensky has no idea what antibody dependent enhancement is, why it’s a problem, nor does she know how to spot antibody dependent enhancement if it’s happening in the population.
Bougiecrats just execute the plan. They do not think. They just tick boxes. That is not what the U.S. needs in the midst of this crisis.
Fauci is a malevolent force inside the government and he is wrong about everything
We already knew this but the article drives it home:
Fauci pushed for a national vaccine passport system.
Fauci pushed for vaccine mandates for domestic air travel.
Fauci pushed for the vaccine mandates that eventually became the OSHA, CMS, and federal worker vaccine requirements. Thankfully the OSHA vaccine mandate was recently struck down by the Supreme Court and the federal worker mandate was stayed last Friday by a federal judge in Texas.
One reason that the Biden administration was not prepared for the Delta and Omicron variants was because Fauci assured them that “the vaccine push would be able to, for the most part, nullify a Delta surge.”
Fauci is literally the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man Elf.
Six people dictate coronavirus policy for 330,000,000 Americans. Five of the six are completely rotten
Biden’s Pandemic team consists of six people:
Jeff Zients, an economist and former management consultant with no scientific nor medical background;
Xavier Becerra, a lawyer with no scientific nor medical background;
Janet Woodcock, the woman who gave us the opioid epidemic that kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War;
David Kessler, who is a decent guy (not sure how they let him on the team);
Tony Fauci, who funded the creation of the virus that killed more Americans than all foreign wars combined; and
Rochelle Walenksy, who looks like she’s always on the verge of a nervous breakdown and is clearly unfit for purpose.
This is the point that I keep coming back to again and again:
Would you rather have six captured bureaucrats imposing their diktats on 330,000,000 people? Or would you rather have the one-million professionally-active doctors and 210,000,000 adults in this country using logic and reason to solve this problem using their best judgement?
It is profoundly unAmerican to give six corrupt unelected bureaucrats this much power. And it is absolutely the wrong way to make scientific decisions. No wonder the Biden administration gets everything wrong when it comes to coronavirus.
Ron DeSantis lives rent free inside Biden’s head and he is the reason we do not have a national vaccine passport system
The article states that the Biden administration, in March of 2021, began planning for a national vaccine passport system. We all saw the trial balloons that they floated in the press. But then they scuttled the plan when they saw that Governor DeSantis opposed it and was using it to build opposition to the administration. The Biden administration fears losing to DeSantis in the 2024 election and so they have scaled back their totalitarianism somewhat in hopes of not giving him more ammunition.
The reporters at the NY Times are dumb fascist clowns that have their thumb on the scale for Pharma
The NY Times is one of the best jobs in journalism. And the four senior reporters assigned to this article exemplify the total intellectual and moral collapse of the bourgeoisie.
The first five paragraphs of the article are all about how the vaccine does not stop the Omicron variant. The very next sentence reads,
Mr. Biden and his team have gotten much right, including getting at least one dose of a vaccine into nearly 85 percent of Americans 12 and older…
Did they not read the five paragraphs before about how the vaccine does not work? How is an 85% vaccination rate a success when the vaccine does not actually stop the virus? In fact, the best evidence shows that these vaccines have negative efficacy, something that these crack “reporters” do not seem to realize.
Throughout the article, the reporters chide Biden for not pushing harder for vaccine and mask mandates and more testing. They claim “a chorus of voices inside and outside the government” pushing for such measures — but strangely they never cite any sources by name who are part of this “chorus”. Apparently that’s the script and they are sticking to it regardless of whether they have to manufacture such claims.
Furthermore these stenographers for the cartel never once ask about vaccine effectiveness/risks, the fact that most masks make no difference, and the 90% false-positive rate from tests that their own newspaper reported on in August 2020. I guess they don’t trust the NY Times either.
They are also addicted to the “overwhelmed hospitals” narrative — they just sprinkle it in for a dash of flavor whenever their rhetoric starts to sag. They never question the firing of doctors and nurses with natural immunity and critical thinking skills. Nor do they examine the possibility that vaccine failure and vaccine injury might contribute to whatever patient surges might exist.
They live inside the Pharma-directed metaverse and they have no plans to ever leave or question any of its assumptions.
Conclusion
The reason why RFK Jr., Del Bigtree, Alex Berenson, and Joe Rogan have bigger audiences than the NY Times is because they tell the truth.
The reason why the Biden administration is a complete and total failure is because it is filled with bougiecrats who do not think, they just execute the plan and wait around for their participation trophy.
None of the bourgeois institutions that caused this problem (from the corporate media to the government to the public health establishment) are capable of correcting course based on new data. They are guided by ideology, not facts. The only solution is revolution. Let’s make it happen.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky has overridden the recommendations of the FDA vaccine advisory committee and authorized booster shots for individuals who took the Pfizer vaccine. The boosters are for anyone who took the Pfizer vaccine six months ago or more, in addition to all those with underlying medical health conditions that make them susceptible to the COVID-19 variants. [CDC Announcement HERE]
Additionally, all healthcare workers and basically all those who were previously designated as “essential workers”, including those in the food supply chain, are authorized to receive the vaccine. According to Joe Biden’s speech that followed the unilateral declaration of the CDC, this decision means, “60 million Americans are now eligible for a booster six months after their second shot. And up to 20 million who will receive their — received their earlier Pfizer shot at least six months ago are eligible today.”
The unilateral booster declaration does not include authorization for Moderna or Johnson and Johnson, only Pfizer. Apparently, the Pfizer lobbying group has deeper pockets and is more politically connected. The Moderna and J&J decision will be made at a later date. “We will also evaluate with similar urgency available data in the coming weeks to swiftly make additional recommendations for other populations or people who got the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines.” (link)
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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