November 22, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment – Vaccine Mandates – is presented as a debate.
The Case for Covid Vaccine Mandates contends that the vaccine significantly reduces the seriousness of the disease and to some degree prevents the spread of the virus if those unvaccinated get vaccinated, thus protecting others from getting the disease. However, the author further opines that any mandates should be voted on by the legislature whether it be a federal or state mandate, signed by the executive and upheld by the judiciary.
The Case against Covid Vaccine Mandates contends that a bedrock principle of American life is one gets to make their own decision about their body. Public Health officials should provide education to individuals so they are fully informed, but the individual should be allowed to make their own decision. Further, advocates against mandates contend that unforeseen severe consequences with vaccines have occurred in the past and that vaccine manufacturers are not diligent in assessing such potential consequences as they have no liability if they occur. Hence, there are significant personal safety concerns as well as falsely promoted benefits with such mandates based on history. Such is the case with the 9/9/2021 mandate of Covid vaccines.
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security reports in its 11/17/2022 update, “Vaccine mandates—for COVID – 19 and other diseases – are contentious issues in the US. On several occasions, the US Supreme Court has refused to hear arguments or let lower court rulings stand, allowing COVID-19 vaccine mandates to remain in force. Now, the Blackfeet Nation is challenging a Montana law that prohibits businesses and governments from discriminating against people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 or other diseases. The case raises the question whether Montana can enforce its law on the Blackfeet Nation, superseding the tribe’s right to enforce its own ordinances as a sovereign nation within US borders to protect the health of its people.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment – Vaccine Mandates – is presented as a debate.
The Case for Covid Vaccine Mandates contends that the vaccine significantly reduces the seriousness of the disease and to some degree prevents the spread of the virus if those unvaccinated get vaccinated, thus protecting others from getting the disease. However, the author further opines that any mandates should be voted on by the legislature whether it be a federal or state mandate, signed by the executive and upheld by the judiciary.
The Case against Covid Vaccine Mandates contends that a bedrock principle of American life is one gets to make their own decision about their body. Public Health officials should provide education to individuals so they are fully informed, but the individual should be allowed to make their own decision. Further, advocates against mandates contend that unforeseen severe consequences with vaccines have occurred in the past and that vaccine manufacturers are not diligent in assessing such potential consequences as they have no liability if they occur. Hence, there are significant personal safety concerns as well as falsely promoted benefits with such mandates based on history. Such is the case with the 9/9/2021 mandate of Covid vaccines.
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security reports in its 11/17/2022 update, “Vaccine mandates—for COVID – 19 and other diseases – are contentious issues in the US. On several occasions, the US Supreme Court has refused to hear arguments or let lower court rulings stand, allowing COVID-19 vaccine mandates to remain in force. Now, the Blackfeet Nation is challenging a Montana law that prohibits businesses and governments from discriminating against people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 or other diseases. The case raises the question whether Montana can enforce its law on the Blackfeet Nation, superseding the tribe’s right to enforce its own ordinances as a sovereign nation within US borders to protect the health of its people.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
VACCINE MANDATES – EXCERPTS
NOTE: This segment will be presented as a debate: FOR and AGAINST Vaccine Mandates
THE CASE FOR MANDATES
From: The Case FOR Vaccine Mandates by Alan Dershowitz (2021)
On September 9, 2021, President Biden ordered roughly two-thirds of the American workforce to be vaccinated as a condition of their employment. He acted through a series of executive orders and federal rules, but without express legislation authority to punish those (with some exceptions) who do not get vaccinated within 75 days. This “emergency” executive action will surely be challenged in court.
My analysis will be based on my civil liberties and constitutional perspectives. It will be non-partisan, in the sense that it is not calculated to reflect the views of any political party or faction. If a vaccine significantly reduces the threat of spreading a serious and potentially deadly disease without significant risks to those taking the vaccine, the case for government compulsion grows stronger. If a vaccine only reduces the risk and seriousness of COVID to the vaccinated person but does little to prevent the spread or seriousness to others, the case is weaker. Because we are inevitably dealing in matters of degree – what constitutes “significantly” in the context of reducing or creating risks – judgment calls will be necessary. History suggests that the courts will show considerable deference to legislative and executive decisions that prioritize safety over liberty during a real emergency.
There is little remaining scientific doubt that the available vaccines, perhaps with the need for booster shots for some or all recipients, do benefit those who are vaccinated. Even if they don’t eliminate the likelihood of contracting COVID, they definitely reduce, quite significantly, the seriousness of the resulting disease in most vaccinated adults. The data show that vaccinated individuals who catch COVID require less hospitalization and die less frequently. Unvaccinated adults require more hospitalization, more use of ventilators, and more access to intensive care units. Thus, limiting or denying these potentially lifesaving facilities to the vaccinated who suffer from breakthrough COVID.
These results alone might not justify mandating vaccination for those who refuse to accept the individual benefits of the vaccine because of its perceived risks, or for other ideological, religious, or political reasons. But beneficial results for individuals, combined with positive results for others, would justify compulsion. The empirical question that may determine the constitutional outcome is whether and to what degree compelled vaccination prevents or curbs the spread of COVID to individuals who have opted to be vaccinated. Put another way, do unvaccinated individuals pose a danger to vaccinated individuals?
According to current research, the kind of “herd immunity” that we were able to achieve with other pandemics is unlikely to be achieved for COVID and its variants. We are in a situation here with this current variant where herd immunity is not a possibility because it still infects vaccinated individuals. Nonetheless the current scientific consensus would seem to support the commonsense conclusion that universal or near universal vaccination will help to prevent or slow down the spread of COVID, even if vaccinated individuals can still be contagious.
Let me first offer my personal judgement as to which action should be authorized, and then my professional judgement as to what will be authorized.
I fervently hope the government will not have to compel vaccinations. Compulsion should generally be a last resort in a democracy committed to maximum individual autonomy. In several countries and areas of the U.S., voluntary vaccination has achieved sufficiently high levels to avoid the need for compulsion. That would be the ideal situation, but it is unlikely to occur throughout the U.S., where in some areas and among some groups, the percentage of adults vaccinated is quite low. Because the virus and its variants quickly spread and are not limited to specific areas and groups, mandatory vaccinations (with exceptions) may become necessary, if other steps – conditioning access to jobs and locations – prove insufficient to stem the contagion.
If any compulsion is required, it should be explicitly authorized in a manner consistent with democratic governance: it should be voted by the legislature, signed by the executive, and upheld by the judiciary. Presidents, governors, mayors, and other executive officials should not be making controversial and intrusive laws. There may have been a time for emergency executive action, but legislatures are now on notice of the general issues raised by COVID. The time has come for legislative hearings, debates, nuanced deliberations, and voting. Not all the outcomes of such a democratic process will be sound. Moreover, there may be varying outcomes in different states and cities – which will be problematic for controlling a pandemic that, unlike the law, does not recognize political boundaries. That is the price we pay for our federal republic and our system of checks and balances.
The debate over these divisive and emotional issues should continue and there should be neither governmental nor private censorship of dissenting views. False information should be quickly countered by truthful information so that the public can judge for itself based on the fullest information. Some people will make bad choices based on false information but that is also the price – and it may be an expensive one – we pay for freedom of speech and the right to dissent, which includes the right to be wrong.
Now for my professional analysis of how the courts will treat the changing legal responses to COVID and its inevitable variations. First, the courts, especially the Supreme Court, will try to avoid deciding the hardest ultimate issue: whether it is constitutional to compel unwilling adults to be vaccinated. The Justices will find reasons to decide cases on alternative grounds that do not require them to reach the ultimate issue. These alternative grounds include construing a statute to avoid a constitutional question, “standing,” “lack of authority,” or “insufficient exemptions.”
These and other techniques of avoidance have been used by courts, including the Supreme Court, in order to avoid constitutional issues. I think that process will continue for as long as possible. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court may have to face the issue of compulsion. I believe it will uphold mandatory vaccination and other compelled compromises with liberty, if the medical science at the time demonstrates persuasively that compulsion is necessary to avoid serious public health consequences.
Source: The Case FOR Vaccine Mandates by Alan Dershowitz (2021).
THE CASE AGAINST MANDATES
From: The Case AGAINST Vaccine Mandates by Kent Heckenlively, JD (2021)
BASIC RIGHTS
One of the bedrock principles of American life is you get to make your own decisions about your life. Employers have limited ability to pry into your personal life or medical details. And yet now, with these vaccine mandates, your private decisions are open for the world to see. Further, healthcare is about educating and allowing the patient to make an informed decision.
HISTORY OF VACCINE SAFETY INCIDENTS
While an infant living near the Mexican border, Anita Reyes received a dose of Wyeth’s polio vaccine and shortly thereafter, contracted polio, resulting in her near-complete paralysis. Her parents initiated suit on her behalf, a jury ruled in her favor, and, in 1974 the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Both the Fifth Circuit’s holding and its reasoning were, for vaccine companies, ominous. Reyes v. Wyeth, that is, substantially expanded liability for vaccine manufactures, the latter should bear the loss.
The result seemed to be in accordance with what most of us would think of as justice. A company makes a vaccine, they give it to a young girl, she develops polio which is so severe that it results in “near-complete paralysis” for her, and the company pays for the harm it caused.
On the heels of the Reyes decision came the swine flu faux epidemic of 1976. There, 45,000,000 Americans (one third of the adult population) subjected themselves to a flu shot at President Gerald Ford’s stern urging only to learn, later, that the flu was not particularly dangerous, but the shot itself was – causing in some small proportion of patients Guillain-Barre syndrome, a usually reversible but occasionally fatal form of paralysis. A flood of litigation and withering press attention followed.
Swine flu was predicted to devastate the population, and yet it did not. Instead, it caused a terrible neurological disease. This is an episode we should remember as there is this massive stampede toward getting a vaccine which was developed at “warp speed.”
The third strike against vaccines was the use of a dangerous DTP vaccine, which threatened to destroy the vaccine industry.
Rounding out this troubling trilogy, on April 19, 1982, an NBC affiliate aired an Emmy-winning, hour-long television documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. With footage of dead infants and convulsing children, the broadcast charged that the pertussis component in the DTP vaccine (which protected against whooping cough) had not been adequately tested and could cause “damage to a devastating degree.”
The vaccine killed children or caused seizures. That was the accepted reality of vaccines in 1982. There was none of this foolishness that vaccines don’t cause injury, or that it’s so rare that it might be just one in a million cases. In fact, the potential damages for harm to children by this single vaccine threatened to put many companies out of business.
So, what was the response? Spend a lot of money on vaccine safety so they could better understand the biological interactions and prevent children from being harmed? No. The answer was to indemnify the vaccine companies by putting the US government on the hook, and drastically scale up the childhood vaccine program. The pharmaceutical companies threatened to pull out of the childhood vaccine market, and the politicians responded. Their answer was the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which President Reagan signed into law, despite strong reservations.
The public health officials had everything they needed now. They could claim legal authority to force vaccination on children and their Big Pharma partners were off the hook for any injury or deaths they caused to children.
One would expect that when a law is named the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, it would apply only to children. However, you would be wrong. In October 2010, the US Supreme Court took up the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth Labs. On February 22, 2011, in a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 applied to adult vaccines as well.
Source: The Case AGAINST Vaccine Mandates by Kent Heckenlively, JD (2021).
From: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
The vaccine mandates the Biden administration forced on hospitals are pushing the system to the brink of collapse. So many nurses are quitting that hospitals are being forced to pay up to $10,000 a week to traveling nurses. This situation is unsustainable. Hospitals around the country are cutting services – including an upstate New York medical center that said in September 2021 it would have to stop delivering babies because of staffing shortages caused by the mandate.
But the failure extends past our hospitals. Almost two years into the crisis, we have not just failed to find really effective new small-molecule drug treatments for Covid, we do not even know if a long list of cheap drugs that are already widely available might help. Would ivermectin? Who knows? Hydroxychloroquine? Who knows? Vitamin D? Who knows? Fluvoxamine? Who knows? Here’s something else we know: the medical establishment and especially the federal health bureaucracy, have been bizarrely reluctant to consider or test older and cheaper drugs. At every opportunity they have treated these potential therapies with scorn, while lavishing attention on expensive new drugs such as remdesivir, which have so far failed to make any dent in the pandemic.
Vaccines – and the mRNA vaccines in particular – are the ultimate examples of this obsession with new and expensive biotechnology. The very word vaccine seems to have a hypnotizing power, for non-scientists and scientists alike. We had good reason in 2020 to predict that a vaccine for Sars-Cov-2 would not work very well -- mRNA therapeutics were not even intended as vaccines. They were repurposed as vaccines when their developers realized that they had toxicities that would make repeated dosing difficult. The history of vaccines for influenza and other coronaviruses should have been another warning sign. Flu vaccines are notoriously ineffective, while vaccines for other coronaviruses don’t exist at all.
Yet from the first, Dr. Fauci had an idee fixe that vaccines would save us all. Naturally this easy solution appealed to Donald Trump. Warp Speed! Trump is out, but Biden is even more committed to vaccines. And now, in the face of obvious vaccine failure, Fauci and the White House will not back down. Thus, the effort to force boosters even in the face of concerted opposition from the Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization –and press vaccines for children on reluctant parents. A third dose has little chance of working for more than a few months, and it comes with major risks. But without a third dose, whatever protection they have offered will likely collapse just as a fall and winter wave hits the U.S., making nonsense about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” even more impossible to sustain. Already, a strong argument can be made that the vaccines are extending the pandemic. Natural immunity confers extremely strong protection against reinfection; anyone who gets Covid and recover from it is extremely unlikely to get it again.
In contrast, our currently available vaccines lose their power in a matter of months – as Pfizer itself now acknowledges. If we are lucky, the current mess won’t do much more than lead to huge profits for Pfizer, Moderna, and BioNTech. Vaccine efficacy will slide towards zero and we will live with Sars-Cov-2 and its variants just as we do with the flu. If our health care system has failed us, we also have failed it. Like the opioid crisis, the Covid pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated broader societal fractures.
The United States has markedly more Covid deaths in people under sixty than other advanced nations for one simple reason: our sky-high rates of obesity, especially morbid obesity. For almost two years, the media has refused to acknowledge this simple truth. But the shortcomings of our health care system pale in comparison with the complete failure of our media outlets to ask even the most basic questions about our response to Covid – and now the vaccines.
First, even the fact that so many medical professionals would rather quit their jobs than be vaccinated has not prompted the media to reconsider whether the vaccines may not be the miracle we were told. The fact that supposedly reputable news organizations are openly working in concert with government to craft narratives around Covid – and now to push vaccines and demonize the unvaccinated – is extraordinarily dangerous.
I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the rule of law. I believe they, and we, are more powerful than this crummy little virus. I believe truth will prevail. I have to. We all have to. The alternative is impossible to imagine.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
NOTE: This segment will be presented as a debate: FOR and AGAINST Vaccine Mandates
THE CASE FOR MANDATES
From: The Case FOR Vaccine Mandates by Alan Dershowitz (2021)
On September 9, 2021, President Biden ordered roughly two-thirds of the American workforce to be vaccinated as a condition of their employment. He acted through a series of executive orders and federal rules, but without express legislation authority to punish those (with some exceptions) who do not get vaccinated within 75 days. This “emergency” executive action will surely be challenged in court.
My analysis will be based on my civil liberties and constitutional perspectives. It will be non-partisan, in the sense that it is not calculated to reflect the views of any political party or faction. If a vaccine significantly reduces the threat of spreading a serious and potentially deadly disease without significant risks to those taking the vaccine, the case for government compulsion grows stronger. If a vaccine only reduces the risk and seriousness of COVID to the vaccinated person but does little to prevent the spread or seriousness to others, the case is weaker. Because we are inevitably dealing in matters of degree – what constitutes “significantly” in the context of reducing or creating risks – judgment calls will be necessary. History suggests that the courts will show considerable deference to legislative and executive decisions that prioritize safety over liberty during a real emergency.
There is little remaining scientific doubt that the available vaccines, perhaps with the need for booster shots for some or all recipients, do benefit those who are vaccinated. Even if they don’t eliminate the likelihood of contracting COVID, they definitely reduce, quite significantly, the seriousness of the resulting disease in most vaccinated adults. The data show that vaccinated individuals who catch COVID require less hospitalization and die less frequently. Unvaccinated adults require more hospitalization, more use of ventilators, and more access to intensive care units. Thus, limiting or denying these potentially lifesaving facilities to the vaccinated who suffer from breakthrough COVID.
These results alone might not justify mandating vaccination for those who refuse to accept the individual benefits of the vaccine because of its perceived risks, or for other ideological, religious, or political reasons. But beneficial results for individuals, combined with positive results for others, would justify compulsion. The empirical question that may determine the constitutional outcome is whether and to what degree compelled vaccination prevents or curbs the spread of COVID to individuals who have opted to be vaccinated. Put another way, do unvaccinated individuals pose a danger to vaccinated individuals?
According to current research, the kind of “herd immunity” that we were able to achieve with other pandemics is unlikely to be achieved for COVID and its variants. We are in a situation here with this current variant where herd immunity is not a possibility because it still infects vaccinated individuals. Nonetheless the current scientific consensus would seem to support the commonsense conclusion that universal or near universal vaccination will help to prevent or slow down the spread of COVID, even if vaccinated individuals can still be contagious.
Let me first offer my personal judgement as to which action should be authorized, and then my professional judgement as to what will be authorized.
I fervently hope the government will not have to compel vaccinations. Compulsion should generally be a last resort in a democracy committed to maximum individual autonomy. In several countries and areas of the U.S., voluntary vaccination has achieved sufficiently high levels to avoid the need for compulsion. That would be the ideal situation, but it is unlikely to occur throughout the U.S., where in some areas and among some groups, the percentage of adults vaccinated is quite low. Because the virus and its variants quickly spread and are not limited to specific areas and groups, mandatory vaccinations (with exceptions) may become necessary, if other steps – conditioning access to jobs and locations – prove insufficient to stem the contagion.
If any compulsion is required, it should be explicitly authorized in a manner consistent with democratic governance: it should be voted by the legislature, signed by the executive, and upheld by the judiciary. Presidents, governors, mayors, and other executive officials should not be making controversial and intrusive laws. There may have been a time for emergency executive action, but legislatures are now on notice of the general issues raised by COVID. The time has come for legislative hearings, debates, nuanced deliberations, and voting. Not all the outcomes of such a democratic process will be sound. Moreover, there may be varying outcomes in different states and cities – which will be problematic for controlling a pandemic that, unlike the law, does not recognize political boundaries. That is the price we pay for our federal republic and our system of checks and balances.
The debate over these divisive and emotional issues should continue and there should be neither governmental nor private censorship of dissenting views. False information should be quickly countered by truthful information so that the public can judge for itself based on the fullest information. Some people will make bad choices based on false information but that is also the price – and it may be an expensive one – we pay for freedom of speech and the right to dissent, which includes the right to be wrong.
Now for my professional analysis of how the courts will treat the changing legal responses to COVID and its inevitable variations. First, the courts, especially the Supreme Court, will try to avoid deciding the hardest ultimate issue: whether it is constitutional to compel unwilling adults to be vaccinated. The Justices will find reasons to decide cases on alternative grounds that do not require them to reach the ultimate issue. These alternative grounds include construing a statute to avoid a constitutional question, “standing,” “lack of authority,” or “insufficient exemptions.”
These and other techniques of avoidance have been used by courts, including the Supreme Court, in order to avoid constitutional issues. I think that process will continue for as long as possible. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court may have to face the issue of compulsion. I believe it will uphold mandatory vaccination and other compelled compromises with liberty, if the medical science at the time demonstrates persuasively that compulsion is necessary to avoid serious public health consequences.
Source: The Case FOR Vaccine Mandates by Alan Dershowitz (2021).
THE CASE AGAINST MANDATES
From: The Case AGAINST Vaccine Mandates by Kent Heckenlively, JD (2021)
BASIC RIGHTS
One of the bedrock principles of American life is you get to make your own decisions about your life. Employers have limited ability to pry into your personal life or medical details. And yet now, with these vaccine mandates, your private decisions are open for the world to see. Further, healthcare is about educating and allowing the patient to make an informed decision.
HISTORY OF VACCINE SAFETY INCIDENTS
While an infant living near the Mexican border, Anita Reyes received a dose of Wyeth’s polio vaccine and shortly thereafter, contracted polio, resulting in her near-complete paralysis. Her parents initiated suit on her behalf, a jury ruled in her favor, and, in 1974 the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Both the Fifth Circuit’s holding and its reasoning were, for vaccine companies, ominous. Reyes v. Wyeth, that is, substantially expanded liability for vaccine manufactures, the latter should bear the loss.
The result seemed to be in accordance with what most of us would think of as justice. A company makes a vaccine, they give it to a young girl, she develops polio which is so severe that it results in “near-complete paralysis” for her, and the company pays for the harm it caused.
On the heels of the Reyes decision came the swine flu faux epidemic of 1976. There, 45,000,000 Americans (one third of the adult population) subjected themselves to a flu shot at President Gerald Ford’s stern urging only to learn, later, that the flu was not particularly dangerous, but the shot itself was – causing in some small proportion of patients Guillain-Barre syndrome, a usually reversible but occasionally fatal form of paralysis. A flood of litigation and withering press attention followed.
Swine flu was predicted to devastate the population, and yet it did not. Instead, it caused a terrible neurological disease. This is an episode we should remember as there is this massive stampede toward getting a vaccine which was developed at “warp speed.”
The third strike against vaccines was the use of a dangerous DTP vaccine, which threatened to destroy the vaccine industry.
Rounding out this troubling trilogy, on April 19, 1982, an NBC affiliate aired an Emmy-winning, hour-long television documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. With footage of dead infants and convulsing children, the broadcast charged that the pertussis component in the DTP vaccine (which protected against whooping cough) had not been adequately tested and could cause “damage to a devastating degree.”
The vaccine killed children or caused seizures. That was the accepted reality of vaccines in 1982. There was none of this foolishness that vaccines don’t cause injury, or that it’s so rare that it might be just one in a million cases. In fact, the potential damages for harm to children by this single vaccine threatened to put many companies out of business.
So, what was the response? Spend a lot of money on vaccine safety so they could better understand the biological interactions and prevent children from being harmed? No. The answer was to indemnify the vaccine companies by putting the US government on the hook, and drastically scale up the childhood vaccine program. The pharmaceutical companies threatened to pull out of the childhood vaccine market, and the politicians responded. Their answer was the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which President Reagan signed into law, despite strong reservations.
The public health officials had everything they needed now. They could claim legal authority to force vaccination on children and their Big Pharma partners were off the hook for any injury or deaths they caused to children.
One would expect that when a law is named the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, it would apply only to children. However, you would be wrong. In October 2010, the US Supreme Court took up the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth Labs. On February 22, 2011, in a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 applied to adult vaccines as well.
Source: The Case AGAINST Vaccine Mandates by Kent Heckenlively, JD (2021).
From: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
The vaccine mandates the Biden administration forced on hospitals are pushing the system to the brink of collapse. So many nurses are quitting that hospitals are being forced to pay up to $10,000 a week to traveling nurses. This situation is unsustainable. Hospitals around the country are cutting services – including an upstate New York medical center that said in September 2021 it would have to stop delivering babies because of staffing shortages caused by the mandate.
But the failure extends past our hospitals. Almost two years into the crisis, we have not just failed to find really effective new small-molecule drug treatments for Covid, we do not even know if a long list of cheap drugs that are already widely available might help. Would ivermectin? Who knows? Hydroxychloroquine? Who knows? Vitamin D? Who knows? Fluvoxamine? Who knows? Here’s something else we know: the medical establishment and especially the federal health bureaucracy, have been bizarrely reluctant to consider or test older and cheaper drugs. At every opportunity they have treated these potential therapies with scorn, while lavishing attention on expensive new drugs such as remdesivir, which have so far failed to make any dent in the pandemic.
Vaccines – and the mRNA vaccines in particular – are the ultimate examples of this obsession with new and expensive biotechnology. The very word vaccine seems to have a hypnotizing power, for non-scientists and scientists alike. We had good reason in 2020 to predict that a vaccine for Sars-Cov-2 would not work very well -- mRNA therapeutics were not even intended as vaccines. They were repurposed as vaccines when their developers realized that they had toxicities that would make repeated dosing difficult. The history of vaccines for influenza and other coronaviruses should have been another warning sign. Flu vaccines are notoriously ineffective, while vaccines for other coronaviruses don’t exist at all.
Yet from the first, Dr. Fauci had an idee fixe that vaccines would save us all. Naturally this easy solution appealed to Donald Trump. Warp Speed! Trump is out, but Biden is even more committed to vaccines. And now, in the face of obvious vaccine failure, Fauci and the White House will not back down. Thus, the effort to force boosters even in the face of concerted opposition from the Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization –and press vaccines for children on reluctant parents. A third dose has little chance of working for more than a few months, and it comes with major risks. But without a third dose, whatever protection they have offered will likely collapse just as a fall and winter wave hits the U.S., making nonsense about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” even more impossible to sustain. Already, a strong argument can be made that the vaccines are extending the pandemic. Natural immunity confers extremely strong protection against reinfection; anyone who gets Covid and recover from it is extremely unlikely to get it again.
In contrast, our currently available vaccines lose their power in a matter of months – as Pfizer itself now acknowledges. If we are lucky, the current mess won’t do much more than lead to huge profits for Pfizer, Moderna, and BioNTech. Vaccine efficacy will slide towards zero and we will live with Sars-Cov-2 and its variants just as we do with the flu. If our health care system has failed us, we also have failed it. Like the opioid crisis, the Covid pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated broader societal fractures.
The United States has markedly more Covid deaths in people under sixty than other advanced nations for one simple reason: our sky-high rates of obesity, especially morbid obesity. For almost two years, the media has refused to acknowledge this simple truth. But the shortcomings of our health care system pale in comparison with the complete failure of our media outlets to ask even the most basic questions about our response to Covid – and now the vaccines.
First, even the fact that so many medical professionals would rather quit their jobs than be vaccinated has not prompted the media to reconsider whether the vaccines may not be the miracle we were told. The fact that supposedly reputable news organizations are openly working in concert with government to craft narratives around Covid – and now to push vaccines and demonize the unvaccinated – is extraordinarily dangerous.
I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the rule of law. I believe they, and we, are more powerful than this crummy little virus. I believe truth will prevail. I have to. We all have to. The alternative is impossible to imagine.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
| covid_15l_vaccine_mandates_--_segment_15.pdf |