Hello All,
I hope your weekends are going well! With the COVID-madness quickly transitioning to other headlines and crises at home and overseas, the days between posts here will likely grow. I have some other writing projects ongoing, as well. If any readers here recognize references from Family Guy, cue Stewie: “You still workin’ on that novel?”
(Maybe I am, Stewie! Maybe I am…)
But, a few stories bubbled up this week that deserve some attention. Unfortunately, they do little to inspire confidence in the institutions meant to protect us. Quite the opposite, actually.
1.) CDC Director Admits to “Too Little Caution, Too Much Optimism”
Dr. Walensky of the CDC makes a surprising admission regarding mRNA vaccines and the (lack of) concrete knowledge regarding their effectiveness in the clip below, which will likely have many of us scratching our heads.
From what my ears hear in the clip: “I think…I can tell you where I was when the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective - um, the vaccine. So many of us wanted to be hopeful - so many of us wanted to say, okay, this is our ticket out, right? Now we’re done. Um, so I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism, um, for some good things that came our way. I really do. I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said waning when, when, you know, oh this vaccine’s gonna work. Oh well, maybe it’ll work - it’ll wear off. Nobody said what if the next variant doesn’t, it doesn’t… it’s not as potent against the next variant.”
Okay, so that’s a brief, out of context clip. Alex Berenson was able to point readers to the full clip here, but I think there are plenty of eyebrow-raisers in the 45 seconds above. First, she referenced knowing where she was when the “CNN feed came” claiming that the vaccines were 95% effective. Perhaps I’m off-base here, but doesn’t this sound like the Director of the CDC is getting her news on vaccine effectiveness from CNN? Isn’t that something she’d be reporting TO mainstream media, in the first place? Perhaps I’m missing something.
But her admission of “we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism” is what really grinds my gears. We all lived through a year of unprecedented coercion, mandates, bad information, mix-messaging, and nonsense - much of it resulting from people who would say “well, the CDC recommends (fill in the blank)…”. People lost jobs. Business closed. Healthy kids were prevented from going to school based on coming into contact with positive peers. Loved ones died in hospitals alone. The list goes on and on.
“We had too little caution and too much optimism” doesn’t quite cut it when you’re talking about the health and safety of millions across the nation, especially after the two years we’ve all experienced.
And then she admits that nobody was talking about vaccine effectiveness wearing off, nor was anyone talking about potency (or lack thereof) of the vaccines against future variants. Again, I guess I’m just off-base about a whole lot of things… but aren’t those some of the FIRST questions you ask before recommending mandates for vaccines during a pandemic? My goodness, I once had such respect for agencies like the CDC. But how do we unsee this stuff?
2.) Surgeon General calls on Big Tech to “Turn Over” COVID-19 Misinformation Data
Despite many bits of COVID “misinformation” being proven true over the course of two years, President Biden’s Surgeon General has demanded that Big Tech companies turn over data regarding misinformation.
From the NY Times article linked and included in the tweet above:
A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.
The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.
So just to reiterate… despite TWO YEARS of experience painfully demonstrating that yesterday’s misinformation is today’s accepted fact (as Dr. Prasad reminds us, think natural immunity, vaccine-induced myocarditis, and transmission of COVID-19 by vaccinated people, to name a few)… the government is demanding that Big Tech hand over data on COVID-19 “misinformation” consumers and sources. At what point do people look in the mirror and admit, “you know, we don’t have the best track record here… maybe it was wrong to label all alternative viewpoints as misinformation?”
Someone install some mirrors, because as a society we have yet to reach that stage of self-reflection.
3.) First round of FDA clinical trial data drops on Pfizer vaccine.
After several rounds of legal arm-wrestling (including several requests by the government to delay the process for DECADES), the first 10,000 pages of FDA clinical trial documents regarding the Pfizer vaccine have been released. Aaron Siri provided a link to the pages below.
10,000 pages is a lot of data, and no doubt it will take time to learn more. However, the list of vaccine side effects was one of the first things to make the social media rounds following the release… and it took several pages to fit them all (see below). As a caveat to this, I haven’t seen any data on prevalence, or how many people experienced any one particular side effect - for now, we can only assume this was a running list of side effects in the trial data.
Remember, huge swaths of the population wanted vaccines mandated in order for folks to work, go to school, restaurants, gyms, and take part in society. It took the Supreme Court to stop OSHA from mandating vaccines for large employers only a couple months ago. And here we are, in March 2022, finally seeing a full list of possible side effects from the FDA’s clinical trial data.
You know, back when informed consent was a thing, we’d see the list of risks BEFORE we choose whether to receive a particular treatment. Can you imagine if the COVID-19 vaccines were treated the same as other pharma products in commercials, where the narrator speed-reads the list of possible side effects and instructs you to “talk to your doctor”? Anyone want to try speed-reading those pages with a stopwatch?
In any case, there’s a whole lot of data to dissect and many researchers are busy doing just that. One thread in particular caught my eye below, courtesy of Dr. Aaron Kheriaty:
As Dr. Kheriaty states, stay tuned for more on the Pfizer data as time goes on. This was only the first drop of documents, and there will be others to come.
Well, I guess I’m back to “workin’ on that novel” for another week. Ha!
Thanks for reading, all! Have a nice rest of your Sunday.
-G