Even when Covid vaccine advocates try to tell the truth about the mRNAs, they wind up lying

The New York Times writes an article about Covid vaccine injuries - but ignores the most serious harms and winds up claiming, bizarrely, the jabs are the greatest medical advance in decades

For a minute Friday morning, I thought The New York Times would be honest about the mRNA shots.

Silly me.

On Friday, the Times ran a piece by Apoorva Mandavilli about Covid jab injuries. Mandavilli is the reporter who helped keep schools closed with nonsense about how kids might be Covid superspreaders. Who tweeted that “someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.” Who in late 2022 claimed Covid killed 3 percent of people it infected.

As Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote last year, “Apoorva Mandavilli is a terrible science reporter,” words truer than any Mandavilli has ever written.

Seeing Mandavilli’s byline on a piece about Covid jab injuries did not inspire confidence. Still I hoped.

Then I saw the headline: “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?

The key words there are “believe” and “listening.” They tipped the Times’s hand, turning the piece into a gaslighting masterpiece.

Amazingly, a summary of Apoorva’s article that Times senior writer David Leonhardt wrote for “The Morning,” the paper’s widely read daily newsletter, was even worse - and ended with a demonstrably false comment about the wonders of the jabs.

The Times cannot look truthfully at the mRNAs.

It slathers even the most mild criticism of them with honey about their greatness. I suspect this failing is partly because Times reporters know their readers will freak out at any suggestion the jabs have problems - and partly simple incompetence.

What do I mean?

(For the answer, wait a week… or subscribe now! Why wait for Mother’s Day? Sign up now so you aren’t distracted then!)

The people claiming vaccine injury the loudest do not necessarily have the strongest cases.

The best way to find real connections is to read case reports and studies from physicians worldwide which have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Those show the mRNAs cause cardiovascular and autoimmune crises, including sudden cardiac death and Type 1 diabetes. (Recently, Japanese data offered evidence that the mRNAs may be linked to some types of cancer, but the increase is subtle and I don’t want to overstate it.)

How often the jabs cause serious cardiac and autoimmune problems remains open to debate; but the fact they can have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

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(UNREPORTED TRUTHS, JUNE 5, 2023)

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Mandavilli could have tried to examine specific injuries where the scientific support for a link is strongest.

She could have talked to physicians and researchers about potential mechanisms of action. For example, do the mRNAs cause autoimmune problems in some people because they activate the immune system so potently?

Instead, she focused on individual stories of people who claim injuries like having their hearts race when they stand up - the vague problems that are difficult to link to a specific cause, or even to diagnose. It is no accident that these are exactly the kind of problems that are so often associated with long Covid.

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Rather than an investigation or explanation of the scientific questions around mRNA side effects, Mandavilli’s piece became a story about what a handful of patients “believe” and why no one will “listen” to them.

And so the Times did not have to take a real stand on the potential dangers of the jabs. It neatly elided the issue:

I hear you, my friend, this is your truth, your feelings matter to me.

The strongest part of the piece came when Mandavilli explained the problems with the federal program designed to compensate Americans for Covid vaccine injuries. As I wrote in March, federal law effectively prevents anyone from suing over ANY injury related to the shots, forcing them into an administrative program that as of Jan. 1 had paid a grand total of 11 claims for Covid jab injuries, at about $4,000 each.

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(UNREPORTED TRUTHS, MARCH 12, 2024)

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But the Times could not bring itself to make a definitive statement like: Even with Evidence of mRNA Harms, Vaccine Injuries Remain Uncompensated.

In making the story about “belief,” the paper denied itself the certainty necessary to take a real stance.

So in one sentence, Mandavilli wrote that

“the government’s understaffed compensation fund has paid so little because it officially recognizes few side effects for Covid vaccines…”

but in the very next, she added that “vaccine supporters, including federal officials, worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.”

This is more of less the definition of blaming the victim.

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Mandavilli has shown more than once that she is simply not very bright. (“Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory.”)

David Leonhardt doesn’t have that excuse.

Leonhardt (full disclosure, we went to high school and college together and worked together at the Times) is a sharp writer - and far more mathematically savvy than most reporters.

But he is also very liberal - and politically savvy. He knows exactly how far the Times’s audience (and his fellow reporters) will let him go when he questions the vaccines. He explicitly said as much in his column Friday, which was based on Mandavilli’s piece:

Let me start with a disclaimer: The subject of today’s newsletter will make some readers uncomfortable. It makes me a little uncomfortable.

The Times has just published an article about Americans who believe they suffered serious side effects from a Covid vaccine. More than 13,000 of them have filed vaccine-injury claims with the federal government…

After retelling the individual stories Mandavilli had mentioned, Leonhardt immediately backtracked, assuring his audience, that:

The benefits of the Covid vaccines have far outweighed the downsides, according to a voluminous amount of data and scientific studies from around the world…

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Let’s pretend that’s true. (It’s not, but pretend it is.)

Why does Leonhardt feel the need to obsessively explain the benefits of the vaccines in an article about mRNA side effects? When he’s writing about deaths from car accidents, he doesn’t feel the need to discuss the virtues of being able to drive coast-to-coast.

Leonhardt would be wise to ask himself why he instantly feels so defensive about these miracle jabs, why he and the Times can’t write a single article about their problems without endless throat-clearing.

He doesn’t, though. Instead he ends his article with a demonstrably false statement: “Overall, Covid vaccines are probably the most beneficial medical breakthrough in years, if not decades.”

Guess again. Even assuming they reduced Covid deaths in 2021, the jabs have never been shown to reduce all-cause mortality, and no one claims they do. Nor did they meaningfully reduce the course of the Covid epidemic.

In late 2021, after nearly every adult in wealthy countries had taken the mRNAs - including tens of millions of Americans who did so only under extreme pressure - the epidemic raged on.

Some European countries and blue states were headed back into lockdown. Only the arrival of the Omicron variant, which was more contagious but less lethal, ended Covid as a societal problem.

In contrast, the GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic have been shown in large clinical trials not just to reduce obesity but to cut heart attacks and strokes and even lower all-cause mortality. And the “checkpoint inhibitor” anti-cancer drugs, most notably Keytruda from Merck, have helped give years of life to many people with late-stage cancer (at extraordinary cost).

These are genuine breakthroughs. Wall Street - the most objective long-run weighing mechanism we have - knows the truth, even if Leonhardt and the vaccine advocates won’t admit it.

That’s why the stocks of Merck - as well as Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the companies that make the GLP-1 drugs - are soaring, while Pfizer is near a 10-year-low. Investors recognize and reward companies for producing breakthrough medicines, because they know that insurers and governments will pay for them.

The mRNAs flopped.

They are powerful immune stimulants but they don’t actually work as vaccines. They weren’t a long-run solution to Covid, and we are still learning their side effects. That’s why no one wants to take them anymore, no matter how much Pfizer and Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control push them.

And no matter how much the New York Times pretends otherwise..