Five years into Covid, why do reporters and health bureaucrats keep lying about the mRNA jabs?
Until they stop, trust in public health will continue to vanish.
(PART TWO OF TWO — for Part One, about the lies over Covid more generally, click here).
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee has all the credentials. He’s a Stanford, Oxford, Harvard-trained1 physician who writes for the New Yorker and produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about cancer in 2010. (It’s called The Emperor of All Maladies, I bought it a while back. I’ll get around to reading it one day, the thing’s like 600 pages long.)
If that’s not enough, Mukherjee just co-founded an artificial intelligence drug discovery startup. Because of course he did, all the cool kids are doing it.
So when The New York Times op-ed page wanted a piece about the lessons of Covid for the pandemic’s fifthish anniversary,2 it went to Mukherjee. Elites gonna elite.
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(Elite doesn’t mean honest. Honest is better. Join me.)
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Inevitably, Mukherjee produced a 2,400-word nails-on-chalkboard whine about how we don’t listen to our public health betters anymore (“All of a sudden, Joe Rogan and Dr. Fauci were seemingly equal authorities.”). And how only government action can save us all from the next pandemic.
Yep, Mukherjee wants bureaucrats managing “health crises systematically, through public institutions, issuing mandates, dispensing carefully vetted information and managing the surveillance and containment of contagion.”
Mandates! Carefully vetted information! The surveillance and containment of contagion! Welcome to Shanghai, circa 2020. And 2021. And 2022. The containment of contagion, so easy to start, so hard to stop. It’s almost, well, contagious.
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(The China Syndrome)
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The cherry on top of this authoritarianism: aside from Covid, which virologists themselves almost surely caused, we haven’t had a serious respiratory virus pandemic in over 100 years.
But after his opening rant, Mukherjee made the pivot that’s now standard for public health and media progressives, thanking the great god mRNA for saving us from the terrors of Covid. He wrote:
In record time, four major pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — created the vaccines that were used most to vaccinate the world. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s, in particular, are triumphs of science: Building on the prior work of academic scientists, they established the use of mRNA as a platform for vaccination.
Oh boy.
Mukherjee’s phrasing — leaping from four vaccines to two — may seem awkward, but he knows what he’s doing. I’m not sure what they teach at StanHarvOx these days, but maybe they should add “presenting basic statistics honestly” to the curriculum.
In reality, most of the world did not get mRNA jabs. In wealthy countries, particularly the United States and Japan, the mRNAs dominated. But globally they made up only about one-third of all Covid vaccine doses.
The most common shots were the simple, old-style “inactivated-virus” vaccines, mostly from China. What are called DNA/AAV vaccines made up another 20 percent or so, mostly in India, where AstraZeneca’s technology was licensed to a local manufacturer.
But the DNAs fell out of favor quickly in the United States and Europe, partly because of worries about a fatal clotting side effect and partly because their clinical trial results did not match the 95 percent protection the mRNAs supposedly offered. From the start, the mRNAs had great branding, no surprise given that Pfizer, the company that brought the world Viagra, has always been better at marketing than science.
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(Better than Cats! Better than E.T.!)
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Knowing that most people didn’t get the mRNAs is crucial to any discussion of the value of the Covid vaccines in general and the mRNA shots in particular. Why?
Because if the mRNAs actually worked better than other vaccines — if they truly represented an important advance — the countries that relied heavily on them should have had different and better outcomes than those that used other kinds of shots, or no vaccines at all.
But that’s not how Covid went.
Take India, which may be of some interest to Mukherjee, who was born in New Delhi. India had a massive Covid wave in the spring of 2021, just as its mass vaccination campaign was beginning.
The best estimates are that about 3 million Indians died of Covid that spring, about 0.2 percent of the population (and much higher than the official estimates).
But that wave effectively ended Covid in India. Everyone got infected practically at once — no surprise, given how crowded and unsanitary the country’s slums are. Natural infection provided immunity going forward. Vaccinations were a sideshow.
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Then there’s China, which followed the opposite timeline with the same results.
China’s strict lockdown prevented Covid from spreading after early 2020. Through late 2022, it had very few Covid infections, and it did not use the mRNAs for Covid shots. Instead it relied on its own homegrown “inactivated-virus” jabs, the same old-school technology used for flu shots, which are essentially useless.
In late 2022, as unrest over lockdowns surged in China’s cities, the country’s ruling Communist Party abruptly ended them. Western reporters warned that China’s decision to rely on non-mRNA vaccines would have terrible consequences.
On Dec. 2, 2022, The New York Times predicted “a tide of deaths... a catastrophic surge [that] could pose a significant threat to the political leadership.”
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(Vox and the Times get everything wrong, for a change. Yes, I’m being sarcastic.)
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Guess again.
China’s crowded, vertical megacities meant that Covid spread fast once authorities lifted the lockdown. As expected, the country faced a short, sharp surge of Covid.
But it was hardly earth-shattering. The best estimates are that about 1.4 million Chinese, including about 1 million over 80, died before it ended in February 2023. And China, like India, hasn’t had to worry about Covid since. (Interestingly, the Chinese epidemic, like the Indian, seems to have run its course in about three months.)
That figure may seem high, but China has 1.4 billion people, so its Covid death rate was only 0.1 percent, about 1 person in 1,000. In other words, people in China died at roughly one-third of the American rate.
The low Chinese death rate suggests either the old-style vaccines worked better than the mRNAs at protecting death or that all the vaccines were equally useless and that demographics are all that mattered. China has a slightly younger population and far less obesity and diabetes than the United States.3
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Meanwhile, in Africa, most people never even got the basic primary Covid vaccinations. As of December 2022 the World Health Organization reported that nearly 1 billion people — 75 percent of Africans — had not received them.
So Covid must have just ripped through Africa, right?
Of course not. Africa was the continent that Covid affected least. The epidemic never really happened there at all. Lockdowns came, worsening poverty and damaging the region’s fragile schooling, and then they went.
This is not to say that the vaccines worsened Covid, merely that viewed globally they appear to have been largely irrelevant, just as they are to the flu.
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(You need the truth. I need you. For less than 20 cents a day.)
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And of all the vaccines, the mRNAs were likely the worst option.
In the United States, Europe, and Israel they briefly suppressed Covid infections in the spring of 2021. But the protection did not last. By the summer, the Delta variant had roared in.
The health bureaucrats and politicians who had promised their fearful citizens the mRNAs would end Covid were stuck in a cycle of boosting and lockdowns. It might have continued forever if Omicron had not arrived in late 2021 and proved it useless.
Meanwhile, the mRNAs have unexpected side effects which scientists and physicians are still sorting through. They can cause heart problems and autoimmune disorders, and in some people they appear to cause long-lasting and perhaps permanent production of the Covid spike protein.
Had the mRNAs been compared head-to-head with the other Covid vaccines, or had placebo-controlled clinical trial safety data been properly collected on them for years rather than months, it is not at all clear they would have been approved.
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Public health bureaucrats and journalists simply refuse to admit this reality.
It’s not just Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. A different New Yorker doctor/writer referred two weeks ago to “the mRNA vaccines that saved untold lives during the Covid pandemic,” which is pretty much par for the course.
But investors, who have to put their money where their mouths are, are not fooled.
Moderna stock is down a cool 92 percent from its pandemic peak, as its mRNA vaccines for diseases other than Covid continue to fail now that they face a more standard clinical trial process rather than being waved ahead at Warp Speed.
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(Fact check: True.)
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What guys like Dr. Mukherjee4 do not seem to understand, despite their many, many degrees, is that their refusal to be honest about the failure of the mRNAs is destroying whatever confidence in public health Americans have left.
In insisting that people reject what they know firsthand to be true, they’re throwing everything they say into question. They are doing to medicine what the reporters who refused to admit Joe Biden’s obvious dementia last year have done to journalism.
Why can’t they stop? I have no idea. They’re not stupid. And they’re not financially compromised (not all of them, anyway). Maybe they just fear that admitting the truth will destroy confidence in the mRNAs?
It’s too late for that, though. mRNA jabs are already past saving — as they should be.
What will it take for the Mukherjees of the world to admit the truth?
(PART TWO OF TWO. Part one is below.)
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Yes, all three. The man’s a walking Great Barrington Declaration.
As I mentioned in an earlier piece, March 11, 2020 isn’t even close to when Covid began. But turning it into Covid’s semi-official anniversary day lets the media distract us from the reality that the virus was circulating in Wuhan, China, by fall 2019 - a fact that raises unpleasant questions about Covid’s origins.
There is one other possibility, that the Omicron variant was less dangerous than the earlier strain, and so by remaining locked down and keeping infections low until the Omicron variant dominated, China had fewer deaths. But that argument has nothing to do with whether any vaccine worked.
May I call him Sid? I doubt it.
I can't help but think that there is something else at work. It was many years back that I opened the Washington Post Metro section to find an article about a bad car accident. Instead of the usual who, what, when and where up front, the piece was very strange. Rather than the facts, it opened along the lines of, "On a cold, dark Wednesday night, Joe Blow got into his car, headed to the 7-11 for a gallon of milk. Little did he imagine..." The headline was something like, "Two Lives Collide in Intersection of Doom." It was WEIRD. I remember showing it to my husband and saying it read more like fiction than reporting. I remember of the two men involved that one was black and one white, and that race came into it somehow.
That was the first time I realized that the editors of one of the country's papers of record had given permission to their reporters not simply to relate the facts, but to craft a narrative. That is what journalists now do. They tell a story. And the stories they tell us become the stories we tell ourselves. They do this because it WORKS. Most of my acquaintance tell themselves these stories. They tell each other the same stories, over and over. It has become impossible for them to even contemplate hearing a different story. Two plus two is now five for some of the "smartest" people I know. It's really and truly shocking to me how much power the narrative, sorry, lies, have.
The "experts" have cognitive dissonance. It's too difficult for them to admit they may have killed or debilitated millions of people with sloppy thinking and bad advice. Credentialized arrogance and financial interest add to the self-delusion.