The media gets vaccines exactly wrong (again).

Rising vaccine skepticism is an effect, not a cause, of the collapse in American medicine

The elite media has found the crisis in American healthcare.

It’s not the decade-long tsunami of opioid prescriptions that unleashed an overdose crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans.

Nor that healthcare costs so much in the United States that it can bankrupt people even if they have insurance. Or that Americans have years shorter life expectancies than Western Europeans despite (or because of) that extra spending. Or that getting a routine doctor’s visit now takes over a month in many cities.

Or even that American physicians still offer trans surgeries and puberty blocking medicines to minors even though Britain and other countries have restricted them.

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(Help me get you the news - and perspective - you need. For twenty cents a day.)

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Nope.

The central crisis in American medicine turns out to be that some people now wonder if vaccines work as well as public health experts claim.

This skepticism is worthy of a highly promoted new book from vaccine fanatic Dr. Peter Hotez and a five-part series last week in Politico. Politico, the self-styed newsletter of the Washington elite, titled its heave THE RISE OF THE ANTI-VACCINE MOVEMENT (all-caps in original).

Lost in the screaming: The bubbling concerns about vaccines have had essentially no practical impact on rates of non-mRNA vaccinations. Americans remain highly willing to vaccinate themselves and their children.

Vaccination rates for standard childhood vaccines were 93 percent in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And uptake of the first round of Covid jabs was practically indistinguishable in the United States and Europe in people over 65, who are at by far the highest risk from Covid. Even now, the United States is pushing the new mRNA Covid boosters harder than Europe.

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(First of five parts. Five LONG parts.)

SOURCE

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What these stories really reveal is the profound vacuity of reporting on vaccines.

As a product category, vaccines have become far more complex and expensive over the last 30 years - despite providing increasingly marginal benefits. In this, they are no different than other pharmaceutical industry products, or American medicine generally.

But the skepticism that the media still sometimes shows about the costs of new drugs or the decisions made by insurers or the potential dangers of widely advertised procedures does not extend to vaccines.

This credulous attitude is bizarre because vaccines are not dosed individually but given to healthy people in advance of illness - and so should be worthy of more skepticism. It is doubly bizarre because vaccines have extraordinary liability protection, protection ordinary drugs do not. And triply bizarre because the government used unconstitutional measures to force healthy adults to take the mRNA Covid jabs.

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(Do it for you! Do it for me!)

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Given how terribly the healthcare system performs for most Americans, no one should be surprised that vaccines have become a flashpoint for criticism (some fair, some not). The failure of the Covid jabs to work as promised - followed by the gaslighting around that failure - has only intensified that scrutiny.

Yet the elite media, which has been in the tank for the mRNAs since Uncle Joe rolled up for his sleeves for them, would rather blame Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and yours truly for the rise in skepticism.

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(Do I get ice cream after?)

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No, the surprise isn’t that Americans are no longer willing to take the assurances of public health bureaucrats - and even their own physicians - on blind faith.

The surprise is that they still mostly trust an ruinously expensive, broken, and opaque system that fails them over and over.