The New York Times hits an all-time low

The Times just got even MORE in the tank for rushed and risky Covid "vaccine" development. I am trying not to get angry. I am failing.

At 9:02 a.m. Friday morning The New York Times published a piece catchily titled:

The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed’

I expected the article would explain how scientists and regulators were rethinking ultra-accelerated vaccine development, since the mRNA shots have proven far less safe and effective than they first seemed.

Silly me.

The article is a lament for the end of “Warp Speed” vaccine development - that is, bringing a completely novel therapeutic to human use in under a year, even though not just the compound itself but the underlying technology has never before been used outside clinical trials.

This is insanity.

The Times article is built on fantasies about Covid vaccines, current and future, that would do wannabe trillionaire Sam Bankman-Fried proud. And like SBF, most of the folks quoted in the article have a financial interest in the junk they’re promoting. But not only did the Times not challenge this nonsense, the paper promoted them.

Here’s what’s I mean:

(PAYWALLED FOR 72 HOURS)

The article mostly focused on pimping - at great length - two supposed advances in Covid vaccine development, nasal sprays and shots that can block many different coronavirus variants at once. Quoth the Times:

Prospects have dimmed for the two most coveted kinds of next-generation vaccines: nasal sprays that can block more infections, and universal coronavirus shots that can defend against a wider array of ever-evolving variants.

Unfortunately, back in the real world, we have no evidence that either nasal or universal vaccines will work any better than the mRNA shots - and plenty that they won’t.

The theory behind nasal vaccines is simple.

Real respiratory viruses arrive through the nose and mouth (usually), so giving people a vaccine the same way will stimulate the immune system more powerfully and quickly than intramuscular injections. As the Times put it, by “generating immunity in people’s airways, where the coronavirus first lands, those vaccines can potentially help extinguish infections before they begin.”

Before they begin! Who wouldn’t want that?

Unfortunately, this theory, like so many other plausible and pleasant-sounding ideas in medicine, has proven completely wrong in reality. We already have a nasal vaccine for a respiratory virus. It’s a influenza vaccine called FluMist, and it’s been around almost 20 years.

How useless is FluMist?

Well, it’s even more useless than the typical flu shot.

In fact, it’s so useless that people over 50 that adults over 50 are NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE IT, because their immune systems are weaker than younger people and thus it won’t generate an immune response in them.

Wait, there’s more!

It’s so useless that in 2016 the Centers for Disease Control said it shouldn’t be used for the upcoming season.

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Federal health officials and pharmaceutical companies were well aware of this unparalleled record of ineffectiveness for nasal shots. Thus, when Warp Speed itself started, they stayed far, far away from nasal vaccines - even though a shot that didn’t require a needle would have been easier to distribute and promote (and would have better matched the end of Contagion).

It wasn’t because nobody ever thought of giving jabs up the nose, mmmmkay?

Okay, those are flu vaccines, though. What about the Covid vaccine? What about an advanced Covid vaccine, one that depends on novel biotechnology, not some crummy inactivated or live attenuated virus like those lame old influenza shots?

Just because flu nose candy doesn’t work DOES NOT MEAN a Covid jab won’t, people!

About that.

AstraZeneca has a DNA/AAV Covid shot that - although not identical to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA jabs - also works by causing our cells to make coronavirus spike proteins that will produce an immune response. AstraZeneca decided to try its vaccine in nasal form.

How’d that work out?

Here’s what they mean by setback, per FIERCE pharma:

On Tuesday, AstraZeneca’s researchers at the University of Oxford said their nasal vaccine candidate came up short in a phase 1 trial, failing to produce a strong immune response in the nasal mucosa of a majority of recipients. The spray also elicited weaker systemic immune responses than intramuscular vaccines.

Yes, you read that right. The nasal spray was less effective than the standard formulation.

In case you’re still not convinced, ask yourself this: Moderna and Pfizer are not in this game for fun. They’ve already sold $110 billion of mRNA shots. If they believed nasal formulations would help sales - with the vaccine-hesitant, with kids, to encourage annual dosing - wouldn’t they put a few million dollars into them?

Instead these supposed next-generation miracles are left to a motley array of third- and fourth-tier companies with names like Xanadu Bio - can’t make it up, folks.

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The second fantasy in the piece is the supposed potential for vaccines that can stop not just Sars-Cov-2 but all coronavirus variants. The Times spends less time on this nonsense, though, because it is so clearly absurd that no one can talk much about it with a straight face. The first-generation mRNAs have caused such severe immune imprinting in their recipients that even the new “bivalent” booster vaccine designed specifically for the currently existing Omicron variant don’t work any better than boosters with the original vaccines, according to independent studies.

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So there it is.

The current mRNA vaccines have proven completely ineffective at stopping coronavirus infection and transmission; many countries have stopped recommending more shots for healthy adults under 50 because their risk-benefit ratio no longer makes sense; and all-cause deaths are now higher in the countries that used them than it was in 2020 or last year.

Instead of facing these facts, the world’s most important legacy media outlet started Friday morning by pretending that the answer is a new generation of rushed vaccines based on fantasy.

And the worst part is that no one who has read its mRNA coverage for the last two years can even be surprised.