They STILL won't quit pushing the mRNAs

A New York Times opinion piece this weekend shows how completely public health bureaucrats and the doctors who love them have lost the plot

Dr. Danielle Ofri wants you to take more mRNA jabs.

She doesn’t understand why you won’t.

Is she mad? No, she’s not mad, people, she’s not the kind of doctor who gets mad. She’s the caring, compassionate kind of doctor. Says so right on her Web page, she’s passionate “about the doctor–patient relationship and bringing humanity back to healthcare.”

So Dr. Ofri isn’t mad, she’s sad. Sad for you for not listening to her.

After all, the mRNA jabs are a miracle! Pfizer agrees. The Surgeon General agrees. Even Travis Kelce agrees, and he’s about to play in the Super Bowl. Again.

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(I won’t stop until they do. And they will NEVER stop. Help me fight, for 20 cents a day.)

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I know how Ofri feels about the jabs, and her patients’ unwillingness to take them. How do I know? Because she wrote about her feels on Saturday for the New York Times in a (paywalled) piece headlined “My Patients Used to Be Enthusiastic About the Covid Vaccine. What Changed?”

Ofri is an internist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and a professor at New York University. She writes regularly for all the places you’d expect: not just the Times but the New Yorker and the Atlantic too.

In other words, count on Ofri to think the right (left) thinks. In Saturday’s piece, she went out of her way to explain mRNA-rejecting patients are not naughty “anti-vaxxers” or even naughtier “science deniers.” They will even take (useless) flu shots upon her request.

Yet they have the “heebie-jeebies” about getting more Covid boosters.

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(Die, anti-vaxxer. Die.)

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Those dummies!

They won’t listen even after Ofri gives them made-up numbers for how well the shots work. (“An estimated three million lives in the United States have been saved.” 3 million Americans? Even Dr. Peter Hotez, the nuttiest of jab fanatics, doesn’t claim more than “hundreds of thousands.”)

They won’t listen after she tells them the new mRNAs are new n’ improved and made all special-like for Omicron.

They won’t even listen after she tells them the newest jabs from Pfizer have been tested on eight mice, or that long-term human trials on booster safety and effectiveness will be finished by the 12th of Never.

Oh wait, she usually forgets to tell them those last two inconvenient truths.

Just like she forgets to tell them that even Omicron-specific mRNA boosters produce an immune response that mostly attacks the now extinct “wild-type” variant of Sars-Cov-2. Or that real-world evidence from all over the world shows the mRNAs have either no or negative efficacy against Omicron.

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Here’s the thing:

Like every good left-thinking public healthitican, Dr. Ofri loves vaccines. All vaccines.

Doesn’t matter if they’ve been used for generations or weeks. Doesn’t matter how they work, if they’re inactivated virus or protein subunit or DNA/AAV or mRNA. Doesn’t matter what they’re for, influenza or Covid or measles. Doesn’t matter how thoroughly they’ve been tested, eight mice or 40,000 people.

You call it a vaccine, Dr. Ofri wants it. (There’s a joke I want to make, but I am too mature. Barely.)

And Dr. Ofri really wanted the Covid vaccines.

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(Jan. 4, 2021: “We’re almost there.” A statement as out of date as her X headshot.)

SOURCE

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“We’re almost there.”

The only reasonable way to read that sentence is the obvious one. In 2021, Ofri thought the jabs would stop Covid, once enough people had received them. 95 percent efficacy, yippie-kay-yay!

She was wrong.

Fine. A lot of people were wrong in the winter and spring of 2021, they didn’t understand the games Pfizer and Moderna had played with the big clinical trials. They didn’t understand how nasty mRNA side effects would be for many jab recipients, or how quickly efficacy would fade.

But what is not fine is the way Ofri has allowed her fixation on vaccines as the be-all, end-all to lead her into frank dishonesty about her error.

And that’s not the only way she’s rewriting history.

Though she pretends the reluctance she sees is new, she’s actually been complaining her patients aren’t enthusiastic enough about Covid jabs for almost two years. In May 2022, she wrote for the Atlantic (of course) that too many people didn’t want the first booster:

I’ve been receiving that response more and more these days. “Two is about right.” “I’ll stick with two.” These folks are not vaccine skeptics… my patients come from communities that were pummeled by the coronavirus; most lined up for the shots as soon as they became available in early 2021.

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(Don’t make me ask twice! Who do you think I am, Dr. Ofri? Oh, wait, I am asking twice.)

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If Ofri were actually being honest about the reasons people don’t want to take more mRNAs, she would begin by acknowledging they failed utterly to meet the expectations she and the public set for them in early 2021. And late 2021 (the first booster). And spring 2022 (the second booster for some patients). And fall 2022 (the bivalent booster).

She would admit she’s now pushing her patients to take a fifth shot - and in some cases, a sixth - for what is at best a couple months of protection. She would admit that she has no idea about the long-term safety of annual or semi-annual mRNA dosing. How can she? No one does.

But Ofri doesn’t want to be honest.

Not about the failure of the jabs, or the fact she is even now helping Pfizer with what is arguably the biggest medical experiment in history, the continued provision of mRNA to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

She wants to hassle her patients:

Something in me doesn’t feel ready to let it go. The specificity of their Covid refusal — especially compared with flu refusal — piques my curiosity and consternation…

So I clear the deck, push myself away from the computer, make full eye contact and begin again. I might start with, “Tell me what’s on your mind” or “What makes you feel differently about the Covid vaccine versus the flu shot?” I try to step into the gray zone of their responses and explore those awkward feelings.

No, doc, what you’re trying to do is make them so uncomfortable they agree to take a shot they don’t want to shut you up.

Because most patients - the non drug-seeking ones, anyway - don’t like arguing with their doctors. Especially when those doctors have repeatedly made clear how they feel, as Ofri no doubt has after years of pushing boosters.

Instead of arguing, Ofri’s patients disengage, leading her to complain that “they can’t really articulate a specific reason, even to themselves” why they don’t want the jabs. And eventually she quits bugging them, though not before “some” do take the jab.

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See, Doc Ofri loves her patients.

Says so right on her Web page.

She just loves vaccines even more.

Who can blame her? Vaccines know how pure her heart is.

And they never talk back.