URGENT/Update: Good news... and bad

The good news: Dr. Vinay Prasad is back at the Food and Drug Administration. The bad: in the wake of Friday's shooting outside the CDC, the demonization of mRNA skeptics is in full force.

Big weekend for the American media-medical-industrial complex.

First, happy news.

Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration reinstated Dr. Vinay Prasad as the agency’s top regulator for vaccines and complex “biologic” drugs. Just weeks ago Prasad was forced out — in retaliation for demanding a drug company stop selling an unproven $3 million per-patient treatment that has killed several people. (Yes, that summary is EXACTLY right. We live in strange times.)

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(Your guide to strange times. For pennies a day.)

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But Prasad proved harder to take down than Big Pharma liked. I was at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday to interview Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director. (I’m looking forward to sharing the interview soon. Bhattacharya is smart, driven, and has big ideas for ways to fix scientific and biomedical research.)

At the time, Bhattacharya told me he hoped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, might be able to convince President Trump to change his mind about Prasad. I didn’t want to write anything because the prospect seemed to unlikely.

I was wrong.

Kennedy came through, and Prasad is back. This is a YUGE loss for swamp creatures like Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA director (and defendant in Berenson v Biden). It’s an equally big win for those of us who think drug companies should have to prove their medicines work. It gives me hope that if someone can just let President Trump know what is really happening in Berenson v Biden, he will step in.

Fingers crossed.

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(RFK Jr.: Making Vinay Great Again!)

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Now, the bad news.

On Friday, a 30-year-old Georgia man opened fire on the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control. The man, Patrick Joseph White, apparently believed Covid shots had injured him. White killed one police officer, David Rose, a Marine veteran,¹ in the attack.

White’s attack was horrific and criminal. I am not defending or excusing it. I want to be completely clear.

But legacy media reporters and public health bureaucrats are already trying to use it against mRNA vaccine skeptics — as I predicted yesterday would happen.

“Bullets in the windows: Until now, it was only a metaphor,” the popular “Your Local Epidemiologist” Substack wrote this morning.

Last night, The New York Times linked the shooting to what it called “the spread of false information around Covid vaccines.”

This morning, in a separate piece, the Times wrote that the attack was “a manifestation of rampant misinformation surrounding vaccines… [which] came after years of conspiracy theories about vaccines and escalating political hostility toward the C.D.C.”

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Reporters and public health advocates are sending a message: stop questioning mRNA shots, or you will be responsible for any potential violence by people who believe the shots have hurt them or family members.

The hypocrisy here is hard to take.

Two weeks ago, Shane Devon Tamura, a 27-year-old Nevada man, shot four people in a Manhattan office tower to death before killing himself. The building Tamura attacked houses the headquarters of the National Football League, and Tamura acted on a (likely) delusional belief that playing football had caused his mental illness.

The New York Times and other legacy media outlets have linked football to brain damage for a decade, writing story after story. But no one at the Times suggested those articles might have caused Tamura’s actions, much less that they were not worth writing or that the Times would shy away from them in the future.

Nor should they.

If football causes long-term brain damage (and there is evidence that it does, though exactly how risky playing in high school may be is unclear), scientists can and should explore the potential link — and reporters can and should cover it.

And if mRNA jabs can cause cardiac, autoimmune, and other damage, scientists can and should explore their risks — and reporters can and should cover them.

Obviously, using inflammatory language like “genocide” or “apocalypse” to discuss the risks of the mRNAs is a mistake. But gaslighting the public by pretending that they do not carry serious potential risks, risks we still do not fully understand, is also wrong.

For FIVE years, people have tried to intimidate and silence me — first about lockdowns, then about the mRNAs. It didn’t work in 2020, it didn’t work in 2021, and it’s not going to work now.

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(Asking the questions that have to be asked. Stand with me. For pennies a day.)

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Just as the Times is not responsible for Shane Devon Tamura, I am not responsible for Patrick Joseph White. The way to address concerns about the risks of the Covid jabs is to investigate them, not to try to silence their critics.

It’s that simple.

1. I heard from several readers yesterday about my use of the term “ex-Marine.” I was trying to avoid “former Marine” — Marines believe no member of their service ever truly stops being a Marine, except in cases of dishonorable discharge. But ex-Marine turns out to be just as problematic, so it’s “Marine veteran” from here on out. There has to be SOME phrase to explain that that a Marine is no longer in active service.