CNN, which comes about as close to being the mouthpiece of the official pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine establishment as any news outlet, has finally published a report (20/5/2022) raising serious questions about the adequacy of the mRNA vaccines deployed against Covid-19. Now that the dust has settled on the pandemic, CNN is quietly endorsing the truth that at least some of the Covid vaccines rushed off the shelves under Emergency Use Authorisation fell far short of being the silver bullet they were presented to the public as.
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In the current environment, merely uttering a doubt about whether the Covid vaccination campaign lived up to its promise is considered in many circles as a form of medical and political “heresy.” For example, I have been urged by a vaccine zealot to keep my mouth shut just for admitting that I was not vaccinated, lest I might sow seeds of doubt in the hearts of my young listeners.
The pressure to sing the praises of the vaccines without qualification or else be considered as a certified “anti-vaxxer” or someone who is just opposed to the use of any vaccine, anytime, has been very strong ever since Western governments rolled out the first vaccines in early 2021.
Those who swam upstream and raised hard-hitting questions about the vaccination campaigns, instead of being engaged with in a rational and evidence-based manner, found themselves abruptly silenced by a modern-day Spanish inquisition led by private censorship Czars at Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.
Support groups catering to the vaccine-injured had their Facebook pages abruptly taken down (see Dr Tess Lawrie’s in-depth interview with Caroline Pover, who had her vaccine harms support group deplatformed by Facebook). Healthcare professionals and lecturers (for example, Dr Aaron Kheriaty and Dr Julie Ponesse) were essentially fired from their jobs for refusing the jab or for daring to publicly question the legitimacy of vaccine mandates.
Because the mainstream media were so tight-lipped about just about anything that might go against the narrative, “vaccinate the heck out of the population, no questions asked,” it is only very rarely that we have been able to unearth uncomfortable truths about the Covid vaccines in a big mainstream media outlet.
The bigger the media outlet (with a few notable exceptions), the more likely, it would appear, that it was broadly aligned with the interests of Big Government and Big Pharma, and the more reluctant it was to air any serious criticism of the efficacy or safety of any of the Covid vaccines.
Finally, CNN, and even Dr Anthony Fauci himself, are beginning to openly raise doubts about the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines. It would be nice to see CNN rally to the defence of the vaccine-injured or condemn unethical vaccine mandates, which one of their own political analysts, Julian Zelizer, called for unequicocally in his CNN column back in July 2021. But perhaps that is asking for too much, given the general contempt for informed consent that now pervades media elites.
In the CNN report I will quote from below, while the authors of the report fall far short of condemning vaccine mandates, they do gingerly suggest that mRNA vaccines might just be less effective than natural infection at conferring protection against disease.
Does this mean the wind is turning and the powers that be are preparing to admit that the vaccines are not holding up well against a shifty and adaptive virus? Does this mean that citizens and scientists who wish to raise legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of novel Covid vaccines might actually be given a fair hearing?
I wouldn’t hold my breath. But the wind could change as the public hysteria surrounding the pandemic begins to fade.
The evidence suggests the Covid vaccines may very well have reduced hospitalisations and deaths, at least those associated with Covid-19 (even if the jury is still out on the more important yet widely neglected question of how much they reduced all-cause mortality), at least in populations with a high degree of vulnerability to Covid disease.
The evidence also suggests that at least some of the Covid vaccines carry elevated risks of adverse reactions, including myocarditis, in particular for young people (this is acknowledged by the Center for Disease Control and the European Medicines Agency; here is a study of myocarditis risk in Covid vaccinees recently published in the Lancet).
So while some of the vaccines may have saved lives or reduced hospitalisations in moderate to high risk populations, it is also very debateable whether the risks of these novel vaccines, even if relatively small, were justified by their net health benefits for people at low or very low risk from Covid-19, such as children and young adults without pre-existing health complications.
The Covid vaccines have a mixed and ambiguous record of success which we are not yet in a position to fully understand, given that they have been around for less than two years and their overall benefits and harms are still the object of ongoing scientific investigation.
Many medical experts consider that there is strong evidence of efficacy at reducing risks of severe disease and death, but there is also evidence that some of these vaccines are associated with rare and occasionally fatal or debilitating adverse events; and that the immunity they produce may offer limited protection against infection, and be considerably less enduring than immunity produced by natural exposure to Covid. Consequently, definitive statements suggesting that the Covid vaccines were either unmitigated disasters or unmitigated blessings across the board would be misleading.
It may well be that Covid vaccines were justified on emergency grounds in the case of moderate to high risk individuals, provided they were administered on an entirely voluntary basis. But that is a far cry from coercing people into taking the vaccines by tying the act of being vaccinated to professional survival, cheaper international travel, and privileged access to social venues.
Furthermore, even if the voluntary administration of some of the Covid vaccines was ethically defensible for moderate to high risk populations, there was never any justification whatsoever for the suppression of scientific and moral debate on the efficacy and safety of the vaccines on offer and the ethics of the vaccination campaigns.
Hopefully, now that some of the media hysteria and politicisation of vaccination is not quite as overwhelming as it was before, there is at least an outside chance that we will finally undertake a more scientific, rational, and open-minded assessment of the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines - just as we would expect for any other medication.
In any case, I find it somewhat heartening that a mainstream media outlet like CNN is now prepared to openly raise tough questions about the long-term efficacy of these novel vaccines, and the degree to which they actually confer a protective advantage when compared with natural infection. This indicates to me that there may be a new openness among mainstream journalists, however self-interested or pragmatic it may be, to entertain reasonable doubts and questions about Covid vaccine technology.
Of course, many would say, “too little, too late,” and they would be absolutely right. It would have been nice to have seen some of this openness and rational analysis back in 2021, when citizens were first being harangued by their employers and governments into taking these vaccines. It would have also been nice if CNN and other mainstream media organs had done serious investigative reporting about the downsides and potential harms of these vaccines rather than uncritically parroting whatever Big Pharma and Big Government told them.
But I suppose a little bit of questioning and critical thinking is better than none whatsoever.
To conclude, here are some of the most telling quotes from this CNN report, “The quest for longer-lasting Covid-19 vaccines.” (A disclaimer: I am quoting a CNN news report, to illustrate a shift in mainstream thinking. I am not saying everything CNN says in this report is necessarily correct).
“The steepest drops in immunity -- which come about four to five months after vaccination and up to eight months after infection, but can vary -- are against Covid-19 symptoms, getting infected and getting sick. Protection against severe outcomes, hospitalization and death remains much higher for a longer period of time, but even this decays to some degree, especially for the elderly and those with compromised immune function.”
“…there's another piece of the immunity puzzle that scientists are urgently trying to solve, and that is whether some of this drop off in our protection (against symptomatic disease) may be a result of the mRNA technology used to build some Covid-19 vaccines, such as those developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, which were the first in the world to use this platform.”
“What we can tell after more than a year of experience with the mRNA vaccines is that their protection starts high but seems to fade more quickly than the immunity that remains after a Covid-19 infection, according to Bhattacharya (Deepta Bhattacharya heads a lab at the University of Arizona).”
“Health care workers who caught a Covid-19 infection, most of them happening in March 2020, before the era of vaccines, were initially about 86% less likely to be reinfected, and that protection lasted up to a year. After a year, it dropped to about 69% in workers who were unvaccinated, which was still better than the protection from mRNA vaccines alone.”
“"I think there's still very clearly room for improvement because there are certain vaccines that do better" in terms of their durability, (Dr Deepta Bhattacharya) said. "There's no question about that.””
“"Some vaccine platforms give a very high degree of protection but the durability isn't very long," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in an interview with CNN.
Fauci said that the mRNA platform may be one of those.”
“All vaccines have strengths and weaknesses -- but some of the nation's leading vaccine experts argue that more research is needed into the durability of the currently used Covid-19 vaccines as a potential weakness, as vaccine-induced immunity can decline within four to six months.”
“During the recent Omicron wave in the United States, the protection that vaccine boosters provide fell more than four months later from more than 90% to around 66% for protection against emergency room visits for Covid-19 and 78% against hospitalizations, Dr. Peter Hotez, CNN medical analyst and virologist and co-director of Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, told CNN.”
Thanks for reading!
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Nope on that "They stopped hospitalizations and deaths!" thing. My doctor specifically looked at how many of his patients who tested positive for SARS2 with the gene therapy jabs and had to go to the hospital or died had obesity, diabetes, and HBP uncontrolled and if they had one or worse all three?
He realized that the jabs were having absolutely no effect when those three conditions were taken into account.