The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been compelled by a court order in January 2022 to release the data it relied on to license Pfizer’s Covid vaccine, including information pertaining to vaccine adverse event reports, in response to a Freedom of Information request submitted by a group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency.
For the first time in over a year, the public can now access detailed information the FDA had privileged access to, concerning the number and kinds of reported adverse events associated with the Pfizer vaccination campaign in the USA and many other countries between December 2020 and February 2021. Incredibly, the FDA had requested up to 55 years to make all requested data available to the public, a request which the judge, thankfully, did not accede to.
In this first “data dump,” we discover that between 1 December 2020 and 28 February 2021, there was “a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events.” These reports included 4,953 cases in the 18-30 age bracket, 13,886 cases in the 31-50 age bracket, 7,884 cases in the 51-64 age bracket, and 3,098 cases in the 65-74 age bracket. These cases involved a total of 1,223 vaccine-associated fatalities.1
Unfortunately, based on the excerpts above, it appears that the total number of doses administered during that initial period is not disclosed in the report (but if someone finds it in the small print, please do let me know!). Until someone unearths the total number of doses administered, we cannot know what proportion of the Pfizer shots was associated with these adverse events. If it turned out to be a very tiny proportion of the total number of individuals in receipt of the Pfizer vaccine, that would be reassuring. For now, we can only guess.
However, what we do know is that this report only saw the light of day a full year after the adverse events were documented, and under the compulsion of a court order. Surely, the public, as well as the scientific community, had the right to access this information at the earliest available opportunity? How can the FDA justify withholding information on adverse events for a full year, precisely when a vaccination campaign is in full swing, and both the scientific community and concerned citizens would have had a legitimate interest in accessing relevant safety data?
Betrayals of Public Trust
The FDA’s sluggish release of vital safety information to the public (here is one enlightening discussion of the data release by Dr John Campbell) is just one of many examples of betrayals of public trust over the course of the pandemic.
Add to this the adoption of unorthodox and untested methods of disease control like home quarantines and society-wide lockdowns; the gross misrepresentation of PCR and hospitalisation data by public health agencies; the arbitrary and ideologically partisan censoring of scientific and political opinions by Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, with the approval of the United States Surgeon-General; the zealous embrace by public authorities of a vaccine apartheid regime; and the imposition of blanket mask orders with no compelling scientific rationale, and you can begin to see why many citizens are losing trust in public authorities.
From one perspective, this is a bad thing: the less we trust our public authorities, the less confidence we have to turn to experts at times when we need their guidance.
But from another perspective, it could be an opportunity to wake up and critically reassess our attitude to public authority. Could it be that we have been trusting political leaders, civil servants, doctors, epidemiologists, journalists, and public health officials not as rational adults who cautiously defer to experts, without forfeiting their critical faculties, but as small children who blindly trust their parents?
Child-Like Trust in Authority
I can distinctly remember a time when I sincerely believed that my parents knew practically everything that was worth knowing, and was shocked to find out that there were a lot of things that they had no more knowledge about than me. If I still believed this at the age of 46, I would either have a serious cognitive disability or I would need psychiatric treatment.
There is a type of blind trust in parental authority that is perfectly normal in a small child, and provides the child with a sense of confidence and security to navigate the world under the guidance of his or her parents, without having to second-guess everything they say. But as we grow up, we learn that our own parents are as mortal and fallible as anyone else, and our submission to their authority, as well as any other human authority, becomes more rational and critical.
Adult Trust in Authority
We gradually discover that human authorities, while useful and necessary, are not infallible, and that we must be prepared to question their recommendations, pronouncements, and orders when we find they are not grounded in adequate evidence or are not oriented to the common good.
In other words, the child-like submission to authority that all of us experienced in our early years was gradually replaced by a more adult submission to authority - that is, one in need of some sort of rational justification, and one that we may withdraw, suspend, or heavily qualify if we notice an obvious conflict of interest or are not satisfied that the authority in question has been exercised responsibly and competently.
This does not mean that we go around second-guessing the opinions and judgments of every authoritative figure we encounter. We rightly give credit to the judgments and recommendations of people better qualified than ourselves to understand certain domains of reality, such as medical doctors, aerospace engineers, respected public health scientists, historians, and senior judges.
Their hard work and training saves us the trouble of having to research every single matter we want to draw a conclusion about. It is rational to rely on the judgments of people more knowledgeable and expert than ourselves rather than attempting to conduct our own independent research on every question under the sun.
Fair enough.
But this trust in experts must not lapse back into an unreflective, child-like trust; otherwise, we regress to an infantile state of blind submission to authority, and surrender our rational autonomy completely. If we fall under the influence of a malevolent or totalitarian authority, as the Germans did in the 1930s, this blind submission to expert authority can send a society down a very dark path.
A Messy World of Good and Evil
If we lived in a paradise untainted by sin and corruption, we could at least count on the impeccable intentions of every conceivable public authority. But the world we live in, to state the obvious, is not a paradise saturated by saintly figures. On the contrary, it is a mix of many different characters, including authentic Truth-Seekers struggling to overcome their biases and conflicts of interest; more or less half-hearted Truth-Seekers who keep a low profile and try not to get in trouble; and more or less ruthless manipulators who use their authority and power to line their own pockets, protect their reputations, and control the people around them, even if this requires them to conceal the truth or put other people in harm’s way.
This is the messy world we live in, a world of good and evil. Furthermore, the higher you rise in this world, the more exposed you are to temptations of malfeasance and corruption. The more power and prestige you possess, the more you have to lose by owning up to your own faults and errors; and the more tempting it can be to do whatever it takes to climb further up the ladder of power and prestige.
This does not mean that every government minister, or every Harvard professor, or every CEO of a megacorporation is ruthlessly exploiting the people around them or cutting ethical corners to climb up higher on the ladder of power, prestige, and financial gain. I have no doubt that there are some admirable and even heroic people in the highest ranks of politics, science, business, finance and academia.
But it does mean that people who manage to reach high positions of power, wealth, and authority are at significant risk of succumbing to the temptation to use their power for selfish and even socially destructive ends. If they surrender their integrity, they may end up concealing awkward truths that might damage their position, or becoming so narcissistic and self-centred that they are unable to recognise the limitations of their own knowledge and power.
Blindness to the Dark Side of Humanity
This dark side of humanity, which power and access to wealth have a way of activating, is something every child, sadly, must wake up to at some point in their emotional and moral development.
Yet many adults appear to act as though it did not exist, or only existed in certain well defined corners of society, such as among their ideological and political opponents. Consequently, we have seen an awful lot of naiveté concerning the intentions of society’s most powerful economic, academic, journalistic, scientific, financial and political elites.
For example, many commentators and ordinary citizens have treated the leaders of the multi-billion dollar vaccine industry, in addition to their regulators, as though they were miraculously immune to conflicts of interest, or incapable of being “economical” with the truth about vaccine harms.
Many have swallowed scientifically flimsy narratives about the alleged necessity of instituting draconian emergency powers during the pandemic, seemingly oblivious to the fact that some of the leading advocates of these narratives, public officials, were their chief beneficiaries - after all, emergency powers are much more discretionary, and less susceptible to parliamentary oversight, than ordinary legislative powers.
We can find a similar, almost child-like naivete concerning
the intentions of Big Tech companies who selectively censor some voices on their platforms
the intentions of those engaged in aggressive campaigns to suppress the use of safe and cheap repurposed drugs to treat Covid-19
the intentions of those who have promoted and executed an aggressive global campaign to pressure all citizens, irrespective of their age, risk profile, or health status, into getting a Covid vaccine
the intentions of media outlets in receipt of public assistance or public health advertising when they uncritically transmit official State propaganda and refuse to publish dissenting commentary
the intentions of influential academics and doctors who allow their advice and medical prescriptions to be coercively imposed upon citizens
If we are to avoid repeating the catastrophic errors of the past two years, in terms of destructive and indiscriminate societal lockdowns, vaccine coercion and discrimination, masking children with no compelling public health rationale, and needlessly propelling economies into recession, then we must develop a more realistic, adult relationship to authority, whether in the political, legal, or scientific domains. We must learn to distinguish between giving the benefit of the doubt to an authoritative voice, and locking ourselves up in our homes just because a doctor told us to do so.
Thanks for reading!
If you would like to give a little extra push to my work in defence of a free and open society, you might consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
A paid subscription:
unlocks all blog posts, including subscriber-only content
gives you exclusive access to occasional online Q & A events with the author (our next online Q & A event will be later this month (March 2022).
Reported adverse events are not the same as fully investigated adverse events proven to be caused, with a high degree of probability, by the vaccine. Nevertheless, vaccine adverse events tend, historically, to be under-reported, not over-reported. There is now strong evidence to show that Pfizer’s Covid vaccines do provoke a non-trivial number of adverse events, including myocarditis. In any case, it is in the public’s interest to know about adverse event reports, even if they have not yet been fully investigated.
The State Is Not Your Daddy - and Big Pharma Isn't Either
Very nice essay, thanks!
There’s a big penalty to pay for not participating in civic matters, and that is the relinquishment of the government apparatus to the ambitious.
And ambitious benevolence is somewhat more rare than is naked venality.
Good people are making a mistake when they think all they have to do is show up at the ballot box every once in a while. That truth is now becoming more and more apparent.
Thanks! Agreed, we need a more engaged citizenship.