by Jeff Childers
It’s finally happened: the dam of jab omertà has broken wide open. While you read this morning’s update, remember that one of the New York Times’ primary functions is to referee the liberal Overton Window — what is acceptable for progressives to think about and to talk about. And yesterday, the New York ran this astonishing non-paywalled, long-form, magazine-style article:
Safe and effective! Prepare to experience a scorching flash of outrage. “Even the best vaccines,” the New York Times somberly informed its readers, “produce rare but serious side effects.” Now they tell us. Following the classic journalistic formula, the article began with a human interest anecdote, a vaccine-injured scientist, Michelle Zimmerman:
Within minutes of getting the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, Michelle Zimmerman felt pain racing from her left arm up to her ear and down to her fingertips. Within days, she was unbearably sensitive to light and struggled to remember simple facts.
She was 37, with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and until then could ride her bicycle 20 miles, teach a dance class and give a lecture on artificial intelligence, all in the same day. Now, more than three years later, she lives with her parents. Eventually diagnosed with brain damage, she cannot work, drive or even stand for long periods of time.
“When I let myself think about the devastation of what this has done to my life, and how much I’ve lost, sometimes it feels even too hard to comprehend,” said Dr. Zimmerman, who believes her injury is due to a contaminated vaccine batch.
The story immediately shifted to the pathetic, problematic PREP Act, the federal law immunizing vaccine manufacturers and providing a fig leaf of a “compensation” process for vaccine-injured people, people who trusted the government and whose previously normal lives now lie in devastated biological wreckage. I happen to know a lot about the PREP Act, more on that in a moment. Here’s how the Times accurately described PREP’s woeful failure:
As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600.
The Times’ first expert, a Yale immunologist, admitted what we all know to be true but which corporate media has so far steadfastly ignored, if not outright denied: that vaccine injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted.” But ignored by whom? And, who is doing the gaslighting? The Times avoided naming anyone in particular.
Rather, the Times went to great effort to highlight the good intentions of public health officials. It quoted former FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, safely retired as of February, who mused she wished she’d done more for vaccine injured people:
“I feel bad for those people,” said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were rolling out. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.”
“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”
This is a promising start, but what about the dead? Never mind! Here we find the first serious gap in the article’s coverage. The Times avoided this difficult issue, only briefly referring to possible deaths. But maybe it was too much to expect in this cautious, tentative first step toward officially acknowledging that Houston, we may have a problem.
My goodness! How could all this anti-progressive gaslighting and illiberal lack of sympathy have possibly happened? How can the Times reconcile this long period of denial and deception? Because it’s just so darn difficult to track vaccine injuries, and because we need even bigger government, that’s how:
The nation’s fragmented health care system complicates detection of very rare side effects, a process that depends on an analysis of huge amounts of data. That’s a difficult task when a patient may be tested for Covid at Walgreens, get vaccinated at CVS, go to a local clinic for minor ailments and seek care at a hospital for serious conditions. Each place may rely on different health record systems.
There is no central repository of vaccine recipients, nor of medical records, and no easy to way to pool these data. Reports to the largest federal database of so-called adverse events can be made by anyone, about anything. It’s not even clear what officials should be looking for.
I could give them some ideas of what to look for. It’s not really that hard. But I digress.
You see, covid vaccine injuries are brand new types of injuries, so what can you expect from busy, hardworking scientists? Dr. Woodcock explained, “I mean, you’re not going to find ‘brain fog’ in the medical record or claims data, because it doesn’t have a good research definition.” The former FDA Commissioner insisted, “It isn’t, like, malevolence on their part.”
It’s not like malevolence. It is malevolence. It’s like deliberate institutional neglect. But they meant well. “Federal officials,” the Times explained, “worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.” But health agencies’ duty is to pursue the truth, even when it’s complex or inconvenient, not to curate a simplified narrative for their perverse perception of an infantilized general public.
