Why did all of our officials lie to us and why do so many people now believe that never happened?
Speaking out against the vaccines is quite challenging because of how deep the faith in them runs throughout the medical field. On one hand, anything which supports the vaccine narrative (e.g., dubious claims vaccines are completely effective) is taken on faith and never subject to scrutiny. On the other hand, anything which questions their efficacy or safety is attacked to the point you are on shaky ground to question something about them even if you have rock-solid evidence.
Before my eyes were opened to this with the COVID-19 vaccines, I, like many of my colleagues assumed vaccines were safe, effective, and proven to be by a robust body of clinical research. After me and my colleagues realized how much we had been lied to about this with the COVID-19 vaccines, we started looking into the vaccines and discovered much of the evidence we’d assumed was there simply wasn’t. For example, at this point one of the only vaccines that we believe has robust clinical trial evidence demonstrating efficacy is the shingles vaccine.
In the last few years, I’ve gained a deep understanding for how powerful the pharmaceutical industry’s propaganda apparatus is and I’ve come to terms with the fact many people I deeply respect can’t see what’s right in front of them. At the same time, things still keep on happening that just leave me jaw dropped.
Whenever I share something on Twitter for instance, defenders of the narrative always jump at the chance to attack what I put forward. In many cases, this results in them taking a quick look at what I said, extrapolating it into an idea in their mind, and then ridiculing that idea because it is patently absurd. The problem is that in many cases, the idea they are attacking has nothing to do with what I actually said; it was just something they imagined I said.
Recently, I shared an article about how 3 (and arguably 4) Democratic members of the Senate suffered unusual heath complications that required them to have an extended leave of absence from the Senate. In addition to the odds of this happening by chance being very low, those Senators aggressively pushed the vaccines, their injuries were ones known to be linked to the vaccine and their injury rate (out of the 48 Democratic Senators) matched the adverse event rate independent surveys have found with these vaccines.
One of the injured Senators was Dianne Feinstein, who developed a shingles infection which then developed into Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (a very rare complication of shingles Justin Bieber experienced last year), and then encephalitis (an even rarer complication that affects roughly 1/30,000 to 1/50,000 people who get shingles). Beyond this being an extraordinarily rare condition, both an increased rate of shingles and the two severe complications Feinstein experienced have been linked to the COVID-19 vaccines in numerous databases tracking the adverse responses to vaccines.
The response I saw on Twitter to this was that shingles is such a common condition (it affects 1/3 adults) that me arguing Dianne Feinstein’s condition was linked to the vaccines was equivalent to me being unscientific enough to argue someone needing to go to the bathroom after drinking a glass of water was also due to a vaccine. I received many more similar criticisms as well (this line of attack is a common trope used to dismiss people who claim they experienced an adverse reaction to a vaccine).
What I found so surprising about this was that it wasn’t just nobody’s on Twitter; many of the well know “experts” also jumped in on this meme (e.g., these two) including one of the most prolific skeptics on Twitter:
AMD asked quite a few of them if they wanted to correct their statements and was ignored by all of them—something we both believe illustrates how little accountability there is for people who make absurd statements that endorse the narrative. When I asked AMD why smart people do things like this, I was sent “Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot” as a response.
That article argues that the more “intelligent” people are, the more likely they are to appraise information by quickly looking for something which supports their existing beliefs while simultaneously being blind to anything which challenges them. AMD argued this behavior is particularly problematic because the non-experts on Twitter will typically default to parroting the messages established by those tunnel-visioned experts.
Last week, I shared this article, again from AMD:
After I posted it, I then had many commentators argue that no one ever promised the vaccines would prevent transmission and that I was gaslighting the public by claiming anyone said that. This really shocked me. We literally had our public officials tell us over and over that the vaccines would stop transmission and tons of documented proof they did this can easily be found online. It’s both incredible and sad that the hypnosis of the narrative is so powerful people can easily forgot what they had sincerely believed only a year ago.
After this happened I asked AMD to put together a compilation of the lies we were told about transmission and the proof those who told us should have known they were lying. I feel this is important for everyone to learn about because the mythology of stopping transmission was used to:
1. Encourage widespread discrimination against the unvaccinated (under the nonsensical logic that the vaccines “worked” but simultaneously could not protect you from someone who had not been vaccinated).
2. Bait the public into agreeing to a mass vaccination campaign and to accept both illegal and extremely harmful vaccination mandates being enacted upon the American people.
Please read AMD’s article and consider subscribing to their newsletter (its my favorite one on Substack).
AMD’s article is excellent and throughly debunks one of the central lies that made the insanity we saw throughout COVID-19 possible. If this lie is not exposed, I am certain it will be reused to push through the next onslaught of vaccine mandates.
Source: The COVID-19 Vaccines Could Never Prevent Transmission