A Limited Hangout On Vaccine Harms

Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Well, it’s finally happened.

The New York Times (NYT) has acknowledged COVID vaccine harms. In a major piece written by their top pandemic reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, the paper has written of “thousands” the world over who have experienced when it is more like millions, according to many experts who have been yelling about this issue for years.

The thesis is not that the vaccine harmed people but really that people BELIEVE they have been harmed. It is their truth. We should listen, as they say in postmodern parlance.

At least it is something, right? Multitudes the world over have been screaming about the most dangerous shots ever authorized and still not withdrawn given the evidence. Indeed, mandates to get them are still in place at many U.S. colleges and even to legally immigrate to the United States.

The legacy media has been steadfastly silent, as if obeying a gag order. At last, the venue decided it was time to say what everyone knows but say it is with a spin.

Somehow the paper manages to blame the victim. “The rise of the anti-vaccine movement has made it difficult for scientists, in and out of government, to candidly address potential side effects.”

It’s a strange statement because anyone who expressed even the slightest doubt about universal mandatory vaccination with untested technology was smeared as an anti-vaxxer (yes this has happened to me more times than I can count, even though before three years ago, I never thought much about the subject at all).

In addition, the article concludes that the shots are still worth the risk because they saved millions of lives (this is completely unproven and ever fewer believe it). The story is pitched as a recognition of the vaccine-injured the same way nations celebrated those injured or killed in battle, people harmed in a worthy cause.

Really? From the beginning, the COVID response followed military protocols and this approach to the injured and dead follows the same line of thinking. But that is precisely the core of the problem. It was an infectious disease and should have been treated with traditional public health measures. What they chose instead has absolutely broken everything.

Further, we have proof that the Biden censors came to treat true stories of vaccine injury as “malinformation” and pushed social-media companies to block them from appearing. This is nowhere mentioned in the article, which is deeply insulting.

There is a phrase for the intention of this article. It is called a “limited hangout” in reference to an old tactic used by the intelligence community to admit some errors, some messes, some scandals, in order to distract from wider and more devastating failures. It is deployed when the public outcry becomes too great to enable credible full denials.

In effect, the major cheerleader for the vaccine, the smearer of good people everywhere, has been forced to admit error, even while downplaying the extent of it. Maybe that will be the end of it? It’s highly doubtful.

The strategy is extremely risky. If you wait too long, and the reality that people have experienced is too commonly understood, the tactic can end only in reinforcing more public outrage and an even more intense demand for investigation.

That seems to have happened, as the article prompted an astounding outpouring of tragic stories, even in the comment section of the article itself. Even Chris Cuomo, brother of the Governor of New York during the crisis, has admitted to being vaccine-injured.

There are three salient points here that point to the biggest public health scandal of our lifetimes:

1. Most people did not need these shots even if they were safe and effective, which they were not. It was known from the very outset that COVID had medically significant effects mostly for the aged and infirm. Most everyone else would be better off with infection-acquired immunity, which is (or was) widely known to be broader, long-lasting, and more effective than any vaccine for most diseases. It was also known from January 2021 that the vaccines produced an unusually large amount of harms.
2. The companies that were producing these shots were deploying a brand new technology, supposedly some miracle tech that would allow fast printing of any vaccine for any disease. But it would not otherwise have passed regulatory standards. It was pushed through under the pretext of emergency, given pre approval by the military, and the companies that made them were fully indemnified from liability for harms. There was simply no way that this disastrous experiment could end well.
3. The Biden administration took it a step further and mandated the shots for all businesses with more than 100 employees plus all transportation and health care workers. Part of that mandate was shot down by the Supreme Court but much of it remains. In other words, millions were forced to get a shot they didn’t want. To top it off, there was clearly a political motive here. The White House took note of more reluctance to accept the shot in Red states, so someone gained some sadistic pleasure out of muscling the political enemy.

The full range of injuries has shocked me. We all know somehow who was injured. We know plenty of people who faced multiple strange illnesses following vaccination that the victims have been reluctant to admit were vaccine harms. This is because many people chose to get them when they obviously did not need them. Others were forced to get the shots, but unwilling to believe that governments could impose on them a product that turned out to be deeply harmful.

Looking back at my own enlightenment on this, I never believed a vaccine was necessary because all the top experts in February 2020 said that the disease could be handled by off-the-shelf therapeutics. President Trump even said the same, despite wanting credit for Operation Warp Speed now (though he will rue the day that he demanded such credit).

It was in May 2020—only two months into lockdowns—that a very wise man, Professor Barry Brownstein, sent me an article to publish. I did so only reluctantly because I thought it was surely overwrought. I published it anyway, and it caused the roof to fall in on my end, as if I had sawed through a pillar of public health. I was truly astonished.

He wrote as follows and with perfect prescience:

“If you’re cheering the government for cutting red-tape, think again. Liability shields for crony capitalists and no cost for failure policies guarantee errors will be made. Without market safeguards significant injuries to human beings are highly likely. Errors will be exacerbated if medical tyranny prevails with legal mandates requiring the COVID-19 vaccination for employment and travel.”

Wow. He is a prophet. I had no idea at the time but everything about which he warned came true.

No one can say we did not know. We knew. For sure. They went ahead anyway. Now four years later, we get the very first admission that there was and is a problem. Edward Dowd put together a nice contrast between then and now.

He missed this one from the paper only last October: “Feeling Terrible After Your Covid Shot? Then It’s Probably Working.”

I can do no better than to quote from among the VAST number of comments on the NYT’s own piece. They were unable to censor this fast enough. I will let their words finish up the remainder of this article.

“Finally, a glimmer of information from the NY Times about the myriad harms caused by the Covid vaccines. This has arguably been one of the most suppressed stories on the planet because thousands, indeed millions, have been negatively affected by these vaccines. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) maintained by the CDC has over 1.6 million reported adverse events and over 37,000 reported deaths. [url=https://openvaers.com]https://openvaers.com[/url]/ During the pandemic, the news of vaccine injury was not reported on by mainstream media, only by independent media. People who reported their injuries on their social media accounts had their posts removed—and in many instances their accounts closed—so the information about potential harm didn’t get shared. All we heard, and still hear, is ‘safe and effective.’”

Read the rest of the article at  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.