On the awful Catch-22 the media and public health face over Covid jabs

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

Everyone now knows mRNA shots are neither safe nor effective. But the people who pushed them fear telling the truth will wreck their credibility. So they keep lying – and wrecking their credibility.

Everyone hates mRNA.

That’s no exaggeration.

The new Covid “vaccine” season started last month. It’s shaping up even worse (for Moderna and Pfizer and the Centers for Disease Control) than last year’s.

In deep blue New York State, under 5 percent of people have received an mRNA jab this fall, including not even 1 percent of children and teenagers.1 The figures are similar elsewhere. At this rate, maybe 10 percent of Americans will get a Covid shot before next spring – and the figure will likely be even lower in red states.

Investors have noticed too. Shares in Moderna are down 44 percent in the last year and have fallen almost 90 percent since their 2021 peak – which was, of course, fueled by the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandates.

Yet public health bureaucrats and journalists are still pretending it’s 2021.

Last month, CBS News tut-tutted its worry that Americans might “skip COVID and flu shots.” (The network claimed that up to half of adults might get this year’s vaccine, an estimate so far off as to be laughable. The figure represents either deep-blue-Manhattan-media fantasy or a deliberate effort to make the shots seem more popular than they are, or more likely both.)

Meanwhile, the CDC is sticking with its bizarre recommendation that everyone —including infants older than six months, teenagers, and healthy adults — receive a new mRNA booster jab.

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(Yeah, I’ll pass. And so will everyone else.)

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Over at the Atlantic (always! always the Atlantic!), failed Substacker Charlie Warzel threw this line into his anti-free-speech rant yesterday about growing distrust of the media and government:

The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials… reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage.

Let me try to explain this as clearly as I can to Warzel: You have cause-and-effect EXACTLY backwards.

People know the mRNAs didn’t work.

They know in the most fundamental, personal way: because they (not me, lucky me, I danced through the raindrops and I am glad I did) took or were forced to take the shots. Then they had side effects, sometimes serious ones, including autoimmune conditions and cardiac disorders. Then they got Covid. Then they got Covid again. And they may also know older people who took the jabs and later died of Covid – putting the lie to the theory the shots work against serious illness even after they fail against infection.

The mRNA shots are not effective. They are not particularly safe either. More evidence about their risks is emerging every month, usually from studies conducted outside the United States, since American researchers won’t touch the issue.

Americans have figured this out for themselves, which is why 90 percent of people won’t get them anymore. Even most Americans who get flu shots2, people who are by definition not anti-vaccine, won’t get them.

Public health officials and journalists lied – or, at best, badly misled and overpromised – about the Covid vaccine. They must know they did, since everyone else does.

Yet instead of being honest about their mistakes, they are doubling down. Of course trust in public health and journalism is falling to all-time lows. (The Biden dementia fiasco did not help.)

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I understand the crisis they face. I understand the impulse to keep lying.

Admitting the truth now will be incredibly painful for both reporters and public health expers. Acknowledging they failed to note the obvious risks of shoving a hastily tested biotechnology into the arms of more than a billion people will provoke anger from readers and viewers and patients. Figuring out how they became handmaidens for Pfizer and Moderna will be awful.

But they have to stop digging. They are hurting confidence not just in the mRNAs, not just in all vaccines (I know many of you want that, you know I am not convinced), not just in public health and the media – but in all our government and scientific institutions.

The failure of the mRNAs, and the failure to admit or discuss that failure, is corroding every part of our civic life.

It has to end. The people responsible must admit the truth.

Or we will never trust our institutions again.