What needs to happen now

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 – a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.

We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)

And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.

But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.

No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.

So, without further ado, here are five scientific and/or public policy proposals that can help bring us back on track. Three are directed directly at the mRNA jabs, while the other two are larger. All face an uphill battle, but none are impossible, especially with public uneasiness about the jabs continuing to rise.

They’re presented in order of approvability – which, unfortunately, roughly corresponds to reverse order of importance – with a short explanation of each. Feel free to add your own…

(WANT TO SEE MY TOP FIVE? SUBSCRIBE. OR WAIT 72 HOURS. I KNOW, SUCH A TEASE. IT IS VALENTINE’S DAY, AFTER ALL.)

1. An IgG4 registry. 

   Even mRNA advocates acknowledge they did not expect the fact that many people have a Covid immune response centered around less potent IgG4 antibodies after multiple mRNA shots and infections. We need to prospectively track a large group of those people, 20,000 or more, to see what their health outcomes are over the next few years.

2. No mRNA flu shots without at least three years of safety data from the ongoing randomized controlled trials. 

   We ended the Covid mRNA trials much too early by offering the vaccine to people who received the placebo shot in early 2021. As a result we have no clean long-term safety data on the Covid jabs – and it is hard to see how we ever will.

   We must not make the same mistake with the flu shots. There’s no urgency to approve them, as we have flu vaccines already. No, they don’t work very well, but at this point we have no reason to believe the mRNA flu jabs will be any better. Getting safety data that compares a balanced group of mRNA and placebo recipients should be the top regulatory priority, and the flu trials are the way.

3. Remove the mRNA Covid shots from the standard childhood immunization schedule. 

   This is self-explanatory. Countries all over the world are now banning the mRNAs for kids. Covid is barely a cold for most children, and the myocarditis risks are real. The Centers for Disease Control should be sued to infinity if it won’t undo this.

   Which leads to…

4. End immunity protection for ALL vaccines, and certainly any novel vaccines that don’t rely on simple inactivated viruses. 

   Pharmaceutical companies do not need absolute immunity to make vaccines. How do I know? Some of their biggest-selling drugs are aimed mostly at comparatively healthy people, and many of those have serious risks. Heart medicines like statins are often given preventively, even though they can on rare occasions cause severe muscle disorders.

   The biggest selling treatment worldwide, Humira, treats arthritis, psoriasis, and other autoimmune conditions – serious but generally not life-threatening illnesses – but can cause anemia and even cancer. People take it, knowing the risks, because they want relief. They don’t sue because they’ve been properly informed of the risks in advance. And our courts have handled these cases when they do, sometimes delivering large verdicts, other times tossing them entirely. Lawsuits over drugs have kept the United States has by far the biggest and most successful pharmaceutical industry anywhere.

   Only vaccines are somehow exempt from any liability. Why? Because a generation ago the companies convinced governments that they wouldn’t make them unless they had complete immunity, that even a few random cases of serious side effects following childhood vaccinations would put them out of business. Again, though, our experience with other drugs proves this threat isn’t real.

   The companies also convinced governments that those side effects would mostly be random and unrelated to the vaccines. But even if that argument applies to old-school inactivated virus vaccines, it clearly does not work for the mRNAs, which have severe and relatively common side effects like myocarditis – and work (when they work at all) for months rather than decades, making them much more like therapeutics than vaccines.

   The solution is obvious – eliminate the drug/vaccine distinction and subject vaccines to the same liability laws as other drugs – and other products generally. A product too risky to be manufactured without complete immunity for its maker is a product too risky to be used.

5. End all gain-of-function research worldwide; and, ideally, revert research on mRNA therapies to preclinical and early stage work for late stage cancer and other life-threatening illness only (basically where it was before Covid hit). 

   This is the big enchilada, and deserves its own Stack. Suffice it to say I’m increasingly convinced that virologists on the one side and immunologists on the other are engaged in an arms race that benefits them and their corporate and government masters alone, at huge risks for everyone else. More to come on this.

So that’s my top five. Interested to hear what you think of them – and what you’d add?