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More COVID coverup?

AP Photo/LM Otero

COVID-19 is real, and it is deadly. And the evidence seems to suggest that the COVID vaccines can mitigate the worst effects of infection, and that they are relatively safe for most people.

But much of what we have been told about COVID, COVID vaccine safety and effectiveness, and COVID “prevention” measures has been deceptive. COVID vaccines can be harmful or deadly to some people, they don’t prevent infection or transmission, and measures to stop COVID transmission have been failures. Placing a bandana or a surgical mask over your face does nothing but annoy you and make communication difficult.

Look at China–as soon as they lift a few restrictions, which remain more stringent than anything the US ever tried–vulnerable people started dropping like flies. Two years after a vaccine was invented to “stop” the virus it is burning through a billion people. Airborne viruses are impossible to control over the long term. Society can afford one “boy in a bubble,” but not a population. And it is no way to live.

We have been lied to constantly, and the lies continue. Yet another doctor is breaking her silence in Australia about the COVID vaccine coverup. She argues that far more doctors are aware of adverse reactions to the vaccine than will admit it, and that they participate in a coverup due to intense pressure from the authorities.

Former federal MP Dr Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators.

In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject.

“This is an issue that I have witnessed first-hand with my wife who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunisation,” the 65-year-old said.

“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”

Phelps is not a kook or a tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. She is the former president of the Australian Medical Association and was a federal Minister of Parliament. As a doctor she clearly has access both to anecdotal data and is capable of analyzing the studies being done.

She is speaking up as both a doctor and a victim of the vaccine. Both she and her wife had serious adverse reactions to the vaccine, and claims her colleagues have all seen similar cases.

To be clear, Phelps is not making the claim that the vaccine is inherently dangerous to everybody. The public data she cites–and this is from studies, not anecdotal data–is that adverse reactions occur relatively rarely, but are far more common than publicly acknowledged. About 1 in every 1000 patients has experienced a serious reaction, which is far more common than with the average vaccine. Her own and her wife’s reactions were both severe.

“We did a lot of homework before having the vaccine, particularly about choice of vaccine at the time. In asking about adverse side effects, we were told that ‘the worst thing that could happen would be anaphylaxis’ and that severe reactions such as myocarditis and pericarditis were ‘rare’.”

Dr Phelps revealed she was also diagnosed with a vaccine injury from her second dose of Pfizer in July 2021, “with the diagnosis and causation confirmed by specialist colleagues”.

“I have had CT pulmonary angiogram, ECG, blood tests, cardiac echogram, transthoracic cardiac stress echo, Holter monitor, blood pressure monitoring and autonomic testing,” she said.

“In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.”

Dr Phelps said both reactions were reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) “but never followed up”.

She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”.

If you have been following the controversies surrounding the COVID vaccines none of this should shock you. There appears to be solid evidence that as a collective entity society may benefit from COVID vaccines by reducing morbidity and mortality, but as individuals the costs and benefits are very unevenly distributed. If vaccinating everybody reduces the overall number of deaths and hospital visits the public health officials may, in their own minds reasonably, conclude that forcing everybody to get the vaccine makes good sense. Society as a whole will benefit.

But the evidence is pretty clear that in some cases individuals would be far better off skipping the vaccine. It makes little sense for individuals extremely likely to survive the disease without lingering effects to be vaccinated, especially since the vaccine does nothing to curb the spread of the disease itself. Getting vaccinated if you are unlikely to get severely ill doesn’t even protect your loved ones or society as a whole. Forcing vaccinations on 6 month-old babies is insane.

So why, if all this is the case, are doctors not speaking up more loudly?

“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” she said.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), which oversees Australia’s 800,000 registered practitioners and 193,800 students, last year warned that anyone who sought to “undermine” the national Covid vaccine rollout could face deregistration or even prosecution.

AHPRA’s position statement said that “any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action”.

This is not an idle threat. Here in the United States doctors have been harassed for speaking up with doubts about the vaccine. This fall the Republican candidate for Governor–an award-winning doctor–was investigated multiple times after complaints filed for political reasons based upon his vaccine skepticism. He wasn’t anti-vax, but anti-mandate, and he had to defend his medical license several times.

In California it is against the law to spread “disinformation” about COVID, making any form of dissent dangerous for doctors. You can lose your license. Phelps again:

She added that “in trying to convince people in positions of influence to pay attention to the risks of Long Covid and reinfection for people with vaccine injury, I have personally been met with obstruction and resistance to openly discuss this issue”.

“There has been a delay in recognition of vaccine injury, partly because of under-reporting, concerns about vaccine hesitancy in the context of managing a global pandemic, and needing to find the balance between risks and benefits on a population level,” she said.

“Reactions were said to be ‘rare’ without data to confirm how common or otherwise these reactions were. In general practice I was seeing cases, which meant other GPs and specialists were seeing cases too. Without diagnostic tests, we have to rely largely on clinical history.”

In July this year, the independent OzSAGE group of which Dr Phelps is a member issued a position statement calling for better systems and management of Covid vaccine adverse events and “recognition of the impact of vaccine injury”.

Dr Phelps, who was heavily involved in crafting the statement, wrote in her submission that the OzSAGE document “outlines the scope but not the scale of the problem because we do not know the scale of the problem”.

“This is partly because of under-reporting and under-recognition,” she said.

According to the TGA’s most recent safety update, there have been a total of 137,141 adverse event reports from nearly 64.4 million doses — a rate of 0.2 per cent.

There have been 819 reports “assessed as likely to be myocarditis” from 49.8 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna. Fourteen deaths have officially been linked to vaccination — 13 after AstraZeneca and one after Pfizer.

As you can see, Dr. Phelps is not making a sweeping claim that the vaccine is inherently deadly, but merely that the dangers of the vaccine have been downplayed and even hidden in the rush to get the vaccine out there. This accords with other evidence, which is far more nuanced than the story we have been told.

It seems pretty clear that the vaccine is not universally deadly–otherwise most of the American population would be dead, as well as a decent chunk of the world population. But it is also clear that public health officials have been hiding the ball–vaccines are neither inherently safe nor nearly as effective as has been claimed. Lots of public health officials have moved the goalposts repeatedly, going from “you won’t get the virus and you won’t spread it” to “you probably won’t get as sick as you otherwise would.”

These are vastly different claims with vastly different implications for making risk assessments. There are huge swaths of the population who are at very little risk of severe or deadly COVID infections, and they probably shouldn’t get vaccinated if the vaccine provides little to no benefit to others. Why would they increase their risk for little benefit?

So why are public health officials making dangerous recommendations, even if the danger is small for each person? Especially when other countries have decided not to?

As I wrote before, American public health officials firmly believe in dumbing down their recommendations to the lowest common denominator. If they acknowledge that the truth is complicated people might get the wrong idea and start making risk assessments on their own, and we can’t have that. Treating people like adults is the wrong way to go. Marty Markary explained in a Newsweek article:

When that study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn’t matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

I listened to the meeting, and couldn’t believe what I heard. At times, the committee members sounded like a group of marketing executives. Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington said “what we really need to do is to be as consistent and clear and simple as possible,” pointing out that the committee needed “a consistent recommendation which is simple.”

Other committee members similarly emphasized the importance of a universal booster message that applies to all age groups. Dr. David Kimberlin, editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics Red Book, speaking on his own behalf, said “Americans are yearning for, are crying out for a simpler way for looking at this pandemic.” He suggested that not recommending boosters for young children would create confusion that “could also bleed over to 12-to-17-year-olds, and even the adult population.”

The committee also debated how hard to push the booster recommendation, discussing whether the CDC should say that 5-to-11-year-olds “may” get a booster versus “should” get it.

Exhibiting classic medical paternalism, committee member Dr. Oliver Brooks of the Watts Healthcare Corporation said “I think may is confusing and may sow doubt,” adding “if we say should more people will get boosted versus may, then we may have more data that helps us really define where we’re going.” Dr. Brooks was essentially suggesting that boosting in this age group would be a clinical trial conducted without informed consent.

This is sheer arrogance, and that arrogance explains why people no longer trust the CDC. If you remember the masking advice and how it constantly changed it becomes clear that the public health establishment cares more about compliance than anything else. They may think they are making the right decisions for society as a whole, but what they are actually doing is talking down to Americans. And we don’t appreciate it.

Nor should we. Public health officials are not Gods and they should never lie. It undermines their mission, and any short-term gains, even if they are large–and these lies do not gain us anything–are a bad long-term strategy.

Tell the truth. American adults are free people who can make their own decisions.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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