In October 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was asked by “journalist” David Zweig about COVID’s risk to teachers. In his reply, Dr. Bhattacharya imagined a 40-year-old. He blew off all of COVID’s non-fatal harms and said that a 1 in 500 risk of death was “very moderate”. No big deal!
With this in mind, we can turn to a statement Dr. Bhattacharya recently published titled On the New NIH Vaccinology and Immunology Center. It said:
People who report serious health problems, including those that occur after vaccination or long-term symptoms after infections, deserve to be heard, taken seriously, and evaluated with the best tools science can offer. In 1986, Congress established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In doing so, it recognized that vaccines have benefited many people, and that, like every medical intervention, they can also cause adverse effects in some who receive them.
While “more research” is always needed, few topics in medicine have been studied more thoroughly than vaccines, and people who report injuries after vaccines have been taken seriously. Dr. David Gorksi recently discussed this new NIH clinic, as did Dr. Paul Offit put it in an article titled RFK Jr.’s Next Move. It said:
RFK Jr.’s claim that the public’s concerns about vaccine injuries have been dismissed or gaslit isn’t supported by the facts. When issues about vaccine safety have been raised, researchers have performed studies carefully and rigorously to determine whether vaccines were causing harm. For example:
In 1976, a vaccine to prevent swine flu was shown to be a rare cause of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an ascending form of paralysis.
In 2001, a rotavirus vaccine was shown to be a rare cause of intestinal blockage called intussusception.
In 2010, researchers proved that a swine flu vaccine used in Europe was a rare cause of narcolepsy, a permanent disorder of wakefulness.
In 2021, J&J’s adenovirus-vectored COVID vaccine was found to be a rare cause of clotting, including clotting of the brain, which could be fatal.
Also, in 2021, Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccines were found to be a rare cause of myocarditis.
Dr. Offit continued:
This works both ways. Carefully performed scientific studies might also prove that vaccine fears are unfounded. For example, in 1998, when a British researcher raised the possibility that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism, researchers performed more than 24 studies proving that this wasn’t true. Parents who continued to believe that MMR caused autism weren’t being dismissed or gaslit. Quite the opposite. Their fears were taken seriously, and millions of dollars were spent on studies addressing their concerns
He’s absolutely right.
Kennedy and Dr. Bhattacharya aren’t going to be the first to listen to people who say they have been injured by vaccines, nor will they be the first to research their claims “with the best tools science can offer.” Given their abominable track record of anti-vaccine disinformation, no reasonable person will trust what they “discover” anyways.
However even in a fantasy world where Dr. Bhattacharya was trustworthy, we can apply the standards he set regarding COVID to his new NIH clinic. Unless he finds a side effect that is worse than a 1 in 500 risk of literal death, we can all follow his lead and blow it off as “very moderate”.