The NYTimes story on Jan 24th “Vaccines alone won’t end the pandemic” did not age well
Vaccine mandates are most appropriate for a vaccine that blocks transmission and eliminates severe disease. Though the virus just 1-year-old and the vaccines were brand new in early 2021, several doctors provided powerful justifications for mandates at that time. Because they wanted people to stop worrying about COVID, they wildly overpromised the vaccines 4 years ago. Some examples include:
Dr. Vinay Prasad, February 16, 2021:
A vaccinated grandparent can hug a young grandkid… we know the vaccine is 100% effective against protecting against bad outcomes for grandparent. (Author note: this was false at the time).
Dr. Marty Makary, March 10, 2021:
An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.
Dr. Marty Makary, March 18, 2021:
If anyone hears of a person hospitalized or dead from Covid-19 after full vaccination, please let me know. The data show that vaccines confer near perfect protection against death and hospitalization from Covid. Can’t we be honest about that?
Dr. Vinay Prasad, May 13, 2021:
For somebody who’s already been fully vaccinated, they can wear the mask out of solidarity or in a symbolic sense, but their wearing a mask indoors is not benefiting anyone else. There’s an infinitesimally low probability of even having an infection that can be detected on a PCR test, let alone being able to spread it to someone.
Drs. Tracy Beth Høeg, Lucy McBride, Allison Krug, Monica Gandhi May 26, 2021:
As we saw in Israel and Britain, vaccinating adults indirectly protects children. The same trend is evident here in the United States: Adult vaccination has lowered covid-19 incidence among children by 50 percent in the past four weeks.
It’s hard to think of a better justification for mandates than Dr. Prasad’s claim that vaccines would end the pandemic, but he said they would. “Enough with these models”, he said about projections that contradicted his wishes. “They have often been erroneous.”
Things didn’t turn out that way, unfortunately.
COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk Benefit Assessment and Ethical Analysis of Mandate Policies at Universities
While reasonable people can disagree about the exact qualities of a virus and vaccine that would make a mandate appropriate, I kept my beliefs to myself. However, even if I opposed mandates, I would never use my medical credentials to champion peoples’ right to gamble with their lives. I believe doctors should explain why people should want vaccines, which is the best way to obviate any mandate. It’s true that some people lost their jobs due to mandates, and I get why they are upset. However, they are better off than the estimated 234,000 people who died from anti-vaccine misinformation. That’s where our sympathy should lie, and there are certainly some people who are alive today due to mandates, though they do not know it.
Other doctors however, specifically those who provided strong rationalizations for mandates in 2021, took a different path. Once it became clear the vaccine was not the perfect panacea they had promised, they didn’t pause and reflect on how they overhyped it and how this might have led to mistrust. Rather they abruptly and furiously turned against it.
Instead of sharing accurate information to persuade people to take the vaccine, they relentlessly minimized its benefits and treated rare, temporary side-effects as a fate worse than death. Dr. Prasad wrote articles such as We Need to Talk About the Vaccines Public Debate on Side-Effects is Being Censored, which were always designed to appeal to peoples’ emotions. A college student who was mandated to take a vaccine disturbed them much more than a college student who died because they didn’t take one. They devoted great effort to defend peoples’ right to suffer and die because they were tricked by anti-vaccine disinformation. The energy they expended standing up for someone’s right to avoid a potentially life-saving vaccine was matched only by their juvenile mockery and scorn for anyone who wanted to avoid a potentially life-threatening virus. That was “living in fear” and it was shameful.
Several of these doctors, namely Drs. Vinay Prasad, Marty Makary, and Tracy Beth Høeg even wrote a lengthy paper titled COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk Benefit Assessment and Ethical Analysis of Mandate Policies at Universities that opposed mandates. In a pandemic where 1,200,000 Americans died and millions more were sickened, that’s what mattered to them. Dr. Prasad decided models were fine after all, as long as they supported his political beliefs.
Given these authors, it was no surprise their paper was full of distortions and omissions. As Dr. Bob Morris said in his thorough debunking of it:
The study has at least a dozen major flaws, all tending to either overemphasize the risks of the vaccines or understate their benefits… This is not a simple honest disagreement over how data should be interpreted. This is the flagrant, repeated torture of data until it confessed. Think of it as conclusion-first science.
Today, these doctors treat mandates as one of the pandemic’s greatest catastrophes and blame them for the lack of trust in medicine. However, their opposition to mandates was not rooted in a principled respect for bodily autonomy and medical freedom. Rather, they were anti-vaccine, and they knew they could use mandates to inflame and enrage their audience.
FDA Chief Says They’re Looking at Whether to Approve COVID Shots for Next Winter
Indeed, several of these doctors are now the Medical Establishment, and I recently discussed how they are trying to sabotage the Novavax vaccine under the guise of wanting “Gold Standard of Science.” Unsurprisingly, this may extend to all COVID vaccines. According to the article FDA Chief Says They’re Looking at Whether to Approve COVID Shots for Next Winter:
The head of the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that the agency is now looking at whether it will still approve COVID-19 vaccines for next winter, citing a lack of data on booster shots.” We’re taking a look. I can’t comment on any particular application. As you know, we have a bunch of applications for those booster shots,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett.
Makary said many health care workers did not get the last round of COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, calling it “a bit of a public trust problem.”
“I think there’s a void of data. And I think rather than allow that void to be filled with opinions, I’d like to see some good data,” Makary said.
His answer marks a change from during the Biden administration, when FDA officials backed plans to routinely update the COVID-19 vaccines each year. Makary’s remarks echo his justification for delaying Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, which was expected to get full approval on April 1. Novavax said Monday that the FDA had asked the company to commit to another clinical trial of the shot.
“Today, there is broad population immunity, and the big question is does it provide a benefit? Without a study on the new formulation and product, we can’t give an honest evidence-based answer to that question,” Makary told the newsletter “Inside Medicine” this week.
The article noted that Dr. Makary is being advised by Dr. Hoeg, a COVID-fabulist, sports medicine doctor, and political appointee.
Meanwhile, Dr. Prasad is cheering our new Medical Establishment from the sidelines. He anointed himself as the voice and protector of people who want a COVID vaccine. He feels it is his duty to shield strangers from what he considers to be an “uncontrolled experiment”. Even though booster vaccines have shown their value in dozens of observational studies, he believes no one should be allowed to get them until they meet his personal standards of evidence. Every tweak and adjustment to the vaccine forces it to start from scratch, as if we know nothing about it and every study up until this point can be thrown in the trash.
Notably, Dr. Prasad does not hold the virus to the same high standards, or any standard at all. During the harshest wave of the pandemic for children, when nearly 1,000 were hospitalized daily, Dr. Prasad wrote his article Should We Let Children Catch Omicron. In it, he said then that it was “reckless” to prevent COVID in children, a philosophy he now believes should apply to the entire country.We should just let nature take its course without trying to intervene in any way – the “soft eugenics” discussed by Dr. David Gorksi- and we should do so without getting informed consent from those who will be affected. Repeatedly infecting people with new, mutating virus against their will when a vaccine is available, isn’t an uncontrolled experiment, apparently.
Dr. Mark Hoofnagle pointed out there’s a dark history in medicine of withholding treatments from people without their consent. Yet, this might become the official policy.
Today, our Medical Establishment and their propagandists want to use the power of the federal government to limit what vaccines are available to you and your family. They feel you’re too stupid decide this for yourself. They want to impose their will on you the whole time pretending they are your guardian and stewards of good science. While they stood up for the rights of anti-vaxxers to die in droves, this is how much respect they have for your bodily autonomy and medical freedom. Not only do they not feel you have the capacity to consent to a vaccine, they are not seeking your consent to infect you with SARS-CoV-2.
And if COVID vaccines are unavailable in the future, and your grandmother or immunosuppressed neighbor suffers as a result, then we have not only these doctors to thank, but also every freedom-loving, libertarian, contrarian, heterodox person, publication, and university that legitimized their anti-vaccine nonsense while dunking on anyone who warned about it.