The Feds are finally investigating what I've been pointing out since November 2020: Pfizer shut down its Operation Warp Speed vax clinical trial from late October until the day after the election.
Your are interpreting anecdotal data in a way that you wouldn’t being do so, if Trumo won the 2020 election and conversely the liberal family across the street would have your stated position now if Trump had won in 2020. That is Steve‘s point and pretty obvious given the state of today’s politics. It is not a calumny against “conservatives.”
You also don’t address efficacy. The vaccine did not prevent contagion of a rapidly mutating virus, but it did seem to reduce the lethality. Safety of the vaccine is still an open question. It’s easy to highlight the costs (potential but unproven side effects) in 2025 but downplay the benefits in the distant past (reductions in severe COVID in 2021). I had an unvaccinated family member who almost died (so don’t tell me it was no worse than the flu). That being said, a fully vaccinated family member dropped dead unexpectedly at a youngish age.
Alex Berenson has a link in his Substack today to a Spanish study showing the more shots you got, the more likely you are to keep getting Covid. For another anecdote that is true of the biggest vax zealot I know, who has had at least 7 shots and keeps coming down with Covid. Even the people who pushed it finally had to admit it did nothing to prevent infection.
I got the two Pfizer shots. I got COVID six weeks later, but was only symptomatic for a few hours. I think by then it had mutated to the more contagious but less dangerous variant.
More anecdotal evidence, but higher level-- I know an ER doc who told me the first summer after vaccine availability essentially every COVID patient he admitted to in hospital was unvaccinated. If you believe that and the original studies, the main benefit of the vaccine was reducing seriousness and lethality among the elderly and otherwise vulnerable. OTOH, if you look at mortality stats after everyone was vaccinated it's hard to see 90% effectiveness there.
I don't think the politics of COVID vaccine hesitancy would have changed had Trump won the election. The biggest diference would have been the lack of any federal mandates and Trump supporters I saw on-line were always suspicious of the vaccine because of the enthusiastic support for its arrival by Fauci etal. This was before the election. After a Trump win and no mandates to get it at the federal level, I can pretty much guarantee every blue state governor in the country would have issued the exact same mandates they issued under Biden.
If Pfizer had announced the efficacy of its vaccine on the morning of Monday, November 2, 2020, Trump then spent the last 24 hours of his campaign trumpeting the success of his Operation Warp Speed, and then Trump eked out a come from behind victory, Trump would have absolutely owned the covid vaccine.
Oh, Trump would have crowed about the successful trials, but it wouldn't have changed the distribution of who got the the vaccine and continued to get it over the following 4 years. And Revelin below is just wrong- had Trump issued mandates, conservatives would have resisted just as much and for the exact same reasons. Democrats probably would have joined such resistance but my point is that there never was going to be a mandate from Trump to take his vaccine which I think would definitely have led to the Democrats mandating it at the state levels just like they did.
I think it's a little of both. Trump touting it would have helped among the right, but the enforcement of vaccination by the government on people who didn't need it, with always dubious rationale that we could get to herd immunity, was what pushed the wackiest anti-vaxxers over the edge.
Sure - and then we would have had a fairly ineffective Trump 2nd term. Instead, he had another 4 years to marinate and develop a strategy that has a better chance of turning the country around.
On the other hand, Ukraine war, nor Oct 7, 2023 would have happened.
Yeah, and in that scenario the Democrats would have been all over the fact that it did pretty much nothing to slow the spread of the Omnicron variant in 2021. More people died of COVID during Biden's term post-vax than during Trump's first term.
As Yancy notes, that doesn't translate into pro/anti-vax positions without adding in mandates to get a shot. If it had been treated like the flu shots and merely recommended I don't think it would have generated the political heat it did. The Democrats would have argued much more about the efficacy of the vaccine, not it's safety.
But Trump did own the vaccine, in the sense of claiming credit for it. The Left, once they could call it Fauci’s vax, a good, sciencey, Democrat vax, and not Trump’s, downplayed OWS and Trump’s role in it. In fact, I believe that’s the deciding reason Trump was deplatformed from Twitter and MSM — you can’t demonize antivax sentiment as Trumpian anti-science when Trump is blaring support for it to the general public. When he did tell people to get vaxxed, his supporters, to their credit. drew the line, backing him generally in everything else, but not that. Still, I have no doubt that many, left and right, would now be on a different side of the issue had Pfizer not delayed its results
I agree the mandates were a big turning point for me and many others. But I have to be honest with myself, if the mandates had come from ‘my guy’ would my rationalizations (and I purposely use that word and its connotations as we were in an environment of limited information) have been the same? I at first refused to take the vaccine after the mandates until the realities of living and working overseas forced my hand, which is another part of the story. I think I was the last person in the world to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.
I would have had the same opinion either way, but I have the advantage of being a medical professional. The vaccine should have been solidly recommended for anyone over 60 or 65 with no push to vaccinate any otherwise healthy person under 40. IN between the recommendation should be based on how healthy you are and how much contact you have with others. I took it as soon as it was available because I thought it was cool technology that, by its nature was likely to be pretty safe.
I got COVID maybe 3 times, the first being a real hipster case in March, when it first came out. I can't imagine I would ever bother with a booster.
I agree; I’m not sure I would have refused the jab if things had been different. I always thought getting jabbed should be done without coercion, and if Trump had tried that heavy-handed approach, I would probably have been joined by many on the left in resisting it. Had it been left to each individual to decide, the ethically right way, I probably would have refused simply because I didn’t believe I was at high risk, but I probably wouldn’t have been so adamantly against it, so it’s possible I would have gotten it. I’m ALMOST grateful for the scientific skullduggery and Democrat shitbaggery and election fraud
I have no opinion on side effects. I didn’t address them in my comment. The vaccines were promised to prevent one getting COVID and to stop the spread of the virus.
It’s not remotely controversial to say that they utterly failed to fulfill either of those promises.
I don’t think even liberals believe that the COVID vaccines are effective.
What I regard as a calumny is being lumped in with vaccine deniers in general as opposed to holding a completely reasonable position in regard to the COVID vaccines specifically.
I’m not at all surprised that increasing numbers of people are questioning vaccines in general: the public health establishment in this country utterly destroyed much of the faith and good will it had built up over the previous seventy years or so.
Fair enough. You weren’t explicit on the side effects issue, but I assumed that your vaccine hesitancy stemmed from the downside risks. Otherwise take the useless shots in your mind and get on with your life.
Imagine if our so called experts had adopted a risk management approach to the problem. That to me was always the biggest scandal. It is hard not to come the conclusion that there weren’t some ulterior motives behind the decisions to use one size fits all solutions be it lockdowns, recommendations on the vaccines, therapeutics, etc.
The compounding problem was that the "so called experts" were not real experts either. For example, the person the NIH put in charge of the COVID-19 - Deborah Birx - was an expert on HIV. Unfortunately, HIV is very different - it is one of few viruses where effective human immunity normally doesn't establish itself in the long run. So she may have been misprogrammed by her previous study field.
I understand completely. However, this is not how historically medical information is transferred from doctor to patient. Promises are just promises.
For example, even if despite initial promises, the vaccine didn't reduce the spread but reduced the lethality by say 70%, 95% of the immunized would have been OK with it.
Anyway, at very early stages - when we were still dealing with variant zero or the variant Lombardy, the vaccines were effective against infection. And in 2021, they seem to have reduced lethality in the infecteds by maybe 70%. After 2021, it was just anyone's guess.
As an aside, mRNA is a sexy way of rapidly introducing new vaccines. Having to use two viral vectors to have a reproducible vaccination - what Sputnik vaccine developers have done - is really cumbersome. And creating an attenuated virus for vaccination is even more cumbersome. So the question is more - are mRNA vaccines genuinely safe? After all, they are using nucleotides that are not naturally occurring...
Maybe against you, but I guarantee that plenty of Republicans who refused the jab would have gotten jabbed, and possibly have favored mandates, had Trump won, just as many Democrats who got it, and favored mandates, would have refused it
How do you know it was completely useless? By the Fall of 2021, the zero variant against whom the vaccine was designed was no longer circulating. And by beginning of 2022, the Corona virus variant circulating - was it called Omega ? - anyway, it was superspreading and much, much milder. If Omega would have been the original variant, no-one would have bothered with lock-downs or vaccinations in the first place.
I think the variant that suddenly swept in around Thanksgiving 2021 that proved highly infectious but not very deadly was called Omicron.
We got lucky that it evolved in an infectious but less lethal direction. There's a modest tendency in that regard over other infectious diseases, but hardly always. E.g., the basic version of smallpox appears to have stayed about 6% lethal for thousands of years.
Yep, but the point I am making is that to discuss usefulness in a strict sense, you need to compare the effectiveness with respect to the original virus. In that scheme of things the original vaccines were initially really effective.*
Even though - there were never any randomized controlled trials that looked at actual lethality. Initially, we had that big Pfizer and Moderna trials in healthy and fairly youngish volunteers where no-one died and that was it. The parameter tested for there was moderate to moderately severe symptoms LATER confirmed by a PCR test**. After that, all we had were observational studies that suggested that lethality was going down by 2/3 after the vaccine was introduced in 2021.
What happened to the usefulness of vaccinations in 2022 is anyone's guess.
And we still don't really know about (a) how safe is mRNA vaccination independent of its payload in general terms, and (b) was there a specific issue in COVID mRNA vaccination in younger males - say 20 to 35 year old, compared to their unvaccinated age and sex group.
*Otherwise, one looks at the vaccine escape-effeciency of viruses.
**I think the Chinese manufacturers made a study design "mistake" by regular testing with PCR swabs for infection independent of symptoms. This way they may have picked infections in the vaccinated group that were running without symptoms and that would have been missed by the Biontech/Pfizer or the Moderna designs.
By the standards that our public health system established.
A. The vaccines would prevent people from getting COVID.
B. The vaccines would stop the spread of COVID, thus allowing a return to normalcy.
Neither of those proved true.
The later statements that the vaccines were resulting in less severe cases were unfalsifiable.
The Public Health Establishment really shot itself in the foot by stating that while large gatherings of white people, such as the Sturgis motorcycle rally, were extremely dangerous and concerning, large gatherings in support of BLM were completely fine and of no concern.
The vaxx was just a MacGuffin for the petty tyranny managers wanted to indulge anyway. The approval/subsidy of it was used as a justification *FOR* lockdowns instead of against them. Many employers greeted it as a great excuse to fire people they didn't want to keep anyway.
You are right. Opposition to the vaccines from the right was more about government and corporate lies, and forced vaccination, than it was about any Trump/Biden purity test.
It's the same kind of reasoning as the guy who says "if cigarettes reduce life expectancy, how come that one guy I know smoked and live to 90?" Often from the same exact people. Hopefully a eugenics program will eventually eliminate such illogic.
Well, it all turned out to be a big fraud anyway. The "vaccines" that weren't, were neither safe nor effective, and there's lots of evidence that they knew it. And it's been disappointing that Trump continued to push the Big pHarma narrative that the toxic jabs "saved 100 million lives", when in fact it saved no one and has killed more than 20 million people worldwide so far (that we know of, because they are still NOT collecting that data in many countries). The death and injury tolls have continued to be elevated years after the jabs. Trump was extremely naive and prone to being bought in his first term, which is why he appointed Big pHarma executives to run "public health" after Pfizer donated $1 Million to his inauguration. He seems to have better people around him now, but it would be nice if he acknowledged the injured and the dead from this poison.
Trump was caught in a purity spiral; we all were. He couldn't point out this was a respiratory virus that would just have to play itself out without hysterical Leftists screaming that meemaw survived the Holocaust but she was being KILLED by Trump. He couldn't point out it was a lab leak without being accused of outright insanity. Same for masks and keeping grandparents away from their grandchildren. He's not astute enough to point out the "vaccine" provides a sort of heads-up to your immune system while, in the meantime, you still catch, spread, and can even be hospitalized or die from COVID.
“Trump has been a decent counterpuncher, but he’s a poor conspirator. He’s seldom been cynical enough about how low his foes would go against him. He doesn’t have the attention span to obsess enough over what his enemies are planning to do to him in the future. So he’s not often paranoid enough ahead of time about what his foes are up to. He’s just not cynical enough, expecting people to like him rather than to try to do him down“
Well, Trump had the last laugh by getting reelected. Perhaps his latest example of counterpunching is—
“hey, wonder if the reason my re-election was stolen from me was in no small part due to the fact that the cowardly Pfizer people didn’t bother to give me credit for the life saving vaccine which is mainly due to MY administration green lighting the vaccine with warp speed clinical trials! Or something like that. Yeah! THAT’s probably what it was!”
And Trump does tend to remember those who he believes have personally dissed him.
I don't see anything criminal, unfortunately. No doubt some investors could try suing.
I got the Pfizer vax in April '21 after I lost half my sense of smell and taste for a week--but I didn't give anything to my 93 y.o. father who then lived with me. Never got close to sick after that, but isolation was the likely reason. My doctor wanted me to get the latest vax last September, and I ended up saying Fauci ought to be in prison, which didn't go over well. I was in a bad mood, but I still believe it.
The point of the article is not that the vax's were effective, but that one of the large pharma corporations delayed announcing the results of their research and delayed making one vax drug available in order to cooperate with the Deep State unofficial party and favor the Democratic candidate for USA President.
There's more on election manipulation on Mollie Hemingway's book, Rigged, which I recommend in addition to Steve's essays.
This is just dumb. It certainly is true that Pfizer slowed the shot to help Trump's enemies, but timing has nothing to do with the smart people on the right hating the shot. Please remember there were many people smart enough to figure this out. The Dawn Princess was all you needed to understand. I and all the people I could convince in my family never took the shot. Yes, I caught the virus. But, a week in chair like l usually do for flu was all it took to get well.
The Covid Pandemic was a beautiful simulation. It was all a "make-pretend" exercise featuring the most hysterical ideas imagined such as arrows in store aisles and making people stay home except for the people who had to make and deliver food, and the politicians who chose to have their parties and haircuts.
Yes, some people died who should not have died. Many, many more died because of medical malfeasance and incompetence - such as telling people to stay away from the hospital.
Operation Warp Speed was all part of the simulation. That the planners made sure to not allow Trump to politically profit from it is such a cunning act. That Trump still defends Warp Speed despite it being used to sabotage his reelection is due justice for him - he never should have locked down the country in the first place!
And the lab leak is super popular, so popular that it might no longer qualify as a conspiracy theory. Anyway, the lab leak was not a conspiracy; the cover up of the lab leak was the conspiracy.
It's reasonable to say call Lab Leak a True Conspiracy Theory, although it's frustrating that nobody seems to be able to completely nail it down one way or another even after 5 years. It's been stuck at about 80-20 probably true forever.
Frustrating but completely predictable (as I told people even at the time). In the absence of the Chinese fessing up, how could we possibly tell for sure. If there were one simple trick, like a DNA signature that clearly showed human fingerprints it would be strong evidence. Yet we had the whole sequence within the first few months and no one found anything. I don't see why they would come up with it now.
Personally I’ve never been able to get over the fact that the virus originated in the one city on Earth doing the most gain-of-function research.
But the more that time goes by and no smoking gun emerges the more I think it was a coincidence.
I’m at 50/50 now but if now but if no one produces witness, documentary, or forensic evidence by say 2045 I’ll be inclined to believe the official version.
One thing I've never seen addressed is that Fauci and others justified Gain of Function research as a way to discover treatments and preventatives for possible future diseases, yet no one completely successfully did, certainly no claims to any from the Wuhan Lab. In fact, the Establishment denounced most treatment candidates and their advocates.
Has anyone studied the covid death rate of people who were already taking HCQ daily?
How statistically dangerous were the “Covid” vaccines?
Given the virus' universally-acknowledged minimal-to-zero mortality for young people (Just The Flu), what should the age-and-condition cutoff have been?
Commenter ERIK, in a deep-thread comment elsewhere here, suggests a three-tiered baseline:
- Under 40: no Covid vaccine;
- Age 40 to 65 (or 65): Decide case by case, depending on health condition;
We probably dodged a bullet in 2020 let’s be honest, had the vaccine been announced and had the laptop story not been spiked by reputable news outlets then Trump would have squeaked by in the electoral college while getting trounced in the popular vote once again which undoubtedly would have energized the left enormously. Worst of all the gop would have credited the win on the first step act and the platinum plan and they would have doubled down on all his worst policies while still doing nothing about border security or affirmative action.
Something strangely memory holed too is how Kamala Harris and a few other prominent Democratic politicians were saying they wouldn’t trust “Trumps vaccine” before the 2020 election because Trump was doing whatever it took to get the vax approved before the election as an election boost. There was a sense at the time that the vaccine announcement would be inevitable any day during late October and that it would be a boost to Trump so democrats were trying to get out ahead of the vaccine announcement with their own messaging. Perhaps the democratic messaging scared Pfizer into waiting to announce?
As I recall there were a number of Democrat governors, including Newsom and Cuomo (I think he hadn't been replaced yet), who threatened to block distribution of "Trump's vaccine" until their administrations had done an "independent review" of the Pfizer trials. I suspect this had as much or more of an impact on the voting as Pfizer withholding information until after the election.
I’m happy to hear other people recall this too, it seemed to have been quickly forgotten about. Also in the early days of the pandemic it seemed like republicans were pushing for draconian measures like blocking all flights from china while Nancy pelosi was saying it was racist to take covid seriously and to visit your local Chinatown as a show of support. Unfortunately a lot of republicans went off the reservation during Covid by claiming it wasn’t real or saying the vax was itself a bio-weapon which, aside from marginalizing the more sensible criticism of lockdowns and mandates through guilt by association, got a lot of democrats off the hook for their crazy and cynical behavior during the pandemic.
What Pfizer did was just a part of what deep state did. It's just a part of the whole tableau. Just like claiming Hunter Biden laptop was a hoax and getting signatures from 51 top IC personnel. But yes, it would have been funny if the Dems would have been forced to come out as anti-vaxx.
I also wonder how then the Dems would have treated the Sputnik vaccine if Trump won? Just as miserably as they did in real? Or would they have extolled it, because it came from outside the Western sphere?
In 2020, Trump lost 3 states by less than one percent. If he'd won them due to the success of Operation Warp Speed, the Electoral College vote would have been tied 269-269. At that point it goes to the House voting as states. My calculation is that Trump would have won, but it's hardly implausible the Democrats would have won the election one way or another including bribery or coup.
If Electoral college were tied, chances are House of Representatives would have been slightly red too. And then, Trump would have won in the House through their state delegations.
It’s possible too that the announcement a day before wouldn’t have mattered because the people who cared about Covid and took it seriously voted by mail already
It’s disappointing to see you continue this calumny against conservatives who have turned against the COVID vaccine.
I, along with my family, received the vaccine as soon as it became available, in Spring of ‘21.
It proved completely useless. We all got COVID. The vaccines prevented neither contracting the disease nor spreading it.
That’s some vaccine.
Your are interpreting anecdotal data in a way that you wouldn’t being do so, if Trumo won the 2020 election and conversely the liberal family across the street would have your stated position now if Trump had won in 2020. That is Steve‘s point and pretty obvious given the state of today’s politics. It is not a calumny against “conservatives.”
You also don’t address efficacy. The vaccine did not prevent contagion of a rapidly mutating virus, but it did seem to reduce the lethality. Safety of the vaccine is still an open question. It’s easy to highlight the costs (potential but unproven side effects) in 2025 but downplay the benefits in the distant past (reductions in severe COVID in 2021). I had an unvaccinated family member who almost died (so don’t tell me it was no worse than the flu). That being said, a fully vaccinated family member dropped dead unexpectedly at a youngish age.
We just don’t know.
Alex Berenson has a link in his Substack today to a Spanish study showing the more shots you got, the more likely you are to keep getting Covid. For another anecdote that is true of the biggest vax zealot I know, who has had at least 7 shots and keeps coming down with Covid. Even the people who pushed it finally had to admit it did nothing to prevent infection.
I got the two Pfizer shots. I got COVID six weeks later, but was only symptomatic for a few hours. I think by then it had mutated to the more contagious but less dangerous variant.
A significant percentage of the people who caught Covid were either completely asymptomatic or thought that it was hay fever or a cold.
More anecdotal evidence, but higher level-- I know an ER doc who told me the first summer after vaccine availability essentially every COVID patient he admitted to in hospital was unvaccinated. If you believe that and the original studies, the main benefit of the vaccine was reducing seriousness and lethality among the elderly and otherwise vulnerable. OTOH, if you look at mortality stats after everyone was vaccinated it's hard to see 90% effectiveness there.
I don't think the politics of COVID vaccine hesitancy would have changed had Trump won the election. The biggest diference would have been the lack of any federal mandates and Trump supporters I saw on-line were always suspicious of the vaccine because of the enthusiastic support for its arrival by Fauci etal. This was before the election. After a Trump win and no mandates to get it at the federal level, I can pretty much guarantee every blue state governor in the country would have issued the exact same mandates they issued under Biden.
If Pfizer had announced the efficacy of its vaccine on the morning of Monday, November 2, 2020, Trump then spent the last 24 hours of his campaign trumpeting the success of his Operation Warp Speed, and then Trump eked out a come from behind victory, Trump would have absolutely owned the covid vaccine.
Oh, Trump would have crowed about the successful trials, but it wouldn't have changed the distribution of who got the the vaccine and continued to get it over the following 4 years. And Revelin below is just wrong- had Trump issued mandates, conservatives would have resisted just as much and for the exact same reasons. Democrats probably would have joined such resistance but my point is that there never was going to be a mandate from Trump to take his vaccine which I think would definitely have led to the Democrats mandating it at the state levels just like they did.
I think it's a little of both. Trump touting it would have helped among the right, but the enforcement of vaccination by the government on people who didn't need it, with always dubious rationale that we could get to herd immunity, was what pushed the wackiest anti-vaxxers over the edge.
Steve, there are pluses and minuses, as always.
Sure - and then we would have had a fairly ineffective Trump 2nd term. Instead, he had another 4 years to marinate and develop a strategy that has a better chance of turning the country around.
On the other hand, Ukraine war, nor Oct 7, 2023 would have happened.
Yeah, and in that scenario the Democrats would have been all over the fact that it did pretty much nothing to slow the spread of the Omnicron variant in 2021. More people died of COVID during Biden's term post-vax than during Trump's first term.
As Yancy notes, that doesn't translate into pro/anti-vax positions without adding in mandates to get a shot. If it had been treated like the flu shots and merely recommended I don't think it would have generated the political heat it did. The Democrats would have argued much more about the efficacy of the vaccine, not it's safety.
But Trump did own the vaccine, in the sense of claiming credit for it. The Left, once they could call it Fauci’s vax, a good, sciencey, Democrat vax, and not Trump’s, downplayed OWS and Trump’s role in it. In fact, I believe that’s the deciding reason Trump was deplatformed from Twitter and MSM — you can’t demonize antivax sentiment as Trumpian anti-science when Trump is blaring support for it to the general public. When he did tell people to get vaxxed, his supporters, to their credit. drew the line, backing him generally in everything else, but not that. Still, I have no doubt that many, left and right, would now be on a different side of the issue had Pfizer not delayed its results
I agree the mandates were a big turning point for me and many others. But I have to be honest with myself, if the mandates had come from ‘my guy’ would my rationalizations (and I purposely use that word and its connotations as we were in an environment of limited information) have been the same? I at first refused to take the vaccine after the mandates until the realities of living and working overseas forced my hand, which is another part of the story. I think I was the last person in the world to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.
I would have had the same opinion either way, but I have the advantage of being a medical professional. The vaccine should have been solidly recommended for anyone over 60 or 65 with no push to vaccinate any otherwise healthy person under 40. IN between the recommendation should be based on how healthy you are and how much contact you have with others. I took it as soon as it was available because I thought it was cool technology that, by its nature was likely to be pretty safe.
I got COVID maybe 3 times, the first being a real hipster case in March, when it first came out. I can't imagine I would ever bother with a booster.
I agree; I’m not sure I would have refused the jab if things had been different. I always thought getting jabbed should be done without coercion, and if Trump had tried that heavy-handed approach, I would probably have been joined by many on the left in resisting it. Had it been left to each individual to decide, the ethically right way, I probably would have refused simply because I didn’t believe I was at high risk, but I probably wouldn’t have been so adamantly against it, so it’s possible I would have gotten it. I’m ALMOST grateful for the scientific skullduggery and Democrat shitbaggery and election fraud
I have no opinion on side effects. I didn’t address them in my comment. The vaccines were promised to prevent one getting COVID and to stop the spread of the virus.
It’s not remotely controversial to say that they utterly failed to fulfill either of those promises.
I don’t think even liberals believe that the COVID vaccines are effective.
What I regard as a calumny is being lumped in with vaccine deniers in general as opposed to holding a completely reasonable position in regard to the COVID vaccines specifically.
I’m not at all surprised that increasing numbers of people are questioning vaccines in general: the public health establishment in this country utterly destroyed much of the faith and good will it had built up over the previous seventy years or so.
Fair enough. You weren’t explicit on the side effects issue, but I assumed that your vaccine hesitancy stemmed from the downside risks. Otherwise take the useless shots in your mind and get on with your life.
Imagine if our so called experts had adopted a risk management approach to the problem. That to me was always the biggest scandal. It is hard not to come the conclusion that there weren’t some ulterior motives behind the decisions to use one size fits all solutions be it lockdowns, recommendations on the vaccines, therapeutics, etc.
The compounding problem was that the "so called experts" were not real experts either. For example, the person the NIH put in charge of the COVID-19 - Deborah Birx - was an expert on HIV. Unfortunately, HIV is very different - it is one of few viruses where effective human immunity normally doesn't establish itself in the long run. So she may have been misprogrammed by her previous study field.
I understand completely. However, this is not how historically medical information is transferred from doctor to patient. Promises are just promises.
For example, even if despite initial promises, the vaccine didn't reduce the spread but reduced the lethality by say 70%, 95% of the immunized would have been OK with it.
Anyway, at very early stages - when we were still dealing with variant zero or the variant Lombardy, the vaccines were effective against infection. And in 2021, they seem to have reduced lethality in the infecteds by maybe 70%. After 2021, it was just anyone's guess.
As an aside, mRNA is a sexy way of rapidly introducing new vaccines. Having to use two viral vectors to have a reproducible vaccination - what Sputnik vaccine developers have done - is really cumbersome. And creating an attenuated virus for vaccination is even more cumbersome. So the question is more - are mRNA vaccines genuinely safe? After all, they are using nucleotides that are not naturally occurring...
It is absolutely calumny against me. I certainly wouldn't have changed my opposition to Jabbing even if Trump had claimed it was a great success.
As it worked out I still haven't been Jabbed.
Maybe against you, but I guarantee that plenty of Republicans who refused the jab would have gotten jabbed, and possibly have favored mandates, had Trump won, just as many Democrats who got it, and favored mandates, would have refused it
How do you know it was completely useless? By the Fall of 2021, the zero variant against whom the vaccine was designed was no longer circulating. And by beginning of 2022, the Corona virus variant circulating - was it called Omega ? - anyway, it was superspreading and much, much milder. If Omega would have been the original variant, no-one would have bothered with lock-downs or vaccinations in the first place.
I think the variant that suddenly swept in around Thanksgiving 2021 that proved highly infectious but not very deadly was called Omicron.
We got lucky that it evolved in an infectious but less lethal direction. There's a modest tendency in that regard over other infectious diseases, but hardly always. E.g., the basic version of smallpox appears to have stayed about 6% lethal for thousands of years.
Yep, but the point I am making is that to discuss usefulness in a strict sense, you need to compare the effectiveness with respect to the original virus. In that scheme of things the original vaccines were initially really effective.*
Even though - there were never any randomized controlled trials that looked at actual lethality. Initially, we had that big Pfizer and Moderna trials in healthy and fairly youngish volunteers where no-one died and that was it. The parameter tested for there was moderate to moderately severe symptoms LATER confirmed by a PCR test**. After that, all we had were observational studies that suggested that lethality was going down by 2/3 after the vaccine was introduced in 2021.
What happened to the usefulness of vaccinations in 2022 is anyone's guess.
And we still don't really know about (a) how safe is mRNA vaccination independent of its payload in general terms, and (b) was there a specific issue in COVID mRNA vaccination in younger males - say 20 to 35 year old, compared to their unvaccinated age and sex group.
*Otherwise, one looks at the vaccine escape-effeciency of viruses.
**I think the Chinese manufacturers made a study design "mistake" by regular testing with PCR swabs for infection independent of symptoms. This way they may have picked infections in the vaccinated group that were running without symptoms and that would have been missed by the Biontech/Pfizer or the Moderna designs.
By the standards that our public health system established.
A. The vaccines would prevent people from getting COVID.
B. The vaccines would stop the spread of COVID, thus allowing a return to normalcy.
Neither of those proved true.
The later statements that the vaccines were resulting in less severe cases were unfalsifiable.
The Public Health Establishment really shot itself in the foot by stating that while large gatherings of white people, such as the Sturgis motorcycle rally, were extremely dangerous and concerning, large gatherings in support of BLM were completely fine and of no concern.
The vaxx was just a MacGuffin for the petty tyranny managers wanted to indulge anyway. The approval/subsidy of it was used as a justification *FOR* lockdowns instead of against them. Many employers greeted it as a great excuse to fire people they didn't want to keep anyway.
"Jobs created or saved," eh
You are right. Opposition to the vaccines from the right was more about government and corporate lies, and forced vaccination, than it was about any Trump/Biden purity test.
It's the same kind of reasoning as the guy who says "if cigarettes reduce life expectancy, how come that one guy I know smoked and live to 90?" Often from the same exact people. Hopefully a eugenics program will eventually eliminate such illogic.
Well, it all turned out to be a big fraud anyway. The "vaccines" that weren't, were neither safe nor effective, and there's lots of evidence that they knew it. And it's been disappointing that Trump continued to push the Big pHarma narrative that the toxic jabs "saved 100 million lives", when in fact it saved no one and has killed more than 20 million people worldwide so far (that we know of, because they are still NOT collecting that data in many countries). The death and injury tolls have continued to be elevated years after the jabs. Trump was extremely naive and prone to being bought in his first term, which is why he appointed Big pHarma executives to run "public health" after Pfizer donated $1 Million to his inauguration. He seems to have better people around him now, but it would be nice if he acknowledged the injured and the dead from this poison.
Trump was caught in a purity spiral; we all were. He couldn't point out this was a respiratory virus that would just have to play itself out without hysterical Leftists screaming that meemaw survived the Holocaust but she was being KILLED by Trump. He couldn't point out it was a lab leak without being accused of outright insanity. Same for masks and keeping grandparents away from their grandchildren. He's not astute enough to point out the "vaccine" provides a sort of heads-up to your immune system while, in the meantime, you still catch, spread, and can even be hospitalized or die from COVID.
“Trump has been a decent counterpuncher, but he’s a poor conspirator. He’s seldom been cynical enough about how low his foes would go against him. He doesn’t have the attention span to obsess enough over what his enemies are planning to do to him in the future. So he’s not often paranoid enough ahead of time about what his foes are up to. He’s just not cynical enough, expecting people to like him rather than to try to do him down“
Well, Trump had the last laugh by getting reelected. Perhaps his latest example of counterpunching is—
“hey, wonder if the reason my re-election was stolen from me was in no small part due to the fact that the cowardly Pfizer people didn’t bother to give me credit for the life saving vaccine which is mainly due to MY administration green lighting the vaccine with warp speed clinical trials! Or something like that. Yeah! THAT’s probably what it was!”
And Trump does tend to remember those who he believes have personally dissed him.
I don't see anything criminal, unfortunately. No doubt some investors could try suing.
I got the Pfizer vax in April '21 after I lost half my sense of smell and taste for a week--but I didn't give anything to my 93 y.o. father who then lived with me. Never got close to sick after that, but isolation was the likely reason. My doctor wanted me to get the latest vax last September, and I ended up saying Fauci ought to be in prison, which didn't go over well. I was in a bad mood, but I still believe it.
The point of the article is not that the vax's were effective, but that one of the large pharma corporations delayed announcing the results of their research and delayed making one vax drug available in order to cooperate with the Deep State unofficial party and favor the Democratic candidate for USA President.
There's more on election manipulation on Mollie Hemingway's book, Rigged, which I recommend in addition to Steve's essays.
Indeed.
This is just dumb. It certainly is true that Pfizer slowed the shot to help Trump's enemies, but timing has nothing to do with the smart people on the right hating the shot. Please remember there were many people smart enough to figure this out. The Dawn Princess was all you needed to understand. I and all the people I could convince in my family never took the shot. Yes, I caught the virus. But, a week in chair like l usually do for flu was all it took to get well.
Who is cynical enough in 2025 regarding the Democrats and their media allies?
The Covid Pandemic was a beautiful simulation. It was all a "make-pretend" exercise featuring the most hysterical ideas imagined such as arrows in store aisles and making people stay home except for the people who had to make and deliver food, and the politicians who chose to have their parties and haircuts.
Yes, some people died who should not have died. Many, many more died because of medical malfeasance and incompetence - such as telling people to stay away from the hospital.
Operation Warp Speed was all part of the simulation. That the planners made sure to not allow Trump to politically profit from it is such a cunning act. That Trump still defends Warp Speed despite it being used to sabotage his reelection is due justice for him - he never should have locked down the country in the first place!
It occurs to me the lab origins of COVID and deflection therefrom might qualify as the least popular true conspiracy theory.
That would be a good candidate, but vastly more people have heard of lab leak than of the Pfizer delay until the day after the election.
And the lab leak is super popular, so popular that it might no longer qualify as a conspiracy theory. Anyway, the lab leak was not a conspiracy; the cover up of the lab leak was the conspiracy.
It's reasonable to say call Lab Leak a True Conspiracy Theory, although it's frustrating that nobody seems to be able to completely nail it down one way or another even after 5 years. It's been stuck at about 80-20 probably true forever.
Frustrating but completely predictable (as I told people even at the time). In the absence of the Chinese fessing up, how could we possibly tell for sure. If there were one simple trick, like a DNA signature that clearly showed human fingerprints it would be strong evidence. Yet we had the whole sequence within the first few months and no one found anything. I don't see why they would come up with it now.
Personally I’ve never been able to get over the fact that the virus originated in the one city on Earth doing the most gain-of-function research.
But the more that time goes by and no smoking gun emerges the more I think it was a coincidence.
I’m at 50/50 now but if now but if no one produces witness, documentary, or forensic evidence by say 2045 I’ll be inclined to believe the official version.
Thriller author Dean Koontz predicted an epidemic outbreak from the Wuham lab around the turn of the century.
50/50 that it's a coincidence? You are not a Bayesian are you? That's ok. I have several friends who are frequentists.
The wet market theory was deemed racist by Dems
One thing I've never seen addressed is that Fauci and others justified Gain of Function research as a way to discover treatments and preventatives for possible future diseases, yet no one completely successfully did, certainly no claims to any from the Wuhan Lab. In fact, the Establishment denounced most treatment candidates and their advocates.
Has anyone studied the covid death rate of people who were already taking HCQ daily?
How statistically dangerous were the “Covid” vaccines?
Given the virus' universally-acknowledged minimal-to-zero mortality for young people (Just The Flu), what should the age-and-condition cutoff have been?
Commenter ERIK, in a deep-thread comment elsewhere here, suggests a three-tiered baseline:
- Under 40: no Covid vaccine;
- Age 40 to 65 (or 65): Decide case by case, depending on health condition;
- Over age 60 (or 65): Get vaccine.
We probably dodged a bullet in 2020 let’s be honest, had the vaccine been announced and had the laptop story not been spiked by reputable news outlets then Trump would have squeaked by in the electoral college while getting trounced in the popular vote once again which undoubtedly would have energized the left enormously. Worst of all the gop would have credited the win on the first step act and the platinum plan and they would have doubled down on all his worst policies while still doing nothing about border security or affirmative action.
Sounds plausible.
Then again, Trump would have been 4 years less old, which as we saw with Biden is not insignificant.
Trump didn’t dodge a bullet last year, either, but he slipped it
Something strangely memory holed too is how Kamala Harris and a few other prominent Democratic politicians were saying they wouldn’t trust “Trumps vaccine” before the 2020 election because Trump was doing whatever it took to get the vax approved before the election as an election boost. There was a sense at the time that the vaccine announcement would be inevitable any day during late October and that it would be a boost to Trump so democrats were trying to get out ahead of the vaccine announcement with their own messaging. Perhaps the democratic messaging scared Pfizer into waiting to announce?
As I recall there were a number of Democrat governors, including Newsom and Cuomo (I think he hadn't been replaced yet), who threatened to block distribution of "Trump's vaccine" until their administrations had done an "independent review" of the Pfizer trials. I suspect this had as much or more of an impact on the voting as Pfizer withholding information until after the election.
I’m happy to hear other people recall this too, it seemed to have been quickly forgotten about. Also in the early days of the pandemic it seemed like republicans were pushing for draconian measures like blocking all flights from china while Nancy pelosi was saying it was racist to take covid seriously and to visit your local Chinatown as a show of support. Unfortunately a lot of republicans went off the reservation during Covid by claiming it wasn’t real or saying the vax was itself a bio-weapon which, aside from marginalizing the more sensible criticism of lockdowns and mandates through guilt by association, got a lot of democrats off the hook for their crazy and cynical behavior during the pandemic.
What Pfizer did was just a part of what deep state did. It's just a part of the whole tableau. Just like claiming Hunter Biden laptop was a hoax and getting signatures from 51 top IC personnel. But yes, it would have been funny if the Dems would have been forced to come out as anti-vaxx.
I also wonder how then the Dems would have treated the Sputnik vaccine if Trump won? Just as miserably as they did in real? Or would they have extolled it, because it came from outside the Western sphere?
Steve there are two parts to this theory:
1) Pfizer deliberately slowed down vaccine development
2) it cost Trump the election
Even if 1 is true 2 does not follow necessarily. Pundits love monocausal explanations but the real world is not like that.
In 2020, Trump lost 3 states by less than one percent. If he'd won them due to the success of Operation Warp Speed, the Electoral College vote would have been tied 269-269. At that point it goes to the House voting as states. My calculation is that Trump would have won, but it's hardly implausible the Democrats would have won the election one way or another including bribery or coup.
If Electoral college were tied, chances are House of Representatives would have been slightly red too. And then, Trump would have won in the House through their state delegations.
It’s possible too that the announcement a day before wouldn’t have mattered because the people who cared about Covid and took it seriously voted by mail already
The last paragraph.
That problem certainly has been fixed.