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News Flash: The Government Doesn’t Trust Us
I especially appreciated this video, not just because Dr. Battacharya has been consistent in his message, but also his colleague, Dr. Gigi Foster, is not afraid to push back against the powers-that-be.
The federal government continually amazes me with its lack of understanding of, or caring for, the American people. The bureaucrats are distressed that we are not obediently getting into line for our next Covid-19 whatever (vaccine or booster), and the government is deeply concerned for our well-being.
Right.
So they assume our reluctance to participate in the vaccine program is because we are stupid, uneducated, or irrational. It never occurs to them that the cause of our reticence, even our refusal, is due to their duplicity, rumor-mongering, making up the facts, ignoring the science, and hiding the evidence from us.
Let’s quickly review examples of their incompetence and fecklessness:
- They never focused primarily on the elderly, especially those with co-morbidities.
- They sent out contradictory information on the need for children to have the vaccine, and they continue to do so.
- They forced mask wearing, which was nearly useless in fighting the virus.
- They proposed creating a virus-free society, which will be impossible.
- They squelched information that contradicted their agenda, even data from well-respected sources.
- They rarely supplied scientific studies to back up their recommendations.
This list is incomplete, but why would they believe that these actions would justify our trusting their recommendations?
Most recently, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said the following:
‘I believe that misinformation is now our leading cause of death,’ he said, naming ongoing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, the number of people taking Ivermectin and the prevalence of vaping as examples of the problem.
He added:
All this, he argued, had fueled the drop in life expectancy in the U.S. compared to other wealthy nations, and he urged reporters to avoid clickbait, lean into fact checking, make sure the headline matches the copy and take other steps to responsibly convey news about COVID-19 and other pressing health concerns.
‘People are distracted and misled by the medical information Tower of Babel,’ he said. ‘But journalists like yourselves play an important role here and your work has a tremendous impact on public trust.’
How about obesity, smoking, and other lifestyle co-morbidities prevalent in the U.S., Dr. Califf?
So let’s look at the evidence. The government thinks we don’t trust the vaccines, and they are right, but they don’t realize that we don’t trust the vaccines because we don’t trust them. They have lost their credibility card. Now they are trying to frighten us, saying that we will die if we don’t get the jab, because we are trusting the misinformation (which is the only information we can trust). And when can we expect the “experimental” vaccines to become “legitimate”? The latest ridiculous “recommendation” is that we get our kids jabbed.
Seriously?
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the government is so persistent in pushing this agenda. Why do they insist that everyone needs to get the vaccine? Do they make money off the shots? The vaccine variants keep changing, so what are the shots for? To make us feel safer? Is it really all about power and control?
My biggest concern is what will happen as people in larger numbers continue to reject the vaccine and boosters; when will the government get tired of our recalcitrance and become bolder? What might they try to do to “force” more compliance?
The possibilities are endless—unconstitutional, totalitarian, and dangerous.
What will we do then?
Published in Healthcare
Well, right now nobody wants the boosters. They’re having a hard time getting people to comply. They have an oversupply.
So . . . Pfizer and Moderna have boosted the price.
What? That makes no sense. If you have an oversupply, the law of supply and demand almost always means that the cost falls.
Well, what they do is get the COVID jab added to the vaccines required for kids to attend public school. And that way the government creates millions of “instant customers” who are forced to get the jab. And Pfizer and Moderna make even more money. That’s what the government does in the face of our recalcitrance. They ensure the money continues to be laundered.
It’s about money. And people dead or injured by the vaccines are simply an impediment to the profit.
I fear I’m not cynical enough.
Susan, thank you so much for this video link.
There was a post last week by @douglasmyers (aka Justin Other Lawyer) about vaccination, and @drbastiat gave some information about vaccine effectiveness, which I questioned but didn’t know. I remember thinking — though not commenting — “I wish that I knew what Jay Bhattacharya or Scott Atlas think about this.” These are the two guys who have a lot of credibility with me on the issue. There may be plenty of other good experts on the issue, but these are the two that I know and trust.
And now you show me a video with Dr. Jay, interviewed by the terrific John Anderson. This is great.
I’m going to refrain on commenting (much) until I’ve listened to the video. From the very early part, Dr. Jay reports:
I’m only a few minutes in, so I expect that there will be more details. Already, this is very useful information to me.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the feedback!
I’ve certainly become pretty darn cynical. No more jabs for me.
This was a video that actually helped prompt me to make the post you referenced (along with seeing a news report that the CDC was getting ready to vote on including the COVID vaccine in its recommendations to state for mandatory vaccinations). Dr. Jay B. is, IMO, a national treasure.
If FDA Commissioner Califf genuinely believes, as he is quoted in the linked article as having said, that:
He is a moron, and such moronity is a reason why the public no longer trusts the healthcare establishment, and particularly the government “health experts.” It was well established by 2019 (before Covid arrived) that U.S. life expectancy (especially among men) was declining due largely to drug and alcohol abuse driven by despair. I suspect those deaths of despair have only increased in the last three years. There are a bunch of things that are killing people far in excess of the number of people dying of Covid who would survive but for their refusal to follow government “recommendations.”
The numbers go back to 2014 for our life expectancy decreasing. Nice try, Dr. Califf.
Johns-Hopkins put together a list of a dozen reasons why we should be reassured about getting the vaccine. Not convincing to me.
My largest concern about the long-term effects of current (and recent) government propaganda about the Covid vaccine is that a probably small but statistically significant number of parents will avoid getting their children protected against diseases that truly are a risk to children because the government healthcare establishment has pushed so much false information about the Covid vaccines.
I think the future deaths of children for preventable childhood diseases due to parents will be far greater than the future deaths of children due to Covid. And it will mostly be the government’s own fault because the government’s false information about Covid vaccines will cause parents to distrust the earlier and well supported vaccination programs against older childhood diseases.
I finished the clip. It wasn’t as long as I initially thought.
Dr. Jay added some quantification of the risk to young people — myocarditis in young men in the range of 1 per 1,000 to 1 per 3,000. I don’t think that this is a major problem, because as I understand it, myocarditis isn’t necessarily very dangerous, but it is a potential problem. Dr. Jay concluded that on the basis of this risk, it doesn’t make sense to vaccinate the young, particularly as their risk of Covid death is extremely low.
This confirms the impression that I already had. The claims of severe side effects to the vaccination seem overblown, but there are some, and the benefit is small to the young.
Dr. Jay had another statement indicating that the claim that the vaccines “do not reduce transmission” is incorrect. He said “it doesn’t have a very large public benefit.” He didn’t quantify it, but this indicates that the public benefit is non-zero. However, it is small, and therefore he concludes that it’s not proper to coerce people to take the vaccine for such a small public benefit. This, too, made sense to me.
The other interviewee, Dr. Foster, was less helpful to me. She took an absolutist stance, it appeared, objecting to any public vaccination as a violation of human rights and, in this instance, as an alleged violation of the Nuremberg laws. I didn’t find this convincing on general principles, because I could imagine a situation involving a much more effective vaccine, and a more dangerous disease, in which I would agree with coerced vaccination — as we have done in the past for things like smallpox.
However, I found Dr. Jay highly convincing in his argument that we are not in a smallpox situation.
Perhaps a bit humorously, we actually seem to be back to the original term that I used for Covid, “WuFlu.” (This wasn’t original to me — I think that I got it from Andrew Klavan.) Covid seems to be a lot like the flu, though perhaps still a bit deadlier than almost all prior flus. The more recent Covid variants seem much less dangerous than the original.
So, it seems to me that we ought to treat Covid vaccination like the flu:
Of course, this was my basic opinion before watching the video. I appreciate the confirmation.
For those interested, you can view the full video (a bit over an hour) here.
The health experts don’t seem to understand that the public doesn’t trust the journalists either.
I have the opposite feeling about it. Much of the anti-covid-vaccine fear strikes me as reminiscent of the anti-DDT fear. I admire Rachel Carson very much, as a writer and activist. And she never advocated for a complete ban on its use. She said it was lifesaving in areas plagued by malaria. But she died two years after Silent Spring was published, and a movement against pesticides sprang up afterward that is still going strong today. And DDT, when used carefully and sparingly, saves lives. We can’t prove how many mosquito bites would have occurred without its use, but we can guess.
For me, the vaccine is a good option going into covid season. However, my husband is adamantly against it. Such is marriage. And one of my kids has said no to any vaccine of any kind ever again. The other two are more moderate.
At any rate, I hope for their sake that the doctors making the case against it know what they are doing because they are giving medical advice that conceivably could result in someone becoming seriously ill who might not have had such a serious case of this virus if he or she had had the vaccine. If they are right, that the risks never outweigh the benefits, it’s good that they are speaking up. But if it turns out that they are wrong about the risks, then some harm will have been done.
I’ve had major surgery four times (three C sections and one emergency splenectomy), and lots of other moderately serious medical issues. I can’t even begin to imagine the number of chemicals doctors have prescribed for me–including anesthesia many times. I don’t have time to investigate and study every single thing I’ve ever taken or eaten in my lifetime or the companies that made them or the clinical trials they were subjected to. I look at the food supply alone and see a million opportunities to kill me if a company wanted to.
I think this is a decision to be made between a doctor and a patient. There are risks to every single thing we eat or take as medicine.
Well, they reap what they sow. Trust, when lost, is very difficult to recover, especially when it touches on the issues of life and death. I hope parents will be discerning about the choices they make re other vaccines.
I agree on Dr. j, but would add that, as someone who I’ve viewed as a serious skeptic on the “science” of Covid, he makes some points here that are not exactly damning. See Jerry at #2, above.
I reviewed a couple of videos where Dr. Foster was interviewed in Australia in person (I think) and they were incredibly rude and condescending to her. I also think dangers lie ahead if the government tries to be more coercive.
You are correct. Recent polls show that we trust the journalists even less!
You are certainly correct about the “public benefit”/transmission question. However, in context of that comment, Dr. Jay noted that the choice of being vaccinated was about “protecting oneself”, not protecting the community. So I interpreted that to mean that the vaccine was essentially useless in preventing the spread of the disease.
As for the other guest, I looked her up. She’s an economist, and, like many of the public health officials during COVID, she appears to see everything through a very narrow lens (hers being the lens of economic liberty). I would agree that her views need tempered by a broader analysis of any given policy to the public good.
**Edited to remove an ambiguity in the one sentence.
No disagreement from me.
On a personal note, I am waiting for more information on the long term effects of multiple “boosters” of the Covid shot.
There was a brief flurry of concern at the time that multiple “boosters” came into the picture late in 2021 because some information from Europe suggested that multiple boosters might degrade the inherent immune system of a person with a strong inherent immune system. But I can find no follow-up. Is that because it is not really a concern, or is it because government and pharmaceutical forces are preventing further examination of the issue? My suspicious nature suspects the latter, and although it may be unfair to assume bad motives, government and pharmaceutical interest driven behavior in the last couple of years gives me good reason to assume bad motives.
Since I have a robust inherent immune system, I have avoided all Covid booster shots because I don’t trust what those Covid booster shots might do to my inherent immune system.
I don’t know if any of them are saying “the risks never outweigh the benefits.” I have the impression that most of them are saying that we should at least know the risks, since the government either refuses to share the risks or downplays them. I’ve tried to follow this process pretty closely, but if others have a different impression–that doctors are completely discounting receiving the vaccine, I will stand corrected.
CDC mandates for children and they boost the price. Nothing to see here.
Rachel Carson is responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions of people. She is one of histories greatest villains, or should be.
The problem with this covid vax is they had lied about it consistently. There is no reason to force it on people if it works really well. You call for decisions between a doctor and patient? CA has just made that illegal. Say the State Line or you break the law.
This is not some DDT scare, this is tyranny.
Susan, I want to follow up about the title of the post. I’m not sure that it’s helpful to conceptualize the situation as the government not trusting us. The government shouldn’t trust us, at least not completely. If the government could always trust us, we wouldn’t need any laws at all, would we?
The body of your post is more nuanced, which I appreciate. The situation is complex. I definitely agree that we have reason to distrust the government, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong.
I’m thinking of a way to try to harmonize what Dr. Jay said, with the CDC decision to recommend vaccination of schoolchildren. I don’t agree with that CDC decision, but I don’t know all of the facts.
Dr. Jay said that vaccination doesn’t prevent transmission “much.” How much? 5%? 10%? 20%? I could see any of these being considered “not much.” I don’t want to fault Dr. Jay, because I suspect that he didn’t give us a precise quantification because the data is not perfectly clear, so there’s not a really strong estimate.
Let’s assume the high end of this range, 20%. Per Worldometer (here), daily Covid deaths have been running in the 200-500 range for the past 6 months or so. This is far down from the peak, but still significant. If we estimate 350/day, that would be about 125,000/year.
If widespread vaccination reduced transmission by 20%, then it would prevent somewhere around 25,000 deaths per year. That’s not a huge number, but not small, either.
But maybe this figure is lower. Maybe a number of the current deaths are to the unvaccinated, and targeted vaccination would prevent some. How many? I don’t know.
Back to that 25,000 figure, which I admit is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Is it worthwhile to vaccinate the whole population to save 25,000 people per year? I just don’t know. That seems to be a judgment call, but it’s not clear to me that someone who said yes would be obviously wrong, or that someone who said no would be obviously wrong.
In the absence of a strong presentation of the evidence by the authorities who want to mandate vaccination, I am unconvinced, and therefore continue to oppose mandatory vaccination. It is possible that the folks at CDC know something that I don’t know. Tragically, even if they presented a strong empirical case, I’m not sure that I would trust them.
Rather than rely on the experts (and certainly the journalists), I like to look at the raw data that the Oregon Health Authority publishes regularly. A recent monthly report stated that there were 40,013 reported cases of COVID-19 in Oregon that month.
Of those cases, 18,622 were of unvaccinated persons(46.5%) and 21,380 were of vaccinated persons (53.6%). From my tracking of these monthly reports, it doesn’t seem to me that the “vaccine” is worthy of the name.
I have become so distrustful of the whole vaccine racket that I now hesitate to get my usual Fall flu shot. After taking them for 19 years and not getting flu, last year I got the shot and got flu anyway.
Now I feel unable to trust that the flu shot will not also be a stealth covid shot, so for now, “include me out.”
That is exactly my position. I don’t trust my DNA/immune system to anyone but the good Lord.
I didn’t say the government should always trust us. I said they’ve shown they don’t trust us to make wise decisions for ourselves, so they manipulate, distort and hide information from us. I believe they should have been more forthcoming.
I mean, I don’t trust the government, so . . . you know, . . . we’ve reached equilibrium.
I agree with you completely about the mandates. No person should ever be forced in any way to accept medical treatment or medicine.
But what you’ve said about Rachel Carson is not the truth, as I wrote in my comment. She died two years after her book was published, she raised some good questions about cancer which appeared to be an epidemic at that time, and she never ever recommended that it be banned. All of that happened afterward, and the companies who manufactured DDT failed to address the concerns she raised. Instead, they went after her, and wrongly so, and today the result is that people wrongly blame her for malaria deaths in Africa. That it was banned was all the fault of the Democrats who used her book to support a purely political issue.
Aren’t we watching, however, similar political elements in the arguments for and against these vaccines?
I just hope when they ban the vaccines it is a good thing and not a bad thing. Banning DDT was not the answer to the problem. The right answer was using it more carefully.
Stopping the use of DDT has caused 10s of millions of deaths. That was because of her poorly researched and wrong book.