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COVID-19: Vaccination and Informed Consent
Tucker Carlson has launched a new show — Tucker Carlson Today — as part of the Fox Nation streaming service (subscription required). It is a long-form interview with a single person. It is much more satisfying and informative than the limited-time segments on broadcast television and cable shows. In his third episode, he talked with Dr. Hooman Noorchashm about the COVID vaccines, the good news and the not-so-good news.
Dr. Noorchashm is a thoracic surgeon but is, more importantly, an advocate for ethics, patient safety, and women’s health. This was borne out of a personal tragedy: His wife, Dr. Amy J. Reed, died of cancer. She suffered from uterine fibroids which were treated by the use of a surgical tool called a power morcellator to grind up the fibroid and extract it. Except that when a fibroid has even a minute amount of cancer cells, the morcellation process effectively metastasizes the cancer. Dr. Reed went from what was Stage 1 cancer to Stage 4 cancer as a result of the procedure. As reported in the New York Times:
Dr. Reed and her husband fought for years to ban the use of a surgical tool called a power morcellator, which has a spinning blade that slices up tissue so it can be extracted through small incisions. Though the device is regarded as a great boon to minimally invasive surgery, if a patient has cancer, as Dr. Reed did, morcellation can spread the disease.
Dr. Reed and Dr. Noorchashm (pronounced NOOR-chash) won some notable victories. Because of their efforts, the Food and Drug Administration studied morcellation and in 2014 recommended that it not be used in the “the vast majority” of women having surgery for uterine fibroids, a common tumor that is usually benign but that can hide a dangerous type of cancer.
This is by way of background to consider what Dr. Noorchashm is saying about the Covid vaccine.
He is very enthusiastic about the vaccine technology, particularly the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA approach. He thinks that getting a large percentage of the population vaccinated is a good idea, particularly those who are most at risk for serious disease. But he has real concerns about vaccinating people who are naturally immune or who have developed natural immunity in the process of recovering from Covid. The vaccine is wasted on the former group and may be a hazard for the latter group. This is because, according to Dr. Noorchashm, there is a risk that organs previously attacked by Covid will be opportunistically attacked again by the body’s reaction to the vaccine. This second attack may be more severe than the original attack with outcomes that are hard to predict.
Dr. Noorchashm has expressed this concern to the FDA. He has highlighted the fact that the Emergency Use Authorization is based on efficacy, but not safety, testing. We know the vaccine works, but we don’t know the extent of the hazard for certain patients. In his opinion, public health officials are discounting this risk and have made the decision to favor one minority group (the aged and vulnerable with comorbidities who may well die if infected — less than 1% of the population) over another minority group (persons who do not need the vaccine and who will have a fatal reaction to it — an unknown number but likely less numerous than the other group).
Dr. Noorchashm sought to allay fears about the vaccine: while mRNA vaccines are new, research on mRNA has been ongoing for 30 years; mRNA is an intermediary between DNA and proteins, the process is one-way, there is not genetic modification of human DNA involved. Nevertheless, the safety of the vaccine is not known for certain people, and the push for whole population vaccination must necessarily make some healthy people ill. This is not an argument against the vaccine, but it is an argument for individual choice and informed consent.
Dr. Noorchashm has received some pushback, as you can imagine, from his appearing on Tucker Carlson Today. No doubt most of his critics reacted to the excerpts played on Tucker Carlson Tonight which were necessarily condensed. As a result, Dr. Noorchashm published a follow-on in Medium to elaborate his ideas for his critics:
Here are the elements of my argument, for the record — I promise that I shall not deviate from them in my public discourse:
- The COVID-19 vaccines are some of the most powerful and effective ones we’ve ever created. The fact that America did so in under a year is a testament to our nation’s scientific ingenuity and technical prowess. The achievement of this vaccine by Operation Warp Speed was nothing short of a modern day scientific miracle.
- The COVID-19 vaccine, if administered efficiently to enough persons without immunity against SARS-CoV-2, will save lives, will induce herd immunity and will limit the evolution of new mutants by preventing natural infections.
- No persons should ever be forced to take any medical treatment, including vaccines. And no person’s civil liberties, employment or educational opportunities should be curtailed, because of their choice to refuse vaccination.
- Indiscriminate vaccination of persons with natural immunity or those with recent infections is unnecessary or potentially dangerous, respectively. We should not be doing it — and we should demand that FDA and CDC shift their recommendations to restrain vaccination of the recently infected or naturally immune. We should liberally use #ScreenB4Vaccine for safety.
I hope that all are able to see that adopting this strategy will bring sanity and serve to alleviate the concerns that make many Americans “vaccine hesitant”.
Americans are not sheep — Americans respond to reason and to rational choice. Americans want to benefit from effective products and scientific developments, but they also need to know that their individual choices are respected and that they can have a reasonable assurance of safety.
He makes a persuasive case for vaccination. He notes that one of the risks for simply letting the virus do what it does until the population develops natural herd immunity is that the “variants” of the virus are created by infected people. The fewer people infected the fewer variants that will be created. The fewer variants created the less likelihood of a strain of virus resistant to the vaccines that have been developed.
Recent “variant” reports may simply be a scare tactic to keep public health restrictions on personal liberty in place or not. But people should get vaccinated to reduce the potential for variant development. They just need to have a choice and be informed of what we know and don’t know.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Traditionally all sorts of vaccines have been made. I’m not sure what you mean by “fully sequenced” in this context, but I’ve never heard of a vaccine that relied on the full RNA of the virus against which we’re trying to protect. Sometimes it’s a RNA that is modified so that it’s close enough to the bad guy to activate your immune system against it, but not so identical so as to give you the infection you’re trying to guard against. Sometimes it’s basically chopped up bits of the virus so that it’s incapable of causing an infection, but still gives your immune system enough fragmentary information so it can learn about the new structures it needs to protect against. The new mRNA vaccines are one more variation in the array of “traditional” vaccines that have been used.
This is a very generous interpretation of “one more variation in the array of traditional vaccines”
please look at comment 54
please read comment 54
I did. The information in it is not completely accurate. As I mentioned in #61, these new ones aren’t the first vaccines that insert genetic material to produce proteins to activate your immune system against them. Some of the vaccines that use “weakened” viruses do that, too. These new ones are more carefully targeted–they take a more minimalist approach.
I quoted a MD word for word
MDs say a lot of wacky things, and don’t always agree with each other, either.
what was wacky about the MD I quoted?
I already explained what was inaccurate. Whether the guy/gal is a wacko, I don’t know. He/she almost certainly knows a whole lot of things I don’t know. But the MD title doesn’t inoculate a physician against wackiness.
Pfizer and Moderna were the first COVID-19 vaccines to be approved. Both use a new technology called mRNA vaccine, which has never been broadly given to a human population to prevent any disease.
Let that sink in for a moment.
All previous vaccines take a weakened virus or a piece of the virus and inject it into humans to induce an immune response sufficient to prevent a disease. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines inject mRNA, which is a protein code that instructs the body to make a part of COVID-19’s spike protein that will then induce an immune response.
And like I said, that’s not scary different from “weakened” viruses that contain RNA that instructs the body to make whole viruses that contain proteins on their coat that will then induce an immune response. It’s new, but it’s not that new, and to me is a lot less scary than those weakened viruses. The idea of those gives me the willies. Which is not to say nothing can go wrong with these new ones, either, but I’ll take one that just produces a protein over one that creates a whole virus any day. (That type of older vaccine perhaps wasn’t widely used; I’m not sure about the specifics.)
You are exposed/infected with viral RNA on a regular basis-we doctors us the highly scientific term “a cold” to describe it.
Which metaphor. Besides, your assertions were completely false. The J&J vaccine is NOT a traditional vaccine.
Yes. some people seem terribly uninformed. What is more, and likely of little consequence, is that the J&J is actually introducing simultaneously synthetic genetic material and a whole other virus as well for the immune system to deal with. Interesting. We’ll see in years to come how this works out.
It’s not slavery except for those Americans who ended up with ALS after just six months of using statins, in many cases for cholesterol readings that were on the very low side of around 160.
I guess for even those Americans, it was not slavery – it was a death sentence.
Finally the PTB told doctors the alt health community was right and to prescribe CoQ10 along with the statins so patients would avoid this serious complication.
Vaccines and experimental health procedures are another taking of liberty. With the medical mafia being in control of the statistics, we can all rest easy knowing that in those nursing homes where 22 of 138 senior clients died within one week of the COVID vaccines, that was all coincidence. (Even though anyone familiar with death patterns in nursing homes knows that event is an abnormality requiring serious inquiries.)
It is my understanding that there has been one and only one other vaccine using mRNA, developed a few years ago for a corona virus. (Probably the flu.) It was never released for human consumption, as it so over enhanced the virus response that although the clinical trial animals initially all did great after their jabs, when they encountered another version of corona, they all were infected, developed a serious case of that infection, and then they all died.
I’d love to know what these other vaccines are, as that would be big news to me.
Sadly, no matter how many times the important concept of remark # 54 is offered up, people dismiss it.
The indoctrination program that anything called a vaccine is a miraculous life saver has been so successful. Our doctors/nurses are brainwashed. (Although among personal friends, I have had two friends who left nursing to go into other health fields. They now feel they are saving people, using acupuncture, rather than inflicting harm on newborns with a risky vax.)
Were COVID 19 a hemorrhagic fever, that killed 80% of people who got it, I’d be willing to sign up.
But given that I understand risk vs benefit, I am not willing to sign up.
There is little benefit – virtually none. It’s possible, if a person believes the “experts,” the vaxxes ensure that any COVID infection a person is infected with ends up being a mild version. However the experts deprived us of 5 different effective remedies for the infection known as COVID 19. So I cannot believe them, as I consider Gates/Fauci and our Dem governors murderers, on many levels.
Additionally the vaccine also is a substance with an unknown risk. Auto immune diseases may not make themselves known for 6 months or a bit longer. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (AKA mad cow in animals) could take 3 years or longer. (See citation post made 12 hours ago on COVID 19 Trackers group)
Also it is feared that the mRNA vaxxes might hyper sensitize the body’s own immune system to attack anything considered to be a foreign substance. Including a pregnant woman’s placenta.
Here you are:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89998
the money quote:
“ mRNA vaccines have been tested in humans before, for at least four infectious diseases: rabies, influenza, cytomegalovirus, and Zika.”
Unfortunately, his enthusiasm, and even expertise, can not overcome my distrust of the people in charge.
The fact that his and others’ voices are being surpressed, suggests that those in power, and censoring have things other than MY health and well-being in mind.
Mantras for 2021:
1. follow the money
2. Thoroughly explore everything that is censored and suppressed.
3. Stop supression and censorship of speech, in books, media, and internet.
4. Strongly consider doing the opposite of what the MSM pushes.
PS: I want to believe. I just can’t. I’ll accept responsibility for that.
So, if/when we are forced to get the shot, to earn our privilege of grocery, or gas, or banking, or other kinds of health-care, we should think, “oh, glad I dodged the Mark of the Beast, phew, it’s just a bullet?”
Denied the remedies, in order to facilitate the release and Emergency Usage Authorization EUA of this “miracle” shot???
I say if you want them shot(s), get them, but I do not appreciate the coercion factors that are floating around.
I have to fill out a form with lots of personal information, to decline what is not required?
I get a deceptive email from my health insurance promoting the shot as FDA approved, with not a mention of EUA?
The shots are not even FDA approved and NY puts out Excelsior pass to go do things?
These are the deceptions that raise my hackles. They have done nothing to earn my trust, and much to betray.
Call me crazy. I decline.
I don’t expect my choice will be respected. Oh, well.
Really? What happens if you don’t fill it out?
When I have appointments through our local health care system, including our vaccination appointments, I have always been encouraged to do an early check-in on-line “to save time.” However, those early check-in forms tend to ask a lot of intrusive questions, many of which are irrelevant to the health care I am now seeking or ever will be seeking. So I just don’t do early check-in, and when I go to my appointment (including my vaccination appointment) nobody cares whether I did early check-in or answered those questions.
You’re indeed crazy, but I respect your choice. I hope enough people get immunized that our country doesn’t have to get coercive about it. Based on current trends here in our country and elsewhere, I don’t see how it would be necessary. There are people among us who seem to favor coercion for the sake of coercion; those people are a bigger problem than covid-19.
Moderna’s entire business model is mRNA therapy for a variety of diseases, infectious or otherwise
What? I’m saying that the mark of the beast will clearly be giving allegiance to the anit-christ. There will be no hidden mark or unagreed to worship.
Unlike measles, smallpox, and any number of other viruses, the virus that causes chickenpox can later re-manifest in the form of shingles. So, the shingles vaccine is intended to trigger an immune response protecting against the “chickenpox” virus lying dormant in your body.
So, getting chickenpox does not actually confer immunity against the virus, just protection against a second round of the same symptoms. Once we have “chickenpox,” we are vulnerable to future bouts of “shingles.”
And that is a good thing- among its founders were pioneers in the concept. RNA therapeutics hold great promise. Critics who claim they just are into vaccines for the money are both technically correct and pathetic- you could make the same claim about anybody.
Some virus are able to evade the immune system often by finding locations in the body as a sort of sanctuary. HIV is another example. The “chicken pox vaccine” does confer immunity against chicken pox and that is why children receive it. The shingles vaccine is for those who had chicken pox and now face the prospect of the virus causing shingles.
So when my child was a child he had chicken pox. He had all of his vaccines except that one because… well… he had chicken pox. I am pretty sure I fit into that category, too, because I still remember those itchy red bumps that stopped me from going on a field trip to the zoo. (I was really bent out of shape. I wanted to see the animals!)
You’re saying as adults we should go get a shingles vaccine?