Alex Berenson - Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 4: Vaccines

FOREWORD

Welcome to the fourth and likely final installment of Unreported Truths.

If I had time, I would write more booklets: about flaws in PCR testing and how they have made the pandemic appear worse than it is; about the harm done by school closures and the way teachers unions have used Covid to hurt children; about the murky origins of the Sars-Cov-2 virus.

But I dont have time. I have a book called PANDEMIA to write, and it is due all-too-soon. And we seem to be leaving the crisis phase of the pandemic behind. The winter spike has come and gone in the United States and almost everywhere else. With luck, we will have no big spring or summer spike, and even the most panicked among us will begin to resume their lives.

I started writing the Unreported Truths booklets last May. I wanted to speak out about the unfolding crisis I saw a crisis created less by the pandemic than by our panicked response to it. They are simple and urgent, black and white, no charts or graphs. They are filled with facts, not feelings. They are informative, not writerly. They are, to use an insult that seemed fashionable among teenagers for a while, basic.

Now I need to step back and write something a little less basic. We all need to step back, even if doing so is difficult in an age of real-time death counts on CNN and 280-character bulletins on Twitter. Over the last year, governments around the world have scissored our personal freedoms in a way no one would have expected before March 2020. They have locked us down and made us wear masks and closed our schools with almost no oversight or pushback, to combat a virus that kills 1 or 2 of every 1,000 people it infects worldwide.

We need to think about whether what we have done makes any sense, and how to make sure we dont make the same mistakes next time. Because there will be a next time.

So I will be laying off Twitter a bit (I hope) and devoting my energies to PANDEMIA.

But first I needed to write this Unreported Truths, about vaccines.

The media and public health experts have engaged in dangerous groupthink since last March. But their unwillingness to examine hard data or ask tough questions has reached new heights with vaccines.

As youll see when you read this booklet, I am far from an anti-vaxxer. But I believe we should have looked harder at the pros and cons of these new vaccines, especially the ones from Moderna and Pfizer, before we decided to push them on eight billion people around the world.

We have surprisingly little information about these vaccines. After all, none of them even existed at the start of 2020. Yet somehow that mystery paradoxically has worked almost to their benefit. Regulators and governments and journalists have treated them as magic potions that will fix a year of mistakes, rather than what they are: incredibly complex technology that carries real risks. I hope this booklet, without being alarmist, will give you a better idea of what those risks are, and how much we dont know.

Magic potions belong in fairy tales, not medicine.

INTRODUCTION

At 6:45 a.m. on November 9, 2020, the United States woke to stunning news:

Testing of a new coronavirus vaccine had shown hugely positive results. The vaccine, from the American drug maker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, nearly ended infections in the 20,000 people who received it, Pfizer said.

Pfizers Covid-19 Vaccine Proves 90% Effective in Latest Trials, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Journal said the finding was much better than anticipated and marks a milestone in the hunt for shots that can stop the pandemic.

Days later, the news turned even better. Updated data showed Pfizers vaccine and a similar shot from a Massachusetts biotechnology company called Moderna cut the risk of infection by up to percent.

Further, both companies said their products looked safe. No serious safety concerns have been observed, Pfizer reported. Moderna said its vaccine was generally well tolerated.

After nine grim Covid-filled months, the vaccine findings looked like a giant victory for science and medicine. They offered a path back to normal life. Theyd also come much faster than expected. When Covid first emerged from China in early 2020, vaccine experts had predicted shots against Sars-Cov-2 would not be ready until late 2021 at the earliest.

The experts had also warned the vaccines might offer only modest protection, preventing infections in half or two-thirds of the people who received them. In Senate testimony in September, Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, even said vaccines might not work as well as masks.

( https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/cdc-director-says-face-masks-may-provide-more-protection-than-coronavirus-vaccine-.html )

Instead, scientists around the world had come together in a government-academic-private partnership to offer protection to a desperate planet.

These are obviously very exciting results, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN after Moderna released its data on Nov. 16. Its just as good as it gets. ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/16/health/moderna-vaccine-results-coronavirus/index.html )

Debates about which lucky people should have first chance at the vaccines began immediately. The stocks of Moderna and BioNTech, which had jumped during 2020 alongside rising hopes for the vaccines, soared even further after the announcements.

Company executives and scientists basked in praise. A Nov. 10 article in The Guardian, a British newspaper, explained how a husband and wife in Germany Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Ozlem Tureci, both physicians, both the children of Turkish migrants had founded BioNTech.

They are the dream team scientist couple who came up with a big idea that could protect humanity from a virus that has killed more than a million people, the Guardian wrote. The couple married in 2002, interrupting their research only briefly to slip out of their lab coats and dash to the registry office on their wedding day.

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/10/ugur-sahin-and-ozlem-tureci-german-dream-team-behind-vaccine)

A Nov. 30 article about Moderna in The New York Times was equally glowing. It ended with the moment that chief executive Stephane Bancel received the results in a conference call on Sun., Nov. 15, and raced to let his family know:

He ducked out into the hallway to tell his wife. His 18-year old daughter raced down from the second floor. His 16-year-old flew up the basement stairs.

The four of us were crying, he said.

( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine.html )

A Hollywood ending for the ages. The tale of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines seemed almost too good to be true.

And it is.

I am not a vaccine denier.

Lets get that nonsense out of the way first.

I was vaccinated as a kid. Our children have gotten their shots on schedule, with no ill effects aside from a few tears. I dont personally know anyone who has ever suffered any negative effects from childhood vaccinations.

I acknowledge I have not studied the risks of childhood vaccines in any detail. I know they can very occasionally cause serious reactions. But I suspect rising reported rates of autism sometimes blamed on vaccines are more likely tied to changes in the way we label children with developmental problems.

Autism diagnoses have soared in recent decades. But diagnoses of mental retardation, which parents consider more stigmatizing, have plunged. The switch suggests that some children who once might have been categorized as having retardation are now called autistic.

I even think public schools should make some vaccines mandatory, such as for measles and polio. Those viruses carry a small but real risk of death for kids. They can be prevented with vaccines that rely on simple and well-understood mechanisms of action. Generations of vaccinations have proven the risk is very low.