Outline of upcoming posts about COVID-19 vaccine and transmission pseudoscience propagated by the public health establishment starting in March 2021
In this post, I will introduce a new paradigm about how the public health establishment lied about the COVID-19 vaccine and its ability to end the pandemic.
The American public health establishment’s science communication about the COVID-19 vaccine and its impact on transmission of the virus fall into three phases:
1. Science;
2. Pseudoscience;
3. Persecution.
The science phase, which lasted for all of 2020, was characterized by the almost perfect communication of science and its nuances to the public. Fauci and other officials during this time was extremely responsible and nuanced about what the vaccine could and could not do. Extremely sophisticated and intelligent articles were written by Marc Lipsitch at Harvard. WHO press conferences showcased incredibly detailed and sophisticated understanding to the public. Everyone was on the same page and extremely honest about the potential of the COVID-19 vaccine to “end the pandemic” during this period: the vaccine probably couldn’t do it.
The pseudoscience phase, which started in March of 2021, was characterized by a massive reversal of early science communication, by gross misinformation about the vaccine, spread primarily by Fauci and Walensky, using similar messaging and phrases, which suggests coordination. These two figures grossly bastardized the science and misled the public about the vaccine. Top experts with whom I’ve spoken in private believe that this misinformation was motivated by a desire to increase vaccination rates among the public. Public statements of extreme frustration by Fauci, by far the major “misinformation superspreader” during this period, support this suggestion. The conclusions communicated during this phase are not supportable by a careful reading of the scientific literature on transmission. This phase relies on misrepresentations of some very basic concepts from the scientific literature. Many top scientists protested the grossly pseudoscientific statements made by Walensky during this period. I’m currently trying to unearth some of the other discourse about this.
The persecution phase, which started around the middle of 2021, piggybacked off the pseudoscience phase. Because the benefits of the vaccine were exaggerated and because its impact on transmission was massively exaggerated, less educated members of the American medical establishment, legal establishment, and media began to demand the persecution of unvaccinated citizens. Mandates were passed. Civil rights were violated. Without the pseudoscientific period, the persecution period would not have happened. Thus the main perpetrators of this period, its main causes, were Walensky and Fauci. They were responsible for the countless incidents where people lost their civil rights as a result of misunderstandings about what the vaccine could and could not do.
I will communicate these findings further tomorrow or Wednesday, and present the full panoply of statements that supports this tripartite conceptualization. In a later article to be published this or next week, I will also spell out the deeper implications of this era for public health and public health ethics in the age of social media. My hope is that this conceptualization of what happened matches many people’s intuitions and that this conceptualization, if it best matches the data available, which I believe it does and which I hope to soon demonstrate, becomes the dominant understanding of this part of the pandemic. I look forward to sharing with you very soon.
I appreciate the work you're doing, Kevin. While there may be some weight to your claim that 2020 was characterized by somewhat moderate views on the possible impact of covid vaccines, surely all the vaccine talk then (and now) needs to be situated within a larger context. That context was shaped by the hugely exaggerated IFR estimates early on, which, even after they had been shown to be faulty, continued to inform most media reports, the public mood, and thus policy. Likewise, the indiscriminate labeling of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as being due to 'covid', merely on the basis of the positive PCR test, led to significant exaggerations of the health burden of this virus. Complicating the matter further, the protocols imposed on health care workers were themselves deadly and counterproductive. You know all these things, of course. The point I'm making is that 2020, even the Spring of 2020, was hardly a stellar time for science. None of these three areas (to mention only some) could have been defended *even at the time* by any open, rigorous, scientific debate. But once the conviction that 'covid' was a new black death took hold, focusing on a silver-bullet vaccine made a certain kind of perverse sense. If Public Health fails to acknowledge its failures in these early stages, addressing their handling of covid vaccination will not get the root of the problem.
Excellent, but I would like to know who was driving them in their persecution phase. Either they were ignorant or incompetent, which does not strike me as likely, or they were handled and compliant. Who were their handlers?