Opinion
By Jeff Childers
05-04-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Which means it’s time for the Weekend Edition, and it’s a big one. Many of you have been patiently waiting for more good news, and today’s roundup delivers: astounding — if not landmark — New York Times long-form article finally admits there is a PROBLEM with covid vaccine injuries; I announce my latest pending lawsuit; the unlikeliest vaccine injury yet shows up on the news radar; all 49 Republican Senators throw down the gauntlet on the grotesque joke that is the WHO pandemic treaty; new Lancet study raises serious questions about covid infections; and a brand-new Louisiana city is formed for all the right wrong reasons.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
💉💉 It’s finally happened: the dam of jab omertà has broken wide open. While you read this morning’s update, remember that one of the New York Times’ primary functions is to referee the liberal Overton Window — what is acceptable for progressives to think about and to talk about. And yesterday, the New York ran this astonishing non-paywalled, long-form, magazine-style article:
Safe and effective! Prepare to experience a scorching flash of outrage. “Even the best vaccines,” the New York Times somberly informed its readers, “produce rare but serious side effects.” Now they tell us. Following the classic journalistic formula, the article began with a human interest anecdote, a vaccine-injured scientist, Michelle Zimmerman:
Within minutes of getting the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, Michelle Zimmerman felt pain racing from her left arm up to her ear and down to her fingertips. Within days, she was unbearably sensitive to light and struggled to remember simple facts.
She was 37, with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and until then could ride her bicycle 20 miles, teach a dance class and give a lecture on artificial intelligence, all in the same day. Now, more than three years later, she lives with her parents. Eventually diagnosed with brain damage, she cannot work, drive or even stand for long periods of time.
“When I let myself think about the devastation of what this has done to my life, and how much I’ve lost, sometimes it feels even too hard to comprehend,” said Dr. Zimmerman, who believes her injury is due to a contaminated vaccine batch.
The story immediately shifted to the pathetic, problematic PREP Act, the federal law immunizing vaccine manufacturers and providing a fig leaf of a “compensation” process for vaccine-injured people, people who trusted the government and whose previously normal lives now lie in devastated biological wreckage. I happen to know a lot about the PREP Act, more on that in a moment. Here’s how the Times accurately described PREP’s woeful failure:
As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600.
The Times’ first expert, a Yale immunologist, admitted what we all know to be true but which corporate media has so far steadfastly ignored, if not outright denied: that vaccine injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted.” But ignored by whom? And, who is doing the gaslighting? The Times avoided naming anyone in particular.
Rather, the Times went to great effort to highlight the good intentions of public health officials. It quoted former FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, safely retired as of February, who mused she wished she’d done more for vaccine injured people:
“I feel bad for those people,” said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were rolling out. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.”
“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”
This is a promising start, but what about the dead? Never mind! Here we find the first serious gap in the article’s coverage. The Times avoided this difficult issue, only briefly referring to possible deaths. But maybe it was too much to expect in this cautious, tentative first step toward officially acknowledging that Houston, we may have a problem.
My goodness! How could all this anti-progressive gaslighting and illiberal lack of sympathy have possibly happened? How can the Times reconcile this long period of denial and deception? Because it’s just so darn difficult to track vaccine injuries, and because we need even bigger government, that’s how:
The nation’s fragmented health care system complicates detection of very rare side effects, a process that depends on an analysis of huge amounts of data. That’s a difficult task when a patient may be tested for Covid at Walgreens, get vaccinated at CVS, go to a local clinic for minor ailments and seek care at a hospital for serious conditions. Each place may rely on different health record systems.
There is no central repository of vaccine recipients, nor of medical records, and no easy to way to pool these data. Reports to the largest federal database of so-called adverse events can be made by anyone, about anything. It’s not even clear what officials should be looking for.
I could give them some ideas of what to look for. It’s not really that hard. But I digress.
You see, covid vaccine injuries are brand new types of injuries, so what can you expect from busy, hardworking scientists? Dr. Woodcock explained, “I mean, you’re not going to find ‘brain fog’ in the medical record or claims data, because it doesn’t have a good research definition.” The former FDA Commissioner insisted, “It isn’t, like, malevolence on their part.”
It’s not like malevolence. It is malevolence. It’s like deliberate institutional neglect. But they meant well. “Federal officials,” the Times explained, “worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.” But health agencies’ duty is to pursue the truth, even when it’s complex or inconvenient, not to curate a simplified narrative for their perverse perception of an infantilized general public.
The Times rounded up a large group of pro-jab medical professionals, who are now vaccine injured, which the Times insisted it has been following for over a year now:
Similar sentiments were echoed in interviews, conducted over more than a year, with 30 people who said they had been harmed by Covid shots. They described a variety of symptoms following vaccination, some neurological, some autoimmune, some cardiovascular.
All said they had been turned away by physicians, told their symptoms were psychosomatic, or labeled anti-vaccine by family and friends — despite the fact that they supported vaccines.
One standout example is Dr. Gregory Poland, 68, the editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, who can’t shake a continuous loud whooshing sound in his ears from the moments after his first shot. He’s getting no help from the medical establishment. In despair that he might “never hear silence again,” Dr. Poland has “sought solace in meditation and his religious faith.”
Why have we never heard from Dr. Poland before? For Heaven’s sake, he runs the most prominent vaccine-related journal in the world.
If even Dr. Poland, surely one of the world’s chief vaccine advocates, feel stifled, dismissed, and suppressed, what hope can regular folks have to be heard? Even Dr. Poland stands alone on Gaslighting Island. As the Times accurately reported, the CDC admits only four serious “but rare” side effects, and two of those are related to the now-recalled Johnson & Johnson jab.
Not accidentally, the Times painted a narrative picture of complete systemic failure of the public health institutions.
It wasn’t just Dr. Poland either. Among others, the article also mentioned Dr. Ilka Warshawsky, a 58-year-old pathologist, who said she lost all hearing in her right ear after a Covid booster shot. It sounded worse than unilateral hearing loss. One of her therapists recently told her she might never be able to live independently again. But hearing loss is not any recognized side effect of Covid vaccination. Dr. Warshawsky remains ineligible for compensation under the CDC’s list of recognized injuries. Just like Dr. Poland.
The article was packed with pro-jab points. Virus-related injuries are worse. And it’s just a tiny number of people with each type of vaccine injury. But … what about the cumulative effect of all these ‘rare’ injuries? When you start to add up all these various rare adverse events, the overall picture starts to look a lot more concerning. If there are a wide range of potential side effects, each affecting a small slice of the population, the aggregate number of impacted individuals could be quite significant. And not rare.
But nobody’s looking at that. I’ve never seen that question raised in any official forum. Nor did the Times ask in its story. Still, the article points that way.
💉 Now let’s talk about the PREP Act, the 2015 federal law providing vaccine manufacturers with complete immunity and offering injured folks a pretend claims process. I have some hopefully big news. To preserve my clients’ privacy, and for obvious strategic reasons, I have not mentioned it before, but my firm is preparing to file a significant lawsuit against the federal government asking the courts to declare the PREP Act is unconstitutional.
People don’t stand a chance under PREP. It’s worse than useless. Here’s how the Times article described the Act’s Orwellian claims adjudication process:
Claims regarding Covid vaccines go to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. Intended for public health emergencies, this program has narrow criteria to pay out and sets a limit of $50,000, with stringent standards of proof.
It requires applicants to prove within a year of the injury that it was “the direct result” of getting the Covid vaccine, based on “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence.”
The program had only four staff members at the beginning of the pandemic, and now has 35 people evaluating claims. Still, it has reviewed only a fraction of the 13,000 claims filed, and has paid out only a dozen.
Not only that, but the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program is unfunded. It has no permanent budget and is only funded through emergency allocation requests. Last year it received a one-time grant of $15 million dollars, which is being quickly consumed by its administrative costs, and is obviously not being used to pay claims, which are limited to $50,000 anyway.
I believe that, by creating a statutory claims process that excludes access to real courts, the PREP Act is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Article III provides citizens access to courts to resolve their claims, not some unfunded Article I administrative agency. Our lawsuit is drafted, ready to file, and is currently being reviewed by constitutional experts. We hope to file it next week. I’ll have a lot more to say about it soon.
💉 There are already signs that the Overton window is shifting. Yesterday (albeit on News Nation), in a followup to the Times’ story, former CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo revealed — I believe for the first time, and without details — that he was also injured by the covid vaccines. “People like Shawn, and me, and millions of others who still have weird stuff with their bloodwork and their lives and their feelings, you know, physically, are not going away.”
CLIP: Chris Cuomo interviews vaccine-injured nurse and admits his own injury (5:55).
It’s significant that Chris felt safe enough to publicly claim his own vaccine injury. Toward the end of the clip, Cuomo offered to help Shawn (mentioned in the Times’ article) get connected with Cuomo’s doctors, suggesting to viewers a much wider population of the injured and the existence of courageous independent doctors trying to help them:
“Let me tell you something. Shawn, I can’t help you. I’m no clinician. I’m just, I’m sick myself. But I’m working with people who are working on this. So I’ll make sure we’re in touch right after the show. I’ll help anyway I can. I’ll hook you up with my clinicians. I will never stop reporting on this. We need to have a 9/11 commission. It’s not over.”
I can’t help but wonder whether Cuomo’s hasty departure from CNN in December 2021 might have somehow been related to his vaccine injury.
💉 Why are we seeing this now? I’m speculating, a lot, but cynically I sense politics at play. We’re six months out from the election. Who does admitting even partial failure of the vaccine program help, politically, and who does it hurt? The acknowledgement of the reality of widespread, unaddressed vaccine injuries would seem to hurt President Trump the most.
This is a contentious topic. If that’s true, if they are finally admitting the truth of the vaccine problem to hurt President Trump, then I am grateful he has never criticized the jabs. If Trump had come out against the shots, the New York Times would have tripled-down and we would have never seen this day arrive. Just look where hydroxychloroquine wound up.
It doesn’t matter though. The first, most important thing is to get help to vaccine injured people. And this wide crack in the left’s Overton window is just what those of us screaming about this problem have been waiting for. We’ll make the most of it, believe me.
🔥🔥 That’s not even close to all the good news! On Wednesday, in a story completely ignored by corporate media, Senator Ron Johnson published an announcement on his website headlined, “Sen. Johnson Leads Letter Demanding Biden Reject “Unacceptable” WHO Agreements.”
Johnson’s announcement referred to a highly-controversial set of proposed amendments to the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty, which are set for the final approval vote next month. Critics have claimed that in its horrible original drafts, the amendments would have put the WHO in charge of declaring pandemics and then mandating every country’s response, right down to lockdowns and vaccine mandates that arguably would even override national, state, and local laws.
It is hard to imagine a worse, more apocalyptic scenario.
But thanks to diligent independent efforts — no thanks to corporate media lapdogs, who’ve steadfastly refused to cover the story — the WHO’s proposed treaty amendment package has failed approval several times. The first time it failed by the thinnest of margins, rejected only by a couple small countries. But as people began learning and talking about the threat, it has been revised through several rounds and is much improved. But still dangerous.
Senator Johnson (R-Wi.), bless him, organized the entire Republican Senate, all 49 Senators, to sign a letter of objection addressed to Joe Biden. In the letter, the Senators argue the WHO’s treaty amendments would constitute a brand new treaty requiring ratification by two-thirds of the Senate, which the 49 Senators could easily block. The Biden Administration would surely argue the amendment package is not a new treaty at all, but is merely a minor adjustment to an existing treaty not requiring ratification.
Still, this is a significant development, signaling swift and difficult litigation looming if Biden does sign on to the amendment package. Here’s Johnson’s letter:
This is the progress that people who’ve been decrying the horrible WHO amendment have been waiting for.
💉💉 This week the Lancet published a remarkable study with the wordy title, “Safety, tolerability, viral kinetics, and immune correlates of protection in healthy, seropositive UK adults inoculated with SARS-CoV-2: a single-centre, open-label, phase 1 controlled human infection study.” In short, the researchers tried to infect people with covid — and failed.
The so-called “challenge study” extended over several years, recruiting healthy volunteers who were quarantined and then intentionally exposed to covid. Some volunteers were vaccinated and some were not. The researchers tried to give them covid several times, right up the nose, but kept failing, so they kept increasing the dosage.
The last dosage they tried was ten thousand times higher than the first dose. But no dosages worked.
Even more vexing, about 40% of the study volunteers went on to catch covid later, out in the world. The scientists’ conclusion was that prior immunity and vaccination is really excellent protection against existing variants. Maybe. But my conclusion is that covid PCR tests can detect a ham sandwich.
At minimum, setting aside the issue of whether covid actually exists or whether people are just testing positive after catching a cold, this study shows the enduring value of natural immunity, which the CDC’s experts pooh-poohed and called a conspiracy theory.
So.
🔥🔥 And that’s not all. Finally, earlier this week the New York Times ran a hand-wringing story headlined, “Louisiana Will Get a New City After a Yearslong Court Battle.” Of course, it’s racist. The sub-headline decried, “The State Supreme Court cleared the way for a part of Baton Rouge to become the city of St. George. Critics say the white, wealthier enclave separating from the capital could have devastating consequences.”
First, some Baton Rouge citizens just asked for their own school district, citing concerns about out-of-control crime and failing public schools. When state officials refused to let them form their own school district, refused to fix the crime problem, and refused to improve the schools, in 2015 a group of citizens in a “sprawling unincorporated suburb of Baton Rouge” decided the only way forward was to secede from Louisiana’s capital city by forming their own city, called St. George. Four years later, in 2019, they finally got the issue on the ballot, and voters overwhemingly approved the measure.
We’re out.
But they weren’t out, not by a long shot. Then came the lawsuits and all the accusations they were literally a million times worse than the Ku Klux Klan. It couldn’t be that the City of Baton Rouge has become a nepotistic train wreck of a total progressive nightmare. According to opponents, the voters’ motives could only be one thing: invidious racism designed to hurt the black people in Baton Rouge by leaving and taking their $48 million in annual tax dollars with them.
Ironically, lower courts cancelled the new city effort, citing lack of financial viability. But four long legal years later, after litigating all the way to Louisiana’s Supreme Court, the new residents of St. George finally won their independence. Last Friday, the state’s highest court approved formation of the City of St. George in a 4-3 decision, forming a new city of nearly 100,000 people in an area of something under 60 square miles. St. George now becomes one of the Louisiana’s largest cities, and is the first city to be incorporated there in nearly twenty years.
Despite arguing for years that the new city would be too poor to support itself, critics have now turned on a dime, and are now calling the St. George residents rich white people, as reflected in yesterday’s MSNBC headline, penned by reporter Ja’han Jones (if that is his real name):
I guess they can afford to run their own city, after all.
In a recent Fox interview, the former local NAACP president agreed with the racism narrative, describing St. George’s secession as just a plot to hurt “people who look like me.” Absent from all this agonizing about the loss of fleeing former Baton Rouge citizens’ taxpayer revenue is any discussion over what started it all in the first place: the city’s failing public schools.
I think this is consequential. This seems like the way, a real solution to a seemingly intractable problem. How can we fix the failing big blue cities? We need to break them up. Make them into lots of smaller cities. Wouldn’t that be more democracy? And isn’t more democracy a good thing? After all, isn’t protecting democracy the current thing, now that Ukraine has slipped off the radar into the battle trench?
Apparently it depends on who you ask. If you ask me, I say we need more seceding cities. More competition. More democracy! More progress in the conservative counter-revolution.
Have a wonderful weekend! C&C shall return on Monday with all the news you need to stay informed about what’s actually important.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
