While confusion and mistakes were understandable in the beginning, as the pandemic progressed, the Church might have looked deeper and deliberated more thoroughly before taking action, including against contrarian voices.
Part 1: Open Letter to Seventh-day Adventist Church Leadership on That Troublesome Vaccine Statement, by Keith K. Colburn, MD, FACP, FACR
Part 2: Thoughts on Conrad Vine and His Critics, by Janine Colburn. Conrad Vine may be a controversial voice in the church at this time, but is he a“tare”?
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Part 1: Open Letter to Seventh-day Adventist Church Leadership on That Troublesome COVID-19 Vaccine Statement
BY Keith K. Colburn, MD, FACP, FACR
“Claims of religious liberty are not used appropriately in objecting to government mandates or employer programs designed to protect the health and safety of their communities.” —From the 2021 [SDA Church] Official Reaffirmation Statement on Vaccines
Greetings:
I apologize at the outset for the length of this. But I feel each point is important, and bears making in the context of the ongoing debate over how COVID was handled within the Adventist church. I have tried to be as concise as possible, and include links that may not only support points made, but also provide additional information.
My goal with this letter is four-fold. First, it is to show how understandable it was for both ordinary people and leaders to be confused (if not deceived) well into the COVID-19 pandemic as to what was, in fact, true. Whether it was regarding masking, social distancing, lockdowns, repurposed drugs, or vaccine mandates, even highly credentialed experts could not agree, and advice on a number of these things seemed to switch around almost daily. Information and opinion contrary to a well-enforced narrative was actively suppressed and pushed to the margins of social discourse, making the truth additionally difficult to determine. To meet its definition and be effective, science needs nothing so much as the ability—indeed, scientists have the responsibility—to question, and allow questioning of, what are inaptly named “settled truths.”1 This essential task was, to a shocking degree, not allowed to operate during COVID.
Second, my purpose is to ask you to consider what is now available public knowledge about the depth of corruption and deception that was involved in the push for the so-called vaccines2, and how many in positions of influence and power may have been deceived by it while others came to recognize it.
“While confusion and mistakes were understandable in the beginning, as the pandemic progressed, the Church might have looked deeper and deliberated more thoroughly before taking action, including against contrarian voices. ”
It would not surprise us if the government’s response to the COVID pandemic, with its lockdowns and vaccine mandates, may have reflected a kind of test-run by behind-the-scenes global powers or even Satan himself to see how receptive humanity would be to an even larger deception and use of force. This could be something like creating fear of another potential catastrophe which would require the people of the world to act together “for the common good.” People might be asked—or coerced—to unite behind a consortium of one-world powers, say, the World Economic Forum, the papacy, apostate Protestants, the US and other governments of the world to try to save humanity. I could imagine this might come from concern over a perceived climate crisis3 or whatever the next reported threat to humanity may be.
This behemoth of a power, as we saw in COVID, would need to control every human activity and every law-making body to make all people fall in line in order to “save the world.”
It appears to me that our church may have failed the ‘early mandate’ test.
Third, my purpose is to ask you to consider whether, in light of all the confusion and uncertainty, it may have perhaps been unwise to have issued any statement on the COVID vaccine as early as General Conference leadership did, other than to have offered support and theological undergirding for its members who objected to being forced to take a new, questionable, and poorly-studied pharmaceutical for reasons of conscience—on the well-grounded, indeed Adventist-prioritized, principles of health, individual primacy, and religious liberty.
Finally, I’ll ask you to consider how this unforced error on the part of the church may begin to be corrected now, and prevented in the future.
***
I am a double board certified physician specialist (Internal Medicine and Rheumatology) currently in clinical practice. I am also an Emeritus Professor of Medicine and research scientist who has previously served as the Vice-President of the American Federation for Medical Research. Several colleagues and I did a lengthy “deep dive” into the research being done on repurposed drugs for COVID-19 during the pandemic, and have been investigating, on an ongoing basis, issues surrounding the development, use, and concerns regarding the COVID vaccines.
I became convinced that certain of these inexpensive, off-patent drugs were effective in preventing and treating COVID. I saw them work myself, sometimes quite miraculously. More importantly, there are several hundred studies4 that, taken as a whole, confirm the significant effectiveness of these drugs, more than 100 on ivermectin alone. Eventually, I wrote an article on this to inform fellow church members, but no Adventist publication I contacted would publish it until Dr. Tim Jennings of Come and Reason Ministries graciously picked it up as a “blog post.”
The reason one SDA-related journal’s editors turned down my article was said to be because the medical sources they consulted were afraid it was so persuasive it would keep people from being vaccinated. Several people on the boards of these journals told me privately they were convinced enough by my article to take one of these repurposed drugs themselves were they to get sick with COVID. But of course, by then, the drugs were very difficult to obtain due to new and virtually unique-in-history limitations on physician prescribing and pharmacy dispensing. Moreover, Big Pharma was planning its own lucrative treatment options, and likely didn’t care to have competition.
As the pandemic progressed, it became increasingly clear to those of us physicians reading and listening to sources outside most mainstream media, public health authorities, and medical society publications—now arguably captured by, or in thrall to, Big Pharma—that the vaccines were unsafe. We were seeing evidence for this turn up in our practices. My wife and I, who had obtained the single-shot J&J vaccine early in its availability in order for me to continue my work, determined never to take another one. We were learning of serious difficulties experienced by patients and people in our extended circle who were vaccinated and double-vaccinated by the various shots.
A number of these people have been left with calamitous, potentially life-long problems. A friend of my wife’s, previously a healthy athlete who’d scaled numerous world-class peaks, developed a number of brain clots soon after his second vaccine which have left him severely disabled. Another, a young man close to us who had never previously had a headache in his life, experienced splitting, debilitating headaches for six months following his second shot. A physically active guy, he now wonders what a brain scan would have shown at the time, and whether he may also have some of the cardiac damage turning up in a significant portion of young men and others who got vaccinated. Outside our circle, credible reports of devastating side effects from vaccines, at first a trickle, were becoming a tidal wave.
With few exceptions, SDA physicians fell in line with the official narrative. Physicians are no different from other people when it comes to the temptation to sheep-like behavior. With their busy schedules, they are as susceptible as anyone to propaganda masquerading as “settled science.” And no one wants to feel they are out of step with their colleagues. In addition, there was a major liability risk, both perceived and real—which also undoubtedly drove church and other closures to a significant degree. Constraints on physicians in group practices or managed care organizations created a further disincentive or bar to independent thinking and action.
Adventists have long taught that in end times, the devil will be so clever as to deceive “even the very elect.” I believe we are seeing this today in science and medicine, where fraud, conflicts of interest, lying by health authorities, sluggish and dishonest work, distortion, moralism, pandering to woke or politically correct interests, censorship, thought enforcement, severe punishments for deviating from the official narrative, artificial consensus formation, partisanship, deplatforming, government violations of free speech, fakery, and outright corruption are on the rise, creating chaos and public mistrust. There is much evidence for this, with entire books being written on the subject and articles of concern published in some of the most prestigious journals in their fields. As one author has written, "We need scientific dissidents now more than ever.".
Academic medical centers have not been immune from corrosive influences. No less than a previous editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, has written, “To a remarkable extent, medical centers have become supplicants to the drug companies, deferring to them in ways that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago.”5
In conversations with highly-placed individuals over the last 2-3 years, it has become more and more clear to me that the leadership of our church was listening to a large but information-siloed medical community, including some of our own physicians, for advice on COVID policy. Unfortunately, few physicians anywhere appeared to be thinking for themselves or doing their own “research on the research” regarding COVID. What is not known to many lay people is that most clinical physicians get a lot of their “continuing education” on drugs, for example, from the pharmaceutical representatives that visit almost all of us at least weekly. These ‘drug reps,’ as we refer to them, are friendly and usually provide lunch for everyone in the office. They then compare their medication to their competitors’, using their own studies to drive home their sales pitch.
I have conducted a number of drug studies, and came to understand many of the ways pharmaceutical companies make their products appear better than other products, both new and old. It is almost as if each company has “its own truth,” as the real truth may not serve the monetary and shareholder goals of the firm.6 In the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, there are too many perverse incentives and obvious conflicts of interest. As a result of these, between 1991 and 2021, Big Pharma has had to pay out more than 62 billion dollars in fines and settlements for fraudulent behavior and egregious misconduct.
Understanding human nature as Adventists do, would we be utterly surprised if it turns out that Pfizer and Moderna were not entirely truthful about their vaccines, with a potential profit of billions of dollars at stake? Pfizer’s revenue from its COVID-19 vaccines was more than 37 billion dollars in 2022 alone. If they had truly been “safe and effective,” they may have been worth it. But they were not, and Pfizer apparently knew they were not from the very beginning, as shown by its own documents.
It became clear to those of us who were looking carefully into the COVID vaccine issue that they were not adequately studied regarding their safety. Robert Malone, MD, PhD, one of the scientists who helped develop the mRNA technology used in the COVID vaccines, warned the drug companies and the world of the deadly potential of this product. He knew these vaccine products needed a great deal more study before exposing people to them.
Now and on the horizon are companion volumes that purport to show, using the manufacturers’ own documents, that the two most commonly utilized vaccines were both improperly tested and known to be unsafe. One of these is The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity. The other, due out in April, 2025, is The Moderna Papers: Moderna's Crimes Against Humanity. Both of these volumes, which are said to demonstrate the dishonesty and malfeasance involved in the pushing of the COVID vaccines, are edited by Naomi Wolf, a New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist, and her associate, Amy Kelly.
The Pfizer Papers, a 386-page tome, displays and summarizes the results of the work of 3,250 medical experts and research volunteers who combed through the 450,000 pages of documents Pfizer, with FDA support, tried to have embargoed (suppressed) by the government for up to 75 years. It is an astonishing work, and what it reveals is highly disturbing.
The Introduction has been made available online, and is worth reading by itself.
***
“With no solid basis, the FDA quickly came out with warnings (at times in a juvenile, condescending manner) against prescribing or taking ivermectin for COVID.”
Some years before COVID-19, there were a number of experiments that found hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) had significant anti-viral activity.7 When the pandemic first hit, HCQ was tried in treating COVID, at first in France and then elsewhere, with promising results.
Very quickly, strange objections to the use of this drug arose in the scientific literature, which immediately labeled these medications dangerous. Right away, my rheumatology colleagues and I knew someone was lying. We use HCQ all the time in our practice on several diseases. It is one of the safest drugs we use.
Sure enough, articles hastily published in two of the world’s top medical journals with studies purporting to show the risks of HCQ were very soon shown to be based on fraudulent data and had to be retracted. But by then, the damage had been done. Governments had changed their policies on the premise of these fake studies, and few people wanted to take such an “unsafe” drug in any event.
Similar treatment was accorded ivermectin, likewise a very safe off-patent drug, when it was found to also be effective in treating COVID when widely trialed in developing countries such as Peru, Bangladesh, and India. Again and oddly, with no solid basis, the FDA quickly came out with warnings (at times in a juvenile, condescending manner) against prescribing or taking ivermectin for COVID.8
The media’s hatred of Donald Trump came into play early in the pandemic when he suggested that HCQ could be useful for treating COVID. They were merciless in their condemnation of him for suggesting this drug. Almost all of our medical associations in the United States bought into the so-called “settled” narrative about vaccines and the risks of taking these repurposed drugs. Much of it was a lie, and—utilizing more varied sources of information—many people were able to recognize this quite early.
A very big question arose as to why there was so much opposition to widely trialing the very safe and inexpensive off-patent medications in this pandemic. It didn’t take rocket science to guess one possible motive.
The COVID vaccines were rushed into use in the Western world particularly. Permission was given in the U. S. in the form of an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in part because it could be claimed by the drug companies that there were no alternatives to control the pandemic. If there had been, it is likely the vaccines could not have been authorized for use before the several years’ testing ordinarily required to show safety and efficacy.9
Think about it: Why would any company making vaccines want there to be an effective and inexpensive preventative or treatment available if there were billions of dollars to be made with its vaccine?
Because Big Pharma’s money is involved in virtually every aspect of medical science, it has an inordinate influence on physicians, medical scientists, and other influential entities. What is not known to most U. S. citizens is that nearly 75% of funding for clinical trials comes from corporate sponsors. A large amount of money also flows into the CDC from Big Pharma. “Industry fees” account for a full 45% of the funding of the FDA, the agency that approves and regulates drugs in the U. S.
Practically speaking, pharmaceutical companies “own” most medical journals, including the most prestigious. In addition, it regularly sends campaign contributions to U. S. Congressmen; more than two-thirds received campaign funding from pharmaceutical companies in 2020, totaling $14 million.
According to Statista.com, “in 2020, the pharmaceutical industry spent 4.58 billion U. S. dollars on advertising on national TV in the United States, unsurprisingly representing a big shift in spending compared to the 2019 pre-Covid market. In 2020 TV ad spending of the pharma industry accounted for 75 percent of the total ad spend.”
And did we happen to notice the sudden silence of TV news personalities who initially stood up for HCQ and ivermectin but suddenly stopped talking about these drugs? Has anyone wondered why? In light of the above, the question almost answers itself.
As of 2024, there are 1,736 lobbyists for the pharmaceuticals/health products industry working in the halls of Congress. Fifty-five percent of these are former government employees. Where would we guess all those government employees who have been pushing vaccines would like to end up—in a lucrative contract with Big Pharma, or a comparatively low-wage teaching job?
A number of the courageous physicians and physician-scientists who deviated from the party line and observed out loud the alarming adverse events (side effects) they were seeing from the COVID vaccines or who advocated for HCQ or ivermectin use were severely punished. A number have lost their academic posts, specialty certifications, and even their licenses to practice medicine. One such physician, Meryl Nass, a board-certified Internist in Maine known for her expertise in the field of bioterrorism and epidemics and one-time consultant to the Director of National Intelligence, has been fined $10,000, had her medical license stripped, and has been ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation—all for the “crime” of criticizing vaccine mandates and prescribing ivermectin.
I doubt you will get this information from most physicians in the Western world, including at some of our own SDA medical conferences. The deception of the drug companies has been nearly complete, at least until recently.
As more information trickled out regarding vaccine safety, or lack thereof, the dogma came to be that the “most vulnerable” people still ought to be vaccinated. But there remains a question even with those people. In the opinion of many experts, such people would have done better with the repurposed drugs, either preventatively or as treatment. For young people, the data look even more stark. Newer research shows there was little real value in the vaccine versus the vaccine risk for those under 55-60 years old unless they were obese and had chronic diseases like diabetes. For children not medically compromised, the risk of dying from COVID was virtually zero.
***
How does all this information apply to the SDA church organization? Most of the world bought into these deceptions, churches included. It was perhaps an understandable mistake at the time. But when discovered, mistakes ought to be made right. Our church left many members in terrible dilemmas, including employees of church-operated institutions.
This is where people like Conrad Vine have turned out to be invaluable voices. He and a few other SDA members and leaders tried to warn us about the risks of the vaccines10 and these believe, as I do, that the Church has a responsibility to at least reverse course now and apologize to those who were injured by the vaccine or who refused to take it for reasons of conscience. As it happens, members were wise to be cautious about this experimental vaccine, as it has done a great deal of harm to a great many people.
Even before they could have known it was unsafe, a lot of these people did not believe they ought to be forced to take an experimental pharmaceutical into their bodies for religious or religiously-based health reasons. Yet their own church, ostensibly one of the most concerned for religious liberty, would not support their conscientious decision.
Furthermore, the core of the argument our church made for the vaccine mandates—the “protect-thy-neighbor” argument—turns out to have been baseless. The evidence, as assessed by the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic over a two-year period, shows the vaccines “did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus.”11 So much for all the moral bullying.
As someone has wisecracked, we are running out of COVID conspiracy theories, because so many of them are turning out to be true.
My hope, my prayer, and my humble request is that SDA Church leadership will reconsider its actions during COVID and revise its official statements on the taking of vaccines to include full support for a religious liberty objection to mandates. I believe this to be an essential step toward restoring member trust and fulfilling the church’s underlying mission of serving Jesus Christ with integrity and love.
Thank you for reading my letter, and for your kind consideration of this request.
My best,
Keith Colburn
Keith K. Colburn, MD, FACP, FACR
Footnotes
1 A very good article on this appeared in The Spectator’s February, 2021 U. S. edition titled, “Are you tired of experts? The true scientist ‘believes the science’ only provisionally.” An excerpt:
“...there is very little reason for ordinary people to take seriously the various types of expertise they hear praised daily in the media — and so, increasingly, they are learning to do the opposite.
Needless to say, their disbelief, and even their prudent skepticism, infuriates their educated betters — some of them experts themselves, to whom they seem as swine turning up their snouts at the pearls that have been tossed to them. ‘Believe the science!’ they insist through clenched teeth — ignoring the inconvenient fact that the true scientist never believes ‘the science’; or, rather, he believes it only provisionally, until he discovers that yesterday’s science (or last night’s) is incomplete, faulty or just plain wrong, and hence in need of revision or even rejection.
Not every man of science, of course, discovers the same facts concurrently, or interprets them in the same way; which is why an expert may be defined as someone who disagrees with other experts — the same people of whom [the common man has] every reason to be doubting and skeptical.” [Emphasis supplied.]
https://spectator.us/life/tired-experts-science/
2 Here we refer to the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines as “so-called vaccines.” Since their introduction, these products have created controversy over nomenclature. Some have argued that they are not vaccines at all, but gene therapy. Others have argued that they function by producing an enhanced immune response, much like traditional vaccines, and therefore they are correctly called vaccines. It has been argued that they aren’t gene therapy, because they don’t modify genes (though even this claim is being challenged). According to Dr. Adam Taylor, a virologist and research fellow at the Menzies Health Institute, Queensland, Griffith University, “As mRNA is genetic material, mRNA vaccines can be looked at as a genetic-based therapy, but they are classified as vaccines and are not designed to alter your genes.” (https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/mrna-vaccines-are-distinct-from-gene-therapy-which-alters-recipients-genes-idUSL1N2PH16N/)
On Sept. 1, 2021, the CDC changed the definition of vaccine from “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting that person from that disease” to “A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” (https://www.johnlocke.org/the-cdc-changed-its-definitions-of-vaccine-and-vaccination-and-keeps-changing-its-definition-of-fully-vaccinated/). Since this change occurred at the same time that the efficacy of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines was being challenged, especially early (and now discredited) claims by authorities that they prevented transmission, skeptics suspected that the change was made to increase acceptance of a poorly performing product. The CDC, however, argued that the change was made for transparency, since the original language might make one believe that vaccines are 100% effective, whereas this has never been the case, but they do stimulate an immune response. (https://www.newsweek.com/science-fact-check-definition-vaccine-cdc-1964107). For skeptics, labeling this new technology platform as a “vaccine” benefited suppliers by increasing public acceptance and providing liability protection under The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, hence ulterior motives were suspected.
Regardless of where one falls on the semantics question, the scientific reality is that besides ultimately introducing immune system stimulating antigens into the body, mRNA vaccines function quite differently from traditional vaccines. Whereas traditional vaccines provide a known quantity of a known substance into a known part of the body, typically provoking an immune response to the whole pathogen, the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines do not. They provide an unknown quantity (the amount injected may be consistent, but each person generates a different amount of antigen in response, in this case a toxic spike protein) of unknown substances (a major product is the spike protein coded for in the mRNA, but off-target products are also produced because of genetic frame-shifting and impurities in the vaccine itself). This happens throughout much of the body (in a way that is poorly characterized), and for an undetermined time (at least months-long). A basic rule of pharmacology is that the dose determines the response; here we have a “vaccine” for which the dose is unknown. Lack of long-term testing means that the effects of all this are not well-characterized.
3 The World Health Organization (WHO) has already linked climate change and health systems. https://www.who.int/news/item/24-05-2023-wha76-strategic-roundtable-on-health-and-climate.
4 Dr. Pierre Kory and Jenna McCarthy, The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic (New York: ICAN Press, 2023), p. 180, Kindle edition.
5 It may be worth noting that Ellen White had things to say about the facile taking of drugs for every ailment. Some dismiss that as only relevant to her day, when arsenic and mercury, among other toxins, were used in medicine. But maybe the principle needs to be revisited, even if many medications today are beneficial.
https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/110.448
“The Usual but Dangerous Course—A practice that is laying the foundation of a vast amount of disease and of even more serious evils, is the free use of poisonous drugs. When attacked by disease, many will not take the trouble to search out the cause of their illness. Their chief anxiety is to rid themselves of pain and inconvenience. So they resort to patent nostrums, of whose real properties they know little, or they apply to a physician for some remedy to counteract the result of their misdoing, but with no thought of making a change in their unhealthful habits. If immediate benefit is not realized, another medicine is tried, and then another. Thus the evil continues” —The Ministry of Healing, 126.
The 8 principles of healthful living have a lot to recommend them, and did especially during COVID, a time when many Adventists found a great deal of benefit in using them. These principles are supported by research. For example, a plant-based diet was associated with a 60-70% lower risk of moderate-to-severe COVID-19 (https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/4/1/257.full.pdf); exposure to near-IR (a component of sunlight) improved pulmonary function and shortened the hospital stay of COVID-19 patients (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1011134422002342); and a combination of healthy body mass, never smoking, exercise, alcohol moderation, high quality diet, and adequate sleep were associated with a 49% lower risk of developing long-COVID (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/intemed/articlepdf/2800885/jamainternal_wang_2023_oi_220085_1674248303.53655.pdf). Yet few in professional practice appeared to be talking about this.
6 A telling headline recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal (print edition). It read: COVID VACCINE? Great. But What Has He Done Lately? With Pfizer’s stock down sharply, an activist investor is pushing for CEO Albert Bourla to improve performance.
7 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021), p. 71, Kindle edition. See also, here.
8 The FDA was sued for this by three doctors on the basis that it was overstepping its authority and that its advice was interfering with the practice of medicine. The lawsuit was eventually successful. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals enjoined the FDA to permanently remove several of the social media posts it had placed regarding ivermectin, including the most offensive one taunting those taking it as behaving like horses or cows. But, once again, the damage had been done.
9 On the FDA webpage titled, “Emergency Use Authorization for Vaccines Explained,” we find this statement:
What is an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)?
An Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is a mechanism to facilitate the availability and use of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, during public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives. [Emphasis supplied.]
Thus, if an alternative pharmaceutical or other method to prevent and treat COVID had been shown as “adequate” and had been approved and made available, no EUA for the novel and under-tested vaccines would likely have been possible. Thus it stands to reason that vaccine manufacturers, who no doubt had invested a great deal in their product and stood to make a vast sum of money, would perhaps not have been thrilled to learn an inexpensive alternative had been found that could potentially make the vaccines’ EUA unachievable, or, at the very least, the patient risk/benefit ratio of taking one significantly less palatable.
Speaking of being under-tested, later boosters were even worse. See here (and links within).
10 There now appears to be growing anger amongst the vaccinated toward the unvaccinated who “didn’t do enough to warn us” about the risks of taking the vaccine. This has turned up in a number of social media posts, and in a handful of articles such as this one. (No, it’s not Babylon Bee satire, though one might wonder at first.) Here’s an excerpt:
The unvaccinated had access to important information about the potential side effects of vaccines. They knew about the risks of severe allergic reactions, blood clots, and other serious health complications. They knew that vaccines did not immunize us. They knew it wasn’t effective, and that they can cause more harm than good.
They knew all of that, but instead of warning us, the unvaccinated chose to remain silent. They chose to look the other way and not speak out about the potential dangers of vaccines. They let millions of good folks who did the right thing (at the time) fall to death and disease, and many antivaxxers even gloated online about how their coin flip had been the right bet. The more diabolical even urged folks they disagree with to “get boosted.”
The comments beneath the piece are interesting, as well. As awareness of the vaccine harms grows, we will likely be seeing more of this. At that point, I think we can confidently say that the Conrad Vines, Peter McCulloughs, and Ron Kellys of this world won’t be nearly so slandered or spurned.
11 If the argument is that the vaccine worked to prevent COVID in the vaccinated individual, so that that individual would presumably have less chance of getting sick and would therefore not be able to give it to others, this, too, is spurious. Leaving aside the issue of questionable efficacy, the COVID vaccines were made available to everyone. If one didn’t wish to get sick from an unvaccinated individual, and if the vaccines worked as advertised, all one had to do was get a vaccine, or keep oneself relatively isolated, as was suggested in any event for the medically vulnerable. At the end of the day, not everyone was going to get vaccinated, no matter how coercive the mandates.
Moreover, notwithstanding what biased “fact-checkers” say, there is now a growing body of evidence that individuals who were COVID-vaccinated can be “shedders,” meaning they can transmit vaccine-related components such as the spike protein to others through shedding. This is an effect that was foreseen by the FDA when they formulated testing guidelines for virus based gene therapies. This is distinct from viral shedding, where both vaccinated and unvaccinated shed viral particles, such as via oral or nasal secretions, leading to transmission to others (e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9555632/). One question I have yet to see resolved is whether shedding after COVID-19 vaccination comes from the vaccine itself, or from a current or prior infection. But anecdotal reports of symptoms arising from exposure to recently vaccinated individuals suggest (because of temporal proximity) there may be shedding from the vaccine itself in addition to viral shedding from infected individuals.