Discover more from Musings on COVID: A Newsletter
I have learned a great deal on substack.com from fellow writers and readers. As a retired pediatric pulmonologist, I have had a lot of time and interest in staying up with the science and the controversies. However, I have increasingly found that many readers are undisciplined and sometimes flat out wrong in their charges. Many of us are critical of the public health establishment for their untruths. In addition, they love to label all critics as “anti-vaxxers”. That is accurate for Robert F. Kennedy but not most of us. I find the overwrought condemnation of Pfizer and Big Pharma to be very worrisome. In my own professional lifetime, so many new and effective drugs have been discovered and introduced into medical care.
I will herein provide some quotes and paraphrases of unhelpful positions of authors and fellow readers from recent comments.
Here is one: “Dr. Michael Yeadon: Every Single Thing We Were Told Is a LIE.” 'The “Vaccines”Have Killed Millions... Personally I No Longer Believe There Was Any Novel Respiratory Virus... If we can’t persuade people of that, humanity is going down'
My comments: Very few individuals have died from adverse reactions of the vaccines in randomized controlled trials. Many commentators have over-interpreted the fact that some elderly individuals died within days of getting the vaccine which is before any efficacy could take effect and when they were still quite vulnerable to the virus. Doubting that SARS-CoV2 was a novel respiratory virus is just plain ignorant. Dr. Yeadon did work for Pfizer and now is President of a new pharmaceutical firm. His independence and potential conflict of interest are quite unclear.
Here is another: “I would gladly sit at least six feet away from the vaccinated because they may be shedding synthetic spike proteins and I have kept my blood free from that biotech garbage.”
My comments: There is no evidence that the spike proteins created in the vaccinee is different from the spike protein of SARS-CoV2. The spike protein does persist in the body for weeks but no more than the spike protein from natural infection. There is just no basis for assigning the pejorative “biotech garbage” to the products from the vaccine.
Others have suggested that the mRNA vaccines have been ineffective from the very beginning of their use which was December 2020.
My comments: In fact, the first papers in The New England Journal of Medicine were quite straightforward, classically and ethically written, and clear. Infection in vaccine recipients with the alpha variant were largely prevented in the short run. It is not surprising in retrospect that as the virus mutated, the prevention of infection was reduced. There is still fairly good evidence that vulnerable vaccinated individuals are less likely to get serious complications. For my lung transplant recipients, certainly many lives have been saved.
Many commentators mock those who wear masks. My Comments: I am perplexed by those who wear masks, especially those who wear masks when they are in their cars alone or when outside. Most of these individuals are very poorly informed. They are NOT cowards. They believe misinformation circulating in our community, some of which has come from our leaders. Our Asian friends have been wearing masks for decades, especially to reduce exposure to air pollution. Even paper surgical masks are fairly effective in reducing inhalation of pollutants but not fine particles or ozone.
Here is another: “When less than five months later those big trials did not turn up obvious and deadly side effects, they decided the vaccines were safe enough to be given to more than a billion people. They made this decision though the vaccines had NOT demonstrated a clean short-term safety profile in the trials, but rather fairly severe though generally short-term side effects.”
My comments: It is not clear who “they” are. The individuals at the FDA made a calculated risk, not knowing how severe this pandemic could get but they had no power or oversight to recommend the vaccines for “a billion people”. Vaccines have been studied for well over 50 years and come in many forms. Virtually all side effects occur in the first six weeks. That time frame is because the host immune system effectively destroys the ingredients of vaccines in short order. The one kind of reaction that might not be evident within six weeks is an auto-immune reaction. Serial vaccinations could be theoretically problematic but none has been found with tetanus, pertussis, influenza, or other repeated vaccines. The specter of far out and long-term adverse reactions has mostly been hyperbole — like reduced sperm counts, long-term impacts on female fertility, and long-term neurologic syndromes. Many smart people WITHOUT any conflicts of interest weighed in on the mRNA vaccines early in the pandemic and made what was thought to be a reasonable decision. What has happened is that the virus has mutated faster than anticipated and with a speed that vaccine makers have not been able to keep up with. This should not be surprising.
Again: “The people who inhabit the highest levels of this corrupt hierarchy will probably never believe that they are *not* the arbiters of truth and morality for the rest of us.”
My comments: It is quite clear that arrogance has been present within the upper leadership of the government medical leaders and the public health bureaucracy. More concerning to me has been the reflex reaction of some including Tony Fauci to interpret criticisms or alternate explanations as unworthy of consideration. I found the book by Scott Atlas, A Plague Upon Our House, to be a particularly insightful inside account of how our leaders refused to give up the manic emphasis on lockdowns in 2020 even as data emerged that the lockdowns were quite destructive. Atlas describes the attitudes, words, and actions of Birx and Fauci during this time in a fair but blunt fashion. I urge fellow readers to read this book. What he describes a particular kind of intellectual corruption. Critics have accused Fauci of making lots of money through the pandemic. This allegation has no basis in fact. It is the intellectual corruption that goes quite deep in the medical profession that needs to be understood and combatted. We physicians must learn that expertise and authority are often blinding and contagious. The recent posting on Substack of a physician who decided to attend a national conference on vaccines was terribly revealing as his questions were cast aside by the leaders of the conference.
The bottom line is that Americans and American physicians need to learn many key lessons from the pandemic. Science involves the development of hypotheses and testing and retesting these hypotheses. Science is rarely “settled”. Reasonable critics need to be taken seriously at the same time that we retain the ability to reject really whacky and overly simplistic ideas. We should be able to do better when the next public emergency arises. I will have more to say on medical education and the need for general physicians to participate in societal discussions in the future.