The New York Times Is Finally Talking about Covid Vaccine Injuries. Why Now?
In the year 2024, the Times is interviewing people who say they've been injured by Covid vaccines and have filed federal claims. But why was the paper silent for years?
The headline of the the New York Times story is an attention-grabber, “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?”
The story opens with a harrowing account:
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.
According to Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, Zimmerman is one of some 13,000 people who have filed vaccine-injury compensation claims with the federal government.
The progress, unfortunately, has been, shall we say, slow. Less than 20 percent of claims have even been reviewed, according to Mandavilli, and just 12 have been resolved. The average payout? About $3,600.
To be clear, the Times calls the mRNA vaccines “a triumph of science and public health.” But at least, after several years, the paper has finally gotten around to conceding that these vaccines come with “rare but serious side effects,” and interviewing subjects who appear to have been injured by vaccination. (For context, I was writing about apparent vaccine injuries/deaths as early as 2021.)
Vaccines have of course become a highly-contentious topic, largely because many in media and government concluded that the vaccines were such a triumph of science that Americans should be forced to get them (or be fired, excluded from civil society, and/or denied healthcare).
The “get vaxxed or else” approach was sold as “scientific.” This is nonsense, of course. There is no ought in science'; it can only tell us what is.
Still, the federal pressure to coerce Americans to get vaccinated was a great deal for Big Pharma, as I’ve pointed out:
Pfizer’s financial reporting shows that in 2021 revenue was $81.3 billion, roughly double its revenue in 2020. In 2022, total revenues surged even higher, surpassing $100 billion. In 2022, the vaccine accounted for about $38 billion (billion with a B) of Pfizer’s revenue, despite its relatively low price.
… The use of government force (and threats of force) artificially raised the demand of Pfizer’s product, which juiced profits.
The problem, however, is that those days are over. Politicians no longer are talking about forcing Americans to get vaccinated and demand for vaccines has plummeted. A recent CNN survey found that just 1 in 4 US adults say they’ll definitely be getting the updated vaccine. This no doubt explains why Pfizer has jacked the price of its vaccine by 500%.
But goosed profits for Big Pharma is only half the story here. The other half is who is responsible for vaccine injuries.
As I’ve previously pointed out, in the real world, if someone consumes your product and that product injures or kills them, they face consequences—including liability.
Alas, this is not the case with vaccines.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 prevents individuals who’ve been harmed by a vaccine (or who feel they’ve been harmed by a vaccine) from taking manufacturers to court. In short, the federal government protects Big Pharma with liability shields. This means that if their product kills or injures someone, they are not held responsible.
It’s no surprise that this legislation kicked off what we know today as “the Vaccine Gold Rush,” which saw a massive proliferation of vaccinations. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: it doesn’t take a PhD in economics to realize the perverse incentives liability shields create.
The most obvious perverse incentive is that liability shields can encourage developers bringing to market immunizations that are potentially riskier than they might otherwise be if they were held liable for injuries. But an overlooked consequence is that liability shields transform the role of the federal government from a watch dog into a guard dog.
To understand the phenomenon I’m describing, consider the words of New York Times writer David Leonhardt, who describes the decline of honest in public health:
During the pandemic, as I’ve written in the past, government officials and academic experts sometimes made the mistake of deciding that Americans couldn’t handle the truth.
Instead, experts emphasized evidence that was convenient to their recommendations and buried inconvenient facts. They exaggerated the risk of outdoor Covid transmission, the virus’s danger to children and the benefits of mask mandates, among other things. The goal may have been admirable — fighting a deadly virus — but the strategy backfired. Many people ended up confused, wondering what the truth was.
Leonhardt is being charitable here in that he is focusing on what have commonly been described as the “noble lies” public health officials made during the pandemic.
As Slate and many other outlets conceded way back in July 2021, public officials lied at various times during the pandemic, usually in defense of their own policies. But the lies served what many regarded as a greater good: they were designed to improve public health.
This is flawed thinking for various reasons; but even if one accepts the idea that noble lies are justified, it should be obvious that not all of these lies were noble. Some were simply self serving. Some lies are not about public health at all, but about scoring political points or deflecting responsibility. And this brings me back to Covid vaccines.
Since the feds have so much skin in the game—and are on the hook for liability claims—they have little incentive to vigorously pursue the truth about vaccine injuries and settle these claims.
The New York Times is finally asking questions and doing a bit of reporting on vaccine injuries, but for years it was verboten to even discuss vaccine injuries on social media.
Why? Because the feds (and media) had become a guard dog for Big Pharma—silencing anyone who criticized or versed concerns about their vaccines—instead of the “consumer watch dog” that progressives so often envision government to be.
This is why I don’t trust anything the CDC says about vaccines.
The mRNA vaccines may very well be the “triumph of science and public health” that the New York Times and Donald Trump claim. But I feel better about my decision to not receive one with each passing year (I got Covid in March 2021).
And it seems like most Americans have similar sentiments.