Remember when President Biden gave a speech declaring our independence from Covid on July 4th? He based his declaration on the CDC determining that Covid vaccines prevented infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2. An April 1 headline from Fortune declared, “It’s official: Vaccinated people don’t transmit COVID-19.” At the time, no one thought it was an April Fool’s joke since CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow, “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real-world data.”
But then at the end of July, Israel started to report waning efficacy and said the Pfizer vaccine was only 39% effective at preventing infection. Researchers did note at the time that the vaccine appeared to be effective in preventing severe illness and death. So, the retconning of the vaccine program began.
A Canadian Twitter user going by the handle @MartyUpNorth put together the definitive montage of the narrative transition. He chronicles the narrative shift in just over two minutes using media clips from Walensky, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden, and Bill Gates. As Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, notes, now the “experts” have changed what it means to be vaccinated against an illness and they want you to believe it is acceptable:
Cases among the vaccinated are called “breakthrough cases” because the vaccine was supposed to act as a barrier.
The barrier is gone and covid fascists now claim it was always meant to reduce the severity, not the transmissibility of the virus. LIARS!pic.twitter.com/4gcVcs4jVZ
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) December 22, 2021
Using Orwell as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale, the CDC even changed the definition of a vaccine. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported at the time, until September 1, the agency defined a vaccine as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Vaccination meant “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Fair enough. I vaccinated my children for polio on the assumption they would never get the disfiguring disease.
Related: WHO Says COVID Vaccine Boosters Will Likely Prolong the Pandemic
Now, the CDC definition only requires that a vaccine “stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases” and that vaccinations “produce protection” from a specific disease. Is that the bargain we made when we jabbed our kids against the measles or mumps? When they went off to college, was their meningitis vaccine supposed to give them a milder case of meningitis? Of course not. However, now the experts want you to believe that was always the deal.
Our public health bureaucracy should just admit they were wrong and present a strategy that makes more sense. An argument remains to vaccinate Americans at heightened risk, such as the elderly and the immunocompromised, against Covid and possibly even provide some boosters. Public health officials took this approach with flu shots for years because the shots may prevent severe illness. However, the formulation often fails to prevent infection and transmission because it misses the specific circulating flu variant. Researchers warn that this is the case in 2021, and the flu is back in many parts of the country.
The benefit of vaccinating children and young adults with an experimental vaccine with no long-term safety data is unclear. In theory, it protects them from a virus that almost never makes them severely ill. Now, Omicron is not making most people severely sick, and the vaccinated are getting infected and transmitting it right along with the unvaccinated. Scotland and South Africa are reporting between a 75% and 85% reduction in hospitalizations with the new variant. Deaths also remain low, and the few reported in the media appear to be deaths with the virus, not due to the Covid infection. That is a distinction with a difference that agencies should have been accounting for beginning in 2020.
In light of changing conditions, an increasing number of doctors, researchers, and even officials at the WHO are questioning the wisdom of mass vaccinations that include young children and widespread boosters. But the government public health leaders can’t seem to take their foot off the gas. It is past time to ask them why and insist they support their assertions with robust data.
