CommentsACCORDING TO LIZ - The story of Covid is the story of a disaster awash in a sea of lies. By the Chinese government, by Trump and his disciples, by those in the current administration, and by the developers, manufacturers and distributors of the vaccine.
In 2021, Joe Biden disingenuously stated: “you’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations” even though, later in the same town hall, he amended this to vaccinated people who do get Covid are “not likely to get sick. You’re probably going to be symptomless. You’re not going to be in a position where your life is in danger.”
The CDC (Center for Disease Control) had admitted by mid-2021 that the vaccines don't stop transmission but CDC data as of last July indicated that out of the almost 160 million people who had been fully vaccinated, there were less than 5,500 confirmed cases. Those numbers jumped dramatically with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant.
More disturbingly, on October 12th a Pfizer executive admitted publicly to the European Parliament that the company had not tested their vaccine to see whether it helped prevent transmission.
OK, that was a sin of omission, not an overt lie. Pfizer had never claimed that they had tested for curtailment of infection; their mandate was to reduce the effect of the virus and the resulting complications and deaths.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December of 2020 made no claim about transmission reduction. A concurrent FDA press release said there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person” and, in an interview, Pfizer’s CEO expressed that transmission statistics would require further examination.
But did our newly-elected government so not trust the American people to understand the difference between a mild infection and the risk of death? Vaccination clearly did significantly reduce illness and hospitalizations.
Or were there miscommunications in the wake of years of presidential lies and the urgency to drastically decrease the impact on the American healthcare system?
But what else did Pfizer not test for?
Quality control.
The real story is that the testing was rushed, and directed at the traditional adult white male subject base, leaving women, people of color, the young and the old at risk. Women tend to react more strongly to vaccines, weight and ethnicity does make a difference.
Even today it takes a pretty deep dive to get around the anti-vaxxer screeds and all the nanny-state redirects to the real facts.
According to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) over 20,000 of slightly more than 30,000 vaccine-related deaths are from the Pfizer inoculation, almost three-quarters among people over 65, the demographic targeted to receive the earliest shots.
And Pfizer just reported its greatest earnings ever.
Brand name helped boost those numbers – a CBS survey in April 2021 showed 36% of Americans preferred Pfizer vs 19% opting for Moderna and 17% for Johnson & Johnson.
And certainly, as with Covid itself, there are other contributing factors and the Pfizer vaccine was first through the gate, but why has so little attention been paid to these disparities in the months and years that followed?
In March of 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, the Secretary of Health and Human Services issued a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act declaration to provide blanket immunity to shield companies like Pfizer and Moderna from liability if something unintentionally went wrong with their vaccines in order to expedite addressing the public health emergency.
PREP protection lasts until March of 2024 and, unless willful misconduct by Pfizer can be proven, an inordinately heavy lift given the power of Big Pharma, the company can continue to skate all the way to the bank.
But why has so little been done for the victims?
The dead cannot be brought back to life but a far greater number – tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands – are still suffering a range of effects, from minor to debilitating.
Because these symptoms are all over the place – some physiological, some neurological, others relegated by doctors to normal aging such as dementia, Alzheimer’s and increased frailty, some dismissed as psychological – these have not garnered the same publicity that heart damage and deaths received in the early days of the vaccine.
Although in many cases these scattershot symptoms look surprisingly like aspects of long Covid.
What is happening to these victims?
Some are being told to pursue damages through the Health Resources & Services Administration’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program…
But there is a caveat – a submission needs to be made within one year of the first injection.
In the chaos of 2021 when doctors and medical systems often refused to believe patients and report adverse effects, or patronized the victims by saying that they would get better – just give it time.
A couple of weeks, a couple of months, nine months, and that year is up.
Then, again not publicized by VAERS or the CDC, it turns out that certain batches of the vaccines were more deadly than others.
The importance of VAERS (which is co-sponsored by the CDC) is that it is national in scope and receives data from doctors, medical institutions and individuals specifically so it can quickly provide an early warning of a safety problem. This time it failed.
That information should have gone out immediately to all organization that received those batches so that they could immediately follow up on all patterns who received those injections. And medical teams should have been activated to identify and ameliorate their symptoms.
On the other hand, more than 12.7 billion shots have been given, and millions of lives saved. Reducing infections also reduces the side effects to the disease itself, with thirty to fifty percent of patients reporting symptoms that lasted longer than six months.
And there has been a resultant relief to our medical infrastructure, not only the respirators and hospital beds but also on the nurses and doctors. And other frontline personnel and businesses.
Lives are again being saved that are not related to Covid, and fewer people entering hospitals and medical clinics for other purposes risk being infected.
But the outliers, those who suffered in silence so as not to scare people from getting vaccinated, deserve all the help the medical establishment can give that. Help that is currently being denied them.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
