By Arjun Walia | The Pulse
World renowned medical professors and experts in the field have been experiencing censorship efforts by governments and Big Tech companies, like Facebook and YouTube, since the COVID pandemic began. Their heart felt feeling is that some of the information being put out to the public is not sound, and that meaningful scientific discussion needs to be had as it normally would during major events.
Regardless, their voices have been struck down. And it appears things are going to push further. The Rockefeller foundation just pledged 13.5 million to help combat “health misinformation.” Many would argue that what’s actually happening is a removal of some misinformation while also removing the sound voices of various scientists and doctors, as well as their research and opinions, simply because it challenges the “official” narrative we receive from government health authorities.
Facebook has already removed at least 16 million pieces of content from its platform and added warnings to approximately 167 million others. YouTube has removed nearly 1 million videos related to, according to them, “dangerous or misleading COVID-19 medical information.”
Two experts in the field who have been experienced this censorship first hand are Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard Professor and infectious disease expert, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a medical professor and MD from Stanford University.
Earlier on in the Pandemic, Kulldorff was censored by twitter for sharing his opinion that not everybody needed to take the vaccine. Keep in mind that he was not the only one. Sunetra Gupta, considered by many to be the world’s preeminent infectious disease experts, explained that the way COVID vaccines are being promoted and the idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is unscientific and suspicious.
Why? Well, there are many reasons to this logic. Let’s focus on children as an example.
According to Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, the “ill-advised” are pushing the vaccine on children. They explain,
For younger adults and children, it is a different story, as their mortality risk is extremely low. Even a slight risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction could tip the benefit-risk calculation, making the vaccine more harmful than beneficial. We have already observed rare problems with blood clots (J&J vaccine) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, Pfizer and Moderna) in younger people, and additional equally serious issues might still be found. Under such uncertainty, vaccine mandates are unethical.
Second, recovered COVID patients have strong long–lasting protection against severe disease if re-infected, and evidence about protective immunity after natural infection is at least as good as from the vaccines. Hence, it makes no sense to require vaccines for recovered patients. For them, it simply adds a risk, however small, without any benefit.
Third, the pandemic is global. In most countries, older high-risk people have not yet been vaccinated. With a global vaccine shortage, every dose given to a low-risk young adult in the United States means one fewer dose available for high-risk older people in Brazil, Congo, India or Mexico. When American universities and companies mandate vaccinations, they are not only failing the young in this country, they are also indirectly responsible for the death of older people in the developing world.
They conclude their article with the following statement,
Universities used to be bastions of enlightenment. Now many of them ignore basic benefit-risk analyses, a staple of the toolbox of scientists; they deny immunity from natural infection; they abandon the global international perspective for narrow nationalism; and they replace trust with coercion and authoritarianism. Mandating the COVID-19 vaccine thus threatens not only public health but also the future of science.
As pointed out by the professors, there is a wealth of data, and has been during this pandemic, that clearly indicates COVID does not warrant vaccine mandates for children. So why expose them to unnecessary risk?
During the first wave, Jonas F Ludvigsson, a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute published a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that out of 1,951,905 children, despite no lockdown and mask mandates, zero children died.
After he published this piece, an article published in the British Medical Journal on the 18th of February by Ingrid Torjesen explains,
The Swedish government has said that it will strengthen laws on academic freedom after a leading Swedish academic announced that he was quitting his work on covid-19 because of an onslaught of intimidating comments from people who disagreed or disliked his research findings… After the letter’s publication he was bombarded with angry messages through social media and email criticising the study and inferring that it and Ludvigsson were representative of the country’s covid-19 containment strategy.
With the data and evidence in hand, can one really make the argument that COVID is so dangerous that vaccine mandates are required for children? If one looks at the reports of COVID vaccine injuries in young people around the world, it further strengthens this point.
You can access some of those numbers in an article I published regarding Stephanie De Garay. She has been documenting her daughter’s journey after she became severely ill shortly after taking her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine during clinical trials.
The argument from an opposing perspective is that young people are a great source for community transmission, and the vaccine can help this. But does the data support this claim? According to many doctors asymptomatic spread is quite minimal. Dr. Bhattacharya explains,
The scientific evidence now strongly suggests that COVID-19 infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease to even close contacts than symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 per cent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 per cent of instances. A separate, smaller meta-analysis similarly found that asymptomatic patients are much less likely to infect others than symptomatic patients.
Asymptomatic individuals are an order of magnitude less likely to infect others than symptomatic individuals, even in intimate settings such as people living in the same household where people are much less likely to follow social distancing and masking practices that they follow outside the household. Spread of the disease in less intimate settings by asymptomatic individuals – including religious services, in-person restaurant visits, gyms, and other public settings – are likely to be even less likely than in the household.
Furthermore, natural immunity is being completely ignored, especially the robust science showing how strong it is. With COVID being such an infectious virus, many kids may already have robust protection. So why are vaccine mandates being imposed on children, and why are those who oppose these future mandates not given any attention by mainstream media?
This article (The “Ill Advised” Are Pushing To Vaccinate The Young – Claims Harvard & Stanford Medical Professors) was originally published on The Pulse and is published under a Creative Commons license.