“We Had Too Little Caution & Too Much Optimism” CDC Director On COVID Vaccines
The CDC director is now making statements many journalists and scientists were vilified for during the pandemic!
By Arjun Walia | The Pulse
CDC director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, recently made an appearance at her alma mater, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
When asked about COVID vaccines, she stated the following,
“I can tell you where I was when the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective, the vaccine. So many of us wanted to be hopeful, so many of us wanted to say, okay, this is our ticket out, right, now we’re done. So I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I really do think all of us wanted this to be done
Nobody said waning, when you know, oh this vaccines going to work. Oh well, may it’ll work – (laughs) it’ll wear off.
Nobody said what if the next variant doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s not as potent as against the next variant.”
The idea that nobody said that the vaccines may not be “95%” effective and that protection would wane is simply not true. There were many experts in the field making this point, hinting to the fact that it could be a strong possibility. We were heavily marketed with the 95% figure while the population wasn’t being made aware that they offered one percent (or less) absolute risk reduction.
Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate editor at the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a piece issuing a word of caution about the supposed “95% effective” COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna in 2020.
On November 18, 2020, CNN ran this story by reporters Maggie Fox and Amanda Sealy, “Pfizer and BioNTech say final analysis shows coronavirus vaccine is 95% effective with no safety concerns.”
This is the story Walensky says influenced her thinking. CNN simply published the facts, figures, and quotes from Pfizer’s press release sent out earlier that day: “Pfizer and BioNTech Conclude Phase 3 Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate, Meeting All Primary Efficacy Endpoints.”
CNN’s article contains no independent experts analysing Pfizer’s statement. It’s quite clear, and has been for years, that outside interests, like Big Pharma, influence policy at federal health agencies like the CDC.
This has been going on for quite some time. In 2016 group of more than a dozen senior scientists have lodged an ethics complaint alleging the federal agency is being influenced by corporate and political interests.
“We are a group of scientists at CDC that are very concerned about the current state of ethics at our agency. It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests. It seems that our mission and Congressional intent for our agency is being circumvented by some of our leaders. What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviours. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimated and presses to do things they now are not right.
We have representatives from across the agency that witness this unacceptable behaviour. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units. These questionable and unethical practices threaten to undermine our credibility and reputation as a trusted leader in public health.”
Since last year, Walensky has been criticized for ignoring vaccine experts who advise the CDC and who have urged greater caution in vaccine recommendations.
Throughout the pandemic the citizenry has been bombarded with inaccurate messages from legacy media and politicians.
Several researchers from various academic institutions in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada have published a new paper in pre-print form titled, “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns may cause more Harm than Good.” It provides multiple examples of these misleading messages.
Perhaps another reason why “nobody said” as Walensky explains is because they weren’t allowed to. Scientists, journalists and other researchers who shared these sentiments and have been sharing them throughout the pandemic have been heavily censored, ridiculed and “fact-checked.”
For example, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, in response to Walensky’s comments wrote [n]obody could possibly have known variants might be a problem,” referencing a tweet he posted on Jan. 20, 2021, where he stated:
“The vaccines probably don’t work against at least one new variant and they’re going to want you to get vaccinated against next fall.”
Like so many others, Twitter banned Berenson for publishing “COVID misinformation,” which led him to file a federal lawsuit against the platform.
It’s quite ironic that now, top government health officials are openly making the same type of statements which many other scientists, journalists and doctors were making. The only difference is they were, again, suspended from social media platforms and ridiculed.
This type of “fact checking” continues today. In December 2021, the then editor-in-chief of the BMJ, Fiona Godlee, alongside Kamran Abbasi, an executive editor of the BMJ succeeded Godlee on January 1st 2022, published a piece in the journal criticizing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook “fact checkers.” The piece was published on the Nov 2, 2021.
In it, Godlee and Abbasi criticize Facebook for putting a “fake news” label on an article published in the BMJ by award winning investigative journalist Paul Thacker, who was commissioned by the BMJ to write up a story about a former employee of Ventavia named Brook Jackson. Ventavia is a contract research company that helped carry out the main Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial for adults, and Jackson exposed fraud and data manipulation during the trials.
This story continues to be ignored. You can read more about it here.
Emails between federal agencies and Facebook employees from Nov 2020 obtained and released by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) even show how the social media giant was guided in its messaging surrounding COVID-19 by the CDC.
In another admission, Walensky claimed “the science” is, in fact, not foolproof — a statement that contradicts the prevailing narrative of “follow the science” uttered repeatedly by public officials and numerous media outlets over the past two years.
Political and public discourse normalized stigma against people who did not vaccinate, which has been intertwined into the tone and framing of big media articles. We were bombarded with messaging that this is what we have to do to “return to normal.”
Walensky’s comments also contradict the messaging humanity was bombarded with to “trust the science” and that the “science is settled.”
Along with this messaging came the complete un-acknowledgement of COVID vaccine injuries and the science behind natural immunity, which has now been shown to last up to 20 months post infection, with the possibility of this type of protection lasting for a lifetime.
We now know that COVID vaccine protection wanes quite fast for original and new variants. For children, as reported by The New York Times on Feb. 28, 2022, the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were aware that COVID vaccines were only 12% effective in children under the age of 5, but withheld this information from the public in advance of an expert meeting that had been scheduled for Feb. 15, 2022. The FDA cancelled the meeting at the last minute.
The point is, the science that has been and was released calling into question COVID vaccine safety, efficacy and necessity, as well as the extreme harm caused by lockdowns and other mandates was completely ignored, censored and ridiculed throughout the pandemic.
Why? Is it because these measures were being used to serve some ulterior motive besides protecting the citizenry? These are important questions to ask and ponder. It’s not fair that so many people, journalists, scientists and doctors were vilified for what’s become quite obvious to everyone now.
This article (“We Had Too Little Caution & Too Much Optimism” CDC Director on COVID Vaccines) was originally published on The Pulse and is published under a Creative Commons license.