The New York Times tries to quell growing vaccine criticism

Is an article by Times Reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, signaling a shift by legacy media? Or is this actually another attempt to bury the truth until the next election cycle?

NY Times

I am sure that this article, “Thousands Believe the Covid Vaccine Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?”, will get a lot of attention in the next few days, so I will be brief.

Mandavilli has been covering the pandemic response for the Times and has become, in many ways, the voice of reason around medical matters for their vast, left-leaning, educated readership who equate doing one’s own research with reading the Grey Lady religiously.

She says a lot about the kind of coverage her publication has been responsible for during the last four years right up front in the title.

“Thousands Believe the Covid Vaccine Harmed Them”.

Thousands.

Where does she get that number from?

I guess by thousands, she means thousands of thousands. After all, there’s over a million adverse events reported in VAERS. Over three hundred thousand of them being Serious Adverse Events. There are strong arguments that SAEs are underreported by a factor of 40 in that database. That means that there are likely at least 12 million people in this country alone that “believe” they have been seriously harmed.

But VAERS isn’t reliable. She writes:

“It is the largest database, but also the least reliable: Reports of side effects can be submitted by anyone and are not vetted, so they may be subject to bias or manipulation.”

True. It has never been reliable, primarily because, as she points out herself, the CDC has never shown interest in vetting any of the reports in it. But why do Covid vaccine adverse event reports in the first two years since they became available outnumber all those submitted for all other vaccines since the system’s inception combined (VAERS was established in 1990)? It’s not a question worth asking for Mandavilli, winner of The Times’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her coverage of the pandemic.

“Is Anyone Listening”? Yes. Just not you Apoorva, at least not until now.

Is this article signaling a shift in the way legacy media chooses to cover what is arguably the top one or two stories of the century? Or is it a crafty way to diffuse a political landmine for both major party candidates? Let’s take a closer look at how the Times is telling the story.

First, Mandavilli gives the reader an inaccurate scale of the problem without lying. Saying that thousands believe they have been injured is like that saying that hundreds of American soldiers were killed in WWII. Both are technically true statements that minimize the scale of the issue by a factor of a thousand.

Next the article forges into new territory for the Times. Among the throngs of uneducated antivax grifters whom this publication has denigrated for three years, the Times now acknowledges that there is a subset of reasonable people who believe they have been injured. Mandavilli gives us some examples:

There’s Dr. Buddy Creech who ran vaccine trials at Vanderbilt and developed tinnitus and a racing heart after getting jabbed. Interestingly, he says that the symptoms were much like what he suffered from Covid back in March, 2020. Yet he acknowledges that “research may ultimately find that most reported side effects are unrelated to the vaccine” and that “many can be caused by Covid itself”.

Hunh? Why did Mandavilli’s editors include such an utterance? Research may? Most side effects unrelated? Many can be caused by Covid too? It’s purely speculative and nonspecific, but worthy of print because he is open to the idea that reported side effects may not be due to the shot. He’s no longer irredeemable in the eyes of the average Times reader now. He’s also involved with running vaccine trials, so he knows something about vaccines, except, of course with regard to the futility of vaccinating oneself after being exposed naturally.

There’s Renee France, a physical therapist who developed Bell’s Palsy and Shingles after her shot.

There’s Shaun Barcavage a Nurse Practitioner who developed symptoms similar to Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), tinnitus and painful stinging in his eyes, face and genitals.

Michelle Zimmerman, PhD was a previously physically fit and highly productive neuroscientist who now lives with her parents after suffering brain damage which resulted from her vaccination with the J&J product. Interestingly, Mandavilli never mentions which Covid vaccines any of her subjects were exposed to except for Zimmerman. Why? Is it because the J&J vaccine became wildly unpopular at the end of 2021 when the US called for a pause in its use, and therefore only a minority of her readership would fear that they made the same mistake Zimmerman did? Those folks can be comforted by the fact that Zimmerman believes that her injuries were due to contamination and not the product itself. Once again, pure speculation with no mention of how or why she came to that conclusion.

The most interesting of all is Dr. Gregory Poland, head of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group and Editor-in-Chief of “Vaccine” who reported publicly that he suffered debilitating tinnitus after his second dose two years ago. To my knowledge, this is the first time his injury story was mentioned in The New York Times. Yet the Times has cited Poland numerous times as an authority who deemed the vaccines incredibly safe and effective, even in children.

Just over a year ago I attended the World Vaccine Congress in D.C. There I had the opportunity to listen and speak to him directly. In the first plenary session, which he moderated, he used his considerable oratory skills to drive the audience into a frenzy about how amazing these shots were and how frustrating it was to see vaccine hesitancy in the public.

I was shocked, as I was well aware of his vaccine induced condition which appeared a year earlier. I assumed that he had since recovered. Why else would he be so supportive of these products and so dismissive of the vaccine hesitant? He even joked that it might be useful to start a rumor that Ivermectin is laced with "microchips".

Three days later I approached him at the end of the conference. He stunningly admitted to my face that the tinnitus had not relented and that his life was significantly impacted ever since. WTF?

In that same session, Peter Marks, head of CBER, scoffed at the vaccine hesitant, stating that he was no longer tolerant of hearing anybody raise concerns about safety issues. Another shocking statement from someone who sits on the FDA's advisory committee. What exactly is his role, then, in regulating these products??

But in her article, Mandavilli reports that when Marks was asked at a recent congressional hearing whether the nation’s vaccine-safety surveillance was sufficient, he said, “I do believe we could do better.”

Misinformation is a Big Problem

Mandavilli explains that getting to the bottom of things has been difficult because of “Pervasive Misinformation”:

“The rise of the anti-vaccine movement has made it difficult for scientists, in and out of government, to candidly address potential side effects, some experts said. Much of the narrative on the purported dangers of Covid vaccines is patently false, or at least exaggerated, cooked up by savvy anti-vaccine campaigns.”

Okay, but what parts of the narrative are patently false? Strokes? Heart attacks? Myopericarditis? Transverse Myelitis? Menstrual Irregularities? The rise in all-cause mortality in nearly every age group since 2021?

Isn't it possible that the antivax sentiment is the result of the widespread injuries and not something that has arisen out of “savvy anti-vaccine campaigns.”?

Citing antivax sentiment and misinformation as the obstacles to obtaining clarity on vaccine safety is not just absurd, it speaks to the absence of any interest our health authorities and the New York Times have in confronting the truth about the technology they have championed from the start.

The experts Mandavilli cites are basically saying that scientists cannot be candid about vaccine dangers because people might think that they are dangerous. This apparently is reasonable to the editors at the Times who search the globe to find “All The News That’s Fit to Print”.

Not ever specifying which claims are unsubstantiated, she instead goes right at RFK Jr., implying that he is using this issue to catapult him into the Oval office:

“Questions about Covid vaccine safety are core to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign”

It’s true that Kennedy is demanding that vaccines undergo the same standards for safety testing as the medicines we take. Couldn’t Kennedy’s rise in popularity be a sign that the public is calling for a referendum on the wildly ineffective and harmful pandemic response which included very real dangers from the widely administered mRNA products?

Nope. Quoting Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University:

“The sheer nature of misinformation, the scale of misinformation, is staggering, and anything will be twisted to make it seem like it’s not just a devastating side effect but proof of a massive cover-up,”

Sharfstein is letting us know how the Times is approaching this. Real, devastating side effects exist, but that could never be proof of a massive cover-up in his eyes. What if there were millions of cases of devastating side effects and only a few were being acknowledged by health authorities? That sounds like a cover-up to me. This is why the scale of the problem is deliberately minimized in the title and throughout the content of the article. If there were a cover up, publications like the New York Times would be complicit in it.

Demanding the CDC to investigate just a subset of the Serious Adverse Events in their own reporting system is the only way to understand the scale of the problem. Somehow this never occurs to Mandavilli, even though she has spent “more than a year talking to dozens of experts in vaccine science, policymakers and people who said they had experienced serious side effects after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine”.

Florida Surgeon General and Physician/Scientist Joseph Ladapo is also targeted because he called for a halt on Covid vaccination in his state because of “debunked”: theories around “altered DNA”.

Six months ago Dr. Ladapo cited evidence of the presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA which could “pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells”. Mandavilli did not offer any citation that debunked his claims. Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD is wrong because the NY Times award winning journalist says so. That’s how matters of science are decided.

Conclusion

In her defense, she acknowledges that more research needs to be done and that there is little to no means for compensation for the vaccine injured. The problem is that this May 2024, and the vaccine injured and notable researchers have been screaming this for nearly three and half years.

In my opinion this was not an earnest attempt to bring light to an issue that is starting to emerge. This is an effort to placate the subset of Times readers who are starting to understand that vaccine injuries are real without enraging other readers who have been deeply programmed to fear antivax misinformation above anything else. In summary:

1. There are far more than just thousands of people who believe that they have been harmed by these shots. Pfizer’s own post-marketing surveillance data showed that there were over 40,000 people who directly contacted the vaccine manufacturer about adverse events that they suffered, 1/2 of them Serious. These reports were unsolicited and occurred just two months into the vaccine campaign.

2. Mandavilli excuses our health agencies and doctors from any responsibility to be definitive about vaccine injuries because “There is no central repository of vaccine recipients, nor of medical records, and no easy way to pool these data.” Okay. So why are the reported benefits of these vaccines so crystal clear?

3. It is obvious that the New York Times is interested in protecting our health agencies from any alleged failures. Why would an investigative journalist not ask why the CDC wasn’t vetting the adverse events that are reported to them?

4. It’s amazing to me that Mandavilli finds it completely reasonable that one of the world’s biggest authorities on vaccines and proponents of the Covid shots, Dr. Poland, is still injured despite having touting their safety on her own publication numerous times, even after he sustained his harm.

5. Mandavilli now acknowledges that the vaccine injured have been gaslighted and accepts an anemic apology from Dr. Janet Woodcock, head of the FDA for most of the pandemic who says, “I feel bad for those people, I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously. I’m disappointed in myself, I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.” Really? What motivated doctors and health officials to ignore and gaslight the injured for three years? Could it be the New York Times themselves? Here’s just a taste of what you get when you put “antivaxxers make false claims New York Times” into Google:

I believe that this will be the first of many attempts the New York Times will make to reconcile reality with the fantasy that they have created in their readers minds.

What are your thoughts? Why is it coming out now? Please leave your comments.