From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Rep. Paul Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout Act would eliminate the general immunity vaccine manufacturers enjoy from vaccine injury civil suits under the federal National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.

Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona introduced a bill Thursday that would end pharmaceutical companies’ shield against liability for any potential harmful effects of the vaccines they manufacture.

 H.R. 9828, the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, would allow individuals to “bring a civil action against a vaccine administrator or manufacturer in a State or Federal court for damages arising from such injury or death,” according to an advance copy of the text provided to LifeSiteNews.

This would eliminate the general immunity vaccine manufacturers enjoy under the federal National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which instead establishes a compensation program for victims. Gosar’s bill allows for civil actions to be pursued regardless of whether a victim has filed a petition with the program, although ultimately receiving an award from one would invalidate a petition to the other.

“Government bureaucrats and scientists responsible for approving vaccines are in bed with Big Pharma, often owning pharmaceutical stocks, serving as consultants and receiving lucrative contracts from pharmaceutical companies that pressure them to produce favorable results which is in direct violation of federal law,” Gosar said in a press release. “Big Pharma doesn’t deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card for injuries caused by their harmful vaccines.”

The question of vaccine safety has become more mainstream in recent years due to the controversy surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time  vaccines usually take under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.

A large body of evidence identifies significant risks to the COVID vaccines. Among it, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 37,910 deaths, 217,931 hospitalizations, 21,917 heart attacks, and 28,602 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of September 6, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine  “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, and offered several theories for a causal link.

In Florida, an ongoing grand jury investigation into the vaccines’ manufacturers is slated to release a highly anticipated report on the shots, and a lawsuit by the state of Kansas has been filed accusing Pfizer of misrepresentation for calling the shots “safe and effective.”

Yet so far, Big Pharma has largely escaped accountability thanks to both the aforementioned 1986 law and the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005.

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the PREP Act empowers the federal government to “limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.” Near the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the Trump administration invoked the Act in declaring the virus a “public health emergency.”

Under this “sweeping” immunity, CRS explained, the federal government, state governments, “manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures,” and licensed or otherwise-authorized health professionals distributing those countermeasures are shielded from “all claims of loss” stemming from those countermeasures, with the exception of “death or serious physical injury” brought about through “willful misconduct,” a standard that, among other hurdles, requires the offender to have acted “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”

Many hope that by going after Big Pharma for misrepresentations surrounding their products rather than the products themselves, efforts like the Kansas suit can circumvent that hurdle to impose consequences on those responsible for the shots.

From the Brownstone Institute

During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up. In contrast to his claim, he said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.

Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drug store with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas. We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.

It is wildly obvious that high crime in the US is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they are worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days. They are there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.

This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years. Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.

Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.

Only a few weeks following the officious fact check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”

The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject. We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in US history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia, and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.

The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.

Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the US believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea? Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.

Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce. Just as the lockdowns and pandemic response acted out the Hollywood production of the movie Contagion – a perfect example of life imitating art – many activists today want to play a role in a real-life version of Valkyrie.

What’s next, the real-life version of “Civil War?”

There is private violence, public violence, and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are the desiderata of our times. This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope, and depth never before seen.

There were moments following March 12, 2020, and for the next two years, when there was no way to know for sure what was allowed and what was not, who was enforcing the orders (much less why), and what would be the consequences of noncompliance. We seem to have been subject to a range of coercive edicts but no one was sure of their source or the penalties for noncompliance. We were all introduced into the real-world workings of martial-law totalitarianism, which took forms we somehow did not expect. 

There is probably not a living soul without some bizarre story. I was thrown out of several stores for issues of mask compliance even though it was unclear whether there were mandates. It all depended on the day. There was one store where the proprietor was laughing about masks one day and enforcing them the next, following a threat from an angry customer that he would call the police.

Businesses that tried to reopen were closed by force. Violence was threatened against beachgoers. Churches gathered in secret. House parties were extremely risky. Later, refusing the shot meant being barred from the office, though once more it was not clear who precisely was enforcing the order and what the consequences would be for noncompliance.

When CISA – about which no one knew anything because it had been created only in 2018 – sent out its sheet about which industries were essential and which were nonessential, it was not clear precisely who would make the determination or what would happen if the judgment was wrong. Where was the enforcement arm? Sometimes it would appear – threatening visits from inspectors or checks by police – and other times not so much.

On that day, I was riding back from New York City on the Amtrak and suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the possibility that the train could be stopped and all passengers thrown into a quarantine camp. I sheepishly asked an employee about the possibility. He said “It’s possible but, in my view, unlikely.”

That’s what it was like for years ongoing. Even now the rules are unclear, and this is especially true when it comes to speech. We are merely feeling our way around a dark room. We are shocked when a vaccine-critical post stays up on Facebook. A video on YouTube that mentions censorship might stay up or be taken down. Most dissidents today have been demonetized from YouTube, which is nothing but an effort to financially ruin our best creators.

Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning. It is exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It is a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.

Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid, and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant vs the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there is no limit to it.

I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble, and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force. If they can do that, they can do anything.

Censorship has been so effective that it has changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute just held a private retreat for scholars, fellows, and special guests. One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.

This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris, and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results. One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.

What purpose are all these soft, hard, public, and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill-health are main features of the population, and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation. The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frédéric Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy, and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils. We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.

Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.