Brownstone Institute
Had You Known, Would You Have Taken the Jab?
From the Brownstone Institute
” the company skewed the public debate in order to induce Americans to take its shots. The efforts stripped us of the right to informed consent, deceiving us on purported benefits while hiding established risks “
Would 92% of American adults have gotten a Covid shot had they known the “vaccines” only offered a 0.85% reduction in risk? Would young men have taken the jab if they had known it did not prevent transmission?
Americans came to understand that the media campaigns supporting the shots were fraudulent. The touted benefits – preventing infection and transmission – were lies. In response, fewer than one in five Americans elected to receive “boosters” despite multi-billion dollar propaganda campaigns.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has now brought a suit to bring accountability for the fraud that resulted in record profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Paxton filed a complaint alleging that Pfizer misrepresented Covid vaccine efficacy and “conspired to censor public discourse” in violation of Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).
While Big Pharma enjoys immense government-provided insulation from legal liability for vaccine injuries, it cannot lie to promote those products.
Paxton alleges that the $75 billion Pfizer has raked in through sales of Covid vaccines were the “direct and proximate result” of the company’s deceit.
The DTPA requires Paxton prove two questions to succeed in his case. First, he must establish that the company lied or failed to disclose known information concerning its Covid vaccine. Second, he must prove that the company’s fraud was designed to promote sales of the shots.
Brownstone previously analyzed the applicability of the DTPA against Moderna. Now, Paxton’s lawsuit threatens Pfizer with fines of $10 million as well as awards of “restitution, damages, or civil penalties.”
Paxton’s case argues that Pfizer deceived the public on three issues: (1) the efficacy of the vaccine; (2) whether the shots reduced the risk of transmission; and (3) the company’s efforts to “censor[] persons who threatened to disseminate the truth.”
In each instance, the company skewed the public debate in order to induce Americans to take its shots. The efforts stripped us of the right to informed consent, deceiving us on purported benefits while hiding established risks.
Efficacy
First, Paxton targets the now-familiar falsehoods that the company, led by CEO Albert Bourla, touted, including that the shots had “95% efficacy” and worked against mutations of the virus.
Paxton’s critiques do not require the benefit of hindsight. Pfizer’s own data showed that the vaccine was merely 0.85% effective in reducing the likelihood that an individual would contract Covid (known as absolute risk reduction). Put differently, Pfizer’s clinical data showed that “preventing one COVID-19 case required vaccinating 119.”
Despite this unconvincing data, Bourla claimed there was “initial evidence of our vaccine’s ability to prevent Covid-19.” Bourla later said that the shots had “100%” efficacy rates against mutations of the virus, including the Delta variant. Not only was this a lie, Pfizer never tested the shots against the variants. Still, in May 2021 he baselessly claimed that “no variant identified so far…escapes the protection of our vaccine.”
Three months later, the company issued a press release saying that boosters would “preserve and even exceed the high levels of protection against…relevant variants.” Shortly thereafter, the United States exercised its option to purchase 500 million more doses of Pfizer’s Covid vaccines.
These lies clearly and directly induced Americans to take products with illusory benefits. The claims were fabricated, and they led to billions of dollars in windfalls for Bourla and Pfizer.
Transmission
Pfizer’s marketing relied on convincing healthy young adults and teenagers to get shots despite the negligible risk that Covid posed to them. Bourla used transmission to launch a moral blackmail campaign. He told teenagers that they should get the shots to “protect…their loved ones.” He later tweeted, “widespread vaccination is a critical tool to help stop transmission.”
Under oath, company officials later admitted that they had never tested whether the vaccines reduced transmission.
In October 2022, Pfizer spokeswoman Janine Small appeared at a European Parliament hearing. “Was the Pfizer Covid vaccine tested on stopping transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” asked Dutch MEP Rob Roos. “No!” Small responded emphatically. “We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market; and from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.”
Under the DTPA, Paxton must prove that the company misrepresented information regarding the vaccine in an effort to promote sales of its products. With the vast majority of Americans under 70 facing zero substantial risk from Covid infection, the lies regarding transmission were critical to expand the customer base.
This deception underpinned the mandates in 2021 as government and corporate officials insisted that vaccination was necessary to keep healthy adults’ coworkers and neighbors safe. By December 2021, Pfizer’s stock price had doubled from the onset of the pandemic in February 2020.
Censorship
As Pfizer committed to deceiving the public, it had to ensure that journalists would not uncover its corporate misdeeds. Paxton’s suit outlines how the company “sought to intimidate and silence…journalist Alex Berenson.”
As Berenson reported on the efficacy, or lack thereof, of mRNA “vaccines,” Pfizer Board Member Dr. Scott Gottlieb colluded with Twitter to silence his reporting. In August 2021, Berenson tweeted that Pfizer’s vaccine “doesn’t stop infection…[o]r transmission,” and had a“limited window of efficacy.” Despite the veracity of these statements, Gottlieb wrote to Twitter officials encouraging them to ban Berenson’s heresy.
Hours later, Berenson received a permanent ban (he was later reinstated following a lawsuit). Now, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is a defendant in Berenson’s case against the Biden Administration, which accuses White House officials of colluding with private actors in Big Tech and Big Pharma to usurp Berenson’s First Amendment rights.
Paxton’s case also outlines how Pfizer worked to silence scientists who discussed the benefits of natural immunity, calling the rhetoric “corrosive” to the public’s confidence in their products. The aim was simple: shield Americans from the truth so that they would continue to get the product.
A Rare Opportunity to Strike Back
To this point, “victories” against the hegemon that emerged in 2020 have been defensive in nature. Groups have fended off vaccine mandates, states have resisted calls for renewed lockdowns, and journalists have begun to expose the corruption that shattered Western civilization.
These efforts, though important, have failed to bring accountability against those who usurped our civil liberties and pillaged the national treasury. Paxton’s suit strikes at the heart of the corruption behind the Covid regime: how their success required mass deception and their profits depended on lies.
Though $10 million in fines is little compared to the $75 billion in revenue that Pfizer raked in from vaccines alone, the suit signifies that the resistance is at last on the offensive.
Big Pharma sees this is a grave threat, and its lobbying forces led a failed impeachment effort against Paxton this fall. They threw him out of his office, and disabled his ability to do his job that the voters sent him to do. Turning up nothing, the legislature rejected the entire drama. Now he is back and working and this is the result: accountability at last.
The steep drop in demand for Covid shots reveals how Pfizer depended upon fraud to promote their most lucrative product. Once Americans knew the truth, demand dropped by over 75%.
Now, Paxton’s suit brings that fraud to trial.
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Brownstone Institute
The Revolution of 2024: A Rare Victory for Anti-Establishment Fury
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
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