Brownstone Institute
Woody Harrelson Demonstrates the Pain of Truth
From the Brownstone Institute
In the course of an otherwise unmeaningful monologue on Saturday Night Live, Woody Harrelson let go with a remarkable theory of the Covid era. It was supposed to be hilarious but why should it be? In a world in which people were long over this, all the investigations have been done and the condemnations issued, and masses of people are fully cognizant of the underlying reality and all its horrors, his flippant remarks would have been funny.
Instead, the audience sat there in stunned silence. Are they even allowed to laugh? Woody Harrelson, with the intuition of a great comic, quickly moved to the next point and then closed out the opening.
In other words, it’s too soon, as they say. Too soon for laughter. But it’s not too soon for truth.
His words were pretty simple. He tells a fictional story of finding a movie script. In the plot, “the biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes, and people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.” He finishes by saying that such a movie could not be made because it is too implausible.
Ouch.
What’s strange about his observation is just how close to reality we are discovering that this story truly is. Initially, I was pretty sure that the lockdowns extended from a primitive intellectual error, the belief that respiratory pathogens like cooties could be made non-vexing by simply eliminating human contact. It’s a preposterous supposition and one deeply dangerous to the whole idea of human freedom.
When the masks came along, it struck me as tremendously obvious that their only purpose was to give people a means to believe that they were doing something, plus they provide an effective symbol of a panicked epoch that many people wanted to last as long as possible.
Even in April 2020, when the former head of virology for the Gates Foundation called me and told me very clearly that the whole idea of lockdowns was to wait for the vaccine, I could not process the information. This is because I knew based on my reading that there would be no sterilizing vaccine for a coronavirus. A new technology claiming to stop infection and spread would require many years of testing, maybe ten. We cannot stay locked down that long. Society would be in ruins.
The caller assured me that it was coming much sooner. I found that to be ridiculous, even dangerous. But I still had not made the connection: the purpose of the lockdown was to buy time for the production and distribution of a vaccine. An even darker interpretation of lockdowns would be that influential people need to preserve population-wide immunological naivete in order to demonstrate the value of vaccine technology.
As for media and politicians, the idea that they are bought off by Big Pharma is no longer in dispute. We’ve seen too many running reels of “brought to you by Pfizer” on every form of entertainment, and we’ve seen the receipts.
So Harrelson’s story is not entirely wrong. Indeed, in the guise of comedy, he has come closer to truth than any mainstream venue of entertainment has yet to reveal. And, as it turns out, his views are rather well developed, as we can tell from another interview.
There has been a conspiracy of silence and still is. The trauma was so deep and the politicization of the episode so intense that major voices are still silent about it.
Harrelson’s comment likely will not change that. The usual people will emerge to condemn him as a conspiracy theorist and probably claim that he has been listening too much to QAnon, whatever that is, or that he has been hypnotized by some re-pilled influencer. He has certainly made himself a target.
It is much safer never to speak out, never to point out the elephant in the room, never to disturb people’s illusions or upset powerful industrial interests. But he did it anyway. And yes, of course, there is so much more to say about the role of government and the military-style footing on which the whole of society in most parts of the world landed. And the carnage goes far beyond an annoying year or so or staying home. Education, culture, religion, and civil society itself was smashed.
As a Brownstone reader, you are likely ready to embrace the truth whatever it is. But for most of the rest of society in most countries, we still live in the land of taboo. And it is an intense one. The veil of myth that surrounds the great trauma of our lives needs rending at some point. Perhaps it starts just this way: with truth-telling fables in the guise of comedy that fall flat on shocked audiences who prefer to keep up the illusion that all of this happened in the name of public health.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Republished from RealClearPolitics
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