“If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you…”
IF! By Rudyard Kipling
I don’t know anyone who could remain composed, speak with a soft and kindly voice in the face of the denunciation, lies, misunderstandings, and ad hominem attacks such as Robert F Kennedy Jr endured during yesterday’s Senate hearings. For example,
If it were me, despite 50 years of yoga and meditation practice, I would have been too paralyzed to speak coherently. In far less stressful situations than this, I have lost my rationality on many occasions.
And yet, I can see from a distance what might have been a perfect response, the response of a consummate martial artist who turns his opponent’s violent momentum into his own undoing. The response of an imperturbable Zen guru or an ascended master who radiates light and love at all times.
“Mr Sanders, Ms Warren — I hear you. Remember, that for the first 69 years of my life, I was a Democrat like you. I read the New York Times, I listened to NPR, I identified with progressives and democratic socialists who wanted the same things I wanted. I trusted the highly-trained doctors and scientists whose job it was to protect our health by their judgment.
I feel the righteous passion in your voices. At another time in my life, it might have been me saying those same things. I don’t blame you one iota for what you’re saying. I appreciate your commitment to the welfare of the people you represent. I appreciate your trust in the liberal news media and, above all, the scientific literature. When you have such trusted sources on your side, together with the consensus of the community of medical science, it’s appropriate to be sure of yourself, to be passionate in your defense of what you have every reason to believe are self-evident truths.
What I ask of you is a chance to sit down at leisure, in your office, on your schedule and with your staff scientific advisors present to help us both. I want a chance to show you the evidence that has convinced me that all those sources — the news, the medical journals, the scientific columnists have been misled by an insidious disinformation campaign, all funded by exorbitant pharmaceutical profits.
I believe in the liberal press, the pundits and, above all, the scientific journals. There is only one thing that I believe in more, and that is the data. The raw numbers from which scientists derive their analysis and the pundits interpret the scientists. It is the numbers themselves that dragged me from the faith that I had in trusted sources — the same sources you have trusted. It was inconceivable to me that all these sources could have been mistaken about the same thing in the same direction, marching in lockstep. It was inconceivable until it was proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt. It was proven by the numbers themselves. These are numbers so stark, so terrifyingly stark, that it doesn’t take a statistician to interpret them. They jump off the page and make you want to cry. They tell the story of a nation whose health has been sabotaged, whose reality has been subverted by those who profited from the sabotage.
I don’t have to tell you that America’s health has been declining for decades. You know that our life expectancy — the highest in the world when you and I were children — is now lower than any developed Western nation, lower than Chile and Albania and Poland, on a par with Cuba and China which were years behind us in the recent past.
I don’t have to tell you that we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and despite this, we rank 46th in infant mortality. Type 2 diabetes has always been a disease of portly, middle-aged people. In America, the rate of Type 2 diabetes among our children — yes children — is increasing at 5% per year, and has been increasing at that rate for decades.
You know that when the dust cleared and the COVID numbers were counted, America had one of the highest death tolls in the world — at 318 per 100,000. Sweden was widely derided because they never closed their schools or their restaurants or their places of worship, they never limited public gatherings even at the height of the pandemic. Life went on as before. Most people didn’t wear masks. The economy didn’t blink an eye. People accused the Swedish public health authorities of criminal malpractice, but in the end, their death rate was 247, more than 20% lower than ours in America. But Sweden is just the beginning. India’s public health system is a basket case, and people in the major cities are crowded on top of one another, many in unsanitary circumstances. India had a COVID death rate one eighth of ours in America. Subsaharan Africa has only rudimentary system of hospitals, but Congo and Nigeria each had COVID death rates one hundred times lower than the US. In our haughty superiority, are we willing to learn from these poor African nations? In large sections of Nigeria and Congo river blindness is endemic, and so the people get used to taking small, preventive doses of ivermectin every week. Yes, ivermectin. Horse paste. Our CDC told us, condescendingly, ‘You’all are not a horse. You’all are not a cow’. What was the consequence of that ad campaign?
The greatest controversy I have faced at HHS has been about vaccine policy. Almost everyone in this room believes that the COVID vaccines were a miracle of science. Developed in just 9 months, they were nevertheless remarkably safe and effective. We know this because trusted sources have told us again and again and again.
What they didn’t tell us was that in the Pfizer trials — the very data that Pfizer submitted to FDA in support of their successful bid for emergency authorization — in Pfizer’s own data, subjects were divided into a test group receiving the COVID vaccine and a control group of equal size receiving only an inert placebo. The executive summary said “95% effective”, and from that you would have been justified to think that for every death in the vaccine group, there were 20 deaths in the placebo group. In fact, more people died in the vaccine group than in the control group. Before the Pfizer vaccine ever left the test phase, we had reason to know that the vaccine was not 95% effective. Its effectiveness, in terms of avoided deaths, was in fact negative. In ordinary times, this would have been immediate grounds for FDA rejecting the petition, sending the Pfizer scientists back to the drawing board.
One more set of numbers I want to show you before we agree to a longer meeting to go over the data in detail, at your convenience, in your Senate office. VAERS is a joint project of FDA and CDC. For 40 years, VAERS has been collecting data, voluntarily submitted, about suspected side effects from vaccines. With hundreds of millions of vaccine doses every year, there were about 300 deaths nationwide reported to VAERS, a pretty consistent number, year after year. In 2020, there were 420 deaths from all vaccines put together. In 2021, there were more than 20,000 deaths reported to VAERS from the COVID mRNA vaccines. That’s 50 times as many deaths from the COVID vaccines compared to all other vaccines put together. Isn’t that something we’d want to look into together? Isn’t that something we want to avoid for the approval process in the future.
Senators, I am grateful to you for your independent thinking, and grateful that, like me, you are passionate about public health. I invite you — let’s sit down together, look at the numbers, and see if we can resolve the issues that separate us.
Whatever we decide together, you will always have my respect and my admiration. It is entirely appropriate that you oversee the work I am doing at HHS. It is part of your job. We’re on the same team. We share the same values and the same goals. I invite you — let’s sit down together and see if we can agree on the data and what they mean.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thanks for reading Unauthorized Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
