What Happened Today: December 15, 2022
DeSantis does due diligence; Google wants Army organs; France goes to the final
The Big Story
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate potential “crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” According to DeSantis, and his surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who made the announcement at a COVID-19 vaccine roundtable on Tuesday, the panel will investigate what drug companies like Pfizer and Moderna might have known about the actual efficacy, and safety and potential side effects, of their products. “The pharmaceutical industry has a notorious history of misleading the public for financial gain. Questions have been raised regarding the veracity of the representations made by the pharmaceutical manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines, particularly with respect to transmission, prevention, efficacy, and safety,” the petition reads. With the creation of such a jury, DeSantis said that Florida would be able to obtain trial data that the companies have thus far withheld from prominent researchers.
At the same roundtable, DeSantis also announced the creation of the Public Health Integrity Committee to serve as a state-level counterpoint to the CDC, an agency DeSantis repeatedly sparred with throughout the pandemic. His similarly heterodox surgeon general, Dr. Ladapo, said a more thorough investigation was needed into the cause of sudden deaths of young males who’d received the COVID-19 vaccination, citing a preliminary study by his office that found an increased risk of cardiac death among 18- to 39-year-old males who’d received the vaccination. Responding to the DeSantis plan, Dr. Anthony Fauci, outgoing head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN, “We have a vaccine that unequivocally is highly effective and safe, and has saved literally millions of lives … What’s the problem with vaccines?”
Some of the problems with COVID-19 vaccines have already entered the courts. Brook Jackson, a contractor who helped run COVID-19 clinical trials for Pfizer before she reported widespread procedural violations in a whistleblower complaint to the Food and Drug Administration, alleged in a 2021 lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that the misconduct she observed could have “compromised its (Pfizer’s) entire clinical trial.” Speaking to The Scroll, Jackson lauded the DeSantis decision. “The Federal False Claims lawsuit filed in January 2021, alleges that due to Pfizer’s scheme, millions of Americans have received a misbranded mRNA product that is not as safe or effective as represented, yet the U.S. Department of Justice refuses to investigate,” Jackson said. “The People deserve the truth, transparency through this process, and we demand accountability.”
Read More: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/desantis-florida-grand-jury-investigate-coronavirus-vaccine-wrongdoing
In the Back Pages: Vaccines Never Prevented the Transmission of COVID
The Rest
→ The Brits can’t catch a break. Their Queen died, they’re on Prime Minister No. 3 since September, pension funds almost went up in flames, and now postal workers and railroad employees are on strike. Nurses, driving-test examiners, baggage handlers, bus drivers, road crews, and energy-company workers might soon join the strike, which is being driven largely by the fact that public sector wages have only increased 2.2% while inflation has risen as high as 11%. “The last thing [workers] want to do is take strike action, but the government has left them with no choice,” said Rachel Harrison, national secretary of the GMB Union. A recent YouGov poll found 59% of people support striking railway workers and 52% support the nurses. Parliament, meanwhile, has turned the strikes into a political showdown. “After 12 years of Tory failure, winter has arrived for our public services, and we’ve got a prime minister who has curled up in a ball and gone into hibernation,” Opposition and Labour Leader Keir Starmer told Parliament. Conservatives have shot back, accusing Starmer of “protecting their [Labour’s] paymasters” in the unions. Worried that the conservatives might chip away at his party’s current lead in the polls, Starmer has advised top Labour leaders to not appear publicly with the striking workers.
→ Another incurable cancer, cured. A 13-year-old girl in England afflicted with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia was cured this year with a new experimental treatment. Doctors had already tried chemotherapy and even a bone marrow transplant to cure the aggressive cancer—which causes the body’s own immune T-cells to proliferate—with no success. The only option left was a nascent, cutting-edge technology known as base editing, which allows scientists to take healthy cells, edit their genetic code, and instruct them to destroy the cancerous cells throughout the body. After the treatment, part of the patient’s immune system was essentially erased, and it had to be rebuilt with another bone marrow transplant. But so far, she’s cancer free and doing well. Dr. David Liu, who helped pioneer the technology, said that the advancement could have wide-ranging impacts and that it was one of the “key steps toward taking control of our genomes.”
→ Goal of the Day:
France will return to their second consecutive World Cup final on Sunday after ending Morocco’s Cinderella story with a 2-0 victory on Wednesday. The French proved they weren’t a one-trick pony after their 2018 World Cup victory, with a decisive win over the Moroccans. Randal Kolo Muani, who came into the game at the 78-minute mark, scored goal No. 2 on his very first touch of the game, in minute 79. France will face all-time great Lionel Messi and his Argentina squad in the final. Messi has never won a World Cup and has said this will be his last attempt. Didier Deschamps, manager of the French squad, said his boys are ready to do battle with the giant: “We are going to try to counter Messi’s threat and stop him influencing the game.” While we at The Scroll love the drama of French politics, and the genius of French literature, Argentina holds a special place in our hearts—and let’s be honest, they could use some good news. Vamos, Argentinos!
→ Do the benefits of turning over our health data to massive private companies outweigh the costs? That’s the question the leaders of the United States Joint Pathology Center, which falls under the Defense Department—and contains the largest library of human tissue on earth, collected from members of the U.S. military—have been wrestling with while being courted by Google for their holdings. Google is already an aggressive aggregator of human data, securing a deal with a Catholic healthcare system that provided the tech giant with data on millions of patients across 21 states. So when Google became interested in partnering with the government to digitize the 31 million blocks of human tissue and 55 million slides at the JPC, it put the officials there in a bind. While the influx of money and AI know-how could prove invaluable in solving some of the world’s greatest health issues, Google was asking for so much data that it could potentially identify individual service members, a huge privacy violation. After talks fell apart, the JPC partnered with Johns Hopkins University, only to find Google maneuvering in Congress to re-insert itself into the future of the JPC.
Read More: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-military
→ The nationwide mental health crisis afflicting middle and high school students is spilling over to college campuses. A new lawsuit filed against Yale by attorneys from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law on behalf of two students argues that the university’s policies on mental health violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by limiting students’ leave, creating barriers for re-entry, or even sending students away for revealing their struggles. Similar suits have been brought against Brown, Northern Michigan, and Princeton. A 2018 lawsuit against Stanford led to the school changing how it treats students who go on medical leave: It now allows them to remain in student housing even if they aren’t taking classes. Now Yale might follow Stanford’s lead, which could instigate more colleges to heed a chorus of mental health experts who want schools to be more accommodating toward the growing number of students who report having mental health problems and want to receive treatment while continuing their studies.
→ Did somebody want to make something go away forever on Tuesday in New York City? In a three-alarm fire on Tuesday, an NYPD warehouse burned in Red Hook. All manner of evidence was destroyed in the fire, leaving the scene a “soggy ruin,” according to The New York Times. Fire officials are investigating the cause of the blaze, but they did confirm that everything inside the warehouse was destroyed or damaged, a trove of DNA material included. The main impact would be on cold cases, the department said, as no material for pending or active cases is stored in the warehouse. Some sources have told the New York Post that so far the evidence points to an accident, but no official cause has been released.
→ In August 2020, in the heart of the COVID-19 panic, Jerry Seinfeld wrote an op-ed in The New York Times attacking those who said New York was “over.” Seinfeld was blunt: “It’s not.” But it is going to look a lot different. At least in Manhattan. A panel convened by Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul released a plan for the post-pandemic island on Wednesday that includes a lot more green and public spaces in neighborhoods that were formerly defined by their business-driven hustle and bustle. As vacancies in Manhattan office space inch up to nearly 22%, the city is trying to reinvent itself as a more people-centric landscape, complete with continued outdoor seating at restaurants, a pedestrian promenade around Grand Central, and zoning changes that allow for more housing and child care closer to where people work. It sounds lovely, but if they really want to get us all back to Manhattan, the panel may want to consider kicking out all the foreign oligarchs who bought every square foot of the city in recent years.
→ Staffed by FBI plants and run by censorious executives, Twitter has been revealed in recent weeks to be both craven and incompetent. Now a former Twitter manager, Ahmad Abouammo, has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for sharing user data with Saudi Arabia. Abouammo handled relations with journalists and celebrities in the Arab world for the company and apparently accepted a $42,000 watch and a pair of $100,000 wire transfers in exchange for helping the Saudi government track down “users of interest.” While his attorneys pleaded for mercy, the U.S. prosecutors wanted a sentence that would “deter others in the technology and social media industry from selling out the data of vulnerable users.”
→ Saddest Video of the Year:
Former President Donald J. Trump announced yesterday that he would be making a “big announcement” on Thursday. Well, here it is. And even for the one-time host of The Apprentice, it’s hard to stomach. Trump is selling $99 NFT trading cards of himself in various heroic poses in some kind of sci-fi comic book aesthetic. Perhaps he’s more concerned than he wants to let on about the upcoming race against Gov. Ron DeSantis, and now he’s trying to grab whatever cash he can still squeeze out of his fan base. Unlike Bill, Hillary, and Barack, who all made millions of dollars by giving private speeches once they were out of office, Trump, ever the populist, won’t ever make the big bucks at Davos but appears happy to fleece his hard-core supporters.
TODAY IN TABLET:
America’s Least-Wanted ‘Negro’ Critic Rides Again by Paul Devlin
‘Victory is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch’
Surprised by Joy by Ben Greenfield
Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday without preparation. Here’s why.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Vaccines Never Prevented the Transmission of COVID
Allowing zealots to censor news in the name of ‘science’ is a danger to public health
In late 2021 and early 2022, it was commonplace for journalists and public intellectuals to demonize and shame “the unvaccinated,” a group that in the United States was disproportionately low income. The New York Times ran pieces like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,” and “Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk.” The Los Angeles Timespublished a column titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes—but may be necessary.” An opinion piece called “The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us” appeared in Bloomberg, and The Washington Post printed a piece called “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”
CNN’s Don Lemon commented that people refusing the vaccines were being “idiotic and nonsensical.” He argued that it was time to “start shaming them” or “leave them behind.” Noam Chomsky, a self-described libertarian socialist, said unvaccinated people should remove themselves from society and be “isolated.” Asked how they would get food that way, he answered, “Well actually, that’s their problem.”
In Canada, columnists for the Toronto Star proclaimed, “Vaccine resisters are lazy and irresponsible—we need vaccine passports now to protect the rest of us” and “The unvaccinated cherish their freedom to harm others. How can we ever forgive them?” In the U.K., the Daily Mail contended, “It’s time to punish Britain’s 5 million vaccine refuseniks,” and Piers Morgan, a British presenter on TalkTV, suggested that unvaccinated people should not be allowed access to the country’s National Health Service.
Internationally, several politicians threatened to reimplement restrictions and told the public that “the unvaccinated” were at fault. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said unvaccinated people “are very often misogynistic and racist,” and asked, “Do we tolerate these people?” President Joe Biden said that his “patience [was] wearing thin” and that we needed to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” Michael Gunner, chief minister of the Northern Territory in Australia, stated that even if you are vaccinated, “if you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that 5 million French people who remained unvaccinated were “not citizens.”
Across parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, unvaccinated people were fired from their jobs, excluded from higher education, banned from many sectors of public life, denied organ transplants, and even punished by judges in probation hearings and child custody cases. Meanwhile, COVID cases continued to rise in many highly vaccinated countries with vaccine passports and other restrictions in place.
Vaccine mandates were mainly rationalized through the belief that the higher the rate of vaccination, the less the virus would spread. For example, during oral arguments for Biden’s health care worker mandate, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Elena Kagan claimed that health care workers had to get vaccinated “so that you’re not transmitting the disease.” But recently, on Oct. 10, 2022, a Pfizer spokesperson told the European Parliament that the vaccines had never actually been tested for preventing transmission. While this was presented on social media as “breaking news,” the fact that the vaccines were not tested for this purpose has been documented extensively ever since Pfizer and Moderna received their original Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
During the Dec. 10, 2020, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting when the first mRNA vaccines were authorized, FDA adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.” Despite the data presented for individual efficacy, he continued, “we really, as of right now, do not have any evidence that it will have an impact, social-wide, on the epidemic.” The FDA EUA press release from December 2020 also confirms that there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-COV-2 from person to person.”
Simply put, the reason many people believed the vaccines stopped transmission was because government officials and media outlets across the Western world were either careless with their words or did not tell the truth. In 2021, for instance, Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Rochelle Walensky claimed that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus,” and Dr. Anthony Fauci said they would become “dead ends” for the virus. Any speculation that the vaccines significantly reduced transmission was based on limited results from independent studies and the false assumption that the vaccine would prevent infection. Without adequate evidence, vaccination campaigns called on people to get vaccinated not just for their own protection, but to help “protect others” and “save lives.”
Meanwhile, social media companies coordinated with the Biden administration to censor dissent. Many people who asked questions about efficacy or safety risked banishment from Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Now, however, as more and more studies come out, it is increasingly clear that some of the information these companies censored was true.
For anyone content with their vaccination status, this might not be a big deal. Yes, the vaccine information that was provided in 2021 wasn’t entirely accurate, but you might still feel that getting vaccinated was the right decision. However, being misinformed about potential benefits and risks is an enormous deal for, say, a male college athlete who got vaccinated because he wanted to protect his elderly family members, but who then developed myocarditis. Telling him that this is fine because “there was so much unknown” is probably not much of a consolation, especially since his decision to get vaccinated was never going to protect his family members in the first place, and the vaccine manufacturers were given blanket immunity from liability.
It is one thing for the pharmaceutical companies, the Biden administration, the CDC, and the media to intentionally or unintentionally mislead the public; but it is another thing entirely for them to do this while government agencies actively coordinated to suppress alternative views or inconvenient data. While executives and bureaucrats may excuse their errors by claiming that “the science changed,” the public has every right to demand better. Science is the process of discovery through observation and experimentation; of course it changes. That’s why “settled science” is obviously a political, not a scientific term, and why anyone should be able to publicly question scientific consensus at any time. Instead of allowing for debate, political and bureaucratic officials conducted a campaign of mass censorship and coercion. This effectively undermined the principle of informed consent and has resulted in a scandal affecting millions of people.
Read the full article here.