What Happened Today: June 21, 2023
Hamas kills four in West Bank; Israeli settlers riot; Germany gives teens an allowance
The Big Story
Four people were killed and another four wounded on Tuesday when a pair of Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a restaurant and then a nearby gas station in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. One shooter was shot and killed by a bystander at the gas station while the other assailant, who’d fled the scene in a stolen vehicle, was shot and killed by the Israeli military. Taking responsibility for the attack, terrorist group Hamas said its gunmen had carried out the shooting in response to the previous day’s clash between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Monday’s gunfight started after IDF soldiers seeking to arrest militants in Jenin were attacked with explosive devices. The ensuing fight left six Palestinians dead and dozens wounded, as well as eight Israeli servicemembers with injuries. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I would like to remind all those who seek to harm us: All options are open. We will continue to fight terrorism with full force and we will defeat it.”
The week’s violent encounters add to what has been one of the bloodiest stretches of the Israeli-Palestine conflict since the Second Intifada two decades prior. Over the past six months alone, more than 126 Palestinians, most of whom were militants, and more than 24 Israelis and foreign civilians have been killed. Following the attack in Jenin on Tuesday, several top lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition, including Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for law enforcement to stop carrying out targeted raids to arrest militants in favor of an aggressive military operation involving the army and the air force. “A military operation in Judea and Samaria now,” Danny Danon, a senior lawmaker, wrote on Twitter.
In the Back Pages: Was the Covid Vaccine Safe for Pregnant Women?
The Rest
→ A group of some 200 Israelis entered the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya on Wednesday and set fire to at least 30 homes and 60 vehicles as a response to the terrorist attack that left four Israelis dead on Tuesday. Police who responded to the clash were attacked by Palestinians, officials said, and at least 12 Palestinians were reported injured with one killed in the melee. Israeli military officials condemned the attack on civilian property, saying that such incidents undermine the IDF’s “true objective” of “preventing terrorism.”
→ Quote of the Day:
The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there. That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.
That’s President Joe Biden calling a spade a spade at possibly the worst time possible on Tuesday, just days after his Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned from a trip to Beijing during which he tried to restore frayed diplomatic ties with Xi and top Chinese officials. The off-the-cuff comment describing Xi as a dictator came during a fundraising event in California and was quickly rebuked by China, with a foreign ministry representative saying the remarks were “extremely absurd” and “irresponsible.” Yun Sun, who runs the Stimson Center’s China program, said “Washington wants to let this quietly go away,” adding that China will not want to blow it out of proportion either, as it could undermine the “prospect of a process leading to Xi’s bilateral summit with Biden in November.”
→ A fire in a Manhattan e-bike repair shop killed four people and injured two others, raising new questions about the safety of e-bike equipment used widely by delivery drivers and an increasing number of urban consumers who see them as environmentally conscious alternatives to vehicles. The shop had previously received a summons from the city’s fire department for having too many batteries charging in the shop, which was not open at the time of the fire. Unlike typical building fires, those involving e-bikes and lithium batteries are more explosive and can be difficult for firefighters to put out. According to the fire department, just this year alone 13 people have been killed in 108 fires related to lithium-ion batteries.
→ Looking over its books, the Pentagon said on Tuesday that it caught an accounting error that led it to overestimate the amount of military aid given to Ukraine by $6.2 million—sorry, billion. $6.2 billion. Which is about twice the amount of the error previously disclosed. Speaking to the media, Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said the $3 billion error first disclosed in May was elevated to $6.2 billion when Pentagon officials more carefully scrutinized how they valued the equipment, missiles, and ammunition sent to Ukraine. The extra funds, Singh said, will “[just] go back into the pot of money that we have allocated for future Pentagon stock drawdowns.”
Every few years, [he] seems to go through some sort of half-baked pseudo-philosophical reassessment of his priorities and role in the world … seemingly impulsive decisions usually dressed up in some bullshit-laden, cringeworthy, MBA-strategy gobbledygook about the complex challenges of the world and the systemic changes needed to fix them.
That’s Theodore Schleifer writing in Puck about reclusive billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who—according to Schleifer’s sources, at least—is on the verge of pivoting how he allocates hundreds of millions of dollars across the political and philanthropic sphere. The day after Schleifer asked an Omidyar spokesperson for comment, the organization that oversees his investments and donations, The Omidyar Group, wrote a rare blog post on its website, noting that it was “now shifting into even deeper modes of collaboration and diversifying support of our work,” adding that whatever happens next is “a necessary step in our evolution” that could require its existing investments to find new funders to stay afloat. Over the past 10 years, Omidyar has given $400 million to nonprofit activist group The Democracy Fund and $200 million to First Look Media, the news outlet launched with Glenn Greenwald in 2014.
→ German teenagers, who had a rough few years during the pandemic lockdowns, isolated from their friends and unable to do much of anything, have received an apology of sorts from the German government, which announced last week a new program that gives $216 to all 18-year-olds to spend on cultural activities. The “KulturPass” cannot go toward Amazon purchases, Netflix, or Spotify but can be spent locally in shops and locations hit hard by the pandemic, including museums, theaters, and concert venues as well as stores selling books, albums, and instruments. Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Claudia Roth said the program, which will cost about $110 million, is a chance to give something to “the 18-year-olds of today and thus to win them over in the longer term.”
→ Thread of the Day
https://twitter.com/shevereshtus/status/1671314794790416390
That’s from Twitter user Shevereshtus explaining how an NBC report perpetuates what amounts to a “borderline blood libel” as it contorts the details of a fire in an adult care home that killed a volunteer firefighter in 2021. Charged by district attorneys with starting the fire were two rabbis who had kashered a kitchen in the building for Passover before the fire broke out more than an hour later. The rabbis pleaded guilty in exchange for no jail time, and the report fails to mention the details of the case, which make clear that this was a tragic kitchen accident, with law enforcement zealously looking to pin the blame after “the fire alarm system malfunctioned,” as the thread points out.
→ New home construction had a surprising comeback in May, with the total number of new home-building projects underway reaching its highest point since 2016, a sign that the housing market could become a driver to economic growth. Applications for future projects filed by home builders also surged, a change that some housing analysts say is the result of both easing pressures on material costs and a strengthening supply chain. If anything is holding back a housing boom, it appears to be elevated mortgage rates, which continue to hinder housing affordability.
→ A 26-year-old accountant who liked to play soccer on the weekends was fast enough on the pitch that a friend suggested he try out competitive sprinting. Now, four years later, Eugene Amo-Dadzie has become the fourth-fastest sprinter in British history: He clocked a 9.93-second 100-meter sprint at a June race in Austria. Self-identified as “the fastest accountant in the world,” Amo-Dadzie has seen success on the track that might inspire those Pentagon accountants looking for a way to blow off steam after a hard day of accidental overcounting at the office.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Biden’s Ties That Bind by Michael Doran
How the U.S. is working to constrain Israel before announcing its new Iran deal
Academic Freedom Is Social Justice by Carole Hooven
Those of us who work in universities cannot allow polite fictions to be dressed up as facts
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.
Was the Covid Vaccine Safe for Pregnant Women?
The CDC deferred to Big Pharma instead of waiting for evidence. Now the facts are in.
By Marty Makary
In December 2020, just before the vaccines for COVID19 were first released to the public, Dr. Mandy Cohen, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources in North Carolina, urged everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they were able. "Corners were not cut," Cohen said with confidence.
Then as now, pregnant women asked if Covid vaccines were safe for them. Public health officials said “yes” when the correct answer should have been “we don’t know yet,” given that pregnant and breastfeeding women were excluded from the original Covid vaccine trials. With Cohen set to replace Dr. Rochelle Walensky as director of the Center for Disease Control at the end of June, it is a good time to consider how Walensky performed on Covid—and in particular, on Women’s health issues—and ask whether Cohen will be any different.
In February 2021, to settle the controversy over whether the Covid vaccines should be used during pregnancy, Pfizer launched a randomized controlled trial of 4,000 pregnant women. But five months into the study, after enrolling 349 women, the study mysteriously stopped recruiting. Pfizer never offered a reason. Most concerning, the pregnancy outcomes of those who participated in the trial, and their babies, are still not public today, nearly two years later.
But the CDC did not wait for good data to make a decisive recommendation. In April, 2021, just four months after the Covid vaccine was first granted an emergency use authorization and two months into the then ongoing Pfizer pregnancy trial, Walensky decided not to wait for the trial results, and instead recommended that all “pregnant people” get the vaccine. Three months later, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) followed the CDC and “enthusiastically” recommended it as well.
Concerned by the zealousness and absolutism of this recommendation in the absence of evidence, a group of scientists and I petitioned the FDA to add a disclaimer to the vaccine label stating that no randomized trial data is available on the vaccine in pregnant women.
A few months ago, the FDA’s Dr. Peter Marks wrote back to us, denying our request. “The Petition fails to explain how including the fact of no results being reported would be relevant information that would contribute to the safe and effective use of the vaccine,” he claimed.
In other words, women don’t need to know. Just get vaccinated.
Can a vaccine have a different safety profile in pregnant women than in the general population? There’s actually a precedent. The CDC advises that pregnant women not receive the HPV, MMR, or chickenpox vaccines, and instead recommends taking them before or after pregnancy, when indicated.
Remarkably, as the now out-going CDC director—along with the ACOG—was pushing Covid vaccine absolutism for all pregnant women (regardless of pre-existing natural immunity), a June 2021 New England Journal of Medicine editorial on Covid vaccines warned readers of “the dearth of safety information about pregnancy.” The article added the importance of waiting for Pfizer’s pregnancy trial to shed light on the matter, but alas, the early results are still locked up.
Pharma companies actually have a track record of halting trials that aren’t going their way and hiding results they don’t like. It allows them to control the narrative and manipulate markets. In many cases where data is hidden, Pharma companies play doctors like a fiddle.
A 2021 Yale-Stanford-University of Pennsylvania study published in The BMJ found that out of 58 new drugs that the FDA approved in a 2-year period, 33% did not make their trial results public, according to the researchers review of the data 6 months after the drugs’ approval. In 2004, Merck famously withheld clinical trial findings that Vioxx, their newly approved drug that was being used by 80 million Americans, increased heart attack risks. Vioxx was eventually pulled off the market.
In the case of the Covid vaccine trial in pregnant women, the trial may have been terminated not because the results were unfavorable, but because no data was needed. The medical and public health establishments had already made up their minds, declaring it safe and effective regardless of what the data was going to show. Why evaluate a product if the CDC and ACOG are already sold on the product?
Using the same groupthink science, the CDC and ACOG are now blindly recommending boosters and the new bivalent vaccine for healthy pregnant women, and once again ignoring the role of natural immunity. The ACOG website does not cite any clinical trials to back their recommendation, of course. Not only does the new bivalent vaccine lack any randomized trial data in pregnant women, it lacks any randomized trial data in humans (it was authorized based on data from eight mice).
Recently, public health officials went a step further and proposed the idea that people will need an annual Covid shot. That would mean that the average 5-year-old girl would need 77 mRNA Covid vaccine shots in her lifetime. Given the known risks of myocarditis and blood clots with each shot, such a sweeping recommendation should be based on trial data, not dogma. A recent study authored by Dr. Joseph Fraiman in the journal Vaccine identified the rate of “serious adverse events” after the Covid vaccine to be 1 in 662 doses.
To their credit, ACOG’s website does acknowledge Covid vaccination could delay menstruation. A large Covid vaccine study published last July found that “periods were late by less than 1 day on average.” When asked about this, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “The menstrual thing is something that seems to be quite transient and temporary. We need to study it more.” But saying for two years that we don’t have enough studies is ironic when Fauci himself commanded an annual research budget of $6 billion. A Swedish study published last month in BMJ found that an adjusted 26% increased risk of menstrual disturbance after the Covid vaccine in women age 12-49.
Since early 2021 women were reporting changes to their periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding, calling for proper study. Last October, the European Union’s regulator advised that “heavy menstrual bleeding” be added as a side effect on Pfizer and Moderna vaccine labels. Here in the U.S. there’s been no such update to product labeling.
This lack of humility was also evident when healthy young women were told with incredible absolutism that the Covid vaccine cannot affect fertility. The right answer should have been: we don’t think it will affect fertility but we don’t have any good data on the question. A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study published last fall concluded that “Findings of this study suggest that receipt of the first inactivated COVID-19 vaccine dose 60 days or less before fertilization treatment is associated with a reduced rate of pregnancy.”
The medical establishment has also blindly pushed for universal Covid vaccination and boosters in lactating mothers. This recommendation came before a study in JAMA Pediatrics discovered vaccine mRNA particles in breast milk. The finding was so unexpected that it became the journal’s number one most discussed study of 2022, according to the JAMA website. Coming in second was a study reporting myocarditis after Covid vaccination, and third was a study I authored with my teams at Johns Hopkins on durability of natural immunity. It’s telling that the most discussed JAMA studies of 2022 were all on topics that public health officials have consistently downplayed.
In the absence of good data, organized medicine chose the path of stern paternalism. But in my experience as a physician, it’s far better to properly inform a patient rather than steamroll their questions. It may be that Pfizer’s pregnancy trial would have been favorable to the vaccine, showing that the benefits outweigh harms, but Pfizer has not released the data. Perhaps the data were not favorable, or perhaps Pfizer realized they had convinced the medical establishment without data, so why run the risk of sharing what a placebo-controlled trial shows?
Perhaps the most famous example of hidden trial data is the 1989 Minnesota study that found there were more deaths in the group that ate a low-fat diet than the control group that did not. The study was completed in 1973, 16 years before it was released to the public. When asked about the delay, the lead investigator, Dr. Ivan Frantz famously said “we were just so disappointed in the way they turned out.”
The FDA recently authorized a second round of Covid bivalent vaccines for people over the age of 65, with no supporting clinical data. The authorization came a month after the FDA leaked to the press their intention to do so. This is the Biden administration’s new way of running the FDA. Leak something to the media, gauge public backlash, and fast track authorization of the drug without the supporting data typically required.
Is the Covid vaccine safe in pregnancy? Probably. But cutting corners on research and pushing vaccines without data is dangerous. It’s probably why 58% of women under age 50 say they do not trust public health officials when they say that the Covid vaccine is safe and effective in pregnancy, according to a University of Pennsylvania study published last month. Overall trust in the CDC is down from 69% pre-pandemic to 44% today. Dishonesty has consequences.
Even if the vaccine’s benefit outweighs the risks in healthy pregnant women, a review of 65 studies published in The Lancet in February concluded that natural immunity is at least as effective as vaccinated immunity, and probably more effective. So why is the medical establishment blowing through so much political capital on a blanket campaign to immunize those already immune?
For those who think the boondoggle of Covid policy has ended, consider the fact that just two months ago, public-health officials beclowned themselves by insisting Novak Djokovic could not enter the U.S. to play tennis outdoors because he’s not vaccinated. This position, known as Biden’s Djokovic Doctrine, embodies persistent errors in public-health groupthink today, from ignoring natural immunity to downplaying vaccine induced myocarditis in young males to overlooking data on how extremely low risk the virus is for healthy young people to segregating people by vaccine status.
And just this week, the Biden White House required college athletes who won national championships visiting the White House to mask and stay 6-feet apart if they are not vaccinated. Even if they have natural immunity. What does Mandy Cohen have to say about this standing policy still in place today?
To rebuild trust, the medical establishment—including physician associations and academic leaders—should be honest about what is known and unknown, rather than lock arms and broadcast its dogmas as science. For every subgroup in the population, medical science has long held high the principle of requiring data before making strong recommendations. Women should not be treated any differently.
Marty Makary MD, MPH is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of The New York Times bestselling book, The Price We Pay.