We need to understand not only that the vaccinators are wrong, and how they are wrong, but also why they are wrong. If we misdiagnose the source of their error, we’ll go looking for evidence against them in the wrong places, and oppose them in the wrong ways.
Consider a story I’ve been following since last week, about an epidemiologist at Berlin Charité named Harald Matthes. It’s nothing special, merely the most recent occurrence of an obnoxious media dynamic:
Last year, Matthes set up a simple online survey for vaccine side-effects. Volunteers could sign up to fill out questionnaires at regular intervals about their post-vaccination experience. About 0.8% of those surveyed reported what Matthes classified as serious adverse reactions, a number 40 times higher than the official Paul-Ehrlich-Institut rate of 0.02%. Matthes has yet to release his data, but last week he appeared in the German media to announce his preliminary results and demand outpatient clinics for victims of vaccination.
Then the fact-checkers descended. One of the most influential attacks appeared in [Die Zeit](http://Much claimed, nothing proven The doctor Harald Matthes says that severe side effects after the Corona vaccination are much more frequent than known. Research shows that his figures are untenable.), under the headline “Much claimed, nothing proven.” The article dismantles Matthes’s study piece-by-piece: He’s wrong because he defines “severe reaction” differently from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut; he’s wrong because his survey data comes from volunteers rather than a representative sample; and, above all, he’s wrong because he failed to establish a background rate of severe events in the unvaccinated:
It’s completely normal for people to fall ill, sometimes seriously, during the observation period of a study. Every day, almost 1,000 people in Germany suffer a heart attack … It’s important to take this background noise into account, especially when looking for rare vaccine side effects.
There’s a reason I haven’t written about Matthes’s study: These are serious criticisms.
The point, though, is that when it comes to Long Covid, Die Zeit forgets all of this methodological rigour.
In article after article after histrionic article, their journalists demonstrate a total lack of regard for definitions. Everything and anything is Long Covid, so long as it’s preceded by at least the suspicion of SARS-2 infection. All kinds of methodologically dubious Long Covid studies receive the breathless endorsement of Die Zeit, a paper that has never really bothered about the background rate of brain fog or sleep disturbances or joint pain in the population of Germany. Throw it all into the Long Covid bucket, says Die Zeit; after all, SARS-2 is extremely dangerous. Any scary thing anybody says about it must be true.
If you want to know how millions of people can so relentlessly defend the vaccines as “safe and effective,” regardless of what harm they inflict, while simultaneously fearing SARS-2 as a killer virus even after the emergence of Omicron, wonder no more: It is precisely this tendency to uncritically accept every scary poorly-sourced study about SARS-2 risk, while subjecting every last finding to the disadvantage of the vaccines to exacting, isolated demands for rigour. Masks benefit from a similar dynamic, as did lockdowns before them, and mass testing, and contact tracing and other things besides.
If vaccine injuries and deaths were counted in the same way as Long Covid cases and Corona deaths, the vaccines would all be pulled from shelves tomorrow. Alternatively, if we minimised SARS-2 risk in the same way we whitewash the vaccines, nobody would care about mass vaccination at all.
There is very little overt, deliberate deception driving this mass delusion. This is why, as Alex Berenson points out, there’s just not very much in the Pfizer documents that we didn’t already know, and why there’s never going to be very much in them.
The present insanity arises not from the plans of genocidal masterminds in the WHO, but from two years of mass media panic propaganda bordering on psychological abuse, in response to which a great many people find themselves confined in their own self-fashioned moral prisons, having decided that they are not good people unless they mask and self-isolate until SARS-2 vanishes from the earth. They want the vaccines to work, and they find it uncomfortable to contemplate the risks and imperfections of these pharmaceutical products.
Scientists aren’t immune to these emotions. The vaccine developers at Moderna and Pfizer, together with their government regulators, designed trials that would help the vaccines succeed, because they’d spent months awash in Corona panic porn like the rest of us. They made the trials shorter, lest waning efficacy grab too many headlines; they did their best to recruit as few old and vulnerable participants as possible, to keep the efficacy numbers up. This is not to say that there are no liars and malicious actors in the halls of public health, merely that the influence of the insane, panicking hordes is greater.
Orchestrated lying by specific parties very clearly did play an important role in establishing lockdowns and other mass containment policies. The vaccines are a different matter. Hundreds of thousands of scientists and journalists across the world have been wrong about them, in the very same simple and predictable ways, from the very beginning.
A few liars and grifters would be easier – you could expose them and end all of this tomorrow. We’re instead facing the much more intractable problem of pervasive self-deception and motivated reasoning. We need to stop looking for the reveal, and start thinking about how we can ease people out of their madness.
That’s not going to be easy.