In this article — ( Here: Science Based Medicine  ) –– Dr. David Gorski employs his expert understanding of Medicine & Science to rebut each of the 18 reasons not to get vaccinated given by Christian Elliot (in his now viral article).  What?  You didn’t think they could be refuted?  Dr. Gorski’s arguments seem to have at least some merit. A few points will be terribly difficult to refute.

Dr.Gorski has credentials a mile long.  He has also been accused of some rather heinous acts, also a mile long.  You can read about both, ( here  ).

The original“18 Reasons” article can be found ( here  ).  You might want to reference it to read the details of each argument. In this post I will only be listing the main headline of each of the eighteen points.

My goal here (other than getting to 300) is not to be a Shitflinger. We here pride ourselves on being able to discern BOTH sides of an argument. I have not yet seen a point-by-point debate of Christian Elliot’s 18 reasons.  Now you have it.  In some instances you might wonder if Mr. Elliot was bullshitting us. Some of you might even decide to get the shot after reading this!  Good luck to you. 

Hopefully, negative reactions to this article (if any) will be more cogent than, “This is a BULLSHIT article, Stuckfuk!!“. Okaaay? So, let’s go ……….

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#1: VACCINE MAKERS ARE IMMUNE FROM LIABILITY

This is a half-truth that antivaxxers just love. It’s a half-truth in that, yes, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 did require that claims for vaccine injury go through a special “Vaccine Court”, setting up a system called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP or VICP), with the compensation fund funded by a tax on each dose of vaccine.

However, the reason for this act was that there were so many dubious lawsuits being filed in the wake of the scare over the DPT vaccine in the 1980s that there was a real fear that vaccine manufacturers would simply stop supplying vaccines to the US due to liability concerns.

Moreover, as I’ve discussed many times, the Vaccine Court is actually an easier court for complainants than standard civil court. The standards of evidence are, as has been described, 50% and a feather, the court allows “theories of causation” that no regular court would allow, and there are certain “table injuries” known to be caused by vaccines for which compensation is automatic. Even better for complainants, win or lose, the Court pays reasonable court costs. Moreover, if complainants fail, they can still take their case to federal civil court. The law only mandates that they first go through the Vaccine Court.

I also like to point out that lawyers really, really, really hate the Vaccine Court, not because its evidentiary standards are as easy can be for a court, but because they want really big payouts (and their nice cut of those payouts) and are willing to lose a bunch of cases if they can, every so often, hit the jackpot. Certainly, they seem to prefer gambling in hopes of a huge judgment or settlement to working on cases that guarantee they’ll be paid for their billable hours and expenses. (How boring.)

Also, even though it tends to give parents the benefit of the doubt and allow somewhat more questionable injuries to be compensated than a regular civil court would, the Vaccine Court does generally do a pretty good job (occasional exceptions aside) of sticking to the science. That means it doesn’t compensate for “vaccine-induced autism”, because there is no good scientific evidence that vaccines can cause autism.

I also can’t help but note that Mr. Elliot is ignorant, too. I’d be more concerned that COVID-19 vaccines, because they are not yet fully FDA approved and are being distributed under an emergency use authorization (EUA), aren’t even covered by the NCVIA, but rather a more restrictive system. Mr. Elliot did mention the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP), but apparently didn’t really know its significance, and vaccine advocates actually want COVID-19 vaccines to be under the VICP.

#2: THE CHECKERED PAST OF THE VACCINE COMPANIES

I’ve had my problems with Moderna and its overenthusiastic promotion of its mRNA technology, but it’s actually ended up doing much better than I had expected. In any event, Mr. Elliot asks: “Given the free pass from liability, and the checkered past of these companies, why would we assume that all their vaccines are safe and made completely above board?”

First, I note my response to #1. These companies do not have a “free pass”. Second, no one denies that pharmaceutical companies have, from time to time, not been the best companies in the world. Yes, some of them have paid large judgments and settlements, albeit not for vaccines.

However, Mr. Elliot intentionally ignores the fact that the vaccine safety monitoring system in place for COVID-19 vaccines is, because of the unprecedented level of the crisis and the release of so many millions of doses of vaccine in such a short period of time before full FDA approval, quite remarkable in how well it’s doing.

Adverse events are regularly reported (and regularly weaponized by antivaxxers like Mr. Elliot, even when they are incredibly unlikely to have been caused by the vaccine), and the safety monitoring system has picked up adverse events that are literally one-in-a-million, such as cerebral venous sinus thromboses, with the FDA acting on them rapidly to issue a pause in the use of the vaccine associated with the adverse events.

It is not as though we are, as Mr. Elliot seems to be implying, just trusting the word of pharmaceutical companies and vaccine manufacturers. They are under intense scrutiny, not just by government regulatory agencies but by the press, and even in normal times there are multiple vaccine safety monitoring systems, one passive and multiple active.

Moreover, all the current vaccines for which the FDA has issued EUAs have completed phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials, with the number of patients in the phase 3 trials numbering in the many tens of thousands total between the vaccines.

These vaccines are very likely ultimately to receive full FDA approval; it’s just that, in the middle of a pandemic, there hasn’t been enough time to complete the full monitoring process. Meanwhile, it’s not as though the FDA and government oversight agencies haven’t kept an eye on vaccine makers and their claims, such as when AstraZeneca got slapped down for issuing efficacy estimates for its vaccine based on outdated data.

As for the lack of experience in vaccine development cited by Mr. Elliot for Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, yes, Moderna is a startup, but J&J is a very large pharmaceutical company that’s been around for a long time and has developed and manufactured a huge number of pharmaceutical and medical device products.

I’ll finish here by noting that Mr. Elliot repeats the claim that the J&J vaccine “contains tissues from aborted fetal cells”. No, it does not, and the claim that vaccines contain “tissues” from aborted fetuses or contain “aborted fetal cells” is a common antivax trope based on the use of cell lines derived from fetuses aborted 50 or 60 years ago to make virus stock for vaccine manufacturing. Even the Catholic Church states that these vaccines are acceptable for Catholics to use, and it has said the same about COVID-19 vaccines.

#3: THE UGLY HISTORY OF ATTEMPTS TO MAKE CORONAVIRUS VACCINES

I note that Mr. Elliot is using another favorite antivaccine distortion, namely that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines are “gene therapy”. It is true that, early on in the development of COVID-19 vaccines, there were concerns, based on the issues listed by Mr. Elliot, that the phenomenon on antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) might preclude the development of COVID-19 vaccines. These issues had stymied the development of vaccines against the original SARS and MERS coronaviruses, after all.

However, as I like to say, it is now April 2021, not April 2020, and we have lots of data, both from the phase 3 clinical trials of the currently authorized vaccines and from 190 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the US alone that demonstrate this does not happen at a rate detectable by the same vaccine safety monitoring system that has detected one-in-a-million adverse events after COVID-19 vaccines. Mr. Elliot also ignored later science that showed that ADE is a problem mainly in vaccines that do not produce high enough levels of neutralizing antibody.

And, again, hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine have been administered worldwide, and this problem has simply not been observed.

It’s actually a very common antivaccine tactic to focus on a potential problem with a vaccine considered early on in its development and then to ignore all the subsequent science that shows the problem not to have been observed, and Mr. Elliot doubles down on this nonsense in #4 before moving on:

#4: THE “DATA GAPS” SUBMITTED TO THE FDA BY THE VACCINE MAKERS

Again, no such problems were observed in the phase 3 clinical trials, and, again, Mr. Elliot ignores the data after hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine that show that this is not a problem. I guess if you tell the big lie often enough…

Mr. Elliot also bemoans the lack of data on this. I’m seeing a pattern here. Yes, there was or no data on these issues at the time of the EUA submission. However, to say there is “no data” now, in April 2021, is extremely dishonest and ignores all the experience and safety monitoring after millions upon millions of doses.

For instance, evidence is mounting that these vaccines do prevent transmission and mortality, and we know that the protection lasts at least six months, and likely much longer. We also know that vaccine-induced immunity is probably more potent than the immunity that comes after natural infection.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of doses have not turned up safety signals in the individuals about which Mr. Elliot is so very, very concerned. I also find it odd that lack of data on people younger than age 18 or older than 55, in pregnant or lactating mothers, or people with autoimmune conditions or immunocompromised individuals would be a deterrent to Mr. Elliot receiving the vaccine. He’s none of those things, right?

#5: “No Access to the Raw Data from the Trials”

Yes, Mr. Elliot is channeling The BMJ‘s antivaccine associate editor Peter Doshi, whose affiliation with The BMJ continues to do damage when he writes deceptive blog posts like the one cited by Mr. Elliot. Mr. Doshi’s claims are deceptive, as John Skylar notes:

Before you read that, I want to emphasize that Dr. Doshi is just wrong. He claims that the clinical trials for the vaccines contained a design flaw that has made them miss a large number of cases of COVID-19. Specifically, he believes it is inappropriate that they measured only confirmed cases of COVID-19 rather than looking at suspected cases of COVID-19. His argument is that if you look at suspected cases, you see a vaccine efficacy of only about 19%, where looking at confirmed cases gives an efficacy of 95%.

The thing is, this analysis is wildly flawed. Dr. Doshi conveniently ignores the fact that many of the suspected cases turned out to be negative for SARS-CoV-2 infection. So many, in fact, that it would suggest that PCR tests only correctly detect 5% of tested cases. We know this isn’t the case.

While it is probable that some positive cases were missed, it is unlikely that this is a very substantial number.

It turns out that removing these cases has no material effect on the efficacy estimates.

To be honest, I’m slightly torn here, as I noted at the time. Yes, access to raw data is desirable. Transparency is generally a good thing in science. However, in the case of any clinical trial, be it for a COVID-19 vaccine or any other drug, the question is: “When?” In general, clinical trial raw data are not made public at least until after the clinical trial is completed, sometimes not at all, our trust being placed in government regulatory agencies to evaluate the trial data.

Maybe that should change as a result of the pandemic. Be that as it may, Peter Doshi’s demands for “transparency” struck me as very self-serving in that there are a huge contingent of people like him (and Mr. Elliot) out there, waiting to go through the clinical trial raw data with a fine tooth comb looking for even the smallest anomalies (of which there will always be at least a few in any large clinical trial, given that human beings are not perfect and no clinical trial is perfect) that they can use to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the vaccines, whether justified or not. None of this changes my assessment of #5 as deceptive and, even if valid, superseded by much more recent data.

#6: NO LONG-TERM SAFETY TESTING

This is yet another common antivaccine trope that’s been used about vaccines as long as I can remember, even long before the pandemic. It’s tempting just to respond that, to antivaxxers, no amount of “long term safety testing” is ever enough to convince them that a vaccine is safe.

That being said, in fairness I must note that it is true that these vaccines have only been distributed for four months and were developed in less than a year, even as I note that the technologies behind the vaccines (mRNA-based and adenovirus-based) had been in development for a couple of decades before that. I note that anti-GMO “journalist” Paul Thacker made similar claims about “no long term testing” and, when called on it, really had to stretch to find any examples whatsoever of long-term side effects from vaccines, whose adverse reactions, when they occur, usually occur within a few weeks.

Let’s just say that the examples chosen were rare and in special cases, such as immunocompromised patients. Given the data we have now, the highly unlikely possibility of rare late side effects cropping up months from now is not a reason, in the middle of a pandemic, to avoid a vaccine against a disease that is killing millions and disabling even more. Basically, this is a variation of a favorite antivaccine trope, the Nirvana fallacy, in which it is argued that if a vaccine isn’t perfectly safe and perfectly effective it’s crap.

#7: NO INFORMED CONSENT

This is utter BS. When the vaccines were given EUAs, there were data from tens of thousands of clinical trial participants. We now have data from close to 200 million people who have received the vaccines. We know a lot now about these vaccines, and more and more data are being published every week.

Basically, Mr. Elliot is parroting a version of a favorite antivaccine tactic, one I like to call “misinformed refusal” (as opposed to informed consent), in which the uncertainties and harms are grossly exaggerated based on misinterpretation of science, bad science, pseudoscience, and just plain lies, and the benefits dramatically downplayed or denied.

#8: UNDER-REPORTING OF ADVERSE REACTIONS AND DEATH

First of all, no, it is quite simply not true that “only 1%” of adverse reactions are reported to VAERS. That’s a study frequently cherry picked by antivaxxers. Moreover, VAERS is not the be-all and end-all of vaccine safety monitoring anyway; there are multiple and redundant active monitoring systems as well. Also, as a passive reporting system, is prone to gaming by lawyers and antivaxxers, who love to imply causation from what might or might not even be correlation.

I’ve written about how antivaxxers have, like Mr. Elliot, been weaponizing VAERS reports against COVID-19 vaccines by implying what are almost certainly coincidences are, in fact, caused by the vaccine. (And, no, Bell’s palsy was almost certainly not caused by the vaccine.)

Seriously, if your cherry picking of studies and “analysis” of the VAERS database lead you to conclude that there are as many as 220,000 unreported deaths after COVID-19 vaccination that no one’s detected, you are as innumerate as those who claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US.

#9: THE VACCINES DO NOT STOP TRANSMISSION OR INFECTION

This is getting repetitive, isn’t it? (Antivax listicles like this frequently do.)

Again, Mr. Elliot is focusing only on the clinical trial results showing that the vaccines were very good at preventing symptomatic disease from COVID-19; they were not designed to demonstrate whether they stopped transmission or infection. As before, Mr. Elliot is ignoring data that has been published since the EUAs were granted for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that demonstrate that the vaccines do appear to prevent infection and reduce asymptomatic transmission.

Are you seeing a pattern in Mr. Elliot’s disinformation? I am. Here’s a hint to Mr. Elliot. It is April 2021, NOT November 2020. Do try to keep up with the literature. (He won’t, of course.)

#10: PEOPLE ARE CATCHING COVID AFTER BEING FULLY VACCINATED

This one is so dumb that it’s hard for me to write much about it without getting really sarcastic. Of course there are people who catch COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated. No vaccine is 100% effective; so we always knew that this would happen.

Again, this is the Nirvana fallacy, in which antivaxxers suggest that if a vaccine isn’t 100% effective it’s crap. What we do know is that the vaccines are very effective, much more so than scientists had hoped.

It turns out that such “breakthrough cases” are rare, but, of course, when hundreds of millions are receiving the vaccine, millions are falling ill with COVID-19, there will be some breakthrough cases. This isn’t Nirvana, and the vaccines aren’t perfect. They are, however, very, very good.

I also note that this is the same sort of gambit that antivaxxers have used since time immemorial about measles, for instance, claiming that if there are vaccinated children who get the measles that must mean that the vaccine doesn’t work.

#11: THE OVERALL DEATH RATE FROM COVID

One wonders if Mr. Elliot would get on an airplane if there were “only” a 0.26% (or 0.1%) of its crashing and killing him. I suspect that he wouldn’t.

In any event, we don’t yet know the true fatality rate, but the case fatality rate (the death rate among people diagnosed with COVID-19) in the US could be as high as 2%. The infection fatality rate, of course, is considerably lower, because that includes all asymptomatic infections.

He’s also doing the usual selfish thing that younger antivaxxers do and ignoring the much, much higher infection and case fatality rate among the elderly. Determining the “true” numbers is challenging, given the changes in the level of screening and diagnosis over time, as well as how the actual CFR and IFR can vary with time and location, but we do know that COVID-19 is much more lethal than influenza.

Naturally, Mr. Elliot assumes that he won’t be on the unlucky end of those statistics, because, as his germ theory denial leads him to believe, he is so much more healthy than you.

#12: THE BLOATED COVID DEATH NUMBERS

Again, the idea that most people die “with” COVID-19 rather than “of” COVID-19 is a conspiracy theory that arose last summer.

Indeed, I had a name for it: the 6% gambit. It’s the claim that “only 6%” of death certificates show COVID-19 as the sole cause of death because “only 6%” don’t also list comorbidities too, such as heart disease.

Again, this is utter nonsense based on a misunderstanding of how death certificates are filled out, in which the primary cause of death might be, for instance, cardiac arrest, but the condition that ultimately led to that cardiac arrest was COVID-19. Or it could be pneumonia as the immediate cause of death, with the pneumonia having been a sequelae of—you guessed it—COVID-19. (If you want a more detailed explanation, here you go.)

#13: FAUCI AND SIX OTHERS AT NIAID OWN PATENTS IN THE MODERNA VACCINE

The source of this claim seems to be Naomi Wolf, who, as anyone who’s encountered her Tweets on Twitter knows, has gone full antivaccine and COVID-19 crank. Indeed, the video was published on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s website.

As for Anthony Fauci owning patents on the Moderna vaccine, my response was: WTF? I did a patent search on Fauci, and his name does turn up on 38 patents, none of them related to COVID-19 vaccines. Some are related to treatments for HIV, and it is those that conspiracy theorists have zeroed in on by combining them with the bogus conspiracy theory that there are HIV sequences in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein used as the antigen in the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

This is a distortion in that there are short sequences that resemble sequences found in the HIV coding sequence, but the matches are so short as to be insignificant. Lots of genes have similar levels of matching. Some antivaxxers have even falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines increase susceptibility to HIV.

As for the NIH claiming joint ownership of the Moderna vaccine, that is true, but doesn’t mean what Mr. Elliot claims it does. Here is a statement from the NIH on the matter:

NIAID scientists created stabilized coronavirus spike proteins for the development of vaccines against coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Recognizing the importance of these novel immunogens, NIAID has sought patents to preserve the government’s rights to these inventions and to provide incentive for commercial partners to invest the capital and resources needed to advance their development, commercialization, and public use as vaccines.

NIAID has adopted a non-exclusive licensing approach for these patent rights in order to allow multiple vaccine developers to utilize these immunogens in their proprietary vaccine platforms. The mRNA vaccine candidate resulting from NIAID’s collaboration with Moderna, embodied in the material transferred to UNC, is an example of this approach: the stabilized spike protein developed by NIAID investigators is expressed from Moderna’s proprietary mRNA vaccine platform. Responsibility for obtaining regulatory approval of the mRNA vaccine candidate, a product produced and formulated by Moderna, rests with Moderna.

Federal employees listed as inventors on these patent applications assigned their rights to the US government. Accordingly, should the USPTO and other national patent authorities grant the patents, the US government will hold ownership interest in the patents.

According to NIH Director Francis Collins in an interview last May at the Economic Club of Washington, as quoted by Axios:

The bottom line: Many experts anticipate a coronavirus vaccine, once proven safe and effective, would be made as widely available as possible, and that developers aren’t likely to seek big profits from it. Partial federal ownership could be a backstop if those assumptions don’t bear out, but NIH isn’t keen on stepping on industry’s toes.

• “Talking to the companies, I don’t hear any of them say they think this [vaccine] is a money-maker,” Collins said during his Economic Club interview. “I think they want to recoup their costs and maybe make a tiny percentage of increase of profit over that, like single digits percentage-wise, but that’s it. Nobody sees this as a way to make billions of dollars.”

The bottom line is that Fauci does not profit from COVID-19 vaccines, be they the Moderna vaccine or others. He doesn’t own patents on them, and even if he did, as a government employee, he would have signed away the rights to the federal government.

#14: FAUCI IS ON THE HOT SEAT FOR ILLEGAL GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

The “fantastically well-researched documentary”? It’s Plandemic 2 (or, as I like to call it: Plandemic 2: Electric Boogaloo), the sequel to Plandemic, the first COVID-19 conspiracy video to go viral last May featuring antivaccine activist turned COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits.

Basically, the idea behind the two “documentaries” was that the pandemic was a “plandemic”, planned by global elites. It was also the origin of the conspiracy theory that Fauci helped promote “gain-of-function” to make viruses more deadly.

Again, this conspiracy theory shows a shocking ignorance of how NIH grants are funded. As director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci doesn’t dole out the grant money himself. Grant applications go through the standard study section process, where a panel of scientists evaluates the merit of grant applications and then scores them with a priority score, with low scores being better.

The lowest scoring grants are then funded at the institute level until the money runs out. The grant at the heart of this conspiracy theory was indeed for $600,000, and its principal investigator was Peter Daszak, a well-respected virologist. It was not a new grant, but rather year six of a grant that had been funded since 2014. I looked at the RePORTER entry for the grant. The Budget for 2019-2020 was $538,926 direct costs plus $123,054 for indirect costs for a total year six budget of $661,980.

One thing you need to understand about NIH grants is that there are two kinds of renewals, competing and noncompeting renewals. The NIH views, for example, a six year grant as six one-year grants. Each of the one-year segments after the first year are known as noncompeting renewals, because they don’t have to compete with other grant applications. At the end of the grant period, if the investigators want to renew, they have to submit a competing renewal application and go back to the study section.

The point is that a noncompeting renewal is nearly automatic, as long as adequate progress is demonstrated. A competing renewal is not, and this grant was clearly renewed in 2020, because its project end date is listed as June 30, 2025. This is also the grant that was taken away early in the pandemic:

On April 24, the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant for a research project on bat-borne coronaviruses after it was criticized by President Trump and a number of Republican lawmakers. While the grant was held by EcoHealth Alliance, a global environmental health research organization based in New York, it attracted negative attention because part of it supported collaborative activities with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

WIV houses a lab equipped to study the most dangerous class of pathogens, and a number of pundits and politicians are now suggesting it accidentally released SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Though thinly supported, the idea is fueling efforts to focus blame for the COVID-19 pandemic on the Chinese government. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), in particular, has cited suspicions about WIV and the actions of Chinese leaders during the pandemic as justifying a hardline stance, which he said this week could include cutting off student visas in technical fields.

So, yes, this grant to Ecohealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak, was a collaborative grant with Chinese researchers, but Fauci had nothing to do with granting it, and it was political pressure based on conspiracy mongering that led to its being taken away last April and then reinstated, but with onerous conditions in August.

In any event, the grant was to look for bat coronaviruses at high risk to “cross over” into human populations. The origin of the conspiracy theory was described in this Nature article:

A favorite version of the laboratory-origin stories relies on the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered for gain-of-function studies that were also previously performed with bat SARS-like coronaviruses to understand cross-species transmission risk (Nat. Med. 21, 1508–1513; 2015). The irony is that those gain-of-function studies provided valuable information about the biology of SARS-CoV-2. Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar. Moreover, there is an extensive history of pathogen emergence by natural means: most novel viral pathogens that have caused epidemics or pandemics in the human population have emerged naturally from a wildlife reservoir. Therefore, the overwhelming conclusion is that this virus, too, found its way into a human host through a series of unhappy accidental encounters with animals.

And:

In April 2020, we witnessed firsthand how misinformation about the virus’ origins can destroy research when President Trump ordered the National Institutes of Health to strip the EcoHealth Alliance of a grant that involved close collaboration with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH justified the cancellation by saying the research, which investigated bat SARS-like coronaviruses circulating in China and zoonotic spillover, did not align with NIH priorities, which strains credulity. This work produced some of the strongest corroborating evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally emergent pathogen, as serological surveys demonstrated that people living in close proximity to colonies of bats had antibodies to bat SARS-like coronaviruses. The NIH has since set impossible conditions for restoring the grant, ensuring that this research will never resume.

The bottom line: There’s not much behind this conspiracy theory, and it’s a conspiracy theory that was jumped on by Republican politicians and used first to fear monger about the grant and then to scuttle it, all while trying to blame China by implying that SARS-CoV-2 was bioengineered in a Wuhan lab.

Never mind that sequencing of the virus demonstrated conclusively a long time ago that it was not made in a lab.

#15: THE VIRUS CONTINUES TO MUTATE

And, since it’s related, I’ll list #17:

#17: THE WORLD’S LEADING VACCINOLOGIST IS SOUNDING THE ALARM…

I already discussed this one in detail too. The reason that variants are arising is because so many people are being infected; in other words, there’s so much variation for evolution to work on because it’s running rampant. Moreover, Geert Vanden Bossche is hardly “world-renowned”. Far from it. He hasn’t published much in a long time.

His idea that vaccination will fuel the rise of ever more deadly COVID-19 mutants is very similar to Andrew Wakefield’s claim a year before that mass vaccination against measles would fuel the rise of ever more deadly measles variants that would ultimately lead to mass extinction. (I kid you not.)

In any event, as I discussed coronaviruses actually don’t mutate as quickly as most RNA viruses, and the selective pressure of vaccination on viruses is not the same as the selective pressure of antibiotics on bacteria. In any event, like Wakefield, Vanden Bossche has a competing vaccine idea for COVID-19, and pausing COVID-19 vaccination would simply let the virus circulate longer and more widely, providing grist for even more variants than are emerging now.

#16: CENSORSHIP…AND THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DEBATE

I laughed when I read this. It’s basically a clear that this is an appeal to false balance. He’s trying to equate efforts to stamp down disinformation on social media with “censorship”, as cranks often do. In fact, there has been a lot of debate in the scientific community.

#18: I ALREADY HAD COVID

It’s certainly possible that Mr. Elliot has had COVID-19. His symptoms were certainly consistent with it. However, without serology he can’t be sure that he actually had COVID-19. Even if he did have COVID-19, it’s not clear that his immunity is lifelong (in fact, very likely it is not), and, given the emergence of new variants, we have already seen examples of people who have been reinfected. It seems rare, but we don’t know how rare.

More importantly, if the virus does in fact “continue to mutate,” as Mr. Elliot maintains, and actually does produce variants that can evade immunity, then “natural immunity” won’t help him.

More importantly, the CDC does recommend that you should be vaccinated even if you’ve had COVID, because vaccine-induced immunity is less variable than “natural immunity” and there is emerging evidence that it might provide better protection against emerging variants.

And, no, citing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. claiming that getting the vaccine after having had COVID-19 is dangerous is not a good argument, particularly when he cites someone like Hooman Norchashm, a physician who’s claimed not to be antivaccine but has been promoting the idea that it is very dangerous to be vaccinated against COVID-19 if you have an asymptomatic infection or if you’ve recently had it before. It’s not.

He concludes:

Agree or disagree with me; I’ll treat you no differently. You’re a human just as worthy of love and respect as anyone else. For that I salute you, and I truly wish you all the best. I hope you found this helpful. If so, feel free to share. If not, feel free to (kindly) let me know what didn’t make sense to you and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts too. Stay curious and stay humble.

Too bad Mr. Elliot, although he might be “curious”, is anything but humble. Certainly he isn’t humble enough to realize when he is in over his head, as his “COVID-19 antivax greatest hits” compendium demonstrates.

He’s using his gene therapy denial coupled with his antivaccine views coupled with his entrepreneurial bent to spread COVID-19 disinformation. Sadly, it’s worked. His article has had over 2.6 million views just on his website alone, not counting its republication on RFK Jr.’s website

THE END

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Author: Stucky

I'm right, you're wrong. Deal with it. View all posts by Stucky