We Thought We Got The Updated Covid Shot. We Didn't.

This year, nobody has been giving the public clear information about Covid shots. Not the CDC. Not the FDA. Certainly not the mainstream news. Some experts are trying to give clear information but can’t.

It’s gone like this:

You can’t get them but this or that committee needs to have more meetings to officially screw everyone over. Okay, you can get them but your insurance won’t cover it. Actually, only some people can get them. Some people can get them but the FDA won’t recommend them to anyone. You might need a doctor’s note. Some people can get this vaccine but not that vaccine. Here’s a new version of the vaccine with a lower dose. Wait, you can’t get that one either. This state is listening to the CDC, but that one isn’t. This association still supports vaccines, but it doesn’t matter.

On and on…

In the end, my family just started looking around and calling pharmacies to see who had the shot. We thought we found a CVS offering the latest shot from Moderna. We called them to confirm. They told us to come on down.

Yeah, an actual pharmacist said that.

Then…

Gripped by lingering doubts, we called them back to make extra sure, one last time, that the shot we were getting was the most recent, updated formula. That’s when a different pharmacist told us… no.

We got last year’s shot.

On top of that, one pharmacist went above and beyond and told us we probably weren’t going to get any more Covid shots because we’re “not in a pandemic anymore” and the virus poses “no more risk than the common cold.” Hey, at least that pharmacist actually knew what was going on.

So first, CVS needs to get their shit together.

Second, if you read my first version of this post, scratch all that about getting the latest shot. Apparently, it’s the wild west out there. These days, not only do you have to know more than your doctor and your pharmacist, you have to be able to explain it to them like they’re in second grade. Otherwise, they’re happy to sell you an outdated shot without offering you any context. And while it might make perfect sense to get last year’s shot in late August if there’s nothing else available, it would be nice to know up front that’s what you’re getting, just like it would be nice for anyone who gets paid to protect public health to do their effing job. I don’t normally send out posts back to back, but a correction this big warrants it.

Of course, it shouldn’t be this way. We should be able to walk into any pharmacy and get the latest version of any shot without having to read dozens of news articles first and then ask 300 people on Reddit. Drug companies should update the shots when the variant changes. Alas, that was the plan.

That’s what we were promised. That was supposed to be the miracle of mRNA vaccines. Instead, greed intervened and put profits first.

Many of us have been chasing information on vaccines all year, running into wall after wall. We know why. Anti-vaxxers have taken over our public health agencies and intentionally disrupted the process. Of course, it doesn’t help that vaccination rates have plummeted. According to a poll by Kaiser, 59 percent of all adults say they probably or definitely won’t get a Covid shot. In fact, only 37 percent of white adults said they plan to get one. Yeah, it’s pathetic.

How did we get here?

It wasn’t just anti-vaxxers

Plenty of mainstream “journalists” will lay the blame solely on the shoulders of RFK Jr. and his band of minions. That’s half the story. A full understanding requires nuance. As some of us know, a lot of public health officials dropped the ball big time. It’s a story worth retelling, since 90 percent of the public still doesn’t know. First off, the previous CDC did mislead the public about vaccines.

Way back in 2021, we started seeing evidence that the mRNA shots didn’t stop transmission. As the research would eventually show in abundance, vaccinated people do spread Covid, and “the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants… appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people.”

Furthermore, vaccines reduce your risk of Long Covid by roughly 62 percent, but even that mediocre protection wanes over time, requiring boosters once or even twice a year. As the studies show, it’s no trifling matter. It’s a condition characterized by lasting damage to multiple organ systems, and patients have put their pain and quality of life on par with advanced terminal cancer. The mountains of research have prompted many experts to describe the result as “the greatest mass disabling event in human history,” with an oncoming health crisis “so large as to be unfathomable.” We now have at least 17 million adults and 6 million children with Long Covid. I know lots of teachers and writers with Long Covid. Some of them have confided in me that they don’t share this knowledge with anyone. A few of them have even admitted they’ve been living in denial of their condition.

Did the CDC have any clue?

They did.

An internal slide presentation from the summer of 2021 reveals that the CDC was fully aware of waning vaccine effectiveness and the risk of variants like Delta. The presentation urged officials to “acknowledge the war has changed.” Slides said that “breakthrough cases may reduce public confidence in vaccines.” It even reported that vaccinated patients could still spread the virus almost as much as the unvaccinated, and that they were making up a larger portion of hospitalizations and deaths. Once it became impossible to deny the reality of serious breakthrough infections by late summer, the CDC made a muddled attempt to bring back masks in the fall of 2021, but they didn’t try very hard and eventually gave up.

The CDC would abandon any attempt to protect the public during the winter of 2021-2022, caving to corporate pressure to ease quarantine and testing guidelines. Anthony Fauci didn’t even try to hide the real reason for the decision. It had nothing to do with science or medicine. Instead, he said, “We want to get people back to the jobs,” even if they were unwell.

There was already substantial data on Long Covid and “mild” Covid infections, including the likelihood of asymptomatic spread—you were contagious regardless of how you felt. Here’s the conclusion of a report published in the CDC’s own journal, Emerging and Infectious Diseases:

In summary, it is likely that a substantial proportion of patients surviving COVID-19 will experience long-term symptoms requiring prolonged care, even after mild to moderate disease. These symptoms might negatively affect patients’ quality of life and represent an additional burden for healthcare services and social security.

That was published in March of 2022, meaning the CDC had the information by the end of 2021, if not sooner. It was already clear that anyone’s odds of developing Long Covid from an infection hovered around 1 in 20, a conservative estimate. The main risk from Covid wasn’t death or hospitalization anymore. It was lifelong chronic illness. It was a dramatic increase in anyone’s risk of heart attack and stroke, diabetes, brain damage, and blood clots.

You can read all about Covid’s prolonged risks here.

A member of the Covid response team (Ezekiel Emanuel) admitted the true reasoning for the casual attitude during a podcast interview with Andy Slavitt, a healthcare advisor from the Obama administration.

Here’s what Ezekiel Emanuel said:

The problem is we don’t know the Long Covid thing. And when I go around, I hear from a lot of people that’s what they’re obsessed by because it’s so frightening. Brain fog, fatigue, shortness of breath on a chronic basis, not being able to get out of bed. No one wants to risk that. That ruins your life… If you said, look your chances are 1 in 20 of getting Long Covid even with three shots… People would like… I’m not taking those odds… That sounds too much like Russian roulette for I think a lot of people… we do have probably several million people at least who have Long Covid.

So, Biden’s Covid response team knew about Long Covid as early as the winter of 2021-2022 and chose to lie about it.

(To his credit, Ezekiel Emanuel himself wasn’t trying to hide anything. He was fairly open, including in a Time magazine piece.)

A sea of negligence and corruption

To sum up:

By early 2022, public health officials knew very well that vaccinated people still shed virus, enough to make someone else sick. They also knew that even mild infections in vaccinated populations still faced a significant risk. Nonetheless, in February 2022, a firm named Impact Research circulated a memo advising high-ranking members of the Democratic party to “take the win” on Covid and stop talking about it altogether. The consultants advised politicians to “push for feeling and acting more normal” and to “recognize that people are worn out and feeling real harm from the years-long restrictions and take their side.”

This memo contradicted actual polls showing a majority of Americans still supported safety measures and were still worried about Covid. Even in 2024, after years of misinformation, 4 in 10 Americans still believe in taking precautions. In late February 2022, the CDC released a new Covid-19 monitoring system with updated metrics and prettier, soothing colors. Anyone following public health was shocked at the sudden transformation of America’s transmission map from orange and yellow to a bright, festive green. Public health officials condemned this new monitoring system in an op-ed piece in The Guardian. As they wrote:

The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.

A few days later, Biden delivered his State of the Union address, claiming victory over the virus and telling everyone it was safe to return to work and school. It was safe to eat out again. It was safe to shop.

Meanwhile…

Stories from early 2022 were still reporting that White House staff and visitors had to mask around Biden. In fact, they weren’t even given water at meetings “lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.” It was just one of several indications that Biden and his administration offered a message to the public that they themselves didn’t believe. They were hypocritical, even deceitful.

While the Biden administration was promoting “back to normal,” Pfizer was celebrating the end of public health measures in earnings calls with shareholders, with chief science officers like Mikael Dolsten describing conditions like viral persistence and Long Covid as “a real growth opportunity for Paxlovid to do very well” in terms of sales. The president of their bio-pharmaceuticals group, Angela Hwang, spoke in positive terms about infections going up as masking and other social distancing practices stopped. “Infections are going to increase,” she said, creating an opportunity for their drugs.

Around that time, Biden replaced Jeffrey Zients as head of his Covid response team with Ashish Jha, a doctor who had already criticized the reliance on infections as a metric for pandemic response, echoing Trump.

Stepping into his new role, Jha began to advocate for policies of mass infection and herd immunity that liberals had previously rejected. Jha told everyone they were going to get Covid, so just get over it. Epidemiologists like Katelyn Jetelina spoke out in a piece in The New York Times:

“We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”

While they largely downplayed Long Covid in children, Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky advised their own children’s schools to spend millions of dollars installing clean air systems. While they were protecting their children in 2022, Biden was telling states and cities to spend our Covid relief money on police. As The New York Times reported, he was “making a forceful push” ahead of midterm elections “to show he is a defender of law enforcement.” As PBS explained, Biden urged governors to prioritize law enforcement even as the Treasury Department released another round of relief funds. That’s exactly what governors did.

Public health got privatized

For years, the last administration engaged in doublespeak, upgrading their own air quality, enforcing testing requirements at events, and even publicly endorsing clean indoor air, while more quietly encouraging states and cities to spend the money allocated for these improvements on anything else. Ashish Jha personally oversaw the privatization of these tools, saying that “my hope is… you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products.”

Biden also weakened clean air guidance. As Harvard’s Jason Feldman explains, Biden watered down his own agency’s regulations.

Feldman points out:

The agency had proposed requirements for masking, testing, and paid quarantine and isolation, among other provisions, but had become the target of various business groups. Instead, the administration went forward with a narrower rule restricted to health care workers.

As Bruce Rolfsen writes in Bloomberg Law, OSHA tried to pass strong protections, but after interference from Biden’s White House they released final guidance that only applied “in the healthcare sector” and was “supplemented by voluntary guidance for other industries.” An article in the BMJ provides further detail on OSHA’s original intention to protect all workers by providing paid leave, upgrades to ventilation, and access to protective equipment.

Biden overrode them.

As the BMJ authors conclude, “these failures were appalling and led to tens of thousands of deaths,” largely due to “poor communication of existing evidence.” During the same year, at least 28 states, including many liberal ones, passed liability shields to block legal action against businesses for exposing workers to Covid. It was actually the California Supreme Court that killed Covid lawsuits, ruling that employers weren’t liable for “take-home” Covid.

The 2021 Delta surge, which happened under Biden’s watch and after he declined to back his own safety administration, saw an immense wave of death and trauma. It was a direct consequence of dropping mask requirements and failing to protect workers, insisting on vaccines alone:

The winter of 2022-2023 saw the first signs of what experts warned us about, that Covid was causing immune system disruption and damage in adults and children, and it was going to make a regular cold season far worse, especially for adolescents. In November 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to Biden “begging” him to declare a national emergency on respiratory viruses, freeing up federal resources to help overwhelmed healthcare workers.

He didn’t even respond.

Democrats tolerated misinformation

Vaccine skepticism isn’t the only piece of misinformation that undermined our pandemic response. Immunity debt did just as much damage. News networks pushed this piece of misinformation relentlessly, even as some responsible journalists and hundreds of immunologists pushed back on it, trying to explain that the idea rested on a false understanding of scientific facts. Even The Financial Times debunked it, with several comments from immunologists:

The discussion swirling around immunity debt shows how easy it is for a plausible-sounding theory to circulate as misinformation. In this case, misinformation risks promoting the unfounded assertion that infections are clinically beneficial to children, as well as feeding the revisionist narrative that Covid measures did more harm than good.

An entire year later, the CDC finally released a report confirming what pediatricians and informed parents tried to warn everyone about, that the winter of 2022-2023 delivered record-breaking numbers of hospitalizations for children, including those under five. It took another year for studies on Covid’s immune system damage to thoroughly debunk the concept of immunity debt.

During the “Barbenheimer” summer of 2023, The New York Times published a piece of blatant propaganda touting a “positive milestone” as excess deaths, a crucial metric, magically dropped down below prepandemic levels. There was just one little problem here. The CDC achieved this “milestone” not through science and communication but by manipulating their own data. As many of us pointed out, the CDC announced a change to their methodology for calculating excess deaths earlier that year. Here’s the most important part:

On March 15, 2023, the methodology for estimating excess deaths was updated to account for the fact that approximately 160 weeks of data during the pandemic were being excluded in the algorithm (so that expected values were not inflated due to substantially elevated mortality during the pandemic), resulting in unstable estimates of expected weekly numbers of deaths in some cases. To account for this limitation and provide more stable estimated expected numbers for recent time periods, the Farrington surveillance algorithms (1) were first applied to data through 2020 and used to predict the expected weekly number of deaths through 2020. To estimate the expected number of deaths for 2021, weekly counts of death above the 95% prediction interval in 2020 were replaced with imputed values, assuming that deaths (on average) in 2020 reflected the expected numbers and variability predicted by the Farrington algorithm.

The CDC started including the significantly elevated mortality from 2020-2023 in their new baseline. In other words, they upped their expectations. So, they cheated their way to a low mortality rate by predicting that more people would die, and of course that’s true because mild Covid has documented links to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, organ damage, immune system dysfunction, neurological disorders, and cancer. We have undoctored excess mortality from Our World in Data through 2024. As you can see, it has remained 9-10 percent above the pre-pandemic levels with the exception of the last few months (probably a data delay).

Andre Damon has done an excellent job chronicling the dismantling of the systems and tools put in place to track and monitor infections. Evan Blake and Benjamin Mateus have also covered the administration’s failures, focusing on the orchestrated degradation of wastewater monitoring and the devastating surge of disease thanks to Covid’s widely documented impact on our immune systems.

Under Biden, the FDA and NIH have largely ignored a long list of possible treatments for Long Covid and viral persistence that impact at least 20 million Americans. The list includes monoclonal antibodies that have been scrapped for emergency treatment but show a great deal of promise for working in combination with antivirals to treat post-Covid conditions. Currently, it’s sitting on shelves. The FDA has been taking its sweet time to approve Xocova (ensitrelvir), an antiviral that works better than Paxlovid, and it’s widely available in Japan. This drug continues to outperform Paxlovid, and it could soon be available for children.

Just not in the U.S.

That’s how we got here.

All of that explains why Americans don’t care anymore. They’re deeply confused, conflicted, and they’ve given up. Up to 25 percent of children who catch Covid go on to develop Long Covid now. One study estimates that 5.8 million children in the U.S. currently suffer from the condition.

As a pediatrician at NYU has said, “This is a public health crisis for children,” adding that we’re going to see the “long-term impacts of experiencing long covid in childhood for decades to come.”

And then there’s this:

Yes, that’s the CDC tweeting a photoshopped image of a doctor declining to wear a mask for a vulnerable patient. The patient is wearing her mask upside down. It’s not a real N95, but an earloop mask with the label “N95” pasted on the side.

As Laura Weiss wrote in The New Republic, “The Democrats’ current Covid-19 prevention playbook barely differs from that of Republicans, even though the World Health Organization has said… we are still in a pandemic.”

Why does this matter?

The story isn’t that RFK Jr. canceled effective mRNA vaccines for no reason. The story is that almost nobody cares he’s doing it, because our politicians and media have engaged in a bipartisan effort to condition public apathy.

The story is that mRNA Covid vaccines fell short of their original promises. Instead of admitting that and funding better vaccines and treatments, our leaders decided to double down on their own brand of misinformation. They chose to follow the advice of consultants who told them to “take the win.”

It ruined countless lives.

When we lose the rest of our vaccines, we’ll know why. Anti-vaxxers found the perfect opportunity in this massive failure of public health. They manipulated it for their benefit. They used the silence on Long Covid to blame vaccines. They rode a wave of public mistrust into power. If our leaders, our friends, our coworkers, and our neighbors had done a better job, this wouldn’t have ever happened.

It’s not just on the anti-vaxxers.

It’s on them, too.

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