The COVID Reckoning That Came Too Late

The FDA finally begins to admit vaccine deaths, but the true cost will never be known

Now that the FDA has officially acknowledged that children were killed as a direct result of the COVID vaccines, it seems surreal to those of us who spent so much time cautioning against the fast-track approval process, ever-broadening targeted demographics, and recommendations that were effectively mandates for so many people. The exact number will forever be elusive, as the memo itself acknowledged.

This news comes long after most people have stopped caring about the COVID saga. Only now is real, non-politicized information starting to trickle out. A cynic might remind us that the profitability of COVID vaccination has largely dried up too.

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for the FDA, in addition to being the director of CBER (the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research). His memo tells us what so many who were scorned as conspiracy theorists were deplored for saying:

“Unlike the COVID virus, which has a steep age gradient-- being at least 1000 times more likely to kill an 80 year old than an 8 year old-- myocarditis appeared to have the opposite pattern. Young, healthy boys and men-- those least likely to experience bad covid outcomes-- bore the greatest risk. The risk was as high as ~200-330 per million doses given in the highest risk demographic groups.”

Of course, medical research is constantly evolving, so in some sense, it should not be surprising that such memos would come later in time, and give us information that we did not have before. Yet—this vaccine was unlike any other medical drug or device in America.

It was forced on most of the American workforce, under threat of job loss during a time in which nobody was hiring because companies were being shut down by state governments using emergency orders. Parents took the COVID vaccine out of fear that they would not be able to feed their children if they refused. This was an experimental drug that children were pressured to take so that they could stay in school. It was imposed upon those who wanted to engage in sociable hobbies. Even volunteering to provide disaster aid required presenting a so-called vaccine passport. In some states, you could not enter restaurants without proof of vaccine status. Citizens were prosecuted for making fake documents regarding one’s personal medical decisions. Doctors lost their employment if they publicly questioned the new paradigm.

These were not medical decisions. They were infringements upon human freedom, and they represented a large-scale sociological and medical experiment on largely unwilling people. That experiment had outcomes that we will never be able to fully quantify.

It is nearly impossible to trace long-term deaths or chronic illnesses directly to vaccination, but the social damage is also profound and largely unexamined. Consider:

• Those in fields like medicine who got their degrees through spontaneous virtual programs, watching via remote videos what they should have been doing in person.

• The toddlers who missed the key developmental phase of watching human faces to learn subtle social cues.

• The teenagers whose final years in high school, known as a formative period for identity and personality, were spent in front of screens.

These are the victims that we can never number, but whose existence is undeniable.

For the first time, the FDA is admitting not only that the vaccines had negative health outcomes among people who were least likely to be at risk from COVID, but also that the agency itself ignored early indications of danger, instead choosing to continue promoting the drugs to ever-broadening demographics:

“Worse, the FDA delayed acknowledgement of the safety signal until after it could extend marketing authorization to younger boys 12-15. This is described by the Commissioner and I in JAMA. Had the acknowledgement come early, these younger boys, who likely did not require COVID-19 vaccination, may have chosen to avoid the products.”

The COVID era caused the gradual loss of public trust in the medical industry, and in government. That loss of trust was not merely the result of an exhausted populace who were tired of mask wearing—it was the net effect of the fact that people were lied to and misinformed by public officials. The public began to see themselves as victims, or at least enemies, of the very groups that were charged to protect them. Memos like this validate those concerns.

The memo (which everyone should read in full) ends with the claim that a new approach will be taken in the future with regard to vaccine approval and promotion:

“we will take swift action regarding this new safety concern, we will not be granting marketing authorization to vaccines in pregnant women based on unproven surrogate endpoints… we will demand premarket randomized trials assessing clinical endpoints for most new products… We will revise the annual flu vaccine framework, which is an evidence-based catastrophe of low quality evidence, poor surrogate assays, and uncertain vaccine effectiveness measured in case-control studies with poor methods.”

The COVID-era saw medical professionals raised as gods and the establishment itself immune from criticism, even from within. It was a horrifying display of the Scientism of our age, an ideology that treats scientific institutions as unquestionable moral arbiters. Christians who tried to worship the true God were arrested in multiple states for trying to enter their shuttered churches, yet nobody considered shutting medical clinics, or even abortion clinics, because those were considered “essential,” unlike the churches that minister to the human soul.

Because doctors are not gods and the government is not all-good, it is a positive development to have a populace that questions them, even while it represents a loss—that the naivete we once bore was a luxury that we can no longer afford.

There is a debt owed to those who were damaged by the social policies of the COVID era and those who were killed or maimed by the medical ones. Realistically, most of us can acknowledge our inclusion in at least the former category. Those policies were so widespread and drastic that they made victims out of almost everyone, except the elitists of our society. It is a period that will likely be studied for decades, as we gradually learn of the losses in numeric ways that lack humanity and cannot convey appropriate gravity. So we might use these data points better by remembering who we are as a people, and that on account of our humanity, there are policies and decisions that we should never accept. There are commands that we should never obey, for they reduce Man made in God’s image to mere obstacles in the way of bureaucrats. We must never consent to that assertion.