A European Parliament hearing from October 10, 2022 is making the news. While it might seem to be normal parliamentary business, the testimony provided was quite revelatory. The testimony included representatives from Pfizer and Curevac to discuss manufacturing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. The quote that was most notable was when European Parliamentary member Rob Roos of the Netherlands asked if the vaccines were tested to see if they can prevent COVID transmission. Pfizer Director Janine Small testified that the vaccines were not tested for prevention of COVID transmission (see Roos' tweet below).
🚨 BREAKING:
— Rob Roos MEP 🇳🇱 (@Rob_Roos) October 11, 2022
In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission.
"Get vaccinated for others" was always a lie.
The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.
The world needs to know. Share this video! ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/su1WqgB4dO
The fact-checkers at AP News found this to be misleading since "Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue before the vaccine market's release." In a similar vein, Reuters' fact-checkers wrote about how preventing transmission was "not required, not promised." Let's forget for a moment that the Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on the Today Show in September 2020 that "their decision will not only affect their lives...but will affect the lives of others. If they don't vaccinate, they will become the weak link that will allow this virus to replicate."
While purporting to fight misinformation, the fact-checkers at AP News and Reuters hope you do not notice the slight-of-hand with their semantics or what the Pfizer CEO said on live television. The FDA did not require transmission to be tested. That much is true, but that is beside the point. The fact that the vaccines would stop COVID transmission was a repeated talking point from government officials:
- In May 2021, Biden said "if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other vaccinated people around them" and said in a CNN town hall in July 2021 that "you're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
- When pushing for his vaccine mandate in September 2021, Biden reiterated that getting people vaccinated is "about protecting yourself and those around you."
- Dr. Anthony Fauci said in May 2021 that vaccinated people become "dead ends" for coronavirus.
- April 2021: CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that "Our data from the CDC suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and that they are unlikely to spread it to others.
- French government official Jean-Michel Blanquer similarly stated that being vaccinated does not risk contaminating others.
- In 2021, Austria had a lockdown on the unvaccinated to prevent them from transmitting the virus.
I can list more examples, but I think you get the idea by now. Multiple countries mandated that people get vaccinated. There were plenty of jurisdictions that required COVID passports to go to restaurants or shopping, not to mention COVID passports to enter countries in 2021 and the beginning of 2022. The primary underlying rationale of COVID vaccine mandates and COVID vaccine passports was to protect others from getting infected with COVID.
When I criticized Biden's failed attempt at a vaccine mandate in September 2021, I listed 10 reasons why it was faulty. One of those reasons was the following: if the vaccine is what protects the vaccinated (as opposed to making sure everyone is vaccinated), why force the unvaccinated to take it?
Plus, it was anything but clear in 2021 that the vaccines prevented transmission. I went through the data in December 2021 to find that while vaccines helped with severe cases of COVID, they did little to nothing to prevent transmission. I wrote that piece while the Delta variant was the predominant strain. Since Omicron is even more transmissible than Delta, it stands to reason there are similar issues with COVID transmission. After all, the CDC found that in February 2022, 64 percent of adults and 75 of children had been infected by the Omicron variant of COVID.
Here is my main line of questioning for today:
If Pfizer didn't know, what inside information did Biden, Fauci, or any other government official have to justify their push for vaccine mandates?
How could your vaccine mandate-loving neighbor who yelled at the unvaccinated because their choice to not get vaccinated "could kill grandma" possibly have known more about vaccines and transmission than the companies manufacturing and distributing the vaccines?
To answer these questions non-rhetorically, they did not know. Government officials did not have adequate information, clinical data, or other inside information regarding vaccines' effect on transmission before thrusting vaccine mandates or vaccine passports onto the populace. Not only did they not know, there was evidence showing that the vaccines did not prevent transmission.
Just so we are clear, this is not to say that COVID vaccines are useless. Quite the opposite! I have written on multiple occasions that the vaccines are effective because they prevent severe COVID, COVID-related hospitalizations, and COVID deaths (see here, here, and here). A September 2022 paper from the Lancet shows how the COVID vaccines saved anywhere between 14.4 to 19.8 millions within the first year of vaccination (Watson et al., 2022). To throw more nuance into the mix, the Danish government does not recommend that people under 50 get their booster shot. The main success of the COVID vaccines is individual protection of one's health, not societal protection.
The efficacy of vaccines based on certain metrics does not negate that the vaccines were not particularly helpful when it came to COVID transmission. It certainly does not excuse government officials using faulty rationale to pass problematic policy or various media outlets going along with it.
What happened in the EU parliamentary meeting is another example of how governments around the world ignored the science to force onerous COVID regulations on the people, whether it was harmful lockdowns, counterproductive school closures, all-but-useless mask mandates, or ineffective travel bans. Neither the media nor various governments want us to pay attention to these finer points because they would rather deflect the harm the suffering they caused with putting fear-mongering over actual science.
While Biden declared the pandemic is over, what we the people need to do now is make sure that the lockdown lovers, Covidians, and indeed everyone who was responsible for wreaking such havoc on our institutions and way of life do not get to write a revisionist, bastardized version of history to make them look vindicated. We need to hold a light to what was inflicted upon this generation so future generations do not suffer.
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