by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Covid and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxxing Movement
Until the last year or two, I’d never paid any attention to the anti-vaxxing movement, which very occasionally received some coverage in my newspapers. It seemed to mostly consist of a small slice of agitated women from affluent suburbs, morbidly fearful that the standard series of childhood vaccinations would injure their infants, perhaps producing autism or other serious disabilities. I regarded them almost as an eccentric cult that I mentally filed away with Scientologists or UFO adherents.
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That all changed in 2020 as the massive Covid epidemic led the Trump Administration to propose an equally massive roll-out of mRNA vaccines, which were rushed into release without undergoing the usual years of careful clinical trials. Given the new technology employed—which effectively hijacked the body’s own cellular machinery into producing portions of the Covid spike-protein—and the lack of testing, it’s hardly surprising that many individuals were fearful of such injections. Indeed, there were plausible claims that the heavy media campaign against alternative Covid treatments relying upon HCQ and IVM had actually been orchestrated, intended to ensure that the lack of effective alternative drugs would allow the government to use its emergency powers to deploy the Covid vaccines without the lengthy normal testing process. This government-sponsored vaccination project had raised the market value of the large vaccine manufacturers by hundreds of billions of dollars, provoking the reasonable suspicions of cynical observers.
So by 2021 our website was flooded by waves of militant anti-vaxxers, while many of our existing writers and commenters also latched onto that same issue, sometimes to the near-exclusion of most others, a situation that greatly irritated me. Their wild outcries warned that the mRNA vaccines would kill millions—or even billions—perhaps as part of a diabolical globalist plot by Bill Gates to depopulate the earth. All of this seemed like stark, raving lunacy to me, and I regularly said so, incurring their ferocious outrage.
I felt that their basic concern about the widespread use of a relatively untested medical technology might have possible merit. But on balance, the risks appeared smaller than the dangerous Covid epidemic it was intended to mitigate, at least according to an overwhelming large majority of medical professionals. Given my lack of personal expertise, that was the most I could say. So I got my shots, stopped paying any attention to the issue, and hoped for the best.
Fortunately, two years of statistical data now seems to indicate that the medical establishment had mostly been correct and its fervent critics mistaken, and in several recent articles I’d shown that across numerous countries, the number of non-elderly vaccine deaths seems almost invisibly low, too small to be noticeable in the mortality statistics. Anti-vaxxers frequently claim that the vaccines are responsible for a large wave of sudden deaths among youthful individuals and athletes; but the evidence suggests that these are much more likely due to the lingering consequences of Covid infections rather than the vaccines intended to combat the virus, as I’ve discussed in several recent articles:
- Vaxxing Deaths or Covid Deaths?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 2, 2023 • 3,300 Words - Obesity and the End of the Vaxxing Debate?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 9, 2023 • 2,800 Words - Vaxxing, Covid, and International Mortality Rates
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 23, 2023 • 4,500 Words
It’s certainly not impossible that the long-term consequences of mRNA injections might be harmful, but at least so far there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of this, which is the most we can expect at this stage.
The Surprising Flaws in Vaccine Safety Testing
To a huge extent, concerns about mRNA-based Covid vaccines have come to define today’s anti-vaxxing movement, so much so that they seem to be the main focus of perhaps 95% or 98% of all the angry anti-vaxxers I’ve encountered over the last couple of years. Indeed, many of these activists have explicitly said that they’d feel fairly comfortable with the more traditional Covid vaccines released by Russia and various other countries. Although I’m sure that most of the original anti-vaxxers of 2019 are still around, they seem to have been reduced to a tiny minority in the movement that they once pioneered.
