(New York Post) In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during COVID:
Much of the time, they were wrong.
To be clear, public health officials were not wrong for making recommendations based on what was known at the time. That’s understandable. You go with the data you have.
No, they were wrong because they refused to change their directives in the face of new evidence. When a study did not support their policies, they dismissed it and censored opposing opinions.
At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weaponized research itself but putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR.
In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession. Here are 10 ways they misled Americans:
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary COVID vaccine series.
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.AP/Nathan Papes
In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s “misinformation” policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected. That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the COVID vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralized the virus, but they were antibodies that the government did not recognize.
Misinformation #2: Masks prevent COVID transmission
Cochran Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine. And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on COVID transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomized controlled studies.
It recently came out that masks didn’t have that much of an effect on preventing COVID-19 transmission.Jeenah Moon/Pool via REUTERS
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomized studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channeled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce COVID transmission
The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates.Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.
Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle. They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates. A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite. We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the COVID vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males. Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a COVID vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had COVID.
Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
Boosters reduced hospitalizations in older, high-risk Americans. But the evidence was never there that they lower COVID mortality in young, healthy people. That’s probably why the CDC chose not to publish its data on hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under 50, when it published the same rates for those over 50.
Ultimately, White House pressure to recommend boosters for all was so intense that the FDA’s two top vaccine experts left the agency in protest, writing scathing articles on how the data did not support boosters for young people.
