We Can't Listen to the Science if Scientists are Silenced

There is something very wrong with the manner in which the science on vaccines and other COVID policies is being debated. Failing to fix it will only enhance the skepticism and cynicism that were early roadblocks, leaving us much less capable of combatting future national crises of all types.

At the onset of the pandemic, I, like other journalists covering it, spent a lot of time learning more than we ever thought we would need to know about viruses, vaccines, and other matters of epidemiology in order to help disseminate accurate information and inform the public opinion. We leaned heavily on the expertise of credentialed experts within relevant institutions like the WHO, NIH, CDC, and FDA, and pushed back against matters that were overwhelmingly described by these institutions as misinformation.

This is how such journalism is done. Something unexpected and of great consequence happens, the public panics and looks for answers, responsible media outlets seek to inform the public by reporting relevant process-oriented information along with hard data colored by accessible explanations from those credentialed experts. This is what we know, this is how and why, and here's someone who knows much more about it than the rest of us to better explain what it all means.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the biggest takeaway for me as a journalist was learning how politicized the world of science actually is. In retrospect, it should not have been such a big surprise. If my life as a public policy journalist has taught me anything, it's that everything gets politicized. Still, like many other people, I held onto this unrealistic archetype of the unemotional, Spock-like character in the white lab coat with ever-altruistic intentions.

In actuality, of course, scientists and physicians are endowed with the same array of traits as any other human being. Some are honest, some are not. Some are humble, others are arrogant. Some are confident, some are insecure, and many crave affirmation, attention, fame, wealth, and all of the other trappings of life that are prized in our society. And the institutions of science, whether they be public or private, commercial or non-profit, are no more free from the political machinations that plague other organizations.

The internet has been around for my entire adult life, so I've long been aware of the embarrassingly-large anti-vaccine cult that exists within the United States. My only child was born just a few years after Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent UK study suggested a link between certain vaccines and autism. It had already been retracted by the journal that published it, and Wakefield's financial conflicts of interest had been disclosed, but thanks to bad journalism and the ability of a new thing called the internet to constantly regenerate and disseminate information, the bogus theory was still getting a lot of push. As a result, in the early 2000s, it was not fringe for laymen citizens to worry about the safety of childhood vaccines and a possible link to autism.

Back then, I spoke with our pediatrician about my concerns. She explained the science and pointed me to the relevant documentation. His mother and I absorbed it and very confidently proceeded with the vaccination schedule our pediatrician had recommended. Over the course of two decades, however, the junk science on vaccines and autism hasn't receded all that much in terms of people who believe and perpetuate it. And if the internet was the original engine for the conspiracy theory, then the advent of factors like high-speed internet, smartphones, and social media were the modifications that added enough horsepower to give it new life in the run-up to the COVID crisis.

Those factors also played key roles in the political polarization that had taken grip of our country by 2020, creating a perfect storm of opportunity for even something that would traditionally bring us together as a nation, to instead divide us even further. By the time COVID hit, half of the country thought Donald Trump was the savior of our Republic, while the other half thought he was a narcissistic imbecile. Trump's decision not to take the virus more seriously at its onset and some unfortunate statements he made along the way, made him an easy target for the latter half to project their anger and frustration. Because liberals fell in love with the anti-Trump they saw in Dr. Anthony Fauci, he became a convenient villain to the right. As a broad generalization, liberals largely favored lockdowns and mask mandates, conservatives mostly wanted to save the economy at all costs and both groups have, at times, advocated for ridiculous positions.

But here's the hard truth. The more tenable position at the onset of the outbreak–hey, this is a novel disease that's highly transmissible and potentially very deadly, let's give the relevant institutions every benefit of the doubt–became increasingly complicated as we went on and more and more fact-based evidence suggested that many of those institutions and those who run them had all kinds of problematic conflicts of interest when it came to providing the public with honest and accurate information. It has deeply troubled me to see how many people who began in the most reasonable position and for all of the right reasons, nonetheless, refuse to accept the evidence, if only because it would give those on the other side reason to claim victory.

We now know that Dr. Fauci has, on numerous occasions, deliberately misled the American government and its citizens on multiple fronts, including what his own top scientists thought right from the beginning regarding the origins of the outbreak, as well as whether the United States had been funding controversial gain-of-function research both at home and in the Wuhan laboratory where the virus most likely originated. We know that he actively worked to suppress these opinions and the evidence they were based on, and then used his influence with media outlets to demonize anyone in the scientific community willing to publicly disagree to the point that expressing such an opinion–despite it being the most plausible–meant risking the likely possibility that you would be permanently tarred as a having joined the lunatic fringe. In both instances, he was abetted byNIH Director Francis Collins.

In any reasonable society, Fauci and Collins would by now have been the ones who were discredited and ostracized from the scientific community. But reasonable society is not a label likely to be applied to the United States we're currently living in. Fauci is the left's guy, and they're not going to give their opponents the opportunity to celebrate victory any more than Trump's supporters have been willing to acknowledge the litany of lunacy that's come from their man.

In other words, we seem to have collectively lost the ability to understand that more than one thing can be true. Fauci could have seemed to every reasonable and rational person like the absolute best man for the job at the onset of the pandemic. Right-wingers and conspiracy nuts could have hated him for absurd and invalid reasons. And it can still be true that he's a polished, credentialed and well-spoken narcissist whose love of the power and influence that was already his via the billions of dollars his institutions doled out in grants for research they deemed worthy and the clout that gave him in the world of Big Pharma went off the rails when it was multiplied by orders of magnitude during the pandemic. If that wasn't obvious by the time he was referring to himself to Congress in the third person and declaring that an attack on Fauci is an attack on science, it should have been crystal clear by the time all of those emails revealed his other, more dubious machinations.

If there is anything this country does not need right now, it's even less faith in our public institutions, but to blindly follow along and ignore our reality is not the answer. We have somehow gotten to a point where there is one accepted narrative, which is that vaccines are the only answer, everyone who hasn't gotten one is the problem, and everyone who's gone to the furthest limit on vaccines and boosters can jut their chins and declare themselves to be holier than thou. It's become so extreme in some circles on the left that to even question the wisdom of boosters for certain demographics is enough to get you labeled anti-vax, or, at the very least, someone promoting vaccine hesitancy.

Here again, more than one thing can be true. The vaccines can be a scientific marvel developed in a timeline that was beyond impressive, and the companies that developed them can still have perverse incentives to promote vaccine schedules that are highly dubious in terms of personal risk vs. societal reward. That same son is now 17. He had COVID twice before the vaccine was available for his age group. When they became available, we got him fully vaccinated, but not because we felt he needed it. He's an incredibly fit and healthy kid with no comorbidities, so all evidence suggested that the natural immunity earned by surviving the disease would be adequate enough to warrant avoiding the small but nonetheless very real risk of vaccine injury.

We got him the vaccine because it was part of what we felt at the time was the right thing to do in terms of being responsible members of our society and decreasing the chance that he may spread the virus to someone less healthy. Secondarily, he was going off to college, and not getting the vaccine would have meant a somewhat miserable existence. After being vaccinated, he had a breakthrough case. If you're keeping score, that means fully vaccinated, plus even more robust natural immunity. Still, his university, along with many others, is now mandating a booster. This, despite the fact that there has been no serious study or even conversation as to whether the combination of earned immunity and full vaccination should negate the risk of boosting.

This is particularly troubling given the fact that he is in the age group of males most at risk from myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) from the vaccine. While the risk of myocarditis from vaccination is relatively low, it is real enough to seriously consider whether demographics that are otherwise at extremely low risk for COVID complications should be getting boosted or even fully vaxxed in the first place, especially if they have earned immunity from having had the disease already.

At first, we were told by all of the institutions that the risk of getting myocarditis from the disease was much greater than from the vaccine–by a factor of 8-1 according to one study. This, however, came from flawed data, and there is much to suggest that the opposite may in fact be true, especially when you are considering healthy teen males who do not smoke cigarettes and are not diabetic or obese. We also know that myocarditis has occurred more often with the Moderna vaccine than with Pfizer, yet the institutions are silent on such guidance. It occurs much more often with the second Pfizer shot than the first, yet the institutions are not recommending just the single Pfizer shot for this demographic, or even spacing them out further than usual. And again, no one is having any conversation about whether they should be boosted when they have the additional immunity from having survived the disease.

"Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high," wrote Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, two longtime FDA officials who had been leading the agency's review of COVID-19 vaccine applications before resigning from the agency. And they were talking about the entire general population.

There's also the idea that these are for-profit companies who are making a level of profit off of this vaccine that has never even been contemplated. The $30-35 billion a year they are each making annually from the vaccines is orders of magnitude more than even drugs that had previously been record-setting money makers earned. Additionally, when "brought to you by Pfizer" is all over the corporate media landscape that is driving the one accepted narrative, members of Congress are defiantly getting filthy rich in the stock market trading on inside information, and the FDA and NIH are a revolving door to Big Pharma, you'd have to be crazy to think "follow the science" is the only mantra driving the bus.

There are a lot of things we can do to improve outcomes with COVID that don't involve unnecessarily risking the health of our children or anyone else. Given the vastly disproportionate outcomes for healthy, fit Americans vs. the sedentary, the obese, smokers, and those who suffer from associated lifestyle diseases like emphysema, COPD, type-2 diabetes, and hypertension, I'd like to see us at least begin to have conversations about the personal responsibility people should take for their own health so that measures taken in such a crisis can be more equitable next time around. But the fact that there's not a lot of special interest money in that trough makes me less than optimistic.

Long before COVID, we were already proof that a nation that allows the opportunity to profit to drive health policies and protocols is not going to achieve optimal and equitable outcomes, or even close to it. But a nation that cannot allow its most credentialed scientific experts to vigorously debate all aspects of a pandemic and instead allows corporations, politicians, and bureaucrats to decide on a singular narrative and one wildly-profitable primary course of action does not seem like one likely to fare well either. And as bad as COVID may have seemed, the reality remains that we very well could see a much worse pandemic in the near future.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 4th novel, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, was released in 2021 and is availablehere.