New York Times ‘Guide’ to Fall Vaccines Misinforms about COVID‑19 Shots

In my September 22 article “Beware of Flu Shot Misinformation from the New York Times!”, I detailed how the newspaper’s recent “guide to fall vaccine shots” aims to manufacture consent for the CDC’s policy goal of increasing vaccine uptake instead of providing readers with what they need to know to make an informed choice.

Naturally, the Times has the same aim when it comes to COVID‑19 vaccines, so it’s unsurprising that the “guide” similarly misinforms about these shots.

As I pointed out in my prior article,

Of course, the CDC says nothing about natural approaches to supporting proper functioning of your immune system, such as by doing common sense things like maintaining vitamin D sufficiency to reduce your risk of severe influenza illness.

The CDC’s proposed solution to the public health burden of influenza disease is instead 100 percent synonymous with the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

The same naturally goes for COVID‑19 vaccines, and the Times follows the CDC’s example by starting its “guide” to Covid shots with the assertion that the “best defenses” are “vaccines and post-infection treatments.”

The message is thus that there is nothing you can do to naturally support the functioning of your immune system, so you have to depend on pharmaceutical products to stay healthy.

The Times quotes Dr. Peter Hotez, who is described as “a vaccine expert and author of a forthcoming book, ‘The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science’”, saying that, “Overwhelmingly, those who are being hospitalized are unvaccinated or undervaccinated.”

The Times does not provide us with a source to verify Hotez’s claim. But notice that, because he lumps “undervaccinated” with “unvaccinated”, his statement is consistent with hospitalized COVID‑19 patients being overwhelmingly vaccinated.

Indeed, it is was true by April 2022 that most hospitalized COVID‑19 patients had been vaccinated. This should not be surprising since by then most of the population had been vaccinated, and the rapidly waning protection against hospitalization is precisely why “public health” officials started recommending booster shots.

As I noted in my September 9 article “‘Study’ on COVID-19 ‘Misinformation’ Propagates CDC Misinformation”, a recent paper in JAMA Open Network ludicrously defining “misinformation” as any information that didn’t align with the CDC’s claims faulted physicians for saying on social media “that most positive cases were among vaccinated individuals”.

This was “technically true”, the paper’s authors conceded, but they nevertheless judged it “misleading” since this outcome was to be expected given that most Americans got the vaccines.

Moreover, at this point in time, “undervaccinated” could mean that a person who received (a) the two-dose primary regimen that made them “fully vaccinated” back when the “public health” authorities were lying that those two shots would provide durable sterilizing immunity that would stop infection and transmission; (b) a “booster” shot with the original monovalent formula in the fall of 2021; and (c) the bivalent booster shot falsely advertised by the FDA as capable of “updating” antibodies to be specific to circulating Omicron variants; but who (d) hasn’t yet gotten the new monovalent booster shot that is similarly supposed to update antibodies to be specific to the Omicron XBB.1.5 variant (even though Pfizer’s data from the study it did on 10 mice showed that “original antigenic sin” is a real problem).

Naturally, the Times does not disclose to its readers how a study earlier this year by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, found an “association of increased risk of COVID‑19 with more prior vaccine doses”.

Earlier this month, Cleveland Clinic researchers updated a preprint study published at medRxiv again reporting the finding that “those ‘up-to-date’ on COVID‑19 vaccination did not have a lower risk of COVID‑19 than those not ‘up-to-date’”.

The conclusion drawn was that the CDC’s current definition of “up-to-date” provides “a meaningless classification of risk of COVID‑19 in the adult population.”

As for Peter Hotez’s ostensible “expertise” on COVID‑19 vaccines, let’s put that to rest, shall we? Just take four-and-a-half minutes to watch this superb video compilation from Racket News of Hotez’s record (trust me, it’s worth the time, and you could probably use a few laughs):

In January 2020, I published an article titled “NY Times Deceives about the Odds of Dying from Measles in the US”, in which I exposed misinformation in an op-ed by Peter Hotez. When I confronted him on Twitter for lying to New York Times readers, his response, after failing to identify any substantive errors in my article, was to block me. (He identified one error, which I immediately corrected, and which did not in any way affect the validity of any of my arguments.)

“Yes, severe Covid remains rare in people under 50,” the Times’ “guide to fall vaccine shots” acknowledges. But the Times argues that younger adults can still get a “nasty” case of Covid, and “A booster shot will reduce its potency.”

The Times does not disclose that there is no scientific evidence to support that claim. The FDA gave its stamp of approval to the newly formulated shots, and the CDC recommended it for everyone aged six months and up, based on a study in 10 mice, in the case of Pfizer’s product, and 50 humans, in the case of Moderna’s.

For further details about that, please click through to read this full Twitter thread:

The data these “public health” agencies based their decision on were measurements of antibodies in the blood after vaccination—even though both the FDA and CDC know that correlates of immunity for SARS-CoV-2 have not been established, meaning that just because someone has a high level of circulating antibodies does not mean that they have good protection.

In fact, a high level of antibodies in people infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 is associated with severe COVID‑19.

Trying to defend the CDC’s recommendation even for children to get a Covid shot this fall, the Times quotes Dr. Nirav Shah, the Principal Deputy Director of the CDC, lying that the vaccine will prevent infected children from spreading the coronavirus to others.

Shah preposterously asserts that children should be willing to accept the risk of vaccination not so they can be at low risk from COVID‑19 (which they already are), but rather to make that sacrifice for the good of others.

“Do you want to see your grandpa?” he rhetorically asks. “Do you want to hang out with your grandma? Are you really sure you’re not going to give Covid to them?”

Thus, apart from arguing that parents should try to traumatize their children into accepting the vaccine, Shah is brazenly lying that by doing so they can be “really sure” that they won’t become infected and transmit the virus to someone else.

Of course, there is no evidence to support that claim. Although the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public based on the lie that they would provide durable sterilizing immunity, it is now completely uncontroversial that they do not prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

The people at the New York Times know that perfectly well. In fact, the Times reported back in February 2022 that among children aged 5 to 11 years, the COVID‑19 vaccine “offers virtually no protection against infection”.

It’s not surprising that a CDC official would so brazenly lie and fearmonger to advance the agency’s policy goal of increasing vaccine uptake. But what is truly astonishing is how the New York Times tries to pass off the CDC official’s brazen lie as though it were really a good reason for parents to get their children vaccinated.

That perfectly encapsulates how the Times is making no attempt to properly educate its readers to be able to make their own informed choice but instead is partnering with the CDC in deliberately deceiving people in furtherance of the policy goal of increasing uptake of COVID‑19 vaccines.