A Slow, Careful, and Inadequate Walk Back on COVID Vaccines?

The Atlantic has been one of the primary propaganda organs of the COVID cultists, but I have to give two cheers, or perhaps 1, for its publication of a carefully hedged piece that acknowledges that the advocates of vaccines may go a bit too far in obscuring the truth to promote their faith in vaccines.

To give you an idea of just how off the rails The Atlantic has been during the COVID years, recall its attacks on anybody who didn’t toe the line on every kooky idea that the COVID cultists put forth. When Governor Brian Kemp cautiously opened up some businesses in Georgia, the magazine vicious attacked him as a murderer. 

So it went, with a few exceptions. I do recall one excellent piece from a pro-vaccine doctor who wrote that he suspected the return of his cancer shortly after vaccination was likely caused by the vaccine, but that speculation was buried by a flood of propaganda about how we should always trust the experts. 

Michel Goldman has spent his career promoting new vaccines and other drugs. Now he wonders if a COVID shot made his cancer worse. @rkhamsi reports: https://t.co/qBFbbXmZPb

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 27, 2022

Even in that article, the slant was still that everybody should get the vaccine, even if it might kill you. But at least the possibility that the mRNA vaccine was not the elixir of life was a huge step forward. 

This you? pic.twitter.com/fDZDV7GMhh

— Matrix Forest (@MatrixForest) September 27, 2022

Now another piece challenging the narrative—a bit—has appeared in the pages of The Atlantic, and I must give credit where it is due. It still takes all the necessary shots at Trump and Republicans, but at least it acknowledges that, perhaps, their critics aren’t the tribunes of truth either. 

Lack of nuance has been a problem with public-health messaging since the start of the coronavirus pandemic—and now the insistence that no evidence exists for vaccine-related deaths risks adding to the crisis, @BenMazer argues. https://t.co/YFJjcasLHs pic.twitter.com/oOvcqQJWd4

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) December 9, 2025

At issue is Dr. Vinay Prasad’s acknowledgement that the COVID vaccine is linked to some number of deaths in children. 

Prasad made no sweeping generalization that the COVID vaccine was a killer rampaging among the young. Rather, he revealed that after careful analysis of the evidence, there is a modest number of confirmed cases where the vaccine was the cause of death for some children. 

The vaccine-industrial complex went wild, attacking him for saying out loud what should have been expected by everybody. There is no medical treatment invented in the history of humanity that is 100% safe and 100% effective, but when it comes to vaccines it is forbidden to acknowledge this fact. 

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, made a claim that shocked the public-health establishment. “For the first time,” he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, “the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.” The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting COVID shots.

To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement. Prasad’s claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals. A response from 12 former FDA commissioners, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, called Prasad’s memo “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.” All of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, had already been reviewed by the agency’s staff, the former commissioners wrote, and “different conclusions” had been reached. Elsewhere, doctors and scientists declared that absolutely no evidence links COVID-19 vaccines to death in children; and that in order to suggest otherwise, Prasad and his colleagues had engaged in an “evidence-manufacturing mission,” a “dumpster dive” for shoddy data, or—worse—a campaign of lying.

Of course, if Prasad had, as these former FDA commissioners claimed, done any of those awful things, it would indeed be required of them to rebut his claims. 

But, to be honest, they were the liars. In fact, they firmly believe that the entire edifice of modern medicine depends on shading or hiding the truth that even treatments that pass the cost/benefit test in most people can, in some cases, prove disastrous for a few. This is one of the reasons why we have a regime of informed consent. 

…there’s something troubling—and telling—in the fact that his memo has provoked people to deny even the possibility of COVID-vaccine-related deaths. The idea that mRNA-based shots have, tragically, killed a very small number of children is not far-fetched. It also doesn’t imply a catastrophic threat to public health, given that tens of millions of doses of these vaccines have safely been given out to young people. From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, lack of nuance has been a problem with public-health messaging—one that anti-vaccine advocates have made use of to great effect. Now, in a moment when public health in America is under existential threat, this insistence that no evidence exists for vaccine-related deaths risks adding to the crisis.

No public-health authorities deny that COVID shots can have some ill effects. Adverse reactions are possible with all medical interventions. The mRNA-based vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, in particular, are known to cause myocarditis—inflammation of the heart—on rare occasions, especially in teenage boys and young men. The form of myocarditis that occurs after vaccination is typically far less severe than the one caused by viruses; for unclear reasons, mRNA-related cases have largely disappeared in recent years. But this condition can be deadly, and considering the hundreds of millions of mRNA doses that have been administered to Americans, even extraordinarily unlikely outcomes may well be inevitable.

Ben Mazer believes, as so many liberals do, that the Kennedy-led HHS is an “existential threat” to public health, but at least he recognizes a reality: people are responding to the, as he calls it, “lack of nuance” from the public health establishment by rejecting the advice they give. 

What Mazer calls “lack of nuance,” I call “lying.” Denying basic facts in order to promote one’s agenda, especially when done so by people whose sole claim to authority is that they know the truth, while you are not competent to judge them, is a betrayal of trust. 

If we are to trust what “experts” say, then perhaps they should not feel empowered to lie. 

Just sayin’.

The possibility—perhaps the likelihood—that a handful of vaccine-related deaths occurred and were downplayed by medical authorities does not undermine the fact that COVID vaccination, on the whole, has prevented death on a massive scale. Nor does it justify sweeping changes to vaccine regulations. Rather, it suggests the need for some targeted reforms, such as improvements to the country’s vaccine-adverse-event reporting system—and also tells us that a strategy of minimizing tragic outcomes, however rare, may not be the best way to protect a vital instrument of public health.

l used to trust public health officials without giving it a lot of thought. I just assumed that, while hardly infallible, they were honest and well-intentioned. 

I no longer believe that—at least the “honest” part of the equation. Over the past few years, our public health officials have proven to be pathological liars, sometimes in order to cover their own butts or to scratch the backs of their buddies, and sometimes just because they believe that telling people the truth will discourage people from doing what is best for themselves. 

I doubt that most public health officials during COVID were actively malicious. Rather, many, like Mandy Cohen, were elevated way above their level of competence and were far too steeped in the cult of technocracy. Here’s Cohen, who became the head of the CDC under Biden, describing how she made decisions about pandemic restrictions:

The CDC can start winning trust back by replacing the current @CDCDirector with someone who cares about making public health about science again, and not about what your girlfriends tell you on the phone. https://t.co/aQJx9gCwyq pic.twitter.com/O2IydT8mnX

— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) September 18, 2023

There are more Cohens than Faucis in the system, but neither type should be trusted. They are not scientists, but either mean girls or Mengeles. 

I desperately want a scientific establishment that takes its role seriously, is firmly grounded in truth-seeking and truth-telling, and that quits arrogating to itself the power to tell us what to do rather than simply give us the best information available.

I’m thrilled to see that The Atlantic, despite the hemming and hawing about how awful Trump and his appointees are, at least acknowledges that lying might not be the best policy.