If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A few years back, during the small but well-publicized measles outbreak, I had discussions with two individuals. One discussion was with a person that thought all vaccines should be mandatory, let’s call him person A, and another discussion was with someone that was against all vaccinations, let’s call her person B.

Both discussions had their own unique nuances and not dissimilar to the current level of societal discourse. The conversation with person A, I recall, was fueled by his disproportionate anger. I committed the cardinal sin — I disagreed with him. That made me a selfish, evil anti-vaxxer. When I informed him that, in fact, I had all of my vaccinations from measles to Japanese encephalitis, that only made him angrier. There was little method to his madness. Vaccines, as we’ve been told, have been proven safe and effective for decades, right?

Back then, I had no dog in the fight. My libertarian tendencies did not spring from a mistrust of the medical system or the scientific literature. They came from a thorough reading of history and the dangers of totalitarian mandates.

To quote economist, Jacques Attali, speaking in 1983,

“It might be possible in fact to reconcile parliamentary democracy with totalitarianism. For totalitarianism to take hold, we would need only to maintain all the formal rules of parliamentary democracy but at the same time to generalize the use of those drugs”.

Attali, in the same interview, later went on to say that

“It is clear that all the talk about preventive medicine, the economics of health care, and good medical practice will make it necessary that each person have his or her medical record on tape. For epidemiological reasons, all such dossiers will be centralized in a computer to which doctors will have access. The question arises: Will the police have access to those records too?”

These days, Attali seems prophetic. Few people could foresee the totalitarian medical tyranny we now fear. I know that I did not. My fears were more general than that, and not even set at home in my comfy western “democracy”. Rather, I was concerned about the increasing use of social credit systems in countries like China.

Person A, on the other hand, was concerned that a small measles outbreak would lead to a widespread outbreak. Now, I do not want to dismiss that stance out of hand, but one has to have little confidence in a medical intervention if they believe it only works with perfect compliance. But perfect compliance is more worrisome for other reasons. Who decides what medical interventions should be performed? And for what purpose? It was not even 60 years ago women were getting prescribed drugs to make them more subservient to their husbands.

This conversation did not surprise me as I had previous interactions with person A. He believes that the tenets of a good society are built by ceding individual autonomy, and damned to the individuals that make up that society. A top-down, rather than a bottom-up, worldview that is becoming commonplace these days. Socialism, per say.

My conversation with Person B, on the other hand, was more challenging. She was not accusatory, nor unpleasant. She sounded like someone searching for the truth. Indeed, through this conversation, I was forced to think about something that I thought I knew only because I had been told it was true. I took it for granted that vaccines are safe and effective. I needed to look deeper into the literature to challenge her arguments, and indeed, many of those arguments were valid.

I did not try to convince her that vaccinations were safe; I could not. Safety was a function of risk. There were risks and that was undeniable. But there were also benefits. Every person needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis and decide whether getting vaccinated is for them. At the end of the day, I am trying to convey that same message in this newsletter.

One of the discussion points that I highlighted with Person B revolved around VAERS. I called it a good early warning system, a canary in a coal mine if you will. Well, the canary died in its cage long ago, gasping its last breath on noxious fumes. Yet the regulators still claim there is no cause for alarm. They are content to keep the contents of the mine buried safely underground, somewhere between the Pfizer documents and Hades, lest the truth ever surface with them.

But we can’t ignore the dangers these vaccines pose simply by waving a wand and saying that there is no causation. A lot of the fact checkers seem to believe that reports of adverse events that are not investigated are adverse events that did not happen. Claims that reports are not valid because they are unverified does not mean that there is no danger.

Screenshot of the World Health Organization's VigiAccess "Adverse drug reactions"

The world is full of perverse incentives. For example, what is the best way for a police precinct to reduce crime?

Simple. Don’t report crimes.

This example has been famously detailed in a relatively recent investigation by an independent auditor reviewing the CompStat scandal in New York City. Police officers were given a mandate to reduce crime, and their political superiors demanded accountability for increases in crime. In short, if crime rates went up, the police were blamed. So they made them go down.

The theory—supported by real-life examples (most recently in the 81st Precinct—is that precinct commanders manipulate statistics through downgrading and suppression. Because accountability is based on reported crime (i.e., the index crimes), one way to “reduce crime” is to reduce reports of index crime—either by classifying complaint reports in a non-index-crime category or by suppressing reports. In this way, even if crime reports are flat or increasing, they can be made to appear to be decreasing.

Imagine a similar incident — except imagine the police officer is truly zealous about crime rates. He is convinced that if crime goes down, then all of the worlds problems will be solved. Broken window? It might be an accident, not a crime. Look the other way. Such a scenario can appear religious. Such a scenario may be occurring now.

Most of the VAERS reports are submitted by medical professionals. But most events are not even reported. The sad fact is a lot of doctors not only do not want to file reports, but they also want to believe that the vaccines are indeed safe in the dictionary definition of the word. It is easier for some to blame a stray correlation rather than admit that they have repeatedly violated the Hippocratic Oath.

But one hint that these events are causal and not just stray correlations is that they follow a similar pattern, a pattern backed by a multitude of scientific studies that specifically looked for adverse events. Whereas the vaccine trials purposefully did not have statistical power to find adverse events (and may have found some by accident), and only outline the potential benefits for healthy individuals over a short time period. These vaccine trials that admit they were not designed to find whether a vaccine is safe was the basis for their approval, yet the regulators claim they are safe and effective. The media and the politicians have latched onto that phrase and repeated it ad nauseum.

The fact of the matter is that there are simply too many reports occurring in too short of a time period to be ignored. There are too many scientific studies that admit that adverse events are common. You can even find a lot of the vaccine enthusiasts discussing their personal experiences on places like r/CovidVaccinated.

So the penultimate question is if everyone, except the media and politicians (both generally lack a basic understanding of the science they so worship), acknowledge adverse events, why haven’t the regulators? Where are the investigations? Or are they really just sitting on their hands in the hope that this all blows over?