Reviewing the Most Recent “Apology” for the COVID-19 Response

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine mandates have backfired on the conventional vaccine industry, and we are now seeing a degree of skepticism toward all vaccines that I have never witnessed before in my lifetime. Given how dangerous the spike protein vaccines were, this outcome was entirely predictable, which has led many of us to wonder why the medical establishment chose to nonetheless push them (likewise, I put forward the best explanations I could see for this here).

One of the best explanations was shared with me by a pharmaceutical executive from a major vaccine manufacturer (there are only a few instances of people in these positions speaking out against the industry).

This official informed me that Pfizer has very few vaccines besides the incredibly profitable COVID-19 ones (this is also true for Moderna), so in essence, the rest of the vaccine industry was thrown under the bus for the mRNA manufacturers to make a killing off COVID-19.

Now consider the implications of current polling for both the vaccine industry and the general public’s trust in the medical system: over a quarter of the American population know someone whom they believe was killed by the vaccines, and almost half believe that the COVID-19 vaccines are causing a large number of unexpected deaths.

To save the existing paradigm, some type of major pivot will have to be made by the medical industry and government agencies (this is also what Ed Dowd was recently told by a government insider). Biden’s recent State of the Union Address likewise provided strong evidence of this shift:

One of the opening gambits for this switch was Emily Oster’s disingenuous plea for COVID-19 amnesty in The Atlantic at the end of October 2022. The responses to it were almost all “How about you [insert your preferred profanity].” My favorite response was someone choosing to pay to fly this over her house after the article came out:

I felt that Oster’s plea was an excellent example of a pseudo-apology — she “asked for forgiveness” but simultaneously refused to admit she was in any way at fault for any of her previous actions, and used a variety of linguistic constructs to try to both have her cake and eat it too. I really hate when people do that, so I decided to write a response.

Many people suspected that this article was a test to see if the public was open to accepting a very limited apology, and it appears that whoever commissioned it got their answer — more would have to be offered the next time around. Three months later, that offer appeared in Newsweek:

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Newsweek’s article received mixed reactions. Many were jubilant, perceiving that a real apology had been made, while others viewed it with suspicion. After I read it, I realized it was best understood as a sequel to Emily Oster’s initial plea, and was written to test out soundbites (e.g., fancy academic constructs) all targeted to an educated liberal audience.

I believe the underlying goal was to see if there was a way that the medical establishment can both have its cake (say something nice that placates the public) and eat it (not have to actually admit what they did wrong or relinquish any of their power by changing the core problematic policies they advanced).

Unfortunately for them, because of how much public opinion has turned against the vaccines in the last 3 months, I don’t believe they can get what they want simply by issuing half-hearted apologies. Let’s now look at how Newsweek approached this problem:

Although there are many objections to how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, as mentioned above, far and away the public’s greatest concern is the extreme toxicity of the vaccines. Because of how great that concern is, I do not believe that there is any form of propaganda that can gaslight the public into accepting what was done to them. I was thus very curious to see which reference Newsweek would cite to address it.

Newsweek chose to cite the paper written by faculty from numerous Ivy League institutions that argued that the risks of the booster mandates for young adults in college outweighed their benefits (it was also discussed by Steve Kirsch here).

As this was a surprisingly controversial position four months ago, the paper’s authors were very conservative in their claims of harm from the vaccines, and placed them within the context of the minimal benefit of this policy. In short, Newsweek was quite tepid when choosing how they could address the elephant in the room.

The next passage illustrates why people hate when writers use the passive voice in an attempt to get around a difficult topic (e.g., “mistakes were made” being widely used as the soundbite to whitewash how England’s horrendous policies directly caused the death of many of the elderly throughout COVID-19):

This is a great passage that cuts to the core of many of the issues I’ve observed in science and politics for decades. Because so much data exists, it will always be possible to arrange some of it in a manner that proves you are correct (this is why I’ve spent my entire life studying this question — the ephemeral nature of truth is absolutely fascinating).

Since many people are primarily motivated by their emotional patterning and pre-existing ideologies, this results in science consistently using data to arrive at a predetermined position (e.g., one that supports the researcher’s sponsors) rather than the true one.

Before COVID-19, I read industry publications that stated that vaccination could never be allowed to turn into a polarized political issue, because that would alienate 50% of the customer base from vaccine manufacturers. However, as you can see, that is not what happened, and because of that, for the first time in my lifetime, a large portion of the American population no longer trusts vaccines.

I believe this process started after the global players (e.g., Gates and the WHO) decided they wanted to push for a decade of vaccination, beginning with more mandates for children and gradually expanding that violation to adults. This campaign was largely advanced by the Democrat party with Obama realigning his party’s focus to support these interests.

This ended up creating an odd situation where, over and over, state childhood vaccine mandates (which met with heavy protest from the public and parents of vaccine-injured children) were almost unanimously voted for by Democrats and vetoed by Republicans.

The issue understandably became much more politically polarized, and Trump took a public stance on vaccination further increasing its politicization. Unfortunately, after Trump became president, he backed out of his commitment to investigate the safety of the vaccine schedule. I suspect this was partly due to this lacking support in his administration, and Bill Gates petitioning Trump to drop it (which Gates publicly admitted to):

At this point, I am not sure if the political polarization of the vaccine issue was something that broader political forces made impossible to avoid. Alternately, it is also possible that it was decided that the only way to convince the public to take a highly questionable and unsafe vaccine was if a large part of the public mindlessly supported it purely for political reasons that allowed their political tribe to “win.”

This is why, near the end of Trump’s presidency, we saw many prominent Democrats and news outlets insist that they would never take Trump’s rushed vaccine (as it was unlikely to be safe or effective).

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These are amazing examples of “this did not age well.”

Yet, the second that Biden won, the entire Democratic party flipped their views on vaccines, and endorsed the mandates to the point that they were willing to ruin people’s lives with vaccine mandates. In short, the entire subject was heavily politicized to the point that no facts or evidence could sway the narrative.

The lockdowns disproportionately affected the poor, and this was one of the primary reasons I and other lockdown skeptics used to argue against them (as the educated “progressives” pushing for the lockdowns always use addressing social disparities as the core justification for their policies).

Unfortunately, since their attempts frequently worsen rather than improve those disparities, this goal often ends up just being something that gets lip service and makes people feel good about themselves and not much more. I suspect that this is why our attempts to argue against abusing the working class with these absurd pandemic policies fell on deaf ears, even though in principle it should have been a winning argument against those policies.

One of the results of the pandemic response was the largest shift in wealth in history from the lower class to the upper class (e.g., many small businesses were forced to close and their market share was transferred to large corporations such as Amazon). This resulted in billionaires nearly doubling their share of the global household wealth through the course of the pandemic (going from owning 2% to 3.5% of it).

I really hate how the author tries to make all of this into a race thing when it’s not. People from a higher social class could telework from home when the lockdowns happened, whereas people in the lower classes were the ones who actually suffered across the nation from the lockdowns.

Similarly working class women (not mentioned above) were severely affected by the lockdowns, as they became responsible for taking care of their children during the work day (something they had previously relied upon schools for). Likewise, the lockdowns cause a huge increase in domestic violence, and many of the adverse events of the vaccines disproportionately affected women (e.g., 52.05% experienced menstrual abnormalities, which were sometimes quite severe).

I believe that the reason “Blacks and Latinos” were specifically focused upon here was due to a longstanding issue that the public health system has not been able to address: Blacks are well aware of what the government will do to citizens it deems as disposable (especially through medicine), so they were not as enthusiastic about vaccinating.

As a result, a lot of work was done to sell the vaccines to them under the guise of “improving vaccine equity” (Peter Hotez loves this phrase). Nonetheless, the gap still exists:

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There is also an even more important point that this clip illustrates. One of the things I found fascinating about the pandemic policies was that those who benefitted from them (e.g., a teacher who got to work from home, while going to a beach in the Bahamas) tended to adamantly support them, while those who suffered from them always opposed them.

I, in turn, found myself in a rather small minority: I personally benefitted from the lockdowns, but worked really hard to stop them because I felt the “benefit” I received was inconsequential relative to the harm caused to others around me.

Similarly, once the vaccine mandates were introduced, they disproportionately harmed the poor and members of the working class who had no choice except to submit to the vaccine mandate. Immediately after Biden instituted his completely unscientific and — more importantly — illegal vaccine mandate (to the point that it was struck down by the Supreme Court), the working class experienced the largest wave of death ever experienced in American history:

There were three important points I wanted to highlight in regards to this part of Newsweek’s argument.

The first was that the Great Barrington Declaration proved itself correct. Since it was signed by almost a million people, many of whom took great risks to their careers to sign it, no one in the medical profession can argue they couldn’t have known about it.

The second was that Scott Atlas attempted to pressure the Whitehouse’s COVID-19 task force to adopt a policy similar to that described with the Great Barrington Declaration. Unfortunately, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, working in concert with the national media, did everything they possibly could to sabotage it, and were successful in preventing it from ever being adopted.

The third was that at the start of the lockdowns on 4/22/2020, two doctors from Bakersfield, California had a press conference explaining why the lockdowns were a very bad idea (and were subsequently featured in the national news):

Each of these three parties essentially made the same points (e.g., the healthy members of society should develop herd immunity, while the vulnerable were sheltered from the virus).

Unfortunately, each time their points were raised, the media, and in turn, most of my colleagues, went hysterical over the fact that these parties wanted to sacrifice (and kill) large numbers of Americans for the greater good to create herd immunity. In turn, many disgusting things were said and done behind closed doors by my colleagues to those opposing the lockdowns.

Before long, those same people went a step further, from arguing that it was unacceptable to sacrifice people for the greater good (by developing natural immunity to the virus) to insisting we had the right to force everyone in America to vaccinate for the greater good regardless of the vaccine injuries that occurred in the process.

This ultimately created the nightmare scenario that many of us had envisioned: the mRNA spike protein vaccines would prevent the population from developing actual herd immunity to COVID-19, and cause the virus to be with us forever rather than one that disappeared after a few waves, like many pandemics that preceded it.

The best proof for the argument that vaccination prevented that from happening is what occurred in Africa. Africans had both very low vaccination rates and — unlike the rest of the world — now has much lower COVID-19 rates.

Note: this problem was further exacerbated by the medical profession holding the dogma that viruses essentially cannot be treated (and instead must be prevented with vaccines), and that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity. Both of these viewpoints are at odds with reality, but must be sustained in order to sell an endless number of vaccines to the general population.

I completely agree with the point of this passage (other than I do not believe the consensus alluded to was held by the entire academic field). The problem mentioned in this passage is that much in the same way you can’t apologize for something unless you also admit what you did wrong, you can’t have a “collaborative” project if you force everyone to follow a consensus that you decide is right, rather than letting the public decide to follow a policy based on its own merits.

Many of the medical “experts” have effectively been publicly shamed for pushing an incredibly bad policy onto the public, and as a result, have lost their ability of having people adhere to whatever they say just because they said to do so. No one likes to lose power, so it’s very difficult for them to come to terms with this, and that social class is doing everything they can to hold onto it.

Unfortunately for them, unless they actually follow a collaborative model with the public, a point has now been reached where no amount of propaganda can restore the public’s trust in them.

Fortunately, we appear to be living in an era where the traditional propagandist form of governance no longer works (this is where leaders decide on a policy that much of the populace may not like, and then use propaganda to force it on them). It has failed because traditional propaganda cannot compete with the internet.

For this reason, sooner or later, we will have to move to an actual collaborative model where our leadership sells policies to the public on the basis of them making sense, rather than because they forced us to accept them.

Since I am sure you’ve all seen videos of Anthony Fauci lying throughout the pandemic, I wanted to share this video instead (you can also find remixes of the Fauci song online):

I have nothing against this singer, but I cannot say the same for the public health officials who paraded him around to promote their interests.

This specific excerpt is why I do not believe that this is a genuine apology; rather, it’s a forced apology and an attempt to minimize the losses of the vaccine pushers who have discredited themselves to the general public.

Throughout Newsweek’s article, the author attempts to say we had “valid concerns” (that I must emphasize were not political in nature) but nonetheless, in a backhanded way, dismisses all the actual objections raised to the policies (e.g., the alleged “conspiracy theories” that all proved themselves true).

Similarly, to help people who have been injured by their vaccine, I and colleagues have been forced into the very “cottage industry” the author lambasts. This is not my preferred “cottage industry” in which to be. Due to the political nature of the subject, we take on a lot of professional risks as physicians when you try to treat vaccine injuries.

Everyone I’ve talked to says the same thing: we’ve been forced to do it because the medical profession is doing nothing to help these victims (other than to gaslight them), and they really need help.

This is a pretty standard critique of this political class, but while it sounds nice, as far as I know, it being mentioned has never corrected their behavior. Now, let’s look at the actual reason I believe this Newsweek article was written:

One of the things I have come to appreciate from researching a series on the Pfizer whistleblowers is just how sales-oriented many of these companies are, and how completely unacceptable it is to them to lose a long-term source of revenue.

Since there are signs that usage of many other vaccines is declining globally (the vaccine pushers greatly damaged the vaccine “brand” as a consequence of using it to market the experimental gene therapies for COVID-19), the industry is understandably panicked.

Because of this drop in vaccinating, I am beginning to see pleas essentially stating that “we are sorry we messed up here, but please trust us on the other vaccines.” I do not believe that they should be allowed to have their cake and eat it too.

If you have any doubts about my assessment on the authenticity of the above passage, you should consider the source that was cited for that line. It was a hotly debated study that argued that people in geographic areas that vaccinated less were more likely to die from COVID-19 (when in reality, significant data exists that argues the exact opposite).

The major problem with this section is that like many other things in the article, the terms are vague and undefined. For example, how do you determine if a voice is “critical” as opposed to just being misinformation? Instead, it is almost certain that somewhat controversial limited hangouts will be used as the “unpopular voices” that must be tolerated, but the underlying censorship that prevented critical ideas from being heard, will remain in place.

Kevin Bass

When I began the discussion about this plea for amnesty, I made a point to avoid saying anything about the author, as I believe the message and not the messenger is what should be debated. Additionally, I felt that since a major publication was hosting this editorial, it was for all practical purposes their article (e.g., anything Bass said that they didn’t want published, would have been cut by Newsweek’s editors).

After I published my initial assessment on the article, numerous readers informed me that Kevin Bass has been a difficult individual whom they have had to deal with for years. This is because he aggressively defended the status quo and repeatedly attacked people online who supported things like low carbohydrate diets.

One of the most frequently utilized tactics in the propaganda public relations industry is to pay off a trusted third party (summarized here) to promote your interests (as people are much more likely to believe a message presented in that manner). This was something that many of us witnessed throughout COVID-19, and something many credentialed academics or physicians are regularly solicited to do.

One common form of the third party technique is “ghostwriting,” where industry will author something, and then commissions a trustworthy expert to claim the authorship. Ghostwriting is a huge problem in medicine, and frequently the “authors” of studies promoting the usage of pharmaceutical drugs were not the ones actually responsible for writing them.

In addition to the views in this article being diametrically at odds with many Bass had previously held when he attacked those who dissented from the narrative, the commentators I corresponded with who had read much of his previous writings also noted that “his” writing style throughout the Newsweek piece was very different from what they had seen previously.

Since those initial observations, two other events have occurred which suggested that Kevin Bass does not necessarily share the viewpoints contained within his article. The first was this tweet:

For reference, these are the individuals Bass stated were not real scientists:

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The second was his demeanor during his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show that appeared to be geared towards working to restore public trust in the medical industry:

Conclusion

If you look at this article within the context of Oster’s previous plea and its response (both of these articles are essentially trying to do the same thing), I believe a strong case can be made that these were tests to see what narrative needs to be pivoted to.

Likewise, Germany’s minister of health (and a well-credentialed scientist) finally made a limited apology for the disastrous policies he pushed on the German people without acknowledging his worst mistakes, while simultaneously shifting the blame for his decisions to unnamed scientists who gave him bad advice.

In many ways it’s remarkable that we have been able to move the dialogue this far in just a few months, and to be honest, I would have given almost anything for a compromise like what Newsweek’s article presented, to have been proposed any time in 2020 or early in 2021.

However, any time a negotiation occurs, you must always keep in mind that whatever is initially offered is much less than the party is actually willing to agree to, and the fact that something like this is being openly offered means that we are in a very strong bargaining position.

Any type of promise or apology (especially disingenuous ones) will not prevent what we saw happen over the last few years from happening again. Laws, and ideally constitutional amendments (initially at the state level, and then ideally at the national level) can prevent such tragedies, and many people I have spoken to feel we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct many of the systemic issues within medicine that have poisoned our culture.

In my own opinion, if these people are actually sorry for what they did to us, they would be willing to relinquish some of their power so that it could not happen again. Anything less should not be considered acceptable for them to be granted any type of amnesty. That said:

A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.