My Current Default Position About COVID Booster Vaccines

I received two COVID shots as well as a booster. Then, about six months ago I got COVID, which had me feeling down in the dumps for 3 days, which also left me with a loss of strength and balance for a few weeks after that. I'm hearing a lot about the alleged need for all of us to get more and more boosters lately. Should I? I'm not a scientist. I don't know how to read the medical research with confidence. I thought we would all have clear answers about COVID and boosters by now, but it has never been less clear. And now we have Twitter Files indicating that the U.S. government has been warping the conversation about COVID and vaccines, even having a hand in shutting down well-decorated medical professionals who disagree with the national narrative of "get lots and lots of booster shots." I wish we had dependable information about the following:

1. Whether boosters are meaningfully effective

2. Whether boosters are safe; and

3. Whether the risks of boosters (according to some) outweigh the benefits of booster (according to others).

It doesn't help that public health officials and CDC have been so wrong about so many things over the last few years. The evidence on this includes the internal reversals of CDC policy (e.g., No need for a mask, then you must wear a mask; getting the jab will keep you from getting COVID, then not so much). Every time there is a new pronouncement reversing a prior pronouncement, it is presented with equal confidence. Thus, it is not surprising to see recent statistics showing that ever greater numbers of Americans are refusing to get the newest boosters. But also consider comments by doctors such as "Elizabeth Bennett" on Twitter:

I am one of the many people who are now somewhere between disoriented, distrusting and disgusted with the state of COVID information. I am not alone:

In the absence of reliable information and wide-open vigorous conversation among our medical professionals, the rest of us need to act on assumptions and guesses. I am assuming that I am at more risk if I get yet another new booster than if I refuse it. I'm open to new information, of course, but I'm highly concerned that doctors and researchers with legitimate concerns about the boosters are still being shut out of the conversation. I've seen ample confirmation of this censorship--many doctors and researchers being completely shut down by Twitter for instance.  I also see many serious sounding accusations like these.  I would like to know a lot more information. I would like to have credible answers to these 130 highly specific concerns assembled by Steve Kirsch.

In the meantime, no more boosters for me.

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Writer Displeases Boss by Failing to Find Evidence of J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia

Editor: Go gather J.K. Rowling's worst transphobic quotes.

Writer: I cannot find ANY J.K. Rowling transphobic quotes.

Writer is then branded transphobic and barraged with violent imagery and death threats.

Short Video interview here.

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Tara Henley Diagnosis the News Media with Holly Doan

On her recent podcast at "Lean Out," journalist Tara Henley interviewed Holly Doan, who has done traditional meticulous self-critical reporting in Canada for decades.

Holly Doan: It's embarrassing for us.. . . I think the media has not done itself any favors by so much navel gazing, and so much self absorption. Wake up. Pay attention to your readers! I think the journalists have forgotten who their readers are. They don't even know who they're writing for anymore. I'm not going to say. Are they ready for the government? Are they ready for each other? I don't know. But as someone else said recently, it's uncomfortable to watch this suicide because it is industry self-immolation. I think that is media waking up. I don't know. I guess you'll see if there is a difference in the content. That's how you will judge if media is waking up. . . .

I've been asked to give a number of talks on this subject to different groups, some private think tanks recently. And everyone has the same question. What the hell's wrong with media tell us all like what's wrong with media? You know, are they are they lazy? Are they stupid? Are they woke? Or is it all narratives? Is it activist journalism? What happened?

I actually have a perspective that's a little bit different. And that I think that it has to do with the skill set. When I was a young journalist, I started at a very small television station, and part of my job was to twice a week get into the company Pinto, and bumped across snowy roads to cover town council in places you've never heard of, like boys, Vane and Verdun. And from there, you might cover the this was in the city of small City of Brandon, Manitoba, and you've covered the school board and you cover the University Board of Governors meetings, and then you move to Saskatoon and you covers city city council. And then you move to Alberta and you cover the legislature and maybe some courts. And through that decade's long process of learning a craft, you start to understand how government works, how different levels of government relief journalism is not taught in universities. It's something you can't learn in universities. It's an apprenticeship. You have to apprentice to make your mistakes and learn so that by the time you arrive in Ottawa--so 11 years after all of that I arrived in Ottawa, still feeling quite incompetent, and not even ready for what is arguably the biggest story now in the country.

Well, that doesn't happen anymore. Now you have journalists who go to journalism school, where they're not taught anything about covering courts or local council, because it's apprenticeship system, remember? And they go straight to their first jobs on Parliament Hill. Well, how can you know anything about how to cover a farm subsidy program, you might not even know a farmer? How do you cover a business loan program you might even not even know a small business owner. So that's one thing. That's the reporters....

The reporters are no longer telling the desk what the story is because the reporters aren't on the ground and the ones who are on the ground, the few of them that are left, graduated Carlton three years ago. It's a little bit like the analogy I like to use is, you know, when when Mao took over after the revolution in China in 1949, the first thing he did was kill all the tailors because they were a bad class background. And after 25 years, if you looked at images of China on TV, you could tell that no one knew how to make a suit anymore. The tailors were gone. That's a little bit like what's happened to journalism. The skills are gone. Journalism isn't dying. On the ground level, it's dead. Next, you're gonna ask me how do we get it back? I'm not really sure, Tara I'm not really sure. All I know is that you try to focus on Thomas Blackhawks, old timey journalism where we just look at the documents and cover committees and hope that that resonates enough. That Canadians will demand that kind of work. And they are. Tara Henley 5:15 I mean, what you just said it makes the hair on my arms stand up, because I just think it's so important that we have kind of detailed holding of all levels of government to account and that we have an informed citizenry. [More . . . ]

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Conscious Strategies to Shut Down the Center-Left and Center Right

Jonathan Chait, writing at N.Y. Mag: "Helping Trans Kids Means Admitting What We Don’t Know

There is a familiar pattern here in the way left-wing activists shut down internal criticism by treating any criticism of their position as either identical to, or complicit with, the far right. Extremists on the right, of course, use the same method to shut down their critics on the center-right. To the radical, the easiest way to win a debate is to insist that the only choice is between opposing poles. If you oppose any element of their argument, you have endorsed the enemy. If the criticism is tempered and credible, this only makes them regard it as more dangerous.

But this absolutist mind-set has had an especially pernicious effect on the issue of youth gender medicine. This is because the science is genuinely murky and embryonic, making the struggle to identify a humane and effective solution both difficult and necessary. The left has thrown itself behind a crusade to define such a position out of existence....

Progressive activists have not just embraced the gender-affirming care model; they have begun treating any disagreement with it as hateful denial that trans people exist. Indeed, they have frequently denied that any debate exists within the medical community at all.

The purpose of their rhetorical strategy is to conflate advocates of more cautious treatment of trans children with conservatives who oppose any treatment for trans children. This campaign has met with a great deal of success. Much of the coverage in mainstream and liberal media has followed this template — ignoring or denying the existence of the medical debate, and presenting anti-trans Republican politicians as the only alternative to gender-affirming care. This has been the theme not only of progressive infotainment like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, but also mainstream organs like Politico and CNN, where coverage of the issue often treats progressive activists as unbiased authorities and dismisses all questions about youth gender treatment as hate-driven denial of the medical consensus.

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Stealth Editing and Moral Purity

Stealth editing is happening on a regular basis. It should NEVER happen. Further, anyone who examines Matt Taibbi's positions on major political issues should immediately notice that he leans to the "Left," lining up well with the positions taken by most "Left" leaning people three years ago. But that is not good enough in this era of required genuflection to the dominant tribe and anal retentive moral purity. We can't have people who fail to line up perfectly with our tribe on ALL issues. If you are not perfectly with us, you are perfectly against us!

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