One-Size-Fits-All COVID Vaccination Narrative and Internet Censorship

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, MD PhD, writing on the website of Dr. Vinay Prasad (who was interviewed by Saagar and Krystal). Hoeg is concerned about one-size-fits-all vaccination and internet censorship of comments (even by doctors) that are off-narrative):

My interpretation of the data is vaccines continue to be the best tool we have to prevent severe disease. When health care workers could get vaccinated, I got mine the first day I could. That being said, I had wished my parents and older patients could have gotten theirs before me. I begged unsuccessfully to extend my time between the first and second dose because of cardiac side effects I had had from the first dose (which came on quite severely while running). I continue to strongly recommend vaccines to my patients (and now boosters for all over 40-50 or with specific risk factors) and help facilitate vaccination appointments for them and talk them through the data. I recommended to my younger healthier adult patients to only get one dose if they had already been infected based on the data we already had late last winter and a need to preserve vaccinations. I have always felt, based on the data that healthy children were at very low risk and vaccinating them before older adults across the world was unethical and irresponsible. You and I wrote about this for the Atlantic with Monica Gandhi. I still stand by what we said.

Over the spring and summer, the evidence suggested vaccines were very effectively preventing transmission, which was a major rationale for vaccinating everyone. But I also knew, as did you, in the spring that a serious vaccine adverse effect could quickly tip the individual harms of the vaccine beyond those of the benefits for healthy children. And I actually tweeted about the uncertainty about the risk-benefit ratio of vaccination in healthy boys on June 10th as the myocarditis data were accumulating from Israel and our own CDC.

My tweet was censored by Twitter and that landed me on Tucker Carlson (which I had never watched). I understand the political nature of this pandemic (certainly on social media) but the censorship of an issue as important as vaccine-associated myocarditis in boys and young men really got under my skin. I was receiving texts and messages from physicians I knew seeing post-vaccination myocarditis in young boys and men across the country and I was vexed the CDC did not prioritize getting an accurate, stratified estimate of this occurrence. Certainly, as a mom I wanted to have a reasonable sense of the benefits vs risks in my old children. At that time I was glad to connect with the cardiologist John Mandrola because we are very like-minded, particularly on this issue (we’ll discuss our study below).

I have consistently viewed attempts to estimate the rates and define the severity of a vaccine side effect as highly pro-vaccine. Anything else, especially when it comes to children, will quickly erode public trust and fuel overall vaccine hesitancy. Especially now with the vaccines’ limited and transient impact on transmission, we need to be considering each individual’s risks from COVID-19 and their expected benefits (and risks) from each dose. The most important factors to consider in this analysis include age, sex, risk factors for severe COVID-19 and history of infection.

What still boggles my mind, is when you just do the simple math using the German study of infection-hospitalization rates in healthy children, you get a 1/2400 chance a healthy 12-17 year old will be hospitalized for COVID-19 requiring specific covid treatment (this eliminates incidental hospitalizations) and, now with omicron, that is likely around 1/5000 risk (or lower) and yet the rate of symptomatic post vax myocarditis after dose 2 in this age group is around 1/3000 (see below) and yet so few seem to be questioning dose 2 for them (when mathematically it’s the wrong decision), let alone dose 3, which seems a clear mistake to mandate without evidence of benefit. . .

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Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying Urge Further Scientific Investigation Regarding the Coronavirus “Lab Hypothesis”

I thought the lab hypothesis was debunked based on many articles I've seen over the months, but here are two people I respect (based upon their Darkhorse Podcast), Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, suggesting that the lab hypothesis needs to be rigorously investigated because they've noticed more than a few red flags. They further argue that until now, the lab hypothesis has been debunked based on social stigma rather than scientific investigation.

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Rediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Internet is an amazing tool that offers us easy ways to connect with each other with very little effort. This magic technology also allows social media sites to pummel us with videos of people bullying each other and physically fighting each other in public places. The triggering "excuses" for these flare-ups are countless. It's often about masks, but many of these videos focus on the bizarre propensity of many people have to divide others into political and “racial” tribes.

In some of these videos people violently assault each other. I recently viewed a video of two families arguing on a store parking lot. Somebody apparently accidentally bumped somebody else, then the situation quickly and needlessly escalated to the point where guns were drawn. I cringe when I see this insanity. A couple of these disheartening videos show up on my feeds every week, posted by people whose motives are often unclear. Some of these videos involve police officers but the great majority do not. Often, every one of the people featured in the video is ill-behaved. Other videos involve unprovoked violence, however, and many of those incidents culminate in physical injuries to an innocent person. Watching too many of these videos plants a false intuition that we are watching typical human beings doing typical things.

Is there a silver lining to these displays of anger and violence? Is it important to sometimes document our human frailties and cruelties? Should we occasionally hold some of these videos up like mirrors to force ourselves to acknowledge the risk that our anger can dangerously escalate into brutality? Can we use some of these videos as teachable moments, showing what can happen when we fail to show restraint and kindness?

Even if there is such a silver lining, it can’t be healthy to watch a steady stream of these videos showing so many people being so shitty to each other. It seems to me that too much exposure to these videos numbs us to the pain and suffering of others. At some point, our in-group tendencies can completely anesthetize our empathy for "the other." Once we cross that line where we no longer care about the pain of others, these videos serve mostly as conflict pornography. For years, Hollywood has been peddling gratuitous violence as entertainment. Movie and TV studios too often stoop to the lowest level of profitable "entertainment." The proliferation of smartphone camera social media videos suggests that there’s no longer any need for Hollywood to continue paying highly trained writers substantial money to concoct their stylized ballets of violence.

In this age of COVID-19, many people are feeling trapped in their homes. Many of us are also transfixed to our screens on which we exposed to far too many videos of people acting badly. Slouching on the couch to watch strangers being mean to each other can’t be harmless. Aren’t these videos causing permanent social damage? And aren’t there better things to do with one's time?

Almost every day, I walk through glorious Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis. On almost every walk I see people from many different demographic and ethnic groups. They show up in the park with their own styles of clothing, music, food, games and language, even now as the weather is turning colder. It is an especially beautiful thing to behold the families at play, parents and their little children. [More . . .]

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