What Price a Vaccine Against Hypocrisy?

Naturally, the news that the Trump administration had sacked the complete membership of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) and replaced it with new members was greeted with consternation by Global Health Now last week. AP News reported the ousted members as saying that ‘rigorous science is being abandoned’. They are also concerned that the credibility of and public trust in ACIP may be eroded. They are clearly unaware that they lost both credibility and trust many months ago.

A full account of the changes to ACIP is given in JAMA Network by the ousted members. Amid the usual claims that vaccines are ‘one of the greatest global public health achievements’ and during the covid years are ‘estimated to have prevented approximately 1.6million hospitalisations and 235,000 deaths in the US alone’, we are treated to a hagiography on the incorruptibility and impartial dealings of the committee. The claims regarding lives saved by the covid vaccines were comprehensively demolished recently.

ACIP, apparently, provided a ‘unified and trusted approach to vaccinations’. We can be sure that it was unified as, indeed, it was designed to be. However, that does not ensure that their decisions were safe or correct and, in the wake of the manifold issues with the covid vaccines, we know that their decisions were far from safe.

The hypocrisy reaches world-record levels as they explain that they ensured ‘science-based and tested immunisation schedules’ and that they were ‘committed to evidence-based vaccine policy’. Quite which aspects of either science or evidence that were considered in the continued rollout of covid vaccines is unclear.

Early in the so-called ‘pandemic’ The Lancet published a letter showing that absolute risk reduction of all the covid vaccines then available hovered at around 1 per cent for infection. From that, one could extrapolate that the number of vaccinations needed to prevent a single death was in the thousands. In a nutshell, the covid vaccines were a dud.

The proceedings of ACIP are described as ‘transparent’. But that is hardly credible given that they are also responsible for the ‘scrutiny of vaccine safety’ for the ‘protection of the population’. Hard to reconcile that claim with the copious and accumulating evidence regarding covid vaccine safety that we have been at pains to expose in these pages.

The newly constituted ACIP says it will ‘exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp and foster a culture of critical inquiry’. The ousted members claim that this was what they were doing all along. Well, clearly not, and the claim that the changes ‘have left the US vaccine program critically weakened’ will be music to the ears of those families struggling to care for the covid vaccine-injured.

Let us not mourn the passing of a committee that presided over one of the most controversial chapters in public health history. If the new ACIP genuinely embraces critical inquiry and transparency, it may yet restore some public trust. But that trust must be earned, not assumed – especially by those who once assured us that ‘the science is settled’ while real-world evidence told a very different story.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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