OPINION:
When human health is at stake, honesty is a painful but necessary treatment. As the COVID-19 pandemic was well underway, the government’s failure to fully apprise the public of the coronavirus vaccines’ adverse effects resulted in a loss of trust.
Newly uncovered communications show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted an alert in 2021 warning the public that the mRNA vaccines hurriedly manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna could cause myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart and its surrounding lining, The Epoch Times has reported.
An internal debate followed. “The pros and cons of an official HAN are what the main discussions are right now,” the CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver wrote in a May 25 email to an unnamed manufacturer employee, referring to a notice from the agency’s health alert network, or HAN. “I think it’s likely to be a HAN since that is CDC’s primary method of communications to clinicians and public health departments, but people don’t want to appear alarmist either.”
After warning the two pharmaceutical companies of the coming public advisory and consulting the Food and Drug Administration, the planned alert was suppressed. Instead, according to the publication, the agency posted a “clinical considerations” message on its website stating that “increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have been reported in the United States after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna).”
In this manner, the CDC chose a muted method of public disclosure that avoided the attention that a full-fledged alert would have garnered.
Thankfully, vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis have proved relatively rare, occurring mostly in young men. Such cases, however, add to the gamut of adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines, numbering more than 1 million incidents and constituting 56% of health troubles from all vaccines reported to the CDC’s aggregate website since 1990. Clearly, the public has a legitimate reason for concern.
Prospective jab recipients should have been fully informed of the potential adverse effects so they could weigh those against the health dangers of the pathogen, which were small for all but older adults and other edge cases. It appears concerns over alarmism played a role in prompting the CDC to downplay its heart-risk warning, but in this critical period, public health officials themselves were the primary purveyors of panic.
For one, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House chief medical adviser, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the government vaccine mandates he advocated may have contributed to making people more hesitant to be vaccinated. According to CDC data for the week ending Jan. 13, only 21.5% of U.S. adults opted for the updated COVID-19 vaccines, a fraction of the 92.3% who received the original shot.
As the coronavirus pandemic fades, attention is turning to a theoretical “Disease X.” Warning national leaders attending the recent World Economic Forum that the next pathogen could be 20 times as lethal as the last, World Health Organization officials have already primed the planet for the next viral scare.
An American public armed with honest remedy recommendations — including vaccine adverse effects — is best prepared to make informed choices and avoid a future descent into alarmism.
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