If it wasn’t for LinkedIn’s aggressive censorship, I would have blindly trusted government vaccine directives. I once perceived the FDA and CDC as being staffed with some of the world’s best scientists who were above politics and would never issue health directives they knew were harmful or incomplete. I imagined the Biden Administration wouldn’t dare question the counsel of these agencies or let politics dictate critical pandemic decisions.
I’m a lot wiser now.
My journey down the vaccine skeptics rabbit hole began weeks ago when I saw that Joel Kahn, a triple board-certified cardiologist specializing in preventive medicine, posted on his LinkedIn page that the social media site had removed one of his critical vaccine posts. Kahn developed a national following promoting plant-based eating and other lifestyle measures he says will allow people to avoid the services of a cardiologist. Given his prominence and advanced training, I thought it odd that LinkedIn would question Kahn’s medical judgment but concluded it likely was a one-off incident or possibly an algorithm gone awry. Kahn wasn’t anti vaxx — he was just concerned about some of the data being published.
But then a LinkedIn post by a professor at Harvard Medical School saying LinkedIn had removed one of his posts critical of vaccines appeared in my feed. Soon there were other posts from other doctors and those with advanced science degrees saying LinkedIn censored them. That prompted me to give Kahn a call to ask what was going on.
Kahn explained there was a massive corporate and social media campaign to silence and discredit any doctor who questioned vaccine safety and the government’s mass inoculation campaign. He insisted that the government’s own data showed that Covid vaccines were resulting in more deaths than publicly known but LinkedIn would remove posts linking to that data. As the data became more widely known, the media dismissed it as “misinformation.”
Kahn knows me from my reporting about the implosion of Michigan’s Beaumont Health, a once top-tier hospital that was nationally ranked for cardiology when he trained there. Kahn told me about Dr. Peter McCullough, a Dallas cardiologist who did his fellowship training under Kahn and earlier this year was forced out at Baylor Scott & White for insisting that Covid vaccines aren’t safe. McCullough maintains the pandemic could best be managed if Covid patients were diagnosed and treated early with readily available and inexpensive medicines.
Baylor wasn’t content with just forcing out McCullough. They hit him with a $1 million lawsuit saying the hospital was being harmed by McCullough representing that he still worked there, which he denies. One possible reason for the confusion is McCullough’s bio still appears on Baylor magazine’s online listing of distinguished alumni and says he works at the university’s medical center.
Here’s the McCullough profile that Baylor understandably was once so proud of:
Dr. Peter A. McCullough, BS ’84, has been a leader in the medical response to SARS-CoV-2 since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He published Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection, the first synthesis of sequenced multidrug treatment of ambulatory patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in The American Journal of Medicine and subsequently updated in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. McCullough has 28 peer-reviewed publications on the infection and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 pandemic in The Hill. He testified Nov. 19, 2020, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs concerning early ambulatory treatment of high-risk Americans with COVID-19 to reduce hospitalization and death. McCullough is the vice chair of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
While there is evidence that vaccines are more dangerous than the government and media let on, it appears those fortunate to have survived their ill effects evaded Covid for a time and escaped serious illness if they contracted the disease. But Israel, one of the more heavily vaccinated countries, has seen another surge of Covid infections, and many of the inflicted were vaccinated. Ran Balicer, Israel’s Dr. Fauci, admitted in a recent op-ed that Israeli scientists were caught by surprise that vaccines lost their efficacy after about six months. The country is requiring its citizens to submit to another vaccine jab, but Balicer admitted Israeli scientists have no clue how long the so-called booster jab will last and that more boosters might be required.
Although Israel is doubling down on vaccines, it’s also come around to Dr. McCullough’s thinking that early Covid detection and treatment is critical to saving lives. Israel last week announced that Covid patients identified as likely developing severe symptoms will receive the Regeneron antibody-drug combination. Balicer emphasized in a LinkedIn post and in a Jerusalem Post article the importance of early detection and treatment.
According to Balicer, chairman of an advisory committee to Israel’s government and chief of innovation at the country’s biggest healthcare system, Israel last year developed the first artificial-intelligence-based predictive model for deterioration in Covid patients. Among those eligible for Israel’s limited supply of Regeneron will be the unvaccinated, a position that Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and others object to.
Other advocates for early adoption and treatment with Regeneron are Florida governor Ron DeSantis and other southern state Republican leaders, whose successful use of Regeneron to save lives prompted the Biden Administration two weeks ago to limit their supply so it could be distributed to Democratic states lacking the wisdom to treat early-stage Covid patients with the FDA-approved drug. DeSantis has since secured Florida’s own Regeneron supply.
The Biden Administration’s move was clearly political. If Republican states resisting vaccine mandates, masking and other restrictive measures advocated by the White House begin having more positive Covid outcomes with Regeneron, that would likely result in political disaster. It also would totally vindicate Dr. McCullough.
As Charles Cooke of the National Review noted, the media criticized DeSantis for his early use of Regeneron, first insisting that it didn’t work and then falsely alleging the decision was due to a billionaire hedge fund supporter of DeSantis having an investment in Regeneron’s manufacturer. The investment was insignificant in terms of the supporter’s investment portfolio but that’s the moronic state of modern corporate media.
Baylor last week obtained a restraining order against McCullough, which I perceived as an attempt to harass and intimidate him. Linking to a story in a trade publication, I posted this comment on my LinkedIn page:
Dr. Marty Makary, who’s somehow blessed with natural immunity from government and media censorship, is a frequent and loud critic of the Biden Administration’s pandemic management, even accusing it of promoting boosters to distract from the debacle in Afghanistan. He’s a professor and surgeon at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an advisor to the NIA and the FDA, also criticized the White House for prematurely promoting boosters.
The Cleveland Clinic, whose CEO is a world-class surgeon, hasn’t heeded the White House’s call to mandate vaccinations. Instead, it did a study revealing that healthcare workers who contracted Covid didn’t become reinfected. A system-wide mandate isn’t justified.
What do Johns Hopkins, CHOP, and Cleveland Clinic have in common? They are among the very best hospitals in the country, and they consider and tolerate contrarian views, even at odds with government policies and sometimes their own.
Texas-based Baylor Scott & White has no such tolerance. They forced out Dr. Peter McCullough, among the most respected cardiologists in the world and a prominent donor, because he opposes vaccines and says early Covid care and treatment is the best way to curb the pandemic. For added measure, they sued him for more than $1 million, saying McCullough hasn’t made it sufficiently clear he’s no longer with the hospital. Today, Baylor obtained a restraining order.
I’ve never seen or heard Baylor referred to with the reverence of Johns Hopkins, CHOP, or Cleveland Clinic. Their cowardly and mean-spirited treatment of McCullough reveals why they aren’t an A-team hospital and likely never will be.
The post received thousands of views and dozens of “likes,” and seemed to be rapidly gaining popularity. On Thursday evening, LinkedIn removed the post, saying it violated the site’s “community standards.”
My references to Drs. Makary (who I’ve previously profiled) Offit and Cleveland Clinic were all based on information published in corporate and trade media. The post contained no “misinformation,” but rather an observation about doctors and hospitals unwilling to kowtow to the Biden Administration’s whims.
As for the FDA and CDC, it’s a wonder how anyone can wholeheartedly trust these agencies. It’s been widely reported the FDA’s top vaccine experts resigned because of political pressure from the Biden Administration to approve boosters, and CDC’s director on Friday ignored the recommendations of the agency’s advisory vaccine experts and approved boosters for healthcare workers. Historically, CDC defers to its advisors.
Dr. Fauci admitted at a recent conference there was only an “inkling” of U.S. scientific evidence to justify boosters. The public mistakenly believes that forcing healthcare workers to get vaccinated is to protect patients from Covid transmission. It’s not.
At a CDC advisory hearing last week, where it was considered a given that vaccines don’t prevent Covid transmission, Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University unequivocally stated that vaccinating hospital workers is to “reduce mild disease so healthcare workers can go back to work.”
There you have it: The healthcare vaccine mandate is driven by labor productivity concerns. It’s obscene that hospital workers who risked their lives at the height of the pandemic must undergo forced vaccinations, particularly since many of them have already contracted Covid and have natural immunity. To my knowledge, Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health is the only hospital system to recognize natural immunity as grounds for a vaccine exemption.
LinkedIn’s censoring isn’t achieving its desired intent. A palpable anger has overtaken the site, and the more posts they remove the more forceful the vaccination resistance and anger. Contrary to the media’s portrayals, those who oppose vaccines are not entirely ignorant Trump supporters. The most strident anti vaxxers on LinkedIn seemingly have medical and advanced degrees, many from top-tier universities.
Dr. Christina Parks, who holds a PhD from the University of Michigan’s medical school in cellular and molecular biology, recently told a Michigan hearing the two groups who disproportionately avoid the Covid vaccines are PhDs who “understand how they work” and those lacking a high school diploma who “know what they don’t know.”
Parks accused the CDC and other agencies of misleading the public. A local Detroit TV station posted that she peddled “misinformation.”
That’s the America of today. Criticizing The Biden Administration’s vaccine strategy is a career cancelling move, and corporate and social media are at the forefront of the assassination efforts. Had LinkedIn not censored Dr. Kahn, I would have remained blissfully unaware as to the horror that’s unfolding.
LinkedIn will likely censor this commentary, as it has done with two previous posts. If you found this post on LinkedIn before it was removed, I’d welcome if you subscribed to this blog. LinkedIn is the only social media I use to market it.