Let me warn upfront that Steve Kirsch, the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur turned investigative journalist and vociferous critic of Covid vaccines, shouldn’t readily be believed. Kirsch could teach New York Times reporter Tiffany Hsu and other corporate media “misinformation” reporters quite a bit about how to distort facts to spin a narrative. Jeffrey Morris, director of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, learned the hard way of Kirsch’s recklessness and the perils of engaging him.
As recounted by Cat Ferguson in her fair and balanced takedown of Kirsch in the MIT Technology Review, Kirsch last year emailed Morris asking him to estimate the maximum number of deaths caused by Covid vaccines. “Who knows,” Morris replied. “But not 150K (as Kirsch alleged). And not zero.”
Ferguson said Kirsch forwarded Morris’ comment to her and likely other journalists. “BOMBSHELL: Top biostats professor admits we have NO CLUE # of people KILLED by COVID vaccines,” Kirsch wrote. “He thinks # killed by vax could be anywhere between 0 and 150K people dead.”
Kirsch’s misrepresentation of Morris’ comment was reckless and irresponsible, and undermined his cause. Morris strikes me as the rare honest academic who is receptive to challenging government and corporate media vaccine narratives. According to Ferguson, Morris maintains that all claims about vaccine safety should be properly vetted, so burning the rare biostatistician with an open mind about vaccine safety shows questionable judgment.
I could provide countless other examples of Kirsch’s deceptiveness, but Ferguson and Jonathan Jerry in McGill University’s Office for Science and Society publication did deft jobs highlighting the myriad reasons to be skeptical of Kirsch. Medium, supposedly an open forum for “dynamic thinking,” banned Kirsch in December 2020 because of his allegations that Pfizer’s Covid vaccine kills more people than it saves. The ban served yet another example of the perils of censorship and how silencing critics accused of being “misinformation superspreaders” too often stifles credible information and allows those in power to remain unaccountable.
Back in May 2020 a slick video appeared on social media featuring the virologist Judy Mikovitz making what appeared to be some wild and crazy claims, including that wearing masks “activates” the corona virus. The corporate media immediately declared Mikovitz a nut job, and the video was promptly banned from social media. I managed to view the Mikovitz video before it disappeared into the memory hole.
To my surprise, some of Mikovitz’s allegations immediately proved correct, and some have since been validated. One of Miskovitz’s most damning claims was that hospitals were unnecessarily putting Covid patients on ventilators because they had a financial incentive to do so. That claim was correct; hospitals could charge the government $39,000 putting a Covid patient on a ventilator but they only received $13,000 for most other Covid treatments. According to an analysis published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the Covid-19 death rate could have been reduced by as much as 50 percent had ventilators been used more sparingly to treat virus patients.
Mikovitz alleged that Covid was wrongly attributed for many deaths, a claim recently made by CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Leana Wen. Mikovitz also alleged that Dr. Fauci was compromised because he held many unknown patents. That, too, has since been proven correct.
(My commentary on the Mikovitz video can be found here.)
I’ve only recently discovered Kirsch because the free version of his Substack newsletter suddenly appeared in my email. Kirsch is a dogged investigative reporter, and he’s run circles around the corporate media’s pandemic reporters ferreting out many facts and details that I’ve confirmed were correct.
Kirsch’s newsletter was the basis for a recent commentary I posted about the CDC issuing a warning about a possible safety issue with the bivalent Covid vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech. As the CDC insisted the safety issue warning was nothing to worry about, I was mistakenly impressed with the agency’s seeming transparency. Kirsch insisted the CDC only issued the warning because a professor at Israel’s prestigious Hebrew University made public some alarming vaccine safety data through a FOIA request, forcing the agency to issue the warning. The professor was Josh Guetzkow and Kirsch linked to the academic’s column discussing his FOIA findings, which is how I learned of it.
Kirsch, 50, is wickedly smart, which even his detractors acknowledge. He’s made millions founding and selling various tech companies, including the search engine Infoseek, for which Disney paid $770 million in 1998 to acquire a 43 percent interest. The Chronicle of Philanthropy last year estimated Kirsch’s net worth at $70 million, down from $200 million a year earlier. Kirsch and his spouse Michele are founders of the Kirsch Foundation, which supports “high-impact, leverageable activities” leading to “a safer and healthier world.”
My sense is that Kirsch’s approach is akin to that of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Jobs was legendary for his “reality distortion field,” whereby he convinced employees of achieving the impossible by rejecting all data and arguments to the contrary. Musk has repeatedly demonstrated the same trait, which is how he made the manufacturing of electric vehicles commercially viable when the legacy automakers said it couldn’t be done.
What’s admirable is how Kirsch developed an interest in vaccines and Covid treatments. In March 2020, when the pandemic was in its infancy, Kirsch set out to identify covid treatments using readily available FDA-approved drugs.
“Steve Kirsch was extremely helpful early on in the pandemic, stepping up to fund early treatment trials when the US government would not fund such studies,” David Boulware, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, told the MIT Technology Review.
It’s alarming and telling that the U.S. government from the get-go wasn’t interested in readily available drugs to treat Covid, instead betting that vaccines were the only viable pandemic solution. An organization funded by Kirsch and other prominent tech entrepreneurs, including Marc Benioff and Elon Musk, provided Boulware with $125,000 to test the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. Boulware’s studies indicated that hydroxychloroquine wasn’t an effective Covid drug treatment.
Kirsch didn’t like Boulware’s findings, and so began his attacks on researchers for allegedly designing faulty studies and making statistical errors. “You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think that reflects their intelligence,” Doug Richman, a prominent HIV drug researcher, told the MIT Technology Review. “(Kirsch) considers himself an expert in something that he doesn’t have training or experience in, and he’s not following scientific methods to assess data.”
Kirsch has launched a campaign against the FAA and is circulating a petition calling for the resignation of Federal Air Surgeon Susan Northrop. The campaign stems from Kirsch’s scoop revealing the agency quietly revised its EKG test parameters to allow commercial pilots to continue flying with a significantly widened range of heart rhythms.
“This is a tacit admission from the U.S. government that the Covid vaccine has damaged the hearts of our pilots,” Kirsch declared. “Not just a few pilots. A lot of pilots and a lot of damage.”
Andrew Bostom, a cardiovascular epidemiologist who was suspended multiple times by Twitter for sharing research on vaccine side effects, doesn’t view the FAA’s EKG revisions as nefarious.
“(The FAA revision) is “much ado about nothing,” Bostom told Just the News, a Washington-based publication whose stated mission is to report information objectively. Bostom said the more likely reason for the revision was the EKG standards were unreasonable to begin with and that the FAA needed to liberalize them because of the growing pilot shortage.
The FAA told Just the News that its EKG revisions were based on new “scientific evidence,” which it declined to provide. That hardly fosters trust or confidence, and it’s to Kirsch’s credit that he’s aggressively pursuing government agencies and seeking to hold them accountable.
That’s the role of the corporate media, but they’ve opted to serve as shills for the U.S. government, dutifully parroting whatever officials tell them. Therein is why the FAA and CDC can get away with “following the science” without disclosing the science on which their decisions are made. It’s unfortunate that Kirsch isn’t more diligent and responsible in making his sweeping allegations because it makes it too easy for critics to simply dismiss him as an “anti vaxxer.”
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Kirsch is among those at the forefront fanning the flames. The public is fortunate that Substack, unlike Medium, is willing to publish his newsletter. Kirsch is often wrong and mistaken, but when he’s right there’s much cause for alarm.