The American public should count its blessings for Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For reasons I’m not clear, Makary is possibly the only doctor in America who, so far at least, is allowed to publicly challenge the Biden Administration’s vaccine narrative without fear of having his medical license yanked, being intimidated into silence because of costly litigation, or subject to brutal takedowns in the Atlantic and other publications promoting Democratic Party policies and narratives.
Makary has gone way beyond his Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. He’s on the vanguard of doctors doing their best to prevent it.
It would behoove every American to read Makary’s commentary on the Biden Administration’s reckless attempts to use Covid to distract from its horrific debacle in Afghanistan. The effort, in which the New York Times and the Washington Post were complicit, resulted in the mistaken public belief there is science justifying the benefits of vaccine boosters. In fact, some doctors maintain they are potentially harmful.
“I’m not alone in asking where is the science to show declining efficacy of the vaccines against severe disease,” Makary said. “Many medical experts are aghast as how, out of the blue, vaccine boosters were sternly and universally recommended regardless of age or natural immunity.”
Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, is also on record as saying, “data today does not indicate that boosters are needed.” Admittedly, WHO isn’t the most credible of organizations, but its public challenge to the Biden Administration’s and Israel’s public health policies is notable.
Makary has previously challenged the Biden Administration narrative, amplified by the corporate media, that the unvaccinated are a health threat to the vaccinated. According to Makary, “those who are unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold.” Much of the anger in America right now is fueled by the mistaken belief that the unvaccinated are responsible for the breakthrough Covid cases. For all the cheering about forcing U.S. hospital workers to get vaccinated or be fired, The Lancet published this study finding that vaccinated health care workers are more dangerous to patients.
Makary in his commentary outlines how the Biden Administration promoted booster shots to distract from Afghanistan. It leaked to the Times and the Post last Monday that it planned to promote booster shots, generating the first distracting cycle of news coverage. On Wednesday, President Biden held a news conference touting the boosters. The U.S. Surgeon General followed with a media tour, covered by the networks, also touting booster shots.
On cue, the CDC announced on Thursday that it approved of booster shots, pending FDA approval. On Friday, the FDA leaked to the Wall Street Journal that it was rushing to approve the Pfizer vaccine on Monday, generating another round of distracting news coverage. On Monday, the FDA’s expected Pfizer approval dominated the news for a good part of the day.
Pulling the wool over the eyes of White House reporters covering the Biden Administration is easier than taking candy from a baby. To validate this comment, I turn to President Obama’s former foreign affairs advisor Ben Rhodes, who bragged about how he played White House reporters for fools promoting the controversial Iran deal.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change,” Rhodes said in an interview. “They literally know nothing.”
Where is Ben Rhodes now? He’s a contributor to NBC News. His brother, David, was president of CBS News from 2011 to 2019.
The Biden Administration’s Covid response is overseen by Jeffrey Zients, another key former Obama aide who has no medical or science background but earned millions working on the business side of the healthcare industry. That the media so far hasn’t focused on Zients’ pandemic mismanagement suggests he’s possibly behind many of the Biden Administration’s media leaks. Reporters don’t like to bite the hand of their information leaking masters. (My recent profile of Zients can be found here.)
One needs only to look to Israel to appreciate the dangers of allowing politics to influence pandemic decisions. Ran Balicer, the chairman of the expert panel that advises the Israeli government on its Covid response, published a paper in May warning that vaccines alone wouldn’t eliminate Covid and that it was premature to remove other restrictions like indoor masks, quarantining, and vaccination certificates. Israel’s newly elected prime minister ignored Balicer’s warning, and the country is now experiencing Covid outbreaks rivaling last year’s levels. There’s talk of another country-wide shut down.
Washington swamp creatures and their media advisors are myopic. They view the world through 24-hour news cycles, and their crisis management skills are akin to the proverbial boy with his finger in the dyke. Promoting booster shots helped deflect media attention from the Afghanistan crisis last week and yesterday, but the potential future damage risks are substantial.
The Biden Administration has led Americans to believe that vaccines are the ticket to beating the pandemic and returning to normalcy. But what’s only known for certain is that vaccines help mitigate serious Covid illness, at least within the first six months of receiving them. The protective effects of vaccines appear to wane after that, and it’s not yet certain that plying people with additional vaccines is effective or safe. If it’s determined that booster shots are unadvisable, the credibility of the Biden Administration and the CDC, which already is in the dumpster, will be harmed considerably.
Dr. Fauci is doing his part to fuel more distrust of the government’s pandemic efforts. He went on CNN yesterday and declared that if the majority of the 90 million Americans who are unvaccinated get jabbed, the pandemic could be under control by the spring of next year. He also said “the time has come” for businesses as well as colleges and the military to “mandate” vaccines.
If Fauci was responsible, he’d be managing expectations and conditioning Americans to understand the pandemic is far from under control and the focus is on mitigating deaths from the illness. Fauci undermines his credibility as a scientist advocating vaccine mandates because that’s President Biden’s decision to make.
What Americans should be asking themselves is why the Biden Administration’s singular focus is on vaccines. During the AIDS epidemic the focus was on developing treatments to mitigate the disease and experimental treatments were aggressively promoted. One rarely hears about AIDS anymore even though a vaccine has yet to be developed to prevent it.
It’s telling that the FDA warned last week to avoid the use of Ivermectin, a drug the agency initially approved for humans. Ivermectin is a controversial drug, but if you want to educate yourself about how an independent journalist covered the drug and one working for a failing newspaper losing $50 million a year portrayed it, read this story by Matt Taibbi on Substack and this story by Michael Hiltzik in the L.A. Times. Americans should be alarmed that more than 18 months into the pandemic, the FDA’s release approving the Pfizer vaccine made no mention of any drugs being fast tracked for approval to treat Covid.
There are brave doctors risking their careers and reputations warning they have concerns about vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and passports, including a Nobel Prize winner for medicine, a Harvard Medical School professor, a highly regarded cardiologist who authored more than 600 peer review papers, and a scientist whose bio says he invented the mRNA technology used for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines. These experts are routinely censored on social media and the corporate media has uniformly tried to discredit them.
That’s what makes Dr. Makary so extraordinarily brave. Calling out the Biden Administration for playing politics could be put him at considerable professional risk if his criticisms are deemed a threat to getting more Americans hooked on Covid vaccines. It speaks well of Johns Hopkins, consistently ranked among America’s top hospitals, that they haven’t tried to silence Makary, although he makes clear that his views are his own.
I’ve developed an interest and expertise identifying and tracking doctors who are willing to call out healthcare wrongdoing. Overwhelmingly, they work at the most highly regarded hospitals in America. The best hospitals seemingly welcome contrarian and controversial thinkers. I imagine that’s why they are the best hospitals.