I'll tell you something honestly: I never looked into the vaccine question during all those years when I was traveling the country speaking to large audiences about matters of public importance.
For some of you, that will mean I was lazy, or too apt to adopt the standard view without question -- and you're probably right.
But what it means for right now is that I can't be accused of having a preexisting axe to grind on the issue.
And I'll tell you: from the perspective of someone who knows a little bit of the story but is far from an expert, the behavior of the so-called expert class on this stuff is not normal.
Dr. Peter Hotez went berserk when RFK, Jr., appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. Why, RFK had said dangerous things!
So Joe invited him to appear on the program opposite RFK in order to counter what he thought was false, and Hotez refused.
Here was his golden opportunity to save millions of lives, and he declines because he doesn't want to dignify or amplify RFK?
That ship has sailed, Hotez. RFK's opinions are already out there. Why not take this golden opportunity to limit the damage?
Here's what I think is going on in cases like that: people like Hotez have grown accustomed to setting the terms of the debate. This can be discussed; this cannot. Such-and-such topic has been settled. Respectable people have already ruled out X. And so on.
He is not used to a world in which the priestly caste is called into question -- in which dissidents demand to check their work, so to speak.
Whenever I'm spoken to in slogans, and then told that dissident voices cannot be debated, I say to myself: I've seen this movie before.
When it came to the Covid shots, some of the studies purporting to calculate how many lives they had saved may as well have been written in crayon.
I've seen work on mask efficacy that simply assumed what was to be proven -- and who can forget the North Carolina school study that concluded masks worked even though they had no control group!
Since we've been taught to treat the medical establishment as a priestly caste, with the lab coat and stethoscope taking the place of the cassock and biretta, it would never occur to most people that there might be anything wrong with its foundations. It sure didn't occur to me!
Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, said that the problem of medical research fraud "is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary."
I could multiply statements like this many times over.
You surely heard that yesterday Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spoke about what they consider the dangers (and potential autism link) posed by acetaminophen use during pregnancy, but what garnered the most attention were the two men's comments on vaccines.
The new book Vaccines, Amen, sums up my attitude on this: there is definitely a religious reverence around these things, a knee-jerk reaction and a refusal to consider other points of view. It is very typical for government agencies to want to take credit for already-existing trends (like OSHA on workplace injuries and fatalities, which were already rapidly declining before we even had an OSHA), and the same phenomenon appears to be at work here.
Yesterday Trump wondered aloud how it can be that the Amish, who inject none of these things, have essentially no autism?
That could be a coincidence, but with autism incidence rising from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 31 among the general population, that would be one wild coincidence.
The President laid out a series of steps he wanted to see taken, and said there would be further presentations like this one.
Then Secretary Kennedy said:
Some 40 to 70 percent of mothers who have children with autism believe that their child was injured by a vaccine. President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalizing them like prior administrations.
Some of our friends like to say that we should believe all women. Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades, because research on the potential link between autism and vaccines has been actively suppressed in the past.
It will take time for an honest look at this topic by scientists, but I want to reassure the people in the autism community that we will be uncompromising and relentless in our search for answers. We will perform the studies that should have been performed 25 years ago.
It isn't enough simply to say "Andrew Wakefield" and leave it at that, but that's what so many people do on this issue. Again, that makes a relative normie like me wonder: why are defenders of the status quo so reluctant to defend their own position, and so dishonest with the public when they do argue?
My wife and I talk all day, every day, whether we're together or not, and she wrote me this today:
Very much like Charlie Kirk, you can tell RFK is sincere, if you listen to him and not just get the Cliff Notes. Even if he's wrong, he's sincere. This is abnormal pathology happening to our children. Even if he's wrong, why aren't we curious about what is happening and welcoming open dialogue (which I think Jay [Bhattacharya] is along for)?
This is what I mean when I say: it is not easy to navigate this society. It's hard to know who can be trusted. That's why the most obvious thing in the world is for us to band together and share our knowledge and skills.
Just yesterday, on my business email list, I shared an email I'd received that very day from a guy who'd become unemployed because his firm demanded the Covid shots.
Now that he's inside my community, he's started a business with his wife, she's launched a successful Etsy store, and one of our members gave him a connection that got him an excellent new job.
We can whine and complain, or we can band together and help each other.
I choose the second one.
Try us out, and even if you hate my community (you'd have to have brain damage to hate it), you can still keep these 11 amazing things in perpetuity as my thank-you for giving us a try:
https://www.ElevenFreebies.com
Tom Woods
Theo:
My copy of the book just arrived:
