Recent hearings in the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have examined US vaccine safety systems and why vaccination rates are dropping despite efforts to bolster public trust. Vaccine usage appears to fall along party lines with Democrats more willing to take the jab while Republicans seem more distrustful.
Alarming Rise in Propaganda?
It seems in the last few years American politics has intruded into science in a big way, with each side pointing to the other as “abusing science” to achieve political aims. At the outset of the Feb. 15 subcommittee hearing -- titled Assessing America’s Vaccine Safety Systems, Part 1 -- ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz, MD (D-CA), preceded witness testimony with the following comments:
“[W]e are already witnessing an alarming rise in overall vaccine hesitancy which has been fueled by mis- and disinformation spread online during the last four years, and as mis- and disinformation has festered, immunization rates have been falling …
“I worry that the politicization of medicine, the politicization of science and vaccines, will ultimately hurt us all in the end and that the manufacturing of distrust in public health norms and institutions that we have held true for so long will make us less prepared to combat a future pandemic. For example, Republicans are already 2.4 times more likely than Democrats or Independents to believe that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. Childhood vaccination rates are already at a historic low.”
In one breath, Ruiz called for a bipartisan examination of science, then politicized vaccine hesitancy.
Politicizing Vaccine Safety
The hollowness of Ruiz’ words was amplified the following day by House Democrats in a press release titled “Select Subcommittee Democrats debunk Republicans’ dubious claims about vaccine safety” that highlighted Ruiz’ (depoliticized?) accolades of President Joe Biden:
“’[Scientific and medical] efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic helped contribute to one of the most successful vaccine rollouts in history — which, under President Biden’s leadership — led the country out of the depths of the pandemic,’ said Ranking Member Ruiz in his opening statement.
“Select Subcommittee Democrats refuted Republicans’ claims about COVID-19 vaccines by underscoring the data collected from rigorous clinical trials and surveillance that have repeatedly demonstrated and affirmed their safety and efficacy.”
It appears the hearing’s purpose was not to objectively investigate vaccine risks and victim compensation but to create a dog-and-pony show to debunk anyone who questioned mRNA vaccines. Biden did not create the vaccine safety reporting and compensation systems at issue in the hearing; fawning over him for vaccines that could equally be credited to Donald Trump is a billboard-sized “politicization of science and vaccines.”
Verboten Inquiries
Science was once “thought-binary” -- one could argue either side of a theory or even challenge scientific “laws.” No more. Social justice science is non-binary, monolithic, a mind-Borg stifling critical thought. Anyone challenging vaccines or claiming injury from them is a threat to society, an underminer of confidence in science, and a spreader of dreaded disinformation. On January 8 Ruiz offered the following testimony in defense of the controversial Dr. Anthony Fauci:
“For almost a year, Select Subcommittee Republicans have relied on conjecture to build their extreme, conspiratorial narrative to vilify Dr. Fauci under the guise of determining the pandemic’s origins with nothing to show for it. Today, we are no closer to better understanding how COVID-19 came to be.”
The next day, ”non-partisan” Ruiz “depoliticized” Fauci’s testimony even further:
“Nothing we have heard over the last two days or in any of these proceedings has shown that there was a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins, suppression of the lab leak theory, any effort to influence the CIA’s origins assessment, or plot to orchestrate the Proximal Origin paper on the part of Dr. Fauci.
“So that the American public can see through this extreme fishing expedition for themselves, I urge my Republican colleagues to make the full transcript of Dr. Fauci’s 14-hour testimony public as soon as possible.”
Watching the Fauci testimony reflects concerns that Dr. Fauci and others concocted policies such as social distancing, masking, and other mandates without sufficient scientific evidence. As reported by the Washington Examiner:
“In summary, Fauci admitted he pushed COVID-19 protocols that lacked scientific rigor, advocated coercive vaccine policies to disrupt people’s lives that likely fueled vaccine hesitancy, and unjustly smeared millions of people as conspiracy theorists for hypothesizing on a COVID-19 origin story that the FBI now admits is likely true.”
Discerning Disinformation
Many Americans are aware that, according to the CDC’s own data, healthy children under 18 are at very low risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. They question the rationalization for injecting youngsters to protect other vulnerable people as false and unscientific. They know about healthy young people falling ill from the shots even as vaccine injury deniers pushed more injections on children. Parents have scientific reasons to question vaccine safety for their healthy minor children, yet Dr. Ruiz proclaims their understandable hesitancy is a product of the “politicization of science,” a “manufacturing of distrust” by those spreading “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
We are witnessing in real-time the ongoing disinformation problem in America, with government-approved science presented as fact – and devoid of scrutiny - at the heart of the problem. The admitted missteps or diversions during the pandemic provide proof positive that science must be depoliticized, or Americans of all stripes – pro- and anti-vaxxers alike – will surely suffer.
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