Is Big Pharma behind CNN's effort to discredit people — who are skeptical of rushed-to-market COVID vaccine safety?

15 August 2020

CNN — no brain, no integrity?

Here is one of the network's recent headlines:

Anti-vaxxers ramp up conspiracy theories

The CDC's Dr. Redfield is cautiously optimistic that one or more coronavirus vaccines will be ready by the start of 2021. There are 270 active trials for coronavirus treatments, experts say.

Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins expects the National Academy of Sciences to make "interim, high-level" recommendations about who should get priority for a vaccine by Labor Day.

"That would probably include such people as the elderly, residents of nursing homes, health care providers, other people at high risk for chronic illnesses," Collins said Thursday.

But anti-vaxxers have taken to social media to spread lies about the future coronavirus vaccine. Some include claims it contains monkey brains or that it's a CIA plot to take over the world. Others allege the vaccine will include an invisible trackable tattoo or it will disfigure those who take it.

As the lies spread, the government's multi-billion-dollar vaccine effort has yet to come up with a public education campaign to counteract disinformation.

Talking out'cha ya ass, CNN?

First, if somebody trots out an anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine by early 2021, I can confidently assert — based on the world's experience with previous vaccines — that it will not have been properly tested in any methodologically and statistically persuasive way.

This is especially true, if the vaccine is uses mRNA technology, something that has never been used on people before. Great concept, but important molecular biological concerns.

Screwing with nucleic acids inside the body is a potentially hazardous process, given the cascading role that DNA and RNA play in genomic basics, many of which remain unknown and uninvestigated.

Second, FDA Director Robert Redfield is the same Republican Trumpist — and overly confident quasi-windbag — who presided over the FDA's:

unforgivable screwup of COVID testing at the pandemic's outset,

initial denial that masks were effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission,

and

now sits happily atop the FDA's continued stonewall resistance to allowing companies to distribute workable home COVID tests —

in spite of the fact that

SARS-CoV-2 infections continue to spread around the country in numbers high enough to cast doubt (for instance) upon the wisdom of reopening schools.

E25Bio, Sherlock Biosciences and 3M are some of these red-tape-frustrated home test manufacturers.

With regard to home testing, the medically persuasive hypothesis is that successful COVID testing needs only to detect comparatively high viral loads to be effective in helping us slow COVID's progression through the population.

The best, most concise and graphical explanation of this reasoning — proposed by Dr. Michael Mina at Harvard — comes from Dr. Roger Seheult at Medcram:

MedCram - Medical Lectures Explained Clearly, Coronavirus Pandemic Update 98: At Home COVID-19 Testing - A Possible Breakthrough, YouTube (20 July 2020)

Most pertinently, the people most likely to transmit COVID are asymptomatic and have developed these high viral loads in only a few hours.

They are relatively uninfectious before their viral load hits the numerical point at which the comparatively low sensitivity home tests reliably detect the increase.

In other words, all we need is a COVID test that catches the point, when the patient is about to begin shedding the virus. Purportedly, these home tests are good enough to do this.

See, for example:

MedCram - Medical Lectures Explained Clearly, COVID-19 Rapid Tests Demo & Q/A with E25Bio Co-Founder Dr. Herrera (At Home Antigen Tests), YouTube (12 August 2020)

By the preponderance of existing evidence, the FDA's bureaucratic (evidence-ignoring) insistence on high test sensitivity is grossly misplaced, given the apparent actual characteristics of COVID transmission.

Furthermore, these home tests' within-minutes (at home) readouts would allow people to know immediately, even daily, whether they have become infectious.

Presumably, upon discovering their new carrier status so quickly, quarantine and contact tracing could begin right away.

Contrast the home tests' probably helpful efficiency with the United States' currently laggard process — which requires lab processing and takes days to sometimes weeks to return results to "normal" people — as opposed to rich celebrities and professional athletes.

All this infection-promoting delay is due to the Trump Administration's lassitude and its captive FDA's bureaucratic rock-headedness.

So CNN, Director Redfield and his FDA are actually not a reliable anchor for scientific and epidemiological good sense.

Third, mindless kowtowing to Big Pharma's profiteering interest is (probably always) a mistake.

Trying to make intelligently cautious people feel bad about their scientifically valid skepticism — regarding Big Pharma's continual (usually lying) money-grubbing — is most likely going to backfire.

All CNN has achieved with its vacuous drivel is to irritate those of us with medical backgrounds, who have the sense to be cautious about dangerously unproven medical practices.

CNN's anti-vaxxer smear is just going to supplement the reflexively anti-vaxxer crowd with other folks, who actually do know medicine, science and the requirements for statistical proof.

Not a good outcome, even for Big Pharma's predatory goons.

The moral? — Still another sign that Big Pharma . . .

. . . and the Lamestream-owning Oligarchy intend to turn the American people into a lab-rat experiment for profit.

PeteFree.com

Is Big Pharma behind CNN's effort to discredit people — who are skeptical of rushed-to-market COVID vaccine safety?