Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine - Here's what Ben Shapiro could have known

Table of Contents

    1. Ben Shapiro does not like being lied to
    2. Beyond The Washington Post
    3. What happened to second opinions?
    4. Deceit has a history
        a. Deceit doesn’t stop with vaccines
    5. Holding the guilty accountable – easier said than done
    6. A solution for Ben Shapiro – and anyone else who doesn't want to be deceived

1. Ben Shapiro doesn't like being lied to

American conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro is angry that he was lied to about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine’s ability to stop transmission. Shapiro, on his October 25, 2022, show, as reported by Blaze writer Joseph MacKinnon,^[1] spoke about the revelation by Pfizer President of International Developed Markets Janine Small when testifying before the special COVID committee of the European parliament that Pfizer never tested their COVID-19 vaccine to see if it stopped transmission before it was rolled out. He was particularly upset with the Biden White House as a Washington Post column, from which he read, showed that the president knew about this as far back as June 2021 and continued to lie to the American people exhorting them to get vaccinated.  

Shapiro says that he doesn’t know if he would have taken the vaccine had he known then what he knows know since his main purpose in vaccinating was to protect his parents with whom he was bubbled.

In the montage below, Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, Fauci, and others insist that the vaccine will stop transmission. Notice the clip where Fauci states that the primary endpoint from where they derived the 95% efficacy statistic was only “clinically recognizable symptomatic disease.”

Here's a similar montage including the dates on which they were said.

mRNA vaccines and transmission with dates

Here’s Ben Shapiro’s tweet, which includes (from 2:09) Small’s admission to the European parliament:

Shapiro obviously missed this previous admission by COVID-19 task force member Dr. Deborah Birx. Watch Rep. Jim Jordan, on June 23, 2022, calling the U.S. government the largest purveyor of disinformation after Birx told him the government “hoped” the vaccines would prevent infection in the vaccinated.

Jim Jordan grills lying' Birx

Watch Rep. Jordan's entire questioning of Dr. Birx here.

2. Beyond The Washington Post

Encouraging as it may appear that a popular personality like Shapiro has become aware of the disinformation, it doesn’t seem as though Shapiro thought beyond what was put in front of him by the Washington Post. That’s a shame. He should be questioning the entire vaccine trial and rollout. Most importantly, he should have wondered what else was known beforehand, what else they may have lied about, how this was able to happen, and how deep this goes.

Yet, listening to the podcast of that show (available here), one realizes that this is highly unlikely. Shapiro stated that he went along with the claims of lowering transmission made by Pfizer and Moderna in November and December of 2020, saying that’s the data that was being released so that was the data being used, including in conservative media because that was the available information at the time.

There were people who were saying ignore that information, it’s not true, and maybe they turned out to be right, as it turns out, but jumping to conclusions based on the absence of data is not the same thing as following the data until it turns.

Shapiro could not have been more wrong. Many people who recommended caution were not jumping to conclusions. Both mainstream and conservative media had been raising red flags about the COVID-19 vaccines based on what vaccinologists, scientists, health officials, and the media were revealing starting in early 2020. That’s right – even before the vaccine rollout the week of December 14, 2020 (and immediately afterwards) there was admission that they didn’t expect the vaccine to stop transmission – since it was never tested for that purpose – and in fact, they admitted that the vaccines were not being developed safely, either.

The FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer vaccine on December 11, 2020. Here’s some of the information that was available to the public, before the vaccines were given EUA status, and as they were being rolled out to an unsuspecting populace:

Published March 3, 2020, in Stat News^[2] Eric Boodman wrote,

To some, the sweep of outbreak is emergency enough to justify simultaneously working on steps that would normally be done sequentially. To others, jumbling the order of the recipe seems morally questionable, because there could potentially be unknown hazards and it’s unclear how effective this particular formulation is.

Boodman, quoting Jonathan Kimmelman, director of McGill University’s biomedical ethics unit:

Outbreaks and national emergencies often create pressure to suspend rights, standards and/or normal rules of ethical conduct. Often our decision to do so seems unwise in retrospect, …

Published March 21, 2020, in The Atlantic^[3] Graeme Wood and David A. Spiegel, PhD wrote,

The RNA is like the blueprints or schematics that tell workers on the factory floor what to build. An RNA vaccine injects instructions to your cells, and hopes that your cells receive these instructions and follow them, and build the proteins that will teach your immune system to fight a virus. It is a bit like wadding up plans for a Cessna, throwing them through the ventilation shaft of a Ford factory, and hoping that someone inside finds them, and that the factory starts rolling airplanes out its doors instead of pickups.

Despite successes in animals, this strategy has never yielded a vaccine approved for human use. Moderna is a leader in this approach, and you can be sure the scientists there have considered all the ways to make it more likely to work. They throw the plans down the shaft nearest the factory manager’s office; they attach official-looking paperwork and bribes. …

To learn about the financial relationship between Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and Moderna read

• Was a COVID-19 Vaccine Developed before the First COVID-19 Case Was Discovered in America?
• COVID-19 Vaccines: Dr. Fauci’s Team May Personally Profit

Published April 13, 2020, in C&EN (Chemical and Engineering News)^[4] Ryan Cross quoted Inovioa Pharmaceuticals CEO Joseph Kim:

… moving new technologies from the computer into the clinic at an unprecedented rate, and normally distinct phases of a drug program—preclinical animal models, clinical testing, and manufacturing—are happening all at once. “It is like building an airplane while you are flying,” Kim says. (Emphasis added.)

Published June 2, 2020, in the Times of Israel^[5] Lauren Neergaard quoted Ralph Baric:

Even as companies recruit tens of thousands of people for larger vaccine studies this summer, behind the scenes scientists still are testing ferrets, monkeys and other animals in hopes of clues to those basic questions — steps that in a pre-pandemic era would have been finished first.

“We are in essence doing a great experiment,” said Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose lab is testing several vaccine candidates in animals.

… “there’s no question there is more risk in the current strategy than what has ever been done before,” Baric said. (Emphasis added.)

Oxford Study

Could a vaccine also stop the virus’s spread? The Oxford study raises some doubt.

Those researchers found as much virus lingering in the vaccinated monkeys’ noses as in the unvaccinated. Even though the experiment exposed monkeys to high levels of the coronavirus, it raised troubling questions.

Inovio & Pfizer

Said Inovio’s Broderick: “Let me be honest. We’re still not clear at all on what those correlates of protection are” — meaning what mix of immune reactions, and how much, are needed.

… “there’s a huge variation” in immune reactions between the severely and mildly ill, Broderick added.

Still, if vaccinated animals that produce the same neutralizing antibody levels as certain COVID-19 survivors are protected — and people given test doses likewise produce the same amount — “that is great comfort that your vaccine approach actually may work,” said Kathrin Jansen, head of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine research.

Published July 1, 2020, in AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) News.^[6]

Gregory A. Poland, Mayo Clinic

Vaccine testing proceeds slowly because the human body responds slowly: It takes weeks to produce the antibodies that provide immunity, and it can take longer to show harmful side effects.

“The regulatory pathway is meant to be slow, deliberate, reflective,” Poland says. “Data-rich, data-informed, and peer reviewed. Where you shortcut that, you can run into problems.”

…

“If we aren’t deliberate and careful, we could harm people. We have to remember that.”

Published October 21, 2020, in the BMJ^[7] associate editor Peter Doshi quoted Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna:

… the company’s trial lacks adequate statistical power to assess those outcomes. “The trial is precluded from judging [hospital admissions], based on what is a reasonable size and duration to serve the public good here,” he said.

Hospital admissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30 000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out.

Zaks said, “Would I like to know that this prevents mortality? Sure, because I believe it does. I just don’t think it’s feasible within the timeframe [of the trial]—too many would die waiting for the results before we ever knew that.”(Emphasis added.)

Presented October 22, 2020, at the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting Presentation:^[8]

Published October 27, 2020, in the U.K.’s Daily Mail^[9] Megan Sheets quoted Dr. Anthonly Fauci:

Dr Anthony Fauci has cautioned that early COVID-19 vaccines will be focused on preventing symptoms of the virus, not blocking it altogether.  

…

While the end goal of the vaccines will be to eradicate the virus, Fauci noted that developers are aiming for a simpler goal in the first round of jabs.

'If the vaccine also allows you to prevent initial infection, that would be great. [But] what I would settle for, and all of my colleagues would settle for, is the primary endpoint to prevent clinically recognizable disease.'(Emphasis added.)

Published December 29, 2020, in the National Post:^[10]  

WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan and head of WHO emergencies program Dr. Mark Ryan:

The first goal of the vaccine was meant to prevent symptomatic disease, severe disease and deaths, Swaminathan said. [As Fauci was quoted above and as will be shown below, stopping severe disease and deaths was not studied in the trials.]

… Ryan … said after that first goal has been tackled, “we will deal with the moonshot of potentially being able to eliminate or eradicate the virus.”

Ryan said, “The existence of a vaccine, even at high efficacy, is no guarantee of eliminating or eradicating an infectious disease. That is a very high bar for us to be able to get over.”

Instead, the “destiny” of the virus is to become endemic, said David Heymann, the chair of the WHO’s strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards. (Emphasis added.)

Here’s what America’s Frontline News reported in May 2022:

… the COVID-19 vaccine trials were never set up to prove that the vaccines do what vaccines are supposed to do. Peter Doshi, associate editor at the BMJ, noted in his review of the Covid-19 vaccine trials,^[15] that Peter Hotez, vaccinologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said vaccines should:

1. Reduce the likelihood of severe illness and hospitalization
2. Prevent infection and stop disease transmission

Doshi went on to explain that none of the phase III trials were set up to prove either one of those requirements.None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.Fauci’s claim that the vaccine stops clinical disease was also unsupported by the trials. …COVID-19 vaccines were never expected to provide herd immunity Studies in non-human primates showed that the vaccines didn’t work to prevent infection.

• Moderna’s and Johnson and Johnson’s pre-clinical trials with non-human primates showed that although robust antibodies were found after vaccination, nasal swabs picked up virus particles.
• Dr. Katherine Jansen, Pfizer’s lead representative at the FDA’s December 10, advisory committee meeting to evaluate Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency use authorization (EUA), admitted that vaccinated non-human primates became infected after being challenged with the virus.^[27]

As Fauci himself stated (above), vaccines were not trialed to show that they stopped transmission.

• In early December, 2020, shortly before the Pfizer vaccine received Emergency Use Authorization, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said, regarding the vaccine’s ability to stop transmission: “... We are not certain about that right now with what we know.” ^[28]
• Tal Zaks, CEO of Moderna said “Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission,” … “because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable.”^[29]
• WHO Chief Scientist, Soumya Swaminathan said: “I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on.”^[30]

Doctors from the Department of Otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins and at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical Schooll^[31] published a paper before the Pfizer vaccine was rolled out in Israel, explaining that injectable vaccines do not prevent transmission of respiratory viruses.

3. What happened to second opinions?

Shapiro stated that we need to be able to rely on authorities and professionals, such as doctors, auto mechanics, and plumbers, since we can’t drill down on every topic.

While that’s true, it’s generally important to have a modicum of knowledge about the subject in order to understand what the professional recommends and to be able to ascertain if it makes sense to you. All of the information provided in this article is in the public domain. He didn’t need to drill down very hard to understand that there were serious safety and efficacy issues with the vaccines being developed.

That’s also where a second opinion or knowledgeable friend comes in. A second opinion is important not only to prevent deception, but because even experts can be mistaken and/or have a different insight or perspective.

Unfortunately, our “authorities” and the media are doing their best to make sure that counter-narrative voices can’t be taken seriously or even heard. Your knowledgeable friend or second opinion has been given the pejorative term of anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, or is accused of spreading misinformation. (Could that be why Shapiro assumed those who recommended against the vaccine were doing so without real data?) In the case of health professionals, they are often threatened with the loss of their job if they continue to speak up (America’s Frontline News wrote about that here) or even fired for not going along with the narrative. America’s Frontline Doctors founder Dr. Simone Gold, among others, was fired from her position for speaking out against the tyranny of the COVID-19 measures.

In the video below Tucker Carlson talks with Dr. Gold about being fired and how the most viral video of all time in which she and other frontline doctors appeared was quickly taken down by all social media.

4. Deceit has a history

The lies about which Shapiro is outraged are not new and neither is the censorship of counter-narrative information. The same disinformation campaign conducted to promote the COVID-19 vaccines has actually been conducted for the past several decades in an effort to prevent the public from questioning traditional vaccines.

From December 2-3, 2019, just before the first COVID-19 cases were reported, the World Health Organization (WHO) held a Global Vaccine Safety Summit^[11] where prominent scientists and doctors discussed, among other things, the poor state of vaccine safety science which is hidden from the public.  

A prescient episode of The Highwire with Del Bigtree, directly following the WHO summit, revealed to viewers the same lies about the traditional vaccines that were subsequently told about the COVID-19 vaccines and remarked about potential/probable censorship of his program. YouTube removed The Highwire channel in July 2020.^[12] This video clip is a short compilation of some of the summit discussions around safety science shown on The Highwire. Watch the entire show at the end of this article..

a. Deceit doesn’t stop with vaccines

In light of the above, Shapiro would be wise to consider everything else government agencies, “authorities,” and the media have been telling the public about overpopulation, climate change, food scarcity, and more, may also be one big lie.

For instance, UN global communications representative Melissa Fleming, speaking at a World Economic Forum disinformation panel on Sept 28, 2022, told WEF managing director Adrian Monck that the UN owns the science on climate change and they are partnering with Google to make sure that their information is the only information anyone sees:

Additional egregious information provided by Ms. Fleming, as reported by Dr. Robert Malone and carried by the Brownstone Institute,^[13] during the panel discussion included the suggestion that the “UN with the WEF is censoring many scientific discussions, such as the topic of COVID-19, and the UN is in the process of setting up the tools to censor ALL misinformation that the UN deems unhelpful for a ‘stable, peaceful, harmonious and UNITED world.’”^[14]

5. Holding the guilty accountable - easier said than done

Shapiro, a lawyer, believes in justice. He stated that the guilty should be fired and/or prosecuted and that we need new institutions to replace the current ones.

However, holding the guilty accountable is easier said than done. Government officials have been giving pharma and their cohorts in the government passes for deceit and corruption for a long time.

While it’s impossible to list all the egregious incidences over the past decades, here’s a few (mostly recent) things for which the guilty have not been held accountable.

• Despite Pfizer having paid multiple civil and criminal fines to the tune of billions of dollars to the US Justice Department (as have other vaccine and drug manufacturers), no individual gets charged with any crime.^[15] Consequently, there is no incentive for Big Pharma to stop what they consider a cost of doing business.
• Pfizer documents, which FDA officials supporting Pfizer (and probably protecting their own agency which gave the vaccines EUAs) tried unsuccessfully to have sealed for 75 years, reveal that Pfizer knew shortly after the vaccines were rolled out that they had many, many serious adverse effects.^[16] Despite the revelations, to date, no one has been held accountable for hiding the injuries from the public and continuing to promote the vaccines.  
• Congressional hearings led by Senator Ron Johnson in which he spoke with those who suffered serious adverse effects and family deaths from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines, including during the trials which were covered up, have garnered little attention.^[17] No one has stopped the vaccination program or investigated Pfizer because of it.
• Fauci lied to Senator Rand Paul about the origins of the virus, and cover-up of gain-of-function activities at Wuhan; this has not resulted in his termination or prosecution despite an investigation being called for.^[18]  

The media, for a variety of reasons, is also complicit, not the least of which is because of their advertising base:

• Programming is censored when it’s brought to you by Pfizer:

• Media conglomerate Ziff-Davis major advertisers are Big Pharma; Ziff- Davis even has content (adjacencies) to support them.^[19]

6. A solution for Ben Shapiro - and anyone else who doesn't want to be deceived anymore

The best way to combat disinformation is to bring the truth to light. America’s Frontline Doctors has been doing just that since early in the pandemic.

Ben Shapiro can do the same by educating himself and educating his audience. He’s invited to peruse the American Frontline News site and AFLDS.org, and support the AFLDS legal team in its fight for truth and medical freedom.

This way, Shapiro will be able to recognize disinformation when he hears it and share real data and information with his audience on a timely basis. He won't have to wait to read about it in the Washington Post.

Following is the entire Highwire episode about the WHO Global Vaccine Safety Summit.

‍