Question the Narratives: Lessons from the Silenced Majority

An excerpt from Kathryn Brodsky's book, "No Apologies" and a brief update on Missouri v. Biden's Supreme Court developments.

First, dear readers, a quick update on Missouri v. Biden. We will submit our plaintiff’s brief to the Supreme Court tomorrow, and I’ll post a summary on that next week. The date has been set for oral arguments: March 18. I’ll be in DC at the Supreme Court for that big date and will post updates on the oral arguments and the questions from the justices in the days following.

Today I’m delighted to share an excerpt from my friend Katherine Brodsky’s recently published book, which features a chapter on your scribe. I’m republishing it here with the author’s permission. The book also contains chapters on my friends Bret Weinstein, Winston Marshall, and many other interesting voices in the “silenced majority”—consider getting a copy.

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The following is an excerpt from the new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority by Katherine Brodsky (courtesy of Pitchstone Publishing):

Question the Narratives

The Lessons of Aaron Kheriaty

“It’s important to empower ordinary citizens to exercise their reasoning and logic because you don’t have to be an expert in virology or public health to look and see that there are contradictions coming out of people’s mouths and that they just logically don’t hang together.”

—Aaron Kheriaty

Aaron Kheriaty was a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the medical school and director of the medical ethics program at University of California–Irvine (UCI) Health but was eventually fired from that position on December 17, 2021, over his refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine. This followed a lawsuit Kheriaty had launched earlier that year suing the University of California Board of Regents and Michael V. Drake, the system’s president, stating that he should be exempt from the university’s vaccine mandate because, as a practicing physician throughout the first year of the pandemic, he had already been infected with this virus and thus had, as he claimed, “natural immunity.” His stance was ultimately about personal choice. In that regard, he was anti-mandate rather than anti-vaccine per se.

His refusal to take the vaccine was based on his understanding of immunology, which was taught to him in medical school. What vaccines seek to do, he states, is to imitate infection-induced natural immunity. As a result, they sometimes come close to matching the protection provided by natural immunity, but they never meet or exceed the protection that natural immunity offers, with almost no exceptions to that rule. “I was all in favor of having a safe and effective vaccine come on the market for people that hadn’t been infected with COVID,” says Kheriaty, “especially for older individuals, who were the ones who were really at risk of bad outcomes from COVID.”

This wasn’t a conclusion Kheriaty reached lightly. He was actually part of the Orange County Vaccine Task Force, which meant that he had to consider many ethical questions, particularly in the early weeks of the vaccine rollout. Questions like: Who should be first in line? Should healthcare workers get priority? Essential workers? Kheriaty ultimately advocated for those most at risk. “I was never against the vaccines in principle for this virus, and the reports in the early data looked very good in terms of efficacy,” he reiterates.

That said, he did have some concerns about safety because he was aware that clinical trials for the mRNA vaccines had been truncated. During the clinical trials, the participants who received the placebo and those who received the vaccines were followed on an ongoing basis and were evaluated frequently. Because the data gathering was consistent, if a participant in the trial got sick, the researchers had a chance to ascertain whether there was a link to the vaccine or not. But once the trial was ended early, under the claim that the vaccines were so effective that it would be unethical to not provide them to everyone, researchers had to rely on what’s called “passive surveillance.” This meant that safety data was collected through self-reports, which are cumbersome to collect, harder to interpret, and thus not ideal for finding causal links. That meant that we were now getting very poor, ongoing monitoring of safety, according to Kheriaty.

“One thing you have to understand is—whatever else you think of Big Pharma—vaccine manufacturers are very, very good at running clinical trials. I think it was not by accident that the clinical trial was stopped and the placebo arm was eliminated after three months. Because after the rollout, and based on research, especially from abroad, it became clear that after about four months, vaccine efficacy for the mRNA vaccines starts to decline. And by about seven or eight months, basically, in terms of infection, it’s pretty close to the same as placebo. By about six months, it’s below 50 percent effective, which is the threshold for FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval. So, if they would have done a six-month trial, that vaccine probably would not have met that threshold for FDA approval. And they obviously would have had more time to look at adverse effects from the vaccines.”

Further, Kheriaty points out that under U.S. law companies such as Pfizer are immune from liability for any vaccine they produce. “Several years ago, vaccine manufacturers convinced the federal government that it wasn’t worth their investment to do research and development on vaccines unless they were protected from all liabilities from their products’ harms,” he explains. “I think that’s an absurd argument. It’s very clear how profitable these vaccines [have been].”

Although there have been voices of dissent among scientists and medical professionals—often labeled as “fringe voices”—many more have stayed silent. “Reason is, most of the researchers in medicine rely on pharma money for clinical trials for grants, or National Institutes of Health (NIH) money. And so, to kind of contradict the NIH-Fauci narrative is to risk being punished with not getting funded.” Few scientists have been willing to take that risk, Kheriaty argues.

Kheriaty notes that it’s important to understand that the various health services agencies are, as he puts it, “in bed with Big Pharma—It’s very hard to distinguish them now.” He cites the NIH co-owning the patent on the Moderna vaccine as an example. (The NIH gave Moderna $1.4 billion in funding toward the vaccine’s development as well as lending its scientists and facilities.) The NIH ran the clinical trials on that vaccine, the FDA approved it, and the CDC made recommendations that became the basis for the mandates. “There’s financial conflicts of interest left and right… All of these agencies are part of the Department of Health and Human Services. They all answer to the same cabinet-appointed secretary, and so there’s money flowing from pharma back into Health and Human Services. And if you trace who the players are, it’s like musical chairs; they just rotate from CDC to FDA to pharma.”

There was a time, says Kheriaty, when there was a law prohibiting the direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. In the past, drugs could be advertised only to doctors via medical journals or conferences or salespeople. While there is a debate to be had whether greater consumer awareness of prescription drugs is good or bad, the reality is that nowadays, it’s difficult to avoid being targeted by pharmaceutical ads, with ad spending rising annually. According to the Standard Media Index, the pharma industry spent $5.5 billion on ads for the first six months of 2022 alone. That potentially gives pharma companies a lot of influence over media organizations.

“It doesn’t have to be overt,” says Kheriaty. “It can be very, very subtle.” He provides a hypothetical example wherein a TV show has him on as an expert, and the next week, the segment producer gets an email from Pfizer or a similar company suggesting that maybe they should reconsider having on someone like him: “We think you should have more credible sources on,” the email might state. “Here’s a list of people that know the vaccine data better than he does. No pressure. We just wanted to flag you on this. P.S. Our Vice President for Advertising Accounts will contact you next week regarding next year’s ad buys.” That kind of money, insists Kheriaty, can buy a lot of influence.

Unlike Kheriaty, plenty of scientists and medical practitioners were true believers, and they played a prominent role in the mainstream narrative that emerged. To the population at large, it thus appeared as if there was indeed a scientific consensus…

This story—alongside others—continues in the book No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority.

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