Tide Turned? Research on COVID Vaccine Injuries, Once a Taboo Subject, Now Appearing in Some Medical Journals

A health care worker fills a syringe with COVID-19 vaccine in a file image. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

When COVID-19 took the world by storm in early 2020, I mostly relied on reading Nature Medicine, The Lancet, and a few other medical journals to learn the latest on this new disease.

In March 2020, I read an article published in Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” with great interest. Written by California-based Scripps Institute’s Kristian Andersen and four other well-known professors, it said SARS-CoV-2 binds to human cells much better than any computer programs predicted, and concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”

Having been a scientist with the world’s largest vaccine company for more than 10 years, I took issue with this claim.

In a May 2022 commentary titled “Pandemic Lessons Learned: Scientific Debate Silenced, With Deadly Consequences” I wrote: “If SARS-CoV-2 infects people better than your computer predicts, then the only conclusion you can draw is that your computer sucks. How did these world-renowned scientists get the basic logic so wrong? And how did the prestigious publication Nature Medicine not catch that? Did anyone even read the paper before publishing it, not to mention peer review it?”

The Andersen article’s conclusion, as it turned out, was a complete flip-flop on Andersen’s Jan. 31, 2020, email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in which he wrote that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” referring to the coronavirus.

The Fauci emails were made public in June 2021 via Freedom of Information Act requests.

Nevertheless, the Nature Medicine paper became the authority on the origin of COVID. It essentially excluded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Dr. Fauci from any responsibility for the emergence of the virus. Any attempts to investigate or explore other possibilities were labelled conspiracy theories.

Andersen, and the article itself, were the subject of a U.S. Congressional Hearing by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in June 2023. The debate on how COVID originated is still ongoing today.

The Lancet and the Daszak Statement

Andersen and Nature Medicine weren’t the only ones trying to please the CCP and Fauci.

On Feb. 18, 2020, The Lancet, another top medical journal, published a political statement with no science in it. It was organized by Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance, which was the middleman for channeling Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a U.S. Congress report released on May 1 of this year.

The Daszak et al. statement dismissed as a conspiracy theory any suggestion that COVID was not of natural origin.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

The Tune Is Set

The Daszak statement, along with the Andersen article, set the tune for the officially accepted narrative. The narrative then expanded from “a natural origin of the virus” to “a COVID vaccine will flatten the curve and save the world.” Scientists, doctors, and journal editors who dared to challenge the narrative were cancelled and/or labelled conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers.

It has been four years and six months since the world first encountered SARS-CoV-2. Despite the claims by famous scientists like Fauci and Andersen, and despite the countless efforts by top virologists and public health professionals, evidence that the virus originated naturally has not been found.

More and more people now believe that the virus was leaked or escaped from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and published such research in Nature Medicine in 2015, with NIH funding acknowledged.

The lab origin is no longer a conspiracy theory. The U.S. Energy Department and the FBI both now believe that the virus was more likely leaked from a lab than having developed naturally.

Encouraging Developments

Since the pandemic, The Epoch Times and NTD have been publishing documentary films on COVID origin and vaccine injuries. The first such documentary, Joshua Philipp’s “Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus,” was viewed over 100 million times on different platforms combined. However, such reports are rarely seen in other legacy media.

It has also been a taboo subject for scientific research and publication, but that may be starting to change.

Recently, I wrote a commentary about a new paper by five Japanese scientists that was published on Cureus, a peer-reviewed medical journal owned by the Springer Nature Group, the same company that owns Nature and Nature Medicine.

The scientists analyzed data collected from the entire 123 million Japanese population and concluded that the majority of the 115,799 excess deaths in 2022 was not due to COVID infection but rather vaccination, in particular the third COVID shot.

I was pleasantly surprised that a once-taboo subject was now published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, especially a member journal of the Springer Nature Group.

In another positive development, this month the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (IJBM) published a paper titled “Review: N1-methyl-pseudouridine: Friend or foe of cancer?” linking a key ingredient in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with cancer development.

IJBM is owned by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier, which also owns renowned publications like The Lancet, Cell, and ScienceDirect.

May the Force Be With the Editors-in-Chief

In the spring of 2022, when more scientists started to challenge the accepted narratives and seek the truth, I co-wrote the commentary “May the Force Be With Them: Scientists Fight Back.”

At that time, these brave scientists needed all the help they could get. For example, when a journal published a well-researched, well-written, and fact-based scientific paper on the safety concerns of the mRNA vaccines, the editor-in-chief of that journal was ousted.

The journal was Food and Chemical Toxicology, another Elsevier publication, and the editor-in-chief was Dr. José Luis Domingo.

Two years later, I’m optimistic that the IJBM editors-in-chief won’t face the same treatment as Dr. Domingo.

Why? I believe the tide has turned.

A recent New York Times article on COVID vaccine injuries is also an encouraging sign. It cites the Food and Drug Administration’s former acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock as saying the injuries are “serious” and “life-changing,” and “should be taken seriously.”

“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”

Among the reported injured is the editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine, Dr. Gregory Poland. He has been suffering from tinnitus since his first shot. The Centers for Disease Control didn’t take his report on his personal experience seriously. He told the NY Times that he did not “get any sense of movement (from the CDC).”

“If they have done studies (on vaccine injury), those studies should be published,” Dr. Poland added.

The journal Vaccine is also an Elsevier publication, and as the editor-in-chief, Dr. Poland is well positioned to offer his encouragement on vaccine injury studies.

Yes, I believe the tide has turned.

However, as of today, the Daszak statement is still on The Lancet website and the Andersen paper is still on Nature Medicine.

I wonder when the Lancet and Nature Medicine will have the courage to retract them? And when will these two eminent journals start publishing research on COVID vaccine injuries?

References:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/pandemic-lessons-learned-scientific-debate-silenced-with-deadly-consequences-4256843

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/new-email-reveals-what-fauci-knew-about-wuhan-lab-gain-of-function-experiments-truth-over-news-5439612

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/tony-fauci-emails/

https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2023/20230404-andersen-niaid.html

https://oversight.house.gov/release/wenstrup-to-hold-hearing-with-proximal-origins-authors%ef%bf%bc/

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930418-9

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024.05.01-SSCP-Report_FINAL.pdf

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/expert-on-aluminum-toxicity-forced-out-of-university-4886099

https://www.theepochtimes.com/author/aaron-kheriaty

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/editor-in-chief-of-renowned-science-journal-ousted-for-publishing-science-questioning-covid-19-vaccine-safety-4830112

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origins-lab-china/index.html

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv?utm_source=epochtv

https://www.ntd.com/

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/the-unseen-crisis-vaccine-stories-you-were-never-told-documentary-5240019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/documentary-tracking-down-the-origin-of-wuhan-coronavirus-3313091

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/joe-wang-japans-excess-deaths-hit-115000-following-3rd-covid-shot-new-study-explains-why-5634129

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012513/

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.