We Published An Op-Ed In Mainstream Media On The Weaponization Of the Term "Misinformation"

Published in RealClear Health, I helped the investigative journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer make a very public call for authorities to end "misinformation" attacks and increase transparency and oversight.

Although it is unclear what impact this Op-Ed will have on captured health agency and media behavior, I believe it crystallizes this critical issue and the growing expectations (and past disappointments) of the American populace. Enjoy:

In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.

We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.

Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”

These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.

Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.

Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?

Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.

Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.

Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.

Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”

Misinformation?

If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.

The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”

Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”

Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.

The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.

Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.

Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.

Truth Muzzled?

Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.

To read the conclusion of the Op-ED, go to Real Clear Politics here.

Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.

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