Normally, when you do a search on Google for “vaccine” of any variant of the word or phrase which includes the word, all you find is articles or websites that proclaim the wonders of vaccines—how these biologic drugs saved humanity from just about everything. You seldom find mention on Google of the downside of these drugs. In other words, the other side of the story.
Largely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts by the U.S. government to influence search engine companies like Google and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), YouTube and others to eliminate any information critical of vaccines and their harmful or potentially harmful effects, the Internet has been scrubbed of the other side of the story about these drugs.
There was a time not too long ago, for example, that if you did a search on Google for “vaccine reactions,” you would find a link to the website of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) within the first two or three pages of the search. If you did a search for “the vaccine reaction,” you would be led to the website of The Vaccine Reaction on the first page of the search. No more. For all practical purposes, sites such as these do not come up on most Google searches related to vaccines or vaccination. They’ve been scrubbed.
So you can imagine my surprise when I found the article by Apoorva Mandavilli in The New York Times last month titled “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?” In many ways, it was a landmark piece because it raised a significant degree of awareness within the general public that there is indeed another side of the story about vaccines—in this case, the COVID shots. It was certainly a far cry from Mandavilli’s odd piece in the Times last October titled “Feeling Terrible After Your Covid Shot? Then It’s Probably Working.”1 2
Hellbound and Down 