The political pressures around clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines in the 2020 presidential campaign first drew scrutiny from Democrats, with then-nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris spreading mistrust of Operation Warp Speed and suggesting they would avoid jabs developed in the Trump administration.
The parties largely switched sides in the Biden administration, with then-Vice President Harris claiming it was “starting from scratch” on a vaccine strategy and even mandating vaccinations for her own campaign employees once she replaced Biden at the top of the 2024 ticket.
Yet Republicans have continued claiming Operation Warp Speed saved millions of lives based on modeling studies, amid five years of global research on severe adverse events in certain groups following COVID vaccination, from heart inflammation to neurological disorders, and the jabs’ mediocre-to-negative performance against infection.
House Judiciary Committee GOP leaders seized on new evidence Thursday that Pfizer withheld what it considered positive trial results until after the 2020 election, with the result that President Trump couldn’t take credit for a finished vaccine, giving Republicans something to unite around amid internal divisions over the pace of reversing Biden’s COVID vaccine policies.
The Department of Health and Human Services is reportedly planning to stop recommending routine COVID vaccines for pregnant women, teens and children, more than 100 days into the Trump administration and after new peer-reviewed research suggests COVID vaccines worsen fertility and mRNA jabs specifically can produce spike protein for up to eight months.
Yet another peer-reviewed study this year, published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, found the risk of underactive thyroid “significantly increased from 6 to 12 months” after vaccination, and that both under- and overactive thyroid was “significantly elevated at 12 months” for mRNA vaccine recipients specifically.
The Taiwanese researchers “used a huge database, carefully matched vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, and followed outcomes for a full year,” former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson wrote. “That combination gave the study very strong statistical power, meaning that its findings are probably not the result of chance.”
“25,000 children a day are getting the latest version of the mRNA shot,” Texas doctor Mary Talley Bowden, an early victim of COVID treatment policing whose litigation prompted the FDA to stop demonizing ivermectin on social media, wrote on X Friday.
Hellbound and Down 