Joe Biden getting booster in October, 2022, between his second and third cases of Covid-19.

Begin the Deprogramming: There Was No “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”

by Matt Taibbi | Oct 8, 2024

A few readers of this afternoon’s column on Jimmy Kimmel took exception to the line, “We now know the vaccine didn’t really work.” Writes “Blissex”:

And here Matt Taibbi jumps the shark as high as he can and states something outrageous: the vaccines really worked well, with few and rare side effects and reasonable ability to suppress the virus, and it was very necessary to reduce the number of deaths, hospitalizations and even mild sicknesses, to allow the scaling down and end of the lockdowns.

I got the shot the first time. Then I got Covid. Then I learned, in part during work on the Twitter Files, that officials like Anthony Fauci misled the public about natural immunity (here’s Fauci in May, 2021 suggesting two doses of mRNA vaccine offered up to “ten times” more protection than natural antibodies), overhyped risks to healthy adults and children, and severely downplayed Covid’s infectiousness. It came out in congresional testimony that Fauci essentially made up guidances about social distancing, that the policy “sort of just appeared” and was not based on studies, because “that would be a very difficult study to do.”

I agree with defamed reporter Alex Berenson: this medicine is more like a “therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed in advance of illness.” For people in a high-risk category, it can be useful, lifesaving. But it’s a substance you stick in my arm that allows me to get the targeted disease almost immediately, and doesn’t stop me getting it from or giving it to my kids. If that’s a “vaccine,” I’m a Chinese jet pilot.

More to the point, I’m struck by the thematic consistency of the lies about the shot, which somwhow all served the same propagandistic purpose. I’d bet good money that if the incoming administration digs in the right places, they’ll find it in writing somewhere that winding up nitwits like Kimmel to sadistic J’Accuse! routines was an expected consequence of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” campaign:

Kimmel delivered his infamous “Rest in peace, wheezy” set on his show’s season premiere late on Tuesday, September 9, 2021, That same day, Joe Biden gave a press conference denouncing, for the umpteenth time, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Biden complained that one in four Americans wouldn’t get the shot, and that this “25 percent can do a lot of damage.” As if anticipating Kimmel’s monologue about a shortage of hospital beds, he added: “The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreitis [sic], or cancer.”

Except, there was no “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This was a messaging ploy pumped out by the Biden administration. It allowed the legume-in-chief to claim the pandemic was “a tragedy that is preventable,” which in turn allowed him say vaccine refuseniks were “causing unvaccinated people to die.” The White House said it was going to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers” through mandates, and additionally decried “misinformation” as a reason America wasn’t “turning the corner.”

The term “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was first floated by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a briefing from July 16th earlier that year, when she said “there is a clear message that is coming through: this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Jen Psaki doubled down that same day. Five days later, Biden said in a town hall: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”

Each of these things was false. No matter how many times he was corrected, Biden kept erroneously blaming deaths on the unvaccinated. He called this “straight talk,” whispering things like, “You don’t have to die.” That October, he said vaccinated people “cannot spread [Covid] to you.” As late as December, 2021, he asked — even though it was well known by then the vaccine did not prevent transmission — “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else?”

Kimmel meanwhile made a great show of interviewing “real doctors” to scold the “AntiVaxholes,” but he never interviewed people like Germany’s Günter Kampf, who wrote an article in The Lancet titled “Stigmatizing the unvaccinated is not justified”:

In the USA and Germany, high-level officials have used the term pandemic of the unvaccinated, suggesting that people who have been vaccinated are not relevant in the epidemiology of COVID-19…But this view is far too simple… In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated… Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated and people who were unvaccinated… indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated.

Nor did Kimmel call Dr. Eric Topol, just down the road from him at Scripps Research center in La Jolla, who told the AP a week before Kimmel’s “wheezy” routine that “the pandemic clearly involves all people, not just the unvaccinated,” adding that calling it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” could have the “unintended” consequence of stigmatizing such people.

Stigmatizing wasn’t an unintended consequence. It almost surely was the point. It was one thing for a clearly declining Joe Biden to keep repeating the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” saw after data started coming in about “breakthrough” infections and the questionable efficacy of the vaccine against new variants. But it went beyond Biden. It was repeated ad nauseum by White House spokespeople, which in turn led to media coverage delivering the real intended message: “It is a pandemic that’s centered in red America,” as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump put it.

Early official misinformation led to people like Rachel Maddow saying the risk not just of death but getting “really sick” after the shot was “basically zero,” and the risk of giving the disease to someone else “just drops off a cliff.” The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” campaign then led to countless stories about dumbasss Republicans/Trumpers/Tucker Carlson fans filling hospitals and issuing deathbed self-condemnations. From there it was a short jump to people like Kimmel saying farewell to “wheezy,” or Trevor Noah joking we have “more than enough vaccines for every man, woman and child who doesn’t listen to Joe Rogan,” or Howard Stern railing against “imbeciles”:

I’m really of mind to say, “Look, if you didn’t get vaccinated [and] you got Covid, you don’t get into a hospital… You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.”

Except it isn’t a cure. It’s maybe a treatment, indicated for some and not others. At minimum, the argument made by the likes of Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron Kheriaty, and Martin Kulldorff for “protecting those who are at the highest risk” while letting the rest of the population “build up immunity to the virus through natural infection” was neither imbecilic nor crazy. It’s reasoned, defensible strategy, especially given what we eventually learned about the limitations of the shot.

But rather than weigh the benefits of that policy versus Biden’s mass-vaccination plan, the administration and its pals settled on a strategy of bashing “doing your own research.” They painted huge portions of the population as grandma-killing morons who won’t get the shot because Facebook tells them Bill Gates plants microchips in their butts. Note in this Kimmel routine how “Scott” shouts “Q! Q!” as he’s dragged offstage.

Stories like this were used to argue for censorship, when this was really the ultimate example of why we need a First Amendment. Officials here were the wrong ones, repeatedly, and were openly asking for the right to suppress critics even more than they already were. Without free speech, Kimmel might still be doing those routines. Is it too much to hope scientists will be allowed to argue freely going forward?