When Big Pharma Confesses Its Own Sins
Vaccine truth is essentially being admitted by its biggest proponents. And in this immediate aftermath of Holy Week, that unearths questions about anger and forgiveness.
It was early last week that I was watching the Boston Celtics game on local television here in New England. The advertising of Big Pharma is all over the place with the Celtics. The Moderna logo is even on the court of the Boston Garden. Naturally, the marketing for the COVID-19 vaccine is intense, with the push for keeping up-to-date on boosters (get ready for #10 in just three years!). This time though, there was something a little different in the advertising. Note the screenshot below:
Did that not-so-small disclaimer—“The Vaccine May Not Be For Everyone” jump out at you at all? It certainly did to me. So much so that I hit pause, took the screenshot, and then subjected my wife to a brief rant that can be roughly summed up as How do they get away with this?!
How many times over the last several years did so many of us try to say that we had serious doubts about an indiscriminate program of mass-vaccination, particularly in regard to young, healthy people? I never begrudged people who fell in the at-risk categories (elderly, pre-existing conditions, etc.) for wanting to get vaccinated. For that matter, I never begrudged anyone at all. It’s their life. I just didn’t want to be forced into taking the shot to be able to participate in society, and I didn’t want to be called a crazy conspiracy theorist for declining. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask.
But it was too much to ask for a lot of powerful people. Doctors and scientists that questioned the Approved Narrative were sanctioned, fired, or marginalized. People lost jobs. Others were pushed to the fringes of their own friends and family circles, or kicked out entirely.
This was all summed up in an August 2021 speech by Joe Biden. Fresh off of overseeing the debacle that was the Afghanistan withdrawal, he had the audacity to go to the podium and warn the unvaccinated that “our patience is wearing thin.” As though this depraved pedophile is some kind of parental figure.
Now, the backpedaling is underway. The FDA has been forced to concede that Ivermectin really can be used to treat viral diseases after all. Pfizer has been forced to admit that the vaccine can be harmful to young people. Questions about vaccine injuries are slowly making their way into public discussion. And now, Big Pharma’s own marketing campaigns are blasting out warnings that “The Vaccine Is Not For Everyone.”
As to the next line of that disclaimer, “Consult Your Doctor or Physician”, we also know that doctors were being financially incentivized to push the vax onto their patients:
This isn’t me saying it. It isn’t Robert Malone, Naomi Wolf, Peter McCullough, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or any other “spreader of misinformation”. This is Moderna, Pfizer and Blue Cross all telling you what they’ve done. I’m just the guy posting the screenshots.
A Manipulated Society
What I’m wondering about is how people who went ahead and got vaccinated—maybe boosted, and maybe even against their own instincts—feel about all this. I also, to be entirely candid, wrestle with the question that is so existential in the Christian life—that of forgiveness.
Everyone is different, and I would put people into three broad categories:
Category 1: These are the huge numbers of normal people who just went ahead and did what the medical community was pushing but were perfectly nice about it. I think about an old friend who asked me if I planned to get vaccinated. I told him no. You could tell he was worried for me, but I didn’t take it as anything more than that—the honest worry someone has for a friend, and the hope that someone really knows what they’re doing. He never thought anyone should be forced to take the shot.
For people like this, the question of forgiveness is really simple—there’s nothing to forgive. They did nothing wrong. They had a different perspective on something at a volatile time, they shared their view, and that was the end of it. Whether they realize it or not, they and their children are victims—of one of the greediest industries on the planet, of lapdog media, and corrupted government oversight agencies.
Category 2: These are the people who shot their mouths off. They called people “conspiracy theorists,” or “spreaders of misinformation” or any of the other childish little taunts that we’re all too familiar with. On a less obnoxious levels was the social media virtue-signaling of “I got my COVID-19 vaccine” profile photos.
Those that acted (and in many cases, are still acting) like this, have a problem. Big Pharma themselves is cutting the rug out from under them. Big Media won’t be far behind. I would anticipate that blaming President Trump will soon be their next step.
I know a few people like this—I suspect you do as well--and forgiveness is something I’m struggling with. In fact, it’s this category of people that—along with the Celtics/Moderna ad up top—that inspired me to write this article during the week the Christian world celebrates the Easter Octave—or Divine Mercy Week in the Catholic Church. Because dealing with them calls for doing what Christ did to supreme perfection on Good Friday—forgive a mob of people who aren’t ready or willing to acknowledge their own guilt.
This past Holy Week, we did our now-traditional watching of Mel Gibson’s The Passion on Good Friday. Watching the Pharisees manipulate and stir up the mob made me think about what our modern-day leadership class has done. The Iron Triangle of Big Pharma, Corporate Media and Compromised Oversight Agencies carry a quasi-religious authority to a population where there is so much lost faith. They manipulated the mob, and the mob took out after the rest of us. The immemorial words of forgiveness—they know not what they do certainly ring out.
One thing that makes the task of forgiveness here a little easier is that Category 2 people are characterized mostly by obnoxiousness and, at worst, a quiet support of vaccine mandates without getting vocal about it. They didn’t reach the next level…
Category 3: These are people who did much more than run their mouths and act cruelly. These are the people who openly supported seeing their neighbors’ lives destroyed and proudly advocated for it. They celebrated mandates. They told people that essentially “you asked for it” if a negative consequence happened because of vaccine resistance.
Then there was this extreme-- pollsters reported that roughly 40 percent of Democrats supported having social services take people’s children if they weren’t vaccinated.
No one is beyond redemption, but I really don’t know what to say to those who are in this camp. Only that you don’t have to wonder anymore what they would have done in Nazi Germany had they lived in that era. They would have been the one informing the SS where the Jews were. And probably thought they were a noble person for doing it.
The Pain of Being Right - And the Joy of Being Wrong
I’ve been following political affairs closely since I was in high school. You do that long enough, you get some things right, you get some things wrong. When it comes to the big moments—COVID-19, war and peace, the merits of presidential candidates, and all the other big moments that call us to apply immutable Catholic principles to unfolding events—I think the best you can hope for is to hit maybe 55-60 percent of things right, while staying true to those immutable principles in all cases. As more information flows in, you can adjust your thinking.
What I find interesting about moments like this, is that being right isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. As the full truth about the vaccine keeps coming out, I find myself getting increasingly agitated.
By contrast, when I get something wrong, there’s not the same level of angst. For example, there is nothing I have ever gotten more wrong in my political life than in the summer of 2015, when Donald John Trump came down the escalator and announced he was running for president. I vowed I would never vote for him and came within about 48 hours of making good on that pledge in November 2016.
Over the ensuing years, every last good thing I said about Trump had to be pulled out of me like I was at the dentist. I wasn’t just wrong about Trump—I was spectacularly wrong. And it makes me feel good. I like that someone can prove themselves in a positive way. I like that God can work through people I would consider unlikely. Watching it unfold in real time is one small affirmation that all the times He did the unlikely in the Gospel are real.
Conversely, on the vaccine, I was right. Big Pharma themselves is admitting it. And it kind of sucks. It leaves me angry. It leaves me wrestling with the question of mercy and forgiveness at a toxic time in our society. Pray for me. I’ll pray for you. We all need it.