Knock me over with a feather. The New York Times does a story about vaccine side effects. 

I wonder if Google News is going to censor this. They surely will do so to this article, but then again The New York Times is "safe" and Hot Air is filled with a bunch of lying hacks trying to destroy the world. (Join VIP to help us stay in business--Big Tech is censoring the heck out of us and throttling our advertising. USE THE CODE CENSORSHIP TO GET 50% OFF.)

Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening? https://t.co/1UEtuKYk3K

— Elizabeth Scalia (@TheAnchoress) May 3, 2024

For several years talking about vaccine side effects was absolutely forbidden in polite company. Doing so was misinformation, a hoax, a conspiracy theory, or a talking point for MAGA extremists (except Trump, who insists the vax is safe).

Now The New York Times is writing a big story about how people harmed by the vaccine are being ignored and cheated out of compensation. 

Within minutes of getting the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, Michelle Zimmerman felt pain racing from her left arm up to her ear and down to her fingertips. Within days, she was unbearably sensitive to light and struggled to remember simple facts.

She was 37, with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and until then could ride her bicycle 20 miles, teach a dance class and give a lecture on artificial intelligence, all in the same day. Now, more than three years later, she lives with her parents. Eventually diagnosed with brain damage, she cannot work, drive or even stand for long periods of time.

“When I let myself think about the devastation of what this has done to my life, and how much I’ve lost, sometimes it feels even too hard to comprehend,” said Dr. Zimmerman, who believes her injury is due to a contaminated vaccine batch.

That's just the lede. I wonder how many people will get strokes just reading in the Times that evil Red staters might have been right. 

Dr. Zimmerman’s account is among the more harrowing, but thousands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600.

Some scientists fear that patients with real injuries are being denied help and believe that more needs to be done to clarify the possible risks.

“At least long Covid has been somewhat recognized,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Yale University. But people who say they have post-vaccination injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted,” she added.

$3600. Thirty-six hundred dollars. Thank God we have a vaccine-injury compensation program. Otherwise, these poor schlubs might not be able to support themselves. 

So far 12 people have been paid that princely sum. 

No doubt we will be told that the side effects are rare and that COVID is much worse, but come on. For years we have been told that the vaccine was so safe and effective that we should be injecting it in 6-month-old children who are at zero risk of dying from the disease, so color me skeptical that we are getting anything close to the full story. 

If we were, that would be the very first time that we were. It has been lie after lie after lie...

In interviews and email exchanges conducted over several months, federal health officials insisted that serious side effects were extremely rare and that their surveillance efforts were more than sufficient to detect patterns of adverse events.

“Hundreds of millions of people in the United States have safely received Covid vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history,” Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement.

But in a recent interview, Dr. Janet Woodcock, a longtime leader of the Food and Drug Administration, who retired in February, said she believed that some recipients had experienced uncommon but “serious” and “life-changing” reactions beyond those described by federal agencies.

“I feel bad for those people,” said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were rolling out. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.”

“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”

If I could I would reprint the entire article, but that isn't fair use and the Times absolutely deserves to make as much money off this article as it can. (I can't believe I said that!). It is hardly perfect, but nothing ever is, and it is the first step in breaking the silence in the MSM about what will certainly turn out to be one of the biggest medical scandals ever. 

Nobody knows the extent of the problem, but it is vastly larger than has been acknowledged by public officials. Every time somebody like me talks about the issue we are harassed, censored, insulted, and dismissed as nuts. There is very little data available, although what there is hints at a huge problem. The excess death numbers are scary. 

Even leading experts in vaccine science have run up against disbelief and ambivalence.

Dr. Gregory Poland, 68, editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said that a loud whooshing sound in his ears had accompanied every moment since his first shot, but that his entreaties to colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to explore the phenomenon, tinnitus, had led nowhere.

He received polite responses to his many emails, but “I just don’t get any sense of movement,” he said.

“If they have done studies, those studies should be published,” Dr. Poland added. In despair that he might “never hear silence again,” he has sought solace in meditation and his religious faith.

The sad fact is that for a large swathe of the public—or at least our elite—nothing is real unless The Times says it is. For years, the Times has disparaged people who have been raising alarms. It has been an important part of the--let's just say it--conspiracy on the part of the Elite to deny the truth about COVID's origins, the potential problems with the vaccines, and the government's efforts to bully the public into compliance. 

It's impossible to say what spurred the Times to acknowledge that, just perhaps, the vax isn't entirely safe. But it has, which may open the floodgates for others to follow the story. 

No doubt they will continue to disparage those of us who have, time and again, proven to be right while they have been terribly wrong, but at least the public will wake up to the dangers. 

Those dangers are almost certainly far larger than they will ever admit, but the public is already skeptical. Lives might be saved. 

Better late than never, I suppose. It's only taken 3 years and the ruining of countless lives.