Actually, scratch that. It goes back much further than that, with eugenics, the population bomb narrative, and the outrageous claims made to dismiss any dissent on public health measures. Whatever you think about any of these issues, using insults and appeals to authority to impose controversial policies that are rejected or questioned in most other Western countries shows that people in power do not tolerate rational disagreements. 

The apotheosis of this trend has been the battle over vaccines. I am not what you would call a "vaccine skeptic." I have gotten many, but not all, of the vaccines that have been recommended, but only after looking at the evidence collected for each one in recent years. Just a year or two ago (I don't remember) I got the Shingles vaccine--a two-dose vaccine--without hesitation. I will be getting the RSV vaccine at my doctor's recommendation. 

I used to assume that the public health officials who recommend these vaccines are decent people who gather the evidence, make reasonable cost/benefit calculations, and make their recommendations based on serious science. 

During COVID, I learned that all these assumptions are wrong. While some vaccines have very good risk/reward profiles and long track records regarding safety and efficacy, others have almost none of them. They weren't even tested beyond the most cursory of studies--often of very few people over very short time periods. Almost no studies have been done to measure whether the adjuvants used at low levels in any one vaccine remain safe when used in many vaccines given over a short period of time. 

If the dose makes the poison, a substance that isn't harmful at a low dose might become harmful when given tens of times in a brief period, as is done to infants and children. There really haven't been studies looking deeply into these issues. 

📊 Over 53,000 employees were studied.

💉 82.1% got the flu vaccine.

😷 Surprisingly, the vaccinated had a 27% higher risk of getting influenza than the unvaccinated.

📉 Vaccine effectiveness? –26.9% (negative efficacy).

Source: https://t.co/LfjMcMKBpX

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) April 7, 2025

During COVID we had vaccine mandates that imposed draconian punishment on people who refused, despite there being almost no large studies on safety and effectiveness. We were assured that the vaccine would stop COVID in its tracks, with the president, Fauci, the CDC, and all the "experts" making the claim that every vaccinated person would be a "dead end" for the virus and wipe it out. 

May 2021 – Anthony Fauci falsely claims that the vaccinated become a “dead end” for the virus. 47/pic.twitter.com/zX2WrRpNKs

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) May 19, 2023

That was a lie. They weren't just wrong. They never even studied the issue. The claim was made up, just as the claim that social distancing was based on science, or that masks would work. None of it was based on evidence, no less scientific studies. 

📣 The implications are enormous.

It's time to demand annual, real-time evaluation of vaccine effectiveness—before mandates, not after.

Read my full report on Substack: https://t.co/VUeLQPZlxx pic.twitter.com/APP6BARygD

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) April 7, 2025

The Cleveland Clinic did several studies on the efficacy of masks and then the vaccines and discovered that it was impossible for people to effectively comply with mask mandates--their own doctors and nurses couldn't maintain compliance for any period of time--and that the COVID vaccine INCREASED the likelihood of contracting the virus. The more boosters you got, the more often you got COVID. 

Now, they have duplicated that study--a very robust study on tens of thousands of their employees focused on their own employees--that showed similar negative efficacy for the flu vaccine. People who got the flu vaccine were MORE likely to contract the flu than those who did not. 

4 ABSTRACT

25 Background. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during

26 the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season.

27 Methods. Employees of Cleveland Clinic in employment in Ohio on October 1, 2024, were

28 included. The cumulative incidence of influenza among those in the vaccinated and unvaccinated states

29 was compared over the following 25 weeks. Protection provided by vaccination (analyzed as a time30 dependent covariate) was evaluated using Cox proportional hazards regression.

31 Results. Among 53402 employees, 43857 (82.1%) had received the influenza vaccine by the end of

32 the study. Influenza occurred in 1079 (2.02%) during the study. The cumulative incidence of influenza was

33 similar for the vaccinated and unvaccinated states early, but over the course of the study the cumulative

34 incidence of influenza increased more rapidly among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. In an analysis

35 adjusted for age, sex, clinical nursing job, and employment location, the risk of influenza was significantly

36 higher for the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated state (HR, 1.27; 95% C.I., 1.07 – 1.51; P = 0.007),

37 yielding a calculated vaccine effectiveness of -26.9% (95% C.I., -55.0 to -6.6%).

38 Conclusions. This study found that influenza vaccination of working-aged adults was associated with a

39 higher risk of influenza during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season, suggesting that the vaccine has not

40 been effective in preventing influenza this season.

41 

Sorry about the numbering. That is how preprints work. 

I am not cherry-picking here. This is not from some organization wanting to sell you anything. It is from one of the two most respected medical institutions in the world and is a replication of the COVID results now with the flu vaccine. The COVID results were duplicated by independent scientists subsequent to the Cleveland Clinic studies. The sample size is enormous for a biological study--over 50,000 medical professionals and support staff--and if anything, the bias would have been supporting the use of vaccines. 

These results, as with the COVID-19 vaccine results, will be swept under the rug by the public health "community" because they are terrified of vaccine hesitancy. They fear that letting people know that not all vaccines work as promised will undermine faith in their recommendations. 

But that is backward. Establishing a track record of lying undermines faith in the public health industry. People use pharmaceuticals all the time despite the fact that it is hardly unique to have drugs pulled off the market due to safety and effectiveness concerns. People generally trust the system more when it proves that it will reverse course when new information comes to light. 

Nobody sane would trust a system that covers its own behind in order to keep people from doubting it. 

Tell people the truth. That isn't just good advice--it is actually in the public health code of ethics. A code that has been overridden by bureaucrats who want everyone to know that they are better than everyone else. 

The desire for power, money, or ideological imperatives shouldn't drive science. But they do. This means that science that wants to change politics should be treated as...politics. 

Science is not and should never be about deferring to the proclamations of experts. We should listen to experts and seek out diversity among experts because it is almost never the case that on issues that are controversial in the public sphere, everybody in a scientific discipline agrees. There is almost never a case where 97% of scientists agree on anything, so if you hear the word "consensus," your ears should perk up and look for the agenda. 

Lord Kelvin, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the world gave a lecture in 1900 that made the claim that advances in physics were almost complete. Two major questions remained: the unexplained results of the Michaelson-Morely experiment trying to measure the movement of the "aether," the medium assumed to exist that allowed light waves to move, and Black Body radiation, which did not align with the understanding of physics in 1900. 

Out of those two quandaries came Einstein's theory of Relativity and also Quantum Mechanics. In other words, the minor unsolved problems turned out to blow up the discipline of physics and rewrite our understanding of the universe. 

We don't know what we don't know. Follow the evidence, not the consensus.