Progressivism, Brought to you by Pfizer

From the Tom Woods Letter:

It’s hard to believe now, but not even one human lifetime ago the slogan “question authority” was associated with the left-liberal project.

That’s long gone, having been replaced by “shut up and obey.”

This more recent, more authoritarian approach is much more in line with historic progressivism, which began in the Progressive Era as an elitist movement that favored the management of society by a self-identified expert class, albeit concealed beneath a veneer of “democracy.”

So it should not surprise us that Mother Jones, a progressive publication, isn’t really so skeptical of authority or of big corporations after all. It’s now more or less an unpaid division of Pfizer.

We’ve learned that senior editor Kiera Butler is preparing a hit piece on Dr. Vinay Prasad, himself a political liberal, for questioning the safety of the “boosters”; Prasad has correctly noted that the so-called safety data consists of results on eight mice.

Butler sought comment from Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, whom I mention quite a bit in this newsletter. Jay has since reproduced her email, along with his answers.

So here’s Kiera Butler:

I’m writing about the bivalent vaccines, and I saw that you had retweeted Dr. Prasad’s video questioning their safety. I’m wondering if your past activism around opposing Covid protections — with the Brownstone Institute, Hillsdale College, and the Great Barrington Declaration — influenced your opinion on this at all? And I’m wondering if you think it’s fair to characterize your takes on Covid as contrarian?

Jay’s response:

(1) The FDA did not require any human clinical study before approving the bivalent ba4/5 booster, so I don’t have any opinion at all about their safety profile. I simply don’t know.

(2) The GBD was signed and supported by tens of thousands of scientists and doctors around the world. It is not a contrarian position, but represents the standard way of dealing with respiratory virus pandemics that the world has followed for a century until 2020.

(3) I am not paid by any of the organizations you mentioned and received $0 from them. My thoughts reflect my professional training in medicine, epidemiology, and health policy.

Let’s see how much of that winds up in Kiera’s Pfizer press release.

Sorry, article.

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