The trouble with courage is that the situations where it’s most needed tend also to be the ones where it’s least common. Case in point: the abject failure of the Covid-19 vaccines that the Trump administration rushed through development and the Biden administration tried to force on America’s workforce, military, and federal employees, and is still forcing on healthcare workers.

Americans are subjected to emotionally-manipulative messages painting these shots as not only safe and effective but morally obligatory to protect their neighbors, while social networks take it upon themselves to police medical “misinformation” suggesting otherwise, in coordination with the federal government—all with the backing of the public health bureaucracy and prestigious medical institutions. But the truth is very, very different—and not just in their belatedly-acknowledged failure to prevent infection.

One peer-reviewed study by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland (Vaccine, Sept. 2022) found the mRNA-based Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna to exhibit a 16% increased risk of “serious adverse events,” including myocarditis, kidney or liver injury, respiratory distress, and pancreatitis, over the placebo group. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s V-Safe reporting system shows that 7.7% of participants reported needing medical care after vaccination, according to medical freedom attorney Aaron Siri of the Informed Consent Action Network. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri told the Senate last December. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”

As of August 25, 2023 the national Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System has more than 1.5 million reports on the Covid vaccines, including 36,080 deaths, 209,218 hospitalizations, 152,224 urgent care visits, 20,740 heart attacks, 67,564 permanent disabilities, and 33,348 other life-threatening events. While VAERS is not conclusive on its own (because anyone can submit an uncorroborated report), CDC researchers have acknowledged a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS” after Covid vaccination, and admitted that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting (JAMA, Jan. 2022). In 2021, Project Veritas interviewed Jodi O’Malley, at the time a registered nurse at the federally-funded Phoenix Indian Medical Center in Arizona. She obtained footage of a fellow nurse admitting she saw “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the Covid vaccines, but “nobody” was reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”Top of FormBottom of Form

Pentagon medical billing data publicized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) shows that 2021, the first year of the shots’ widespread use, saw massive spikes in diagnoses for multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, breast and testicular cancers, pulmonary embolism, ovarian dysfunction, tachycardia, female infertility, and neurological disorders over the preceding five-year averages. The official explanation from the Defense Health Agency Armed Forces Surveillance Division was that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch, which supposedly only affected the five years in question (convenient!), made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years. (Naturally, this answer was good enough for the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact.)

The strongest counter to these concerns is the simple fact that millions of people have been vaccinated and boosted, and every single person reading this sees every day that they aren’t collapsing in droves, or experiencing any otherwise-unexplainable health problems. How can that be if credible studies and data sources are turning out such alarming numbers? Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the Covid establishment’s most prominent critics, writes that there’s some indication the discrepancy may be due to variables that only affect specific batches (such as contamination, excessive doses, etc.). Under this theory, while only a small fraction of the Covid vaccines would be dangerous, there would be no way for you the patient to tell which you’re getting. That makes sense to this layman, and if true, would mean that investigation and recalls could have resolved this a long time ago—leaving Americans with a still-important but much less frightening debate over the need for whatever useless-but-otherwise-safe vaccines remained.

Regardless, it’s clear why the Democrats don’t care about any of this: Big Pharma tosses big bucks at politicians, and vaccine mandates are highly effective at weeding conservatives and independent thinkers out of institutions like the military, healthcare, and education. But why aren’t the majority of national elected Republicans speaking out? Partly because plenty of them receive Pharma money too, and no doubt because some of them fear crossing former President Donald Trump on one of his only lasting accomplishments, Operation Warp Speed. But mostly, this writer suspects, because they fear being branded as anti-science crackpots.

Admittedly, this fear is not completely unfounded. Most vaccines are obvious blessings, and before Covid, the “anti-vax” label earned its unseemly reputation through junk science and association with celebrity cranks. Arguably the biggest of those cranks, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has enjoyed some strange new respect from some corners of the Right lately (even a blind squirrel occasionally stumbles onto a nut, and the Covid era shook more than a few trees), but conservatives who made the leap to “RFK is right about everything!” were only setting themselves up to be disappointed and embarrassed.

For all the well-deserved stigma of historical anti-vax sentiment, there’s no honest comparison between long-proven, exhaustively-vetted vaccines and new products that were developed in a tenth of the time, and questioning the latter is no more a rejection of the concept of vaccines than an aversion to driving Pintos is a repudiation of the automobile. Recognizing such rational distinctions, and acting on them when necessary, is part of the job our elected representatives sign up for.

It’s true that Republicans are generally solid when it comes to opposing vaccine mandates, but that’s only half the battle. The other half is fully investigating whether the things being mandated should be approved for use at all, let alone recommended. But with rare exceptions, the GOP is AWOL on that question—and before us currently stands a presidential primary choice that would either drag the party in a more responsible direction, or reinforce its current passivity until it’s too late to course-correct.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tackling the issue head-on, having elevated a state surgeon general who is willing to speak clearly about the shots’ defects, directed his administration to conduct its own analysis of their outcomes, and petitioned for a grand jury investigation of their manufacturers. This has naturally provoked hand-wringing among the National Review crowd (which incredibly has refused to learn any lessons from the beating its reputation took during the Trump era), but is absolutely essential: following actual data even when it leads to politically-incorrect conclusions is what made DeSantis a national hero, after all, and forcing the issue into the limelight, armed with real evidence instead of the junk science of years past, will also forcibly shift the default positions of more than a few rank-and-file GOP politicians…if, that is, DeSantis ultimately becomes the GOP’s standard-bearer.

However, if Republicans instead renominate Jabfather Trump, who continues to brush off safety concerns and suggest the shots saved “100 million people” because his entire thought process on the issue begins and ends with the fact that Operation Warp Speed is one of the only elements of his legacy that the cultural elite and mainstream media embrace (the other, of course, being Trump’s abominable First Step Act), then most Republicans will find it safer and easier to continue ignoring the controversy, and we can forget any chance of the next administration getting any real answers even if Trump wins (which he probably won’t anyway).

Further, because the average Republican is incapable of thinking two steps ahead (let alone playing 12-dimensional chess), they would easily follow Trump straight into a trap. As evidence continues to accumulate and Biden seeks funding to develop new vaccines in the name of busting new variants, Democrats could easily seize on that evidence and turn against the old, Trump-associated shots, laying the blame at the feet of the man who ran with the idea of rushing a vaccine to market, (bogusly) explaining away the reversal by claiming to have simply placed too much trust in Trump and Warp Speed in a spirit of naïve-yet-noble bipartisanship. Trump and those hitched to him would have no good answer.

But that trap only fits the Jabfather, who also happens to be a generally incompetent failure who repulses most Americans. If Republican voters aren’t stupid, and instead go with the wildly successful, morally-unblemished, non-moron conservative who isn’t uniquely vulnerable on the issue, Democrats would have to settle for a more conventional attack framing DeSantis’s position as anti-vax quackery, which he can counter with a simple message: “I’ve always embraced most vaccines, I had high hopes for the Covid ones and distributed them myself to the most vulnerable when the initial data looked promising, but I reevaluated once new information came in, just like any responsible leader should.”

As rare as courage is, self-interest is much more common; often it’s just obscured by the biases through which one views the world (from the D.C. swamp to a social media echo chamber to a bubble formed by a candidate’s combination suicide cult/cottage industry). The real challenge, then, will come down to convincing politicians and voters alike that doing the right thing also happens to be the most politically advantageous.