Letter to the Toronto Star

Sent December 22, 2021

Your editorial today implored those who have declined the Covid vaccines to trust the experts instead of doing their own research. The problem is that in the past two years these same experts have repeatedly endangered or harmed the public through incorrect information or reckless policy-making.

The experts told us the virus is not airborne, that cloth masks are effective at preventing transmission or even infection, and that fully vaccinated people hardly ever get infected let alone transmit the virus to others. As a result, people got a false sense of security and exposed themselves and their loved ones to much more risk than they were aware of.

For months, the experts also greatly understated the myocarditis risk for young males following vaccination with Pfizer and especially with Moderna. Moreover, the experts kept schools closed for over a year despite it being clear as early as the spring of 2020 that the virus posed minimal risk to children while school closures caused great harm to them, especially those already disadvantaged.

Despite the destructive consequences of the lockdown in general, the experts never even attempted a cost-benefit analysis of such measures, something any minimally competent and responsible organization would do when it comes to such major decisions.

And in their narrow focus on vaccination rather than public health, the experts also overlooked an already available and proven tool to dramatically reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths, monoclonal antibodies. The failure to make this demonstrably effective early therapy available to the public, especially to high-risk groups, resulted in thousands of needless hospitalizations and even deaths.

In each of these cases the experts exposed the trusting public to great risk or harm. And in each of these cases random people on the internet “doing their own research” did point out these problems and used that knowledge to protect themselves and their loved ones and, increasingly desperately, tried to warn everybody else.

So when you now tell us to trust the experts when they tell us that we have to vaccinate every eligible person in the country to get out of the mess we are in, we respond: Phuq your experts.