What They Knew, What They Buried

Two stories have emerged from the United States in the past few days. They come from different stages of the COVID era and deal with different evidence, but the same ugly suspicion hangs over both.

Were powerful institutions more concerned with protecting the accepted COVID story than finding out what was actually true?

The first story takes us back to May 2020, when much of the world was locked down. Schools were closed. Businesses were going broke. People were being told to stay inside and keep away from their own families because COVID was believed to be both exceptionally deadly and spreading through a largely unprotected population.

Newly released records of a CIA briefing suggest that some influential people were discussing a very different picture behind closed doors.

On 7 May 2020, former US Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb reportedly told a CIA meeting that he believed between 20 and 25 percent of Americans had already been infected.

Authorities knew how many people had tested positive, but they had little idea how many had caught the virus without ever being diagnosed. Antibody studies tried to fill that gap by examining people's blood for signs of an earlier infection.

Using Gottlieb's private estimate, COVID had already spread through tens of millions more Americans than the official case count showed. With the death toll unchanged, that would mean the risk of dying after becoming infected was considerably lower than first feared.

Gottlieb had reportedly estimated in public, only weeks earlier, that about five per cent of Americans had been infected. In August, he publicly suggested the figure was around 8 percent. Inside that May CIA briefing, however, he allegedly put it as high as 25 percent.

That gap needs an explanation. So does Gottlieb's position at the time. He was no longer simply a former government regulator. He was sitting on the board of Pfizer, which was developing a COVID vaccine that would go on to earn the company billions of dollars.

The conflict should have been examined long ago. A Pfizer director was briefing US intelligence officials about the pandemic while apparently giving them a much higher estimate of infections than the public was hearing. Why was he in that room? Why did his private estimate differ so sharply from what he was saying publicly? Why were Americans denied information that could have dramatically changed their understanding of the threat?

Six years later, another row has erupted over information the public may not be encouraged to see.

MIT researchers Retsef Levi and Nelson Lu examined data collected through V-safe, a smartphone-based monitoring system established by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After receiving a COVID vaccine, people could use V-safe to report how they felt and whether they experienced health problems.

Levi and Lu analysed responses from almost 10 million participants. They found that 185,285 people, or 1.87 percent of those surveyed, said their health had worsened for at least three months after vaccination and attributed the change to the vaccine.

More than 185,000 reports of prolonged ill health should have prompted an urgent investigation. Instead, the researchers ran into trouble getting their work considered.

Investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi reports that the paper was submitted to medRxiv, a website where medical research can be published before it has gone through formal peer review. MedRxiv rejected it, saying that aspects of the manuscript could not be verified.

When the researchers asked what the problem was, they reportedly received no specific criticism of their science or methods.

They next submitted the paper to Vaccine, a specialist scientific journal. It was rejected by the editors rather than being sent to outside researchers for peer review.

For readers unfamiliar with medical publishing, peer review is the process in which other specialists examine a study's methods, data, and conclusions. Governments, medical bodies, and journalists routinely dismiss research that has not passed that test. Yet a study cannot pass peer review if journal editors refuse to let reviewers see it.

What makes this episode especially hard to swallow is that Vaccine had recently published a largely reassuring CDC study using substantially the same V-safe database and roughly the same number of participants. That paper emphasised that emergency treatment and hospitalisation after vaccination were uncommon.

A favourable analysis of the database was accepted and published. The MIT analysis, which found a possible safety problem, did not even reach independent reviewers.

The people and institutions involved owe the public some straight answers. The CIA should release the complete record, Gottlieb should explain the difference between his public and private estimates, and Vaccine should identify why it refused to send the MIT paper for review.

We spent years being told to trust the experts and follow the science. Trust is difficult when inconvenient evidence keeps getting stuck behind closed doors.

“If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good.”
– Richard Feynman