That Screeching Sound You Hear? Oh, Just the Media Backpedaling HARD.

ICYMI: Outlets from Forbes to Fortune are suddenly and in tandem reporting on "small, slight, and rare" side-effects of Covid jabs. What does it mean?

I’m back from an amazing trip to New York City, which is still one of my favorite places on earth even though I’m pretty sure an exceptionally large man crapped his pants while standing directly next to me on a crowded subway. (Way worse things than that happened to me while I was living there in the nineties—I’m talking unimaginable, unprintable things—so I don’t even blame Eric Adams.) There’s nothing like gallivanting around Gotham for a few days to invigorate all the senses, you know what I mean?

(Remember, I’m glass-overflowing girl. I can’t help it.)

I’m neck-deep in laundry and email and your delightful anthology submissions (more on that below), but I made the mistake of checking the “news” headlines today and had to pump the brakes on everything else, because I missed you guys and your inspiring commentary and I needed to vent because would you pretty please look at this steaming pile of BS:

Oh, the poor, poor reporters of the world. After three long years of pecking out safe-and-effective on their keyboards until the letters have likely worn off the corresponding keys, a massive study—literally the “largest ever”—drops outlining all sorts of unpleasant Covid vaccine reactions being experienced around the world. Whatever will they do with this new and shocking information?

Oh, wait. Never mind. They’ll do what they always do: make like a record and spin.

The study looked at a mere 99 million vaccine recipients who received a combined 242,831,303 jabs (an average of 2.4 shots each), and found “safety signals” related to 13 neurological, blood, and heart-related conditions including Guillain-Barre syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis.

You may be thinking, well that can’t be good for the narrative. Hahahahaha you naïve little thing, you.

About “the reporting”

Let’s take a look at how the globe’s intrepid, unbiased army of truth-seeking correspondents has decided to present this “new” information to the masses:

Forbes: Covid vaccines from companies like Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca were linked to rare occurrences of heart, brain and blood disorders, a recent peer-reviewed study found, though experts say the risks of developing Covid-19 greatly outweigh the risks of getting vaccinated.

Let’s face it, not being able to smell the soufflé you just baked and feeling a bit feverish for a few days is pure misery. Way worse than acute disseminated encephalomyelitis [sudden, widespread inflammation of the brain and spinal cord], experts say. Thanks, experts! Your professional insight really helps put this into meaningful perspective.

Bloomberg: More than 13.5 billion doses of Covid vaccines have been administered globally over the past three years, saving over 1 million lives in Europe alone. Still, a small proportion of people immunized were injured by the shots, stoking debate about their benefits versus harms.

So many doses! So much life-savingness! Sure, there were harms, but they were plainly written in invisible ink on the package inserts that were never discussed with any of the recipients, so quit your debating. Jeez.

New York Post: “The size of the population in this study increased the possibility of identifying rare potential vaccine safety signals,” lead author Kristýna Faksová of the Department of Epidemiology Research, Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, said in a release.

You see, we looked at so many damned people in our quest to determine—after the fact—how safe the vaccines were or weren’t that of course we found a few side-effects! Not a fraction of the 1,626,370 adverse events that have been reported to VAERS, mind you, and we decided not to look at the side-effect of death for obvious reasons, and sure the risks we did identify were assessed using “observed versus expected (OE) ratios,” meaning even though we expected terrible things of the safe-and-effective vaccines, in reality we saw far more. Which was weird. The point is, you can trust us because we are looking carefully—after the fact—at safety signals. You’re welcome!

Daily Mirror: Meanwhile, in an interaction with Fox News, Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, weighed in on the findings, acknowledging the rare associations identified but stressing the overall safety and benefits of vaccination.

We acknowledge that three percent of the people who ride this roller coaster get thrown from it to their painful and very messy deaths, however we prefer to stress the overall 97% safety record. I guess we’re just glass-overflowing carnival operators!

Here’s my take: By now, every human on the planet knows at least a few people—possibly far more—who have been harmed or murdered by the safe-and-effective jabs. The pesky pile of “safety signals” that has been swept under the rug has created quite the trip hazard. There’s really no side-stepping it anymore.

Reporter: So… what should we do about the safety signals?

Editor [throwing hands in the air]: Fine, you can acknowledge them.

Reporter: Really?

Editor: Not all of them, for crying out loud! Not even most of them. Concede to a scant handful of the most common ones—but not death—and then quickly circle back to how overwhelmingly harmless yet gloriously helpful the jabs are. Quote some experts. Use numbers with lots of commas in them. You know the drill.

Reporter: On it!

About “the experts”

Research published in scientific and academic journals almost always includes a “conflict of interest statement” where the authors disclose any potential financial incentives or personal relationships that could bias the research or influence its outcome. To wit, “the authors of this paper have no conflicts to declare” is what you really want to see in this space. The conflict of interest statement attached to the study in question is a doozy:

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Jeffrey C. Kwong reports financial support was provided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Naveed Z. Janjua reports financial support was provided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anders Hviid reports financial support was provided by Global Vaccine Data Network. Helen Petousis-Harris reports financial support was provided by New Zealand Ministry of Health. Steven Black reports a relationship with GSK that includes: consulting or advisory. Jeffrey C. Kwong reports a relationship with Canadian Institutes of Health Research that includes: funding grants. Jeffrey C. Kwong reports a relationship with Public Health Agency of Canada that includes: funding grants. Naveed Z. Janjua reports a relationship with AbbVie Inc that includes: consulting or advisory and speaking and lecture fees. Naveed Z. Janjua reports a relationship with Gilead Sciences Inc that includes: speaking and lecture fees. Anders Hviid reports a relationship with Independent Research Fund Denmark that includes: funding grants. Anders Hviid reports a relationship with Lundbeck Foundation that includes: funding grants. Anders Hviid reports a relationship with Novo Nordisk Foundation that includes: funding grants. Anders Hviid reports a relationship with VAC4EU that includes: consulting or advisory. Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) conducts Public-Private Partnership with vaccine manufacturers and has received research funding from Sanofi Inc. Petteri Hovi has been an investigator in these studies, but has received no personal remuneration. Helen Petousis-Harris has served on expert advisory boards and had speaking engagements for Pfizer and GSK. She has also received research funding from GSK. She has not received any personal honoraria. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

So essentially we’ve got folks taking money from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, and public health agencies around the globe assuring us that the carnage we see everywhere we look is not only rare despite our own abilities to observe and calculate otherwise, but far more desirable than a week of the sniffles.

If the media’s coffin had any more nails in it, they could open their own hardware store.

What do you think about this “shocking” “new” study and the way the “media” handled it? Don’t disappoint me!

About “the anthology”

A little light housekeeping on this (but the fun kind that doesn’t involve changing sheets the absolute worst or wielding a Swiffer): Thank you from the bottom of my happy, grateful heart for sending me your amazing essays for consideration in Yankee Doodle Soup. I’m blown away by your collective passion and talent and cannot wait to bring this book-baby into the world.

I am extending the submission deadline to mid-March at least, due to overwhelming interest and frankly, overwhelming life. So if you were one of the I-would-but-February-is-a-killer-for-me people, you’d better start working on your new excuse.

IMPORTANT: If you’ve sent me something and have not received even a quick “submission received” reply from me, I ask that you kindly resubmit it (via email, to jenna@jennamccarthy.com), with the word SUBMISSION in the subject line but preferably, SUBMISSION FOR YA, YA FILTHY DOMESTIC TERRORIST, because few things make me happier than seeing that in my inbox. True story.

Lastly, please submit your wonderful essays in word doc format. Links make me dizzy and trying to reformat from Substack or pages makes me want to punch myself in the esophagus. Thanks for understanding.