TLDR: Yes, the COVID vaccine almost certainly made Michel Goldman’s Lymphoma worse. It may indeed have given him the disease.
Goldman is a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research. He is profiled in The Atlantic for a pretty shocking reason, especially given that publication’s very extreme positions on COVID lockdowns and vaccines in past issues. The Atlantic, you might remember, attacked Governor Brian Kemp as, essentially, a murderer for pushing to reopen his state during the COVID hysteria. Their headline alone was remarkable: Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice. Following less strict COVID prevention provisions was human sacrifice. Unbelievable. Infuriating.
Yet last night on Twitter The Atlantic linked to a new article–one that if it had been published by a slightly less prestigious source would have been instantly banned on Twitter and Facebook, no doubt–that explored the case of Dr. Michel Goldman, who perhaps was given lymphoma by the COVID vaccine, and almost certainly had it spread extremely rapidly because of it.
Michel Goldman has spent his career promoting new vaccines and other drugs. Now he wonders if a COVID shot made his cancer worse. @rkhamsi reports: https://t.co/qBFbbXmZPb
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 27, 2022
To give you a flavor of how troubling it was for the magazine to decide to tell the story, consider this reflection from the author, Roxanne Khamsi:
Extremely rare cases like Michel’s create a tricky terrain for science communication. Even a clinical trial with thousands of participants might never turn up a single case of someone’s cancer worsening after vaccination. In that context, experts can’t assign a statistical estimate of the risk across the wider population. Science journalists may be wary of reporting on the story for that reason. In fact, when Michel first told me about his cancer and about the paper he’d written with his brother, I said that I couldn’t write about it. I was worried that some readers would misinterpret my article, and mistakenly see it as a reason not to get vaccinated.As I write this, I’m still concerned that you might do exactly that.
As is usually the case with The Atlantic, the piece is of excellent quality, with a definite spin from the author who is quite up front about her take. I get alternately enraged and amazed by The Atlantic; the pieces tend to be well written and well thought out, but then they publish pieces that go over the top such as the one accusing Brian Kemp of being a mass murderer. In that case, of course, it was the COVID maniacs, not Kemp, who were engaged in throwing lives away to assuage their fears. They sacrificed millions of children’s futures for nothing.
Goldman’s lymphoma–I won’t try to duplicate the article’s description of what happened to him and why the COVID vaccine is likely responsible because the article does it more completely than I could–is likely not a one-off. In fact, the article makes passing references to other likely vaccine related diseases, while carefully repeating like a mantra that such side effects are exceedingly rare and for God’s sake get a vaccine! Even Goldman supports continued vaccinations despite being convinced the vaccine threatened his own life.
And that position may be justified, although it reads more like a magic incantation than well thought out advice to me. (I am vaccinated and boosted, but will refrain from getting another shot).
But in pushing the vaccine so hard they gloss over an important fact: people’s risk for getting severe COVID varies widely by age and co-morbidities. It may be the case that an obese diabetic with heart disease should get the vaccine because the risk from COVID to their life is higher than the risk from the vaccine. But it is also likely the case that a healthy 16 year-old male should not because the vaccine’s risk is greater than the likely benefits.
They just completely ignore that different individuals have different risk profiles in an attempt to soothe people’s anxieties around vaccines. In my opinion their willingness to bend over backwards to communicate the benefits of vaccines put them in the irresponsible position of downplaying what are in fact genuine risks associated with them. Risks that should be avoided if COVID isn’t much of a threat to you.
Some people likely should get the vaccine, while some people shouldn’t. Give people the facts as we know them, tell them how well we know them, and let them make a decision based upon their own risk tolerance.
But people in the elite cannot help themselves. They truly believe that others are incapable of rational thought, and so they talk down to us. When an author’s immediate reaction to being told of a peer reviewed scientific paper’s shocking revelation that the vaccine could be giving people cancer is to decline to write about it, as was the case here, it tells you how much contempt she has for her readers. Her first thought was to keep an important truth from them, and she had to be convinced to reluctantly reveal it to her readers.
Will some people get the wrong idea? Of course. Welcome to humanity. But have a bit of humility, too. Experts are often the worst in such matters because they begin the process of discovery often believing they know the right answer, and so ignore or dismiss genuine evidence that they do not.
COVID hysteria and deception has done more to harm the reputation of medical experts than a thousand conspiracy theorists dispensing misinformation. People are quite well aware that there are nutters out there on the fringes. But since so many COVID “conspiracy theories” have proven to be closer to reality than some of the ridiculous pronouncements of the experts, nobody trusts the experts any more. Epidemiologists have engaged in enough transparent propaganda to convince a lot of normal people to distrust them.
And they have reasons to distrust them.
Again, read the article and make up your own mind. And reflect upon the fact that if this had appeared first in National Review, the New York Post, or HotAir it would almost certainly be banned by Twitter, Facebook, and mocked in The Atlantic.
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