US: Top 10 COVID Events of the Year: Revealing the Facts Unspoken and Unknown
Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times
Most health leaders involved in the U.S. pandemic response have resigned or been replaced, with one leaving his agency with a study that received much fanfare for a somewhat controversial take on vaccines.
Compared to 2022, the science on the effectiveness and risks of masking and vaccinations has become increasingly clear with the release of highly authoritative studies this year.
Let us review the top 10 major events that took place in relation to COVID in 2023.
1. FDA and CDC Find More COVID Vaccine Adverse Events, Including Stroke
Beginning in January, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) found that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detected hundreds of safety signals for Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. This included adverse reactions of myocarditis, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), ventricle dysfunctions in the heart, and many more.
On Jan. 13, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the CDC released a joint statement declaring they detected stroke as a new safety signal in older people who took the Pfizer bivalent boosters. Researchers from Kaiser Permanente also reported in October that people who took the COVID boosters with the influenza vaccine were at a greater risk of stroke.
Days later, researchers affiliated with the FDA published a preprint finding that older people who received the Pfizer booster shot had a higher rate of Bell’s palsy, a type of facial paralysis.
In a statement released in May, the FDA determined that “the current evidence does not support the existence of a safety issue,” as findings of stroke among the elderly decreased. They added that agencies will continue to evaluate new data as they become available.
2. Vaccines Cannot ‘Effectively’ Control COVID: Fauci After Resigning
The resignation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was noteworthy given his role in leading the United States pandemic response and his actions soon after resigning.
Dr. Fauci was very vocal in encouraging vaccine uptake and regularly appeared on television programs motivating people to get vaccinated.
“It’s as simple as black and white. You’re vaccinated, you’re safe. You’re unvaccinated, you’re at risk. Simple as that,” Dr. Fauci said on an MSNBC program during the Delta wave.
Before the Delta wave in the United States, Dr. Fauci compared vaccinated people to “dead ends” for the virus on CBS’s Face the Nation.
However, on Jan. 11, weeks after his resignation at the end of 2022, Dr. Fauci and two other researchers published a paper in Cell Host & Microbe that gained traction due to their comments on the effectiveness of vaccines in controlling respiratory viruses.
“SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses … have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines,” the authors wrote in their introduction.
They then addressed some basic immune principles, expressing that the current vaccines induce immunity in the body but not in the airways, yet current respiratory viruses primarily infect the airways.
“The vaccines for these two very different viruses (influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses) … have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity,” the authors wrote.
While some fact-checkers argue that the study does not contradict Dr. Fauci’s stance during the pandemic, others interpret this as his “coming clean.”
3. Gold Standard Review Finds Evidence of Masking ‘Uncertain’
The Cochrane Library, widely considered the gold standard for systematic reviews, published a review on Jan. 30 stating there was “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.”
“The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect,” the authors concluded, adding that “pooled results of [randomized controlled trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.”
The review’s findings drew widespread criticism from mainstream media. Several articles soon followed, highlighting the effectiveness of masking. The Cochrane editor-in-chief, Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, also released a statement in March claiming that the review did not show masks don’t work.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Dr. Soares-Weiser wrote.
“It would be accurate to say that … the results were inconclusive.”
Currently, the CDC still recommends masking.
“Masks have become political,” said an author of the review on CNN. “I can only tell you what the science is….I can’t tell you whether they work or don’t work. But it’s more likely than not that they don’t work.”
