Unpacking the anonymous claims on Pfizer's lack of efficacy
It's not easy, but it's possible
Following on from my last piece about The Pfizer Documents, this is my current thinking on a very particular problem….
I’ve been thinking about the Pfizer Documents. As I previously wrote, there has been zero mention of them by three major news platforms. That is interesting in and of itself, but it’s only one part of the issue. Whilst the big news platforms have failed to mention the documents at all, non-mainstream sources have already been making progress on what the documents show.
On May 24th, 2022, the anonymous account JikkyLeaks claimed the documents show Pfizer’s vaccine to have essentially zero efficacy at stopping infection. This goes against the “95% effective” claim that was extensively communicated at the time of rollout. This is a considerable claim with considerable implications. But, it’s just an anonymous mouse on Twitter, we can probably just ignore that right?
Even if JikkyLeaks were not an anonymous account, it’s unlikely the claim would pick up any traction. Why? Because modern journalism doesn’t have the tools to deal with the kind of analysis Jikkyleaks presented. They could make a start by acknowledging the documents exist… but even then, I think ‘mainstream’ journalism would make zero progress on the data presented here.
Even if I could sit a ‘proper’ journalist down and show them the data myself, they’d say something like “I’d have to verify this with [random science contact] before I could take it to the editor”. Perhaps they’d send an email, they’d not hear back, and that would be that. They instinctively know that what I’m showing them unravels their house editorial line, so they steer well clear. It would be like showing a solar power employee all the reasons nuclear will supersede their business; regardless of whether or not it’s true, it’s not in their interest to know about it. It’s even easier to not engage with it when it’s an anonymous mouse.
If we’re ever going to create the space for journalism to fill this gap, it’s worth understanding how the claims of Jikkyleaks and other independent researchers stay on the sidelines. So here’s “what would normally happen”.
Normally, to get reported at all, these claims would have to be made by someone who already ‘has the ear’ of a proper journalist. But remember, those who ‘have the ear’ of journalists have very often been facilitated into that position by PR agencies through things like organised events, meets and greets, university alumni networks, talks and award ceremonies. Already, the balance is in the favour of ‘The Science’ selected to appear at those events.
But let’s say - miraculously - that a person who has the ear of a journalist makes the claim, “hey this new data shows the Pfizer vaccine had close to zero efficacy at stopping infections even before its rollout”. Startling as it may sound, the journalist might feel confident enough to raise it in an editorial meeting and see what the response was. Their editor would be sceptical, they’d tell them to verify it properly, and from there, the journalist would struggle to get any further with the story. A tenacious journalist might ‘borrow’ a friend’s science contact, who would likely tell them the claim sounded crazy, and that he hadn’t heard of the Pfizer documents, and ‘why are you looking at crazy claims like this!? Is it from a peer-reviewed journal!?’
It’s also not in that person’s interest to know these things, and so they do not.
Egos suitably damaged, they’d have to now go back to their source and say “we need this to be published in a peer-reviewed paper before we can run with it”. So now the editorial decision is pushed up the supply chain to the medical journals. Is that a good place to mediate truth? Well, previous editors of those journals have told us they no longer believe what’s in them. There are entire books that meticulously detail just how broken and corrupted medical publishing is. So the claim would now ricochet off the medical journal editorial team and die.
Inertia.
Broadly, this is why these claims don’t get anywhere in mainstream journalism. It’s just not set up to deal with this stuff. So we’re in a bind. But this is Substack, and maybe something new and exciting is happening, so maybe there’s another way!?
Let’s recap.
Some Pfizer documents got released, it seems Pfizer didn’t want them released, the documents are real, but no one is talking about them, so it feels like they’re not real. By not even acknowledging them, we can’t even begin to understand them. The ghost of an elephant is standing in the room with us. Those who acknowledge the ghost’s existence are censored. So we stand there, confused, saying nothing, staring directly at the ghostly apparition. Is it there? I feel confident it’s there… but… no one else is acknowledging it so…now what?
There’s very little reason to believe the medical journals will help us out of the mire. To make matters… stranger, there’s now a credible sounding mouse on Twitter making startling claims about the very thing everyone else refuses to acknowledge is real.
So what do we do!?
What we have, I think, is a problem of process. There’s no ‘standard way’ through to verify and unpack the work of these independent researchers. Verification is just one part of the problem, but on that, at least some progress has been made. Another researcher called Josh Guetzkow claimed he’d reached the same results as JikkyLeaks independently. It’s promising, or concerning depending on your mood, but how could I know this claim is true? How can you know that this is truly correct?
I believe we need some new way of verifying and dealing with these claims. Whatever we come up with shouldn’t involve an editor asking us to verify it via ‘a peer-reviewed journal’ or by speaking with ‘our Science guy for the science things’. There’s got to be a better way through.
Even if we could solve the verification problem, is it even possible to unpack these things in a way that can be understood by people other than the researchers making the claims? Is there a new standard we can aspire to that helps us all feel a little more confident that the ghostly elephant in the room really is there? Can we perhaps create a public tool that can help to verify or debunk these claims?
I started unpacking this story, but as I started to write it all out, I realise there’s a lot to explain. I’ve decided therefore to break things up into smaller articles, what follows is a little something for my subscribers that explains why. More coming soon.
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