Tipsheet

One Pollster Has Been Dissecting COVID Panic Narratives. Here's His Take on the J&J Vaccine.

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  April 13, 2021 4:20 PM

If there’s one pollster who been a surprising addition in telling the COVID panic peddlers to simmer down, it’s Nate Silver. Yes, FiveThirtyEight’s Silver has been shredding the COVID czars, especially when it comes to the vaccine. He straight-up accused Fauci of gaslighting on the vaccines. 

“It's pure gaslighting at this point to say we don't know whether vaccinated people spread the virus,” Silver wrote. “Tons of studies—including from the CDC!!!—show that vaccines massively reduce (though probably not entirely eliminate) transmission.”

Now, with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine being paused, we’re once again seeing the panic peddler latch onto a new narrative. The move comes after just six women aged 18-48 developed a clotting issue 6-13 days after receiving the shot. This is extremely rare. There are probably more adverse effects seen from the seasonal flu shot, though there are no political points to be earned on that front. Silver ripped this move as a medical bureaucratic nightmare that’s going to get people killed. Twitchy captured it all:

“If out of the blue one morning Gov. Newsom was like ‘Shark attacks are extremely rare, but out of an abundance of caution, we're closing every beach in California until we investigate more’, that's not likely to get more people to go out to the beach, even once beaches reopen,” he wrote.

He added, “Why did the FDA recommend the pause anyway? Because of a combination of institutional culture, cognitive biases, and bureaucratic imperatives incentives, they greatly overweight the importance of rare adverse effects relative to people dying from COVID.”

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It all circles back to how these experts don’t know what to do it would seem. They want everyone to get vaccinated but seem totally fine with scaring the bejesus out of people while also telling them they need to remain in the bunker until his highness Dr. Fauci feels that it’s okay to eat in a restaurant. 

He also offered what the FDA/CDC could’ve done without delivering what could be a massive blow to the vaccination effort:

These people want us to get vaccinated but then backpedal or shovel out pure panic for very, VERY rare adverse side effects. Is this out of an abundance of caution or are they trying to slow down our rapid pace towards herd immunity? I don’t know. Given how these clowns like to manufacture ‘impending doom;’ for no reason, nothing would shock me here.