UC faculty challenge university’s free speech suppression

The information we sought to convey to the public was supported by highly authoritative sources including JAMA Cardiology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Our editorial would have reached a diverse audience of more than half a million Californians and possibly, motivated otherwise intimidated and silenced scientific, medical, and academic communities to wake up and ask tough questions.

Our editorial made it known that despite the university's claim that the booster would protect against Covid-19 infection and prevent transmission, a mountain of studies proved otherwise. Many publications in top-tier journals, until then considered impactful, had failed to perform thorough research, some even including data from SARS-CoV-2 negative patients in their final analyses (Lucas et al. 2020).

A review of key data from early Covid-19 patients shed light on how critical opportunities were missed to understand the role of comorbidities and the distinctly negative effects of some early treatments such as Remdesivir (Bhargava and Knapp 2023). In a September 2022 article in the journal Vaccine (Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults, Fraiman et al. 2022), UC researchers Sander Greenland, Patrick Whelan, and other scientists lamented the lack of "full transparency of COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data," and called for a thorough harm-benefit analysis of them.

A long list of serious potentially deadly adverse events had already been acknowledged by the CDC, the FDA, the HHS, the WHO, health ministries, and medical researchers around the world – and even by principal manufacturer Pfizer! Our editorial highlighted mounting evidence of serious risks associated with mRNA vaccination, including myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrest, and a higher risk of death in vaccinated individuals. Data from CDC's VAERS released on July 15, 2022, showed a whopping 1,350,950 reports of adverse events for all age groups (more than 135 times the reporting rate for flu vaccines). It also included 29,635 deaths and 246,676 serious injuries.

It has further been well-documented that fewer than one percent of all vaccine-associated adverse events are reported to the CDC's VAERS. This means that actual morbidity and mortality were likely many times greater, as pointed out by, among others, a then-recent HHS-funded Harvard Medical School vaccine injury study (Landofree 2021).

Prior to this pandemic, vaccine manufacturers sought to develop shots that mimicked natural immunity. Yet in the case of Covid-19 and in complete disregard of basic science and immunology, natural immunity was not recognized despite more than 150 peer-reviewed studies reporting that natural immunity acquired by recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection was equal to if not superior to vaccination (Leon et al. 2022)

We noted that paradoxically, over time, Covid-19 shots increased rather than decreased the risk of contracting and spreading the virus (Tseng et al. 2023). Indeed, an article in The BMJ Global Health warned that "mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and likely to cause more societal harm than good (Bardosh et al. 2022)." We pointed out that the CDC and federal government had only "recommended" and not mandated the new booster, so the university's decision to mandate exceeded even CDC/Federal guidelines (Team, Food, and Drug 2021). Finally, we argued that multiple data sources showed that young healthy people who contracted SARS-CoV-2 had a recovery rate of 99.995%!

We referenced a March 2022 court order compelling Pfizer to release 55,000 pages of internal reports on vaccine effectiveness and side effects that eventually revealed 1,246 different adverse effects including Guillain–Barré syndrome, cardiac arrest, deep vein thrombosis, immune-mediated hepatitis, myocarditis, brain stem embolism and thrombosis, interstitial lung disease, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, liver injury, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome.

A preprint posted by Bardosh and colleagues (since accepted) found that 22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 would have to be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one Covid hospitalization, that "booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: and that per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events" were anticipated (Bardosh et al. 2024)."

We explicitly stated that while we were not against vaccination for those who chose it, we were deeply concerned by the coercive nature of Covid-19 mandates. We emphasized that never before in medical history had an entire population been required to receive a vaccine approved only for emergency use, for which there was no long-term data, and no informed consent which, as a matter of law and ethics, requires that no one be coerced into a medical treatment.

We noted that the shift in UC policy from fully vaccinated to up-to-date signaled anticipation of an open-ended process of continuous vaccinations and boosters going far beyond addressing a temporary emergency. We protested that no exceptions were granted even for those who suffered serious adverse events from earlier Covid shots in blatant disregard of the "My body, my choice" stance taken by the medical community for other procedures.

Our editorial referenced the Los Angeles Unified School District (among others) having suspended its vaccine mandate for students and staff in September 2022, after a Superior Court judge ruled that the school district did not have the authority to mandate vaccination. We pointed out that the State of California had not mandated boosters for anyone except health workers, and that the nationwide trend was toward eliminating all mandates.

We affirmed that the rate of hospitalizations was radically down, that Covid-related deaths appeared to be about on par with annual deaths from the flu, and that in contrast, "excess," and sudden, unexpected unexplained deaths had increased sharply since the rollout of the experimental vaccines (StatsCan 2023). We noted that even Bill Gates himself, having substantially financed and massively promoted the Covid vaccination campaign, acknowledged in an interview: "We didn't understand that it's a fairly low fatality rate and that it's a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu (Gates 2022)."

Conclusion

Failure of the UC system and its student publications to allow public access to our editorial's vitally important information was blatant censorship, cynically mocking free speech, academic freedom, and scientific integrity, let alone human decency. Sadly, it showed that University leadership was far more concerned with maintaining funding from Big Pharma and government than in the actual health, welfare, and well-being of its own students, faculty, and staff. The academic community should marshal its resolve to better resist silencing scientific dissent and critique for future "global emergencies."