PROHIBITION
- Aug 18, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 7
Are there questions you cannot ask, have answered, or even work with someone to arrive at an answer to?
Around the time of the last federal election I was writing about my shock at taking the CBC Vote Compass survey. This assessment of one's political perspectives was wacky for a bunch of reasons, mostly because it was not designed to assess your political stance; but, aside from that, I was surprised by how, among this huge swathe of seemingly irrelevant topics, there wasn't even one question about anything related to any aspect of the pandemic. Given that this was a rare event that everyone in the country experienced and most spent years arriving at strong opinions about, the absence of even one question struck me as super-weird. Was I supposed to believe the Greens and the Conservatives officially have the same feelings about business and school closures, contact and movement restrictions, vaccine mandates and passports? Or was it that the public was pre-evaluated as being entirely disinterested? Both seem inconceivable.
But maybe I'm confused and none of that is so weird. As I still find I cannot discuss with anyone almost anything COVID-related, why would what is effectively a national survey enquire about such taboo themes? Even just facts we can all agree upon (like what a vaccine company has published on their own website about their own product or process or what the federal government tells us about their own policies) causes people to literally or just conversationally flee or melt down. And that is true in person or online and of family, friends, and strangers, lay persons or medical professionals. How can that be? What could be less controversial or divisive than figuring out what some party's legal or PR team has published for public consumption and then assuming that is their official version of events? What could be a safer topic of discussion than what was shared in a press release or published in the local paper and when?
I posted a bunch of observations and questions throughout the pandemic that I still cannot get answers to or even have a real conversation with anyone about five years after those events. For example, back before any vaccines were produced and when a theoretical one was being slammed as "the Trump jab" and something that no sane person would ever entertain getting, I observed that — according to the most trusted, award-winning vaccinology and epidemiology experts brought in by the popular press, science magazines, and medical associations and journals to inform their subscribers and the general public — a COVID-19 vaccine could not be tested on sufficient numbers of people or for sufficient time, by basic medical standards and ethics, to address the pandemic. Some experts offered flat denials, others more tepid cautions. For example, after the arrival of the first Chinese vaccine in the summer of 2020 we were told by William Haseltine (former Harvard Medical School professor, founder of the university's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, chair and president of a global health think tank, founder of more than a dozen biotechnology companies, and author):
Telescoping testing timelines and approvals may expose all of us to unnecessary dangers related to the vaccine. While preclinical trials to evaluate the potential safety and efficacy of vaccine candidates are likely to include tens of thousands of patients, it is still unclear whether that number will be large enough and a trial will last long enough to evaluate safety for a drug that would be administered to so many.
After many vaccines arrived from sources all around the globe far earlier than the most aggressive timelines conceivable, and those were being given to millions of people, I then observed that the above assessments were only validated when all key health authorities (by their own evaluations and public offerings) remained totally unaware of the basic properties and capabilities of the vaccines. And that unknowing was persistent even years after authorization and mass vaccination, even as late as 2022. Obviously, any authority offering any information about vaccine production before or during the pandemic was always happy to explain the basics of vaccine development and the purpose of and timelines for human trials. All those sources explained what none of us needed to be told: that the purpose of vaccine trials is to determine what the thing they made is capable of and how (or whether) it should administered and to what populations.
Still, that said nothing about how such rapid production, testing, and distribution was able to take place. That's a story which, if you sought out the information at the time or even go looking today, you will find most parties — your own federal and provincial or state governments; local, national, and international health authorities and organizations; science journals, reference sources, and news outlets; individual experts or your friends — disagreed on and remain, weirdly, discordant about... Alas.
Again, there's not much room for error or disagreement on any of this. So then why the struggle? If you doubt any of this for any reason just go look for the most mainstream sources you can to arrive at an understanding or response. How do those findings congeal into something palatable or merely comprehensible? They don't. I would wager this is why no one will talk about it. I would also wager you've noticed this yourself and have been turned off by the confusion, frustration, or disbelief it engenders; or you haven't considered it, have not looked, don't know, and that is because you don't want to know. Regardless, at a time when it has never been easier to look things up and people have never been more passionate about correcting others and doing so publicly, I cannot find anyone to tell me how or why the situation was somehow different than I've presented.
Here's my version of events on just one very basic set of facts using only the most benign and authoritative sources I can find:
- On the purpose of vaccine trial phases:
"A key goal of phase III is to identify rare side effects and test how well the vaccine works ... Researchers also check if the vaccine prevents the disease, stops infection, or triggers a defense response in the body."
December, 2020 - CBS News
- First shipments of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine begin distribution in the U.S:
Emergency Use Authorization was issued for the Moderna COVID19 vaccine on December 18, 2020. Initial shipments of the vaccine began immediately after authorization. First administrations took place for front-line healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities on December 22, 2020. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received her first dose on December 29, 2020, to help build public confidence.
August, 2021 (almost one year later) - WHO
- The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine: What you need to know:
“Does it prevent infection and transmission? We do not know whether the vaccine will prevent infection and protect against onward transmission. Immunity persists for several months, but the full duration is not yet known. These important questions are being studied.”
January 2022 - Drugs.com
- Moderna Receives Full U.S. FDA Approval for COVID-19 Vaccine Spikevax:
"Our COVID-19 vaccine has been administered to hundreds of millions of people around the world, protecting people from COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death. The totality of real-world data and the full BLA for Spikevax in the United States reaffirms the importance of vaccination against this virus. This is a momentous milestone in Moderna's history as it is our first product to achieve licensure in the U.S.," said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna.
September 2022 (nearly two years after widespread deployment) - PLOS Pathogens
- Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination:
“We observed low Ct values (<25) [meaning the virus was in high volume and easy to find] in 212 of 310 fully vaccinated (68%) and 246 of 389 (63%) unvaccinated individuals. Testing a subset of low-Ct samples revealed infectious SARS-CoV-2 in 15 of 17 specimens (88%) from unvaccinated individuals and 37 of 39 (95%) from vaccinated people.”
March 2024 (more than three years after deployment) - National Library of Medicine
- A Study to Evaluate Efficacy, Safety, and Immunogenicity of mRNA-1273 Vaccine in Adults Aged 18 Years and Older to Prevent COVID-19:
Information provided by: ModernaTX, Inc.
(Responsible Party)
Study Start (Actual): 2020-07-27
Study Completion (Actual): 2022-12-29
Results First Submitted: 2023-12-21
Results First Posted: 2024-03-21
So, I would love to know, what was being communicated to you in 2020 and what did you understand about vaccine development, trial phase timelines, and outcomes? Then, what can we all agree took place regarding vaccine development, testing, human testing results, and deployment? And, finally, how do those facts pair with the completion of phase three trials and requisite studies (revealing just the basics of what the Moderna vaccine was capable of) much more recently, years after widespread, most often mandated, administration to the general public? As above, the primary vaccine deployed in North America was incapable of preventing illness or reducing the shedding and, therefore, transmission of the pandemic virus. In fact, as the above study showed, vaccination may have resulted in worse shedding.
So, is the consensus that none of those points have anything to do with the safety or efficacy of the vaccine? Or maybe that all of that was known to authorities, just not published anywhere or known to the public? And, with that, this scenario would somehow comport with the elementary ethical standard of informed consent? What are we [not] saying?
I'm just a layperson and know nothing about how any of this works, just what I'm being told by experts and authorities and presented in their publications. And I could be confused about all of it. Fine. Great. That's why I was asking questions at the time and, still unsatisfied, I continue asking. I have many more such questions. We could talk about this all day and get into the use of ventilators and certain drugs on COVID patients or virus manipulation for harm reduction, on and on... But do you think if you wrote out these or related questions, five or ten of them, and offered those to you family doctor, an ER doc, the dean of the nearest medical college, pharma CEO, and the head of public health in your region you would, years after the pandemic, get one coherent narrative that corresponds with the historical record or basic logic? I don't. And I don't know why I can't talk about this stuff or get anyone to take a real stab at providing a response. Why is there, seemingly, an unstated prohibition, a kind of taboo, about this and related topics? Are you seeing something radically different? At minimum, what explains why there were no questions about anything pandemic-related on CBC's Vote Compass survey but they were asking about the monarchy and puberty blockers?
