Vaccination waivers are on the rise in Michigan public schools. You can blame the media for that.
The Detroit News reports:
“The number of Michigan students with vaccine waivers has nearly doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic as the percentage of children who get all their recommended vaccines has decreased, two trends health officials fear could make kids more susceptible to infectious disease outbreaks….
“Total waivers have increased over 90% since 2020, when about 11,400 waivers were received, to more than 21,800 in 2024. The number of students in these groups has increased about 4% in that period.”
What’s happened “since 2020” to change things? The introduction of the Covid vaccine, and a joint government and media effort to push the experimental drug.
Every drug commercial on TV talks about the side effects. In every human endeavor there are trade-offs. There are risks. Even with a popular drug like Ozempic, side effects figure prominently in the advertising.
The Covid vaccine didn’t go through the rigors of the drugs on TV, with their long lists of side effects. It was an experiment. Even if you were cheering for the jab, there was reason to doubt whether such a new drug was either safe or effective. It’s not uncommon for the flu shot to be ineffective, designed to target a different strain than what arrives.
Did you hear any such drawbacks in this Michigan health department commercial?
In all of life, there are risks.
Yet on TV, and in newsprint, we were told the jab was both safe and effective, and could be nothing less. By people who could not have known that when they said it. But they said it, and they printed it, anyway.
Consider this May 2021 story in The Detroit News: “Jill Biden touts COVID-19 vaccine as safe, effective during Michigan stop.”
The News reports:
“As of Thursday, 4.7 million Michigan residents, about 58% of the adult population, had received at least their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. President Joe Biden wants to see 70% of the country’s adults get at least their first dose by the Fourth of July.
“The first lady encouraged those who haven’t gotten vaccinated yet to talk to their doctors and pharmacists.
“The vaccine is safe and effective, and it saves lives,” she said.
This is not a news story. It’s a badly written advertisement for the jab. Biden’s claims are offered without evidence but are never challenged.
Had this been a real news story, reporters might have asked: “First lady, you say the vaccine is safe and effective, but how do you know that? It’s brand new.”
And then they would have printed that answer, whatever it was. I see no evidence the question was even asked.
It’s not the reporter’s job to get to the ultimate truth of whether the vaccine is safe. That’s not going to come from a local newspaper in Michigan.
It’s the reporter’s job to question any claim presented by anybody. News reporting is a field whose maxim is: “If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source.”
Reporters who do this can say they operate without fear or favor.
TV news stations at least made money running Covid vaccine ads. What did newspapers get out of these advertorials? Nothing, except headlines to cringe at years later.
Remember when natural immunity—antibodies from catching Covid previously—was treated as a conspiracy theory? Throughout the pandemic, The Detroit News ran syndicated advice columns from a Dr. Keith Roach, who argued for the necessity and even supremacy of the jab over natural immunity.
“If you want to be protected from COVID-19, the vaccine is much better than getting infected,” Roach wrote in one column. “The first reason is that infection with the virus is dangerous. Even though only a small proportion of people die from COVID-19, a small percentage of the entire population means many, many people have died—over half a million in the United States.”
Roach was answering a query from someone who was laid up with Covid for two weeks, and had made a complete recovery.
“The second is that protection after natural COVID-19 infection is not very good,” Roach added. “While it is true that people have some protection for about three months, we saw from the vaccine study data that the degree of protection after infection was not very good at all.”
Yes, you read that right. Roach cites vaccine study data that finds “the degree of protection after infection was not very good at all.” Why would we have any reason to question those claims? Better just print them!
An AP story published by The News tried to turn natural immunity political.
“GOP embraces natural immunity as substitute for vaccines,” read the Nov. 21, 2021 headline.
The story reads: “Republicans fighting President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.
“They contend that people who have recovered from the virus have enough immunity and antibodies to not need COVID-19 vaccines, and the concept has been invoked by Republicans as a sort of stand-in for vaccines.”
Only in the bizarro world of news is natural immunity from a global virus portrayed “as a sort of stand-in for vaccines,” and not a fact of life, given the global everybody’s-gonna-get-it nature of the virus.
The flip side of “assume you are sick,” as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer advised early on, is that you can also assume you have natural immunity, God’s gift.
The jab campaign failed. And the distrust it sowed is now affecting vaccine uptake rates across the board. None of this is surprising. The failures of heavy-handed public health messaging are obvious. The media was that heavy hand.
Michigan health department data shows only 12.5% of Michiganders took the Covid vaccine in the past year. That 58% of Michigan adults who’d taken a dose when Jill Biden visited was actually the high water mark. Joe Biden would be so disappointed in us today.
Trust doesn’t just crack, it shatters. By pushing so hard and so long for a jab that people did not want, or need, and have survived without, the public health-journalism alliance has reaped a season of doubt.
They have only themselves to blame.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
