David E. Scheim, PhD, and Jerome Dancis, PhD, have delivered the letter, reproduced below to the chancellor and Board of Trustees of their California college, which like most of California still had Covid vax mandates. It seems that the letter was successful, as the next day after the letter was emailed, the college granted exemptions to a number of staff whose employment was threatened. Perhaps the key point made was that a study published on MedRxiv on February 23, 2023, by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, found that “the higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19.” “The study, which tracked 51,000 subjects, found: “The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19,” …. That figure shows that for every number of vaccine doses—none, one, two, three, and greater than three, the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was greater with more vaccine doses at every day throughout the study’s 98 days of follow-up. The bivalent booster, however, offered an insignificant 4% reduction in incidence of COVID-19 infection for the Omicron strain that became dominant in 2023.”
Thus, the Covid mandates, which still exist, are ineffective, and counter-productive.
“Dear Chancellor and Board of Trustees: The last vestiges of COVID-19 vaccine mandates are dropping across the US1 as mainstream medical figures who were at the forefront of promoting them when first released now declare them ineffective in limiting infection and disease transmission since the emergence of the Omicron family of variants in 2022. A recent study from the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, cited below, categorically demonstrated that these vaccines, including the bivalent booster, did not limit infection for Omicron, replicating findings of three prior studies. The US public has rejected the new COVID-19 bivalent boosters as well, by their paltry 16% acceptance rate of them vs. 81% for the original vaccines.2
Paul Offit of the FDA advisory board for COVID-19 vaccines “advised his 20-something son to forgo the third shot.”3 Bill Gates, who funded extensive research on COVID vaccine development, stated that “the current vaccines are not infection-blocking,”4 a conclusion supported by Dr. Lena Wen, an oft-quoted public spokesperson on COVID-19,5 and by an expert panelist and the host of NPR’s Science Friday.6
A study from the Cleveland Clinic released on MedRxiv on February 23, 2023,7 found, in fact, that COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective in preventing infection since the Omicron lineages of December 2022 and later became dominant. The study, which tracked 51,000 subjects, found: “The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19,” as graphed in the study’s Figure 2 (below). That figure shows that for every number of vaccine doses—none, one, two, three, and greater than three, the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was greater with more vaccine doses at every day throughout the study’s 98 days of follow-up. The bivalent booster, however, offered an insignificant 4% reduction in incidence of COVID-19 infection for the Omicron strain that became dominant in 2023.
The US public has overwhelmingly rejected the COVID-19 bivalent boosters based not just on these scientific findings and expert guidance but also on the manifest reality of COVID vaccinated family and friends contracting Omicron infections. Recall that COVID-19 vaccines were initially promoted as being at least 90% effective in preventing infection and transmission.8 The rationale for COVID vaccine mandates was that if some 70% of the US public were vaccinated, the “R0” would drop below 1 and “herd immunity” would be achieved.8,9 But as new variants emerged, the vaccines no longer effectively prevented disease transmission,10-12 and the talking point for vaccinations then abruptly shifted to limiting severity of infection. Yet disease severity is a matter of personal health; the justification for vaccine mandates rested on preventing community spread of infection. Shockingly, however, a public relations firm that the CDC engaged to promote COVID-19 vaccinations turned out to be the same one as used by Pfizer and Moderna.13-15 As the original justification for vaccine mandates, limiting disease transmission, fell apart, the lines between protecting public health and marketing the vaccines became very much blurred.
Having spent our careers at the NIH on staff and as an NIH consultant (DES) and as a university professor (JD) and having both had the standard set of non-COVID vaccinations through recent years, we are absolutely not “anti-vaxxers,” but adherents to standards of good science. We were skeptical of the grossly curtailed, less than one-year testing period used for the COVID-19 vaccines, vs. typically multi-year safety testing for vaccines in the past. Rigorous testing of past vaccines has minimized occasional catastrophic results which occurred e.g. with the 1976 swine flu vaccine,16 which was withdrawn two months after its release after 46 million Americans had been vaccinated with thousands of serious adverse effects and $3.5 billion in damage claims.17 The Dengue vaccine, released in 2016, as NPR summarized, “has a dark—and deadly—history.”18 Human trials of a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in 1966-67 “caused disastrous worsening of disease and deaths in infants during subsequent natural RSV infection,” as noted in the leading scientific journal PNAS.19
Note that Pfizer20 and Merck21,22 have paid out a total of more than $8 billion in federal fines and restitution for health care fraud and illegal promotional activity, respectively, in marketing dangerous drugs. For the drug Vioxx, Merck actually formed task forces to “neutralize” and “discredit” individual doctors and scientists who reported its deadly effects, before the drug was withdrawn in 2004 following an estimated 48,000 fatalities in the US.23 Given several other such industry cover-ups of dangerous drugs,24 an investigative report from a top international medical journal exposing fabricated data and deficient oversight in Pfizer’s testing of its COVID-19 vaccine was disconcerting.25,26 When documentation for this vaccine testing was requested, Pfizer and the FDA promised to provide it over the course of 75 years,27 a timeframe found unacceptable by a federal judge.28
Many scientific publications such as these29-35 put the risk of severe adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines at 1-10 per thousand, much greater than official estimates of this risk.36 A population survey of 1,038 US adults conducted by Zogby, whose polls have predicted US election outcomes within a few percentage points of actual results, found that 1.5% of COVID-vaccinated individuals had life-threatening or severe adverse effects.37 A preventative cardiology practice reported in the leading journal Circulation that the mean predictive index (from composite blood tests) of 5-year risk of heart attacks and other acute coronary events in 566 of its patients increased from 11% to 25% within 2-10 weeks after the second dose of mRNA COVID vaccines,38 an alarming foreshadowing of potential long-term risks of COVID-19 vaccines.
Furthermore, recent discoveries have shown that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the immunogen used in all COVID-19 vaccines, is itself toxic.39,40 Notably, of the five human strains of betacoronaviruses, the two common cold strains express an enzyme that neutralizes this spike protein toxicity, while the three deadly strains, SARS, SARS-CoV-2 and MERS, do not.39 A study conducted at leading Boston-based hospitals found that subjects who contracted myocarditis, a serious heart condition, following COVID-19 vaccination had detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in their blood, whereas those vaccinated without adverse effects did not.41 Another recent study found that the spike protein of the Omicron variant has ten times the blood-clumping activity as spike protein from prior variants,40 yet no human safety testing has been performed on the bivalent booster vaccines which engender synthesis of Omicron spike protein.42
In conclusion, since the Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 became predominant in mid-2022, COVID-19 vaccinations, including bivalent boosters, have been ineffective in preventing incidence and transmission of this disease, which thereby removes the justification for a vaccine mandate. The US government has sometimes lied where powerful interests were at stake, such as the claim of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq upon which the 2003 war in Iraq was launched, profiting the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned us in 1961. Experts have sometimes been deployed to support these false narratives, such as Colin Powell for those phantom WMDs. The cover-up by Merck of Vioxx’s deadly toxicities and similar cases of concealed adverse effects of other drugs raise similar concerns, and it is as yet undetermined whether the cited Zogby survey and cardiology practice findings on COVID-19 vaccine toxicities might presage an unfolding population-wide calamity—whether the final record for these spike protein-based vaccines may replicate those of Vioxx or the Swine Flu, Dengue and RSV vaccines. We therefore encourage the Board of Trustees to honor the requests for exemptions from the college’s vaccine mandate from the professors and staff whose employment is currently in jeopardy.
Sincerely yours … “