Culture & Ethics
Medicine
John West: COVID Vaccine Misinformation from Francis Collins
An assurance to the vaccine-hesitant now turns out to be misinformation, as Discovery Institute’s John West reports at The Federalist. It also illustrates what happens when we turn “experts” into idols. How much of what we’ve been told is Top Grade Dependable Medicine falls into this category? Because this piece of info received the blessing of Francis Colllins, recently boosted to the rank of acting White House science advisor, it has gone largely unquestioned:
It was December 2020. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, was just beginning his public push for the Covid-19 vaccines.
Hoping to enlist support from evangelical Christians, Collins granted an extended YouTube interview to his friend Russell Moore, leader at the time of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
During their interview, Collins tried to allay fears that mRNA vaccines might be unsafe because they inject foreign mRNA into the body that could linger there. Collins gave a comforting fact: “The RNA lives a very short time in your body. It is quickly degraded because RNA has a very short half-life. So there’s no residual of what you’ve been injected with beyond probably a few hours.”
Under the banner of fighting “misinformation,” the same message was spread by other health authorities. For example, the Centers for Disease Control’s website still states that mRNA from the vaccines will disappear from the body “within a few days.”
Until being contacted for this article, the respected Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center likewise claimed vaccine mRNA will disappear “in about 72 hours.” This statement appeared on a webpage devoted to debunking “myths” about Covid-19 vaccines.
These claims now appear to be wrong.
New Study Shows mRNA Persists for Months
A few days ago, a peer-reviewed research article was published online by the science journal Cell, one of the world’s top molecular biology journals. The article was authored by pro-vaccine researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere. As part of their research, the researchers tracked how long mRNA from the vaccines persisted in the body.
Contrary to Collins’ previous assertion, the mRNA did not disappear in “a few hours,” a few days, or even a few weeks. In fact, mRNA from the vaccine persisted in a person’s lymph system some two months after vaccination. We actually don’t know how much longer it lasted because the researchers only tracked the mRNA for that long.
In other words, Collins’ confident assurance in 2020 now looks like misinformation.
I’ve been shocked over and over by how otherwise thoughtful people simply assume that physicians and other experts like Collins, those with the loudest media voices, are reliable. Some evangelical Christians have placed undue trust in the good doctor because they think he represents them. That’s unfortunate.
Read the rest at The Federalist. See Dr. West’s coverage on other ways we have been led astray by blindly following the medical establishment, for example: