HJNO Nov/Dec 2024

A PHYSICIAN’S RESPONSE 32 NOV / DEC 2024 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS know why. You have to understand something about Aaron Siri: This guy is a lawyer who makes money by suing pharmaceutical compa- nies and the government — that’s his live- lihood. It’s in his personal interest to bring forth cases fromwhich he and his firmmake money. This is not an honest, dispassionate broker. This is someone that has a very clear conflict of interest in the testimony that he’s giving. This guy has made a livelihood out of suing the pharmaceutical company and suing the government. With regards to the vaccine law, in the ‘80s, there was a discus- sion of how to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to produce products that might not be profitable. Congress made a law that provided some indemnity for those prod- ucts and instead created a federal program to evaluate claims of side effects and pro- vide compensation. And whether that pro- gramworks well or not is all within the pur- view of Congress to fix, and it probably does need to be fixed a little bit, but that’s not evi- dence of some grand conspiracy. This is a law that was made as a means to try and promote pharmaceutical compa- nies to make products that might not have been profitable and might not have come to market otherwise. The larger picture of this is that in medicine, nearly every interven- tion, certainly every medicine that is given, has potential benefits and potential side effects. There is no medicine out there that has zero side effects, ever. There are always some side effects, and it’s the job of the phy- sician to weigh the potential benefit against the potential harm, and vaccines are no dif- ferent. Like any medicine, some small per- centage of people are going to have a reac- tion to it. In general, you trust your doctor to walk you through the pros and cons, try and weigh those two scales, and provide you the information you need to make a choice. In general, for the vaccines, for example, on the school schedule, the pros in most phy- sicians’ opinions, vastly outweigh the very small risks. But any time someone takes a pill — and people take thousands of medicines — any- time you take cholesterol or high blood pressure medicine, any of the daily medi- cines that people take, there are very, very small risks that are rare, but possible. Vac- cines are no different. That’s the system Congress created. Should it be changed? Yeah, it probably should be tweaked like a lot of bills out there. Is it evidence of some vast conspiracy? Is it evidence that, for example, the measles vaccine causes autism and everyone’s covering it up? Absolutely not. And to suggest that, to imply that to vul- nerable families is just repulsive. Editor One of the testimonies was a patient who said she was vaccine injured and none of her doctors were reporting her adverse effects in VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System]. What I read was when the vaccines were under Emergency Use Authorization, physicians were required to put that into the VAERS system. What do you know about that? Was that happening? Physician It’s absolutely happening. I have no idea how that person knows for cer- tain that their physicians didn’t report that. How would they know that? I have no idea how they can assert with 100% confidence that none of their physicians reported that. VAERS is a very interesting system, and it serves a good purpose. The purpose of VAERS, which is a portal maintained by HHS, by the federal government, is to allow people to report potential side effects of vaccines. It’s intended to cast a very, very large net. Those cases get investigated, and some of those cases end up being a side effect of the vaccine, and some of them end up being something else. One of the nice things the federal govern- ment did is make the information in there transparent, so anyone can go and search the database that will, in a de-identified fashion, provide the numbers of reports and the type of reports that have beenmade into the VAERS system. The federal government did that knowing that there’s a potential for it to be misconstrued, but it’s important to do it for transparency. The way it has been and is currently being misconstrued is it’s flatly false to take the total number of events that have been reported to VAERS for any vaccine and say, for example, this vaccine caused 20,000 of these side effects. This is the very prelimi- nary, very large net. They cast a large net to not miss anything and then go investi- gate these cases. By making it transparent, it allowed people to misconstrue it and twist it, and it means nothing of that sort. It’s a pretty good system. Those are preliminary reports. Any side effect, potential side effect, gets reported. You don’t know at the time if it’s a real side effect from the vaccine or if that’s something else [coincidental]. They get reported into the system, but it allows people to take the larger number and really misconstrue it. Editor Florida was mentioned in the testi- mony as being a state to review because the surgeon general is not recommend- ing COVID vaccines this winter — almost held up as a state to emulate. What are the main states experiencing this type of attack on public health? Physician Florida and Louisiana. I think the general read on this is we have a gover- nor who certainly has political aspirations beyond his current role. We have a surgeon general who probably does, too, and I think there’s some degree of them auditioning for a certain audience right now. They have chosen to take every opportunity to show that they’re anti-establishment, to show that they’re iconoclasts, that, “How dare some- one else tell themwhat to do.”They’re going to take every opportunity to kick sand in the air. The problem is, when you kick sand in the air enough, eventually it’s going to fly back in your face. What they’re doing now is,