The anti-vax legal network
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Now that the Covid pandemic is largely over, we can begin to consider its long term effects. The biggest, unfortunately, will probably be the creation of a massive general anti-vaccination backlash on the right wing, boosted by a few pseudo-liberal/left idiots of the RFK Jr. variety.
A particularly annoying carrier of that backlash is the gazillionaire tech bro who thinks that because he made a lot of money figuring out how to get people addicted to computer technology he’s also an expert on everything else in the world, or at least will be after a little googling:
Steve Kirsch is a tech entrepreneur who made hundreds of millions of dollars after founding an early search engine and helping invent the optical computer mouse.
Recently, he stood before a gathering of more than 250 lawyers in Atlanta while wearing a custom black T-shirt designed like a dictionary entry for the phrase “misinformation superspreader.”
“Our definition is it’s someone who’s basically pointing out the truth and it just happens to disagree with the mainstream narrative we’re known as misinformation spreaders, because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to control the narrative,” Kirsch told NPR.
By “they,” Kirsch means a network of pharmaceutical companies, governments, doctors and journalists that he argues are covering up a pandemic-driven plot to poison the world for profit. . . .
Kirsch has a tendency to offer large sums of money to anyone willing to debate his assertions.
“But they won’t do that. They won’t get into any discussion with me because they don’t want to answer a single question,” Kirsch said.
Jeffrey Morris has tried to engage with Kirsch for years. In his spare time, the professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania has gone line by line through some of Kirsch’s claims, providing answers, context and explanations. They once had a long conversation over Zoom.
“And it was an interesting discussion, you know, because he admitted that he was not a scientist and didn’t think like one. And so I was trying to connect with him and help him understand the leaps he was making in his arguments to get him to think more carefully. Because I could tell he was someone with a lot of energy and passion on the issue,” said Morris, who has watched Kirsch pull millions of views on some of his COVID vaccine content.
When someone makes a dramatic claim that vaccines are killing millions, it’s their burden to show the evidence, said Morris, not the other way around.
“They’re presuming that they have the entitlement that what they’re saying can be presumed to be true without them demonstrating rigorously that it’s true, and that it is the responsibility of society and the scientific community to prove them wrong. And if they fail to prove them wrong, or if they don’t show up, then they’re really offended. And then to them, that just proves their guilt. It proves the cover up,” he said.
Unfortunately a bunch of plaintiffs’ lawyers are now circling, hoping that scientifically bogus but potentially incredibly lucrative class action and mass tort suits based on claims that vaccines are killing and maiming The Children will get enough traction to become a self-sustaining cottage industry.
Obviously there are reasons to be suspicious of big pharmaceutical companies. It should be just as obvious that completely unsupported claims about the “dangers” posed by vaccines shouldn’t be on that list of reasons. But the combination of anti-government hysteria, paranoid fears about protecting our precious bodily fluids, and the whole toxic mess that results when people with lots of money decide to turn their personal obsessions into new frontiers in litigation, ensures that the anti-vax backlash is likely to be the most significant product of the Covid pandemic going forward.