Programming note: As part of the seventh-birthday celebrations of The Mark Steyn Club, please join me for a brand new weekly music show. It airs every Saturday on Serenade Radio at 5pm UK time/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~I'm feeling a bit wobbly as another week ends, but through a haze of medication herewith a few thoughts on the passing scene...
First, a terrible headline from The Daily Telegraph:
Families of people who died after Covid vaccination abandon attempt to sue AstraZeneca
Lawyers believe pharmaceutical firm could be covered for people who received jab after April 7 2021 because leaflet noted rare side effect
So your perfectly healthy thirty-three-year-old spouse expired after taking the jabba-jabba? Big deal. Shouldda read the small print:
Families whose loved ones died after taking the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine have abandoned attempts to sue the pharmaceutical giant after being told that they were likely to lose.
Gareth Eve and other families whose relatives were harmed after having the jab have pulled out of the High Court case after being told that they would be unlikely to succeed with their claims because a leaflet issued at the height of the pandemic warned of a rare side effect associated with the vaccine.
The document, given out at vaccination centres, said that "extremely rare cases of blood clots with low levels of platelets have been observed following vaccination with Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca".
Legal experts believe that this could potentially protect the pharmaceutical firm against cases brought by families whose relatives were given a dose supplied after April 7 2021.
In total, 12 families have now dropped out of the legal action.
I take it that these references to "legal experts" refer to the plaintiffs' own legal teams. If so, that's even more depressing. A line in a leaflet? If that's the legal standard, then it's wrong. As a dear friend of the Steyn Show, the courageous and principled pathologist Clare Craig, puts it:
This is utterly unjust.
A line in a leaflet does not equal informed consent,
especially not when every newspaper and politician is repeating how absolutely safe it was at the time - with no correction from AZ. https://t.co/6SMTQSGpmr
— Dr Clare Craig (@ClareCraigPath) May 2, 2024
Clare is absolutely right. First, as innumerable vax victims testified on the Steyn Show, doctors and nurses professed to be absolutely ignorant of supposed side-effects even after their patients had been crippled by them. They said they had had "no guidance" on "adverse events" and, unless a rare curiosity led them to a few and far between outposts on the Internet, ignorance was not only bliss but career-wise very prudent. They were in no position to provide information sufficient to meet the definition of "informed consent".
Second, as Clare notes, a line in a leaflet does not counter the tide of propaganda assuring you of its "amazing" 100 per cent effectiveness:
'After 12 days from the first vaccination of the AstraZeneca vaccine, you are 100% effective against hospitalisation and death'@sara_kayat shares this amazing statistic with us, which you may not have heard yet. pic.twitter.com/jW5uElTk2F
— This Morning (@thismorning) January 4, 2021
It wasn't just "every newspaper and politician", but Her very Majesty, who in one of her worst public interventions of her long reign managed to impugn the motives of those reluctant to swallow the propaganda:
'Think about others rather than yourselves': The Queen makes passionate plea over vaccine take-up as she says jab 'didn't hurt at all' and suggests those refusing it are selfish
So the Sovereign can instruct her subjects that they're "selfish" if they don't submit to the jabba-jabba, but liability-wise her health minister will have a leaflet run up and make sure there's a line in the seventeenth paragraph?
~For the sake not only of all our vax victims but to ensure that it does not happen to us all over again the next time the "experts" all agree on everything, it is necessary to have a complete repudiation of the Covid years. Yet, as Allison Pearson notes, even as the groupthink propagandists have moved on to conceding that okay, maybe, up to a point, a generation of children were damaged by lockdown, they're still damning those who were right about that at the time as "conspiracy theorists":
The few of us who continued to ask, "Why?" after the imposition of frankly bonkers rules (or was it "guidance", Matt Hancock?) were routinely reviled, even threatened. Peter Hitchens, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and I were some of the names on a so-called fact-checking website convened by Neil O'Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, which set out to shame "Covid cranks and dangerous conspiracy theorists".
Oh, this "conservative" Neil O'Brien's a genius. What's the legacy of O'Brien and his enforcers?
Teenagers cut off from friends who took their own sweet lives or plunged down a dark well into mental illness. The shattering cost of all this is slowly beginning to occur to even the most ardent lockdown cheerleaders. "Looking back, I think we failed our children during the pandemic," mused Susanna Reid last week.
The Good Morning Britain presenter was commenting on a study which found that children in England face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings because of school closures during Covid. National GCSE results will steadily worsen until 2030, when it is expected that "fewer than 40% of pupils [will] get good grades in maths and English".
Oh, don't worry. By 2030 they'll have lowered the standards on the grounds that "good grades" are racist and transphobic, so all results will be terrific.
~There is no clearer case for real free speech than the mountain of wreckage inflicted by the suffocating groupthink of the "expert" class four years ago. For that reason alone, I am opposed to the so-called "Antisemitic Awareness Act" passed by the so-called Republican House in Washington. I see half the "conservative" commentators think it's clever politics because it puts Biden on the back foot and forces him into the same camp as the Hamas groupies on America's campuses. Ha-ha! That's very cunning of those Republicans. They're brilliant like that, aren't they?
I think not. What's going on, as I've written, is the cultural Islamisation of the secular western left: the metastasising Jew-hate is an easier point of comity, for the moment, than joining the line at the clitoridectomy clinic. Still, it's a pretty serious development, and deserves a serious response. This isn't it.
For one thing, there's no point criminalising anti-Semitism while simultaneously planning to admit zillions of Gazan "refugees": Over three-quarters of them are in favour of what happened on October 7th, and much of the remainder are just dissembling to pollsters. Passing laws against Jew-haters while admitting ever more of them is just a waste of everybody's time. And anyway, at the border, it's the guys who point out the Jew-hate who get hauled over the coals by US Immigration.
So it's just another "hate speech" law and, after Scotland, Ireland, Canada, etc, who needs that? In addition and in the American context - let me see if I can type this with a straight face - it's "unconstitutional": it creates another zone in which free speech does not apply. I was on the receiving end of that a couple of months ago at the DC Superior Court re "climate change", and thus you won't be surprised to hear I don't think it should be extended to ever more areas of public discourse.
~Besides, like all laws, it will be interpreted by judges - and American judges are increasingly the worst in the Common Law world. By way of low-hanging fruit, here's the latest from the execrable Juan Merchan in the New York Supreme Court. He's considering fining Trump for saying the following:
That jury was picked so fast—95% Democrats. The area's mostly all Democrat. You think of it as a — just a purely Democrat area. It's a very unfair situation, that I can tell you.
I said as much about my own jury pool back in January. It's just the way it is, a simple statement of fact. If a defendant can be punished for such an observation, you might as well torch the Constitution, and the US Supreme Court.
If it's any consolation to Trump, he's only going to be fined for the above. Merchan is threatening to gaol him for this:
"What have you thought of David Pecker's testimony so far? When was the last time you spoke to him?"
Trump answered, "He's been very nice. I mean, he's been — David's been very nice. A nice guy."
The silence of the Conservative, Inc lambs on this stuff is predictable but still pathetic. The New York "justice" system should command no respect.
~As we approach our seventh birthday, I thank all our First Day Founding Members who are still with us - and I thank also all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club. I am grateful to those who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And, notwithstanding the depressing legal developments noted above, I look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
See you tonight for Tales for Our Time.
