And how to handle it. Because this battle isn't going away.
On Friday I was having lunch with a relative.

She’s a nice woman, smart. We’re not especially close - we didn’t grow up near one another and we don’t live near each other now - but we’re blood, and in no way unfriendly.

One more thing: she’s an academic. You can guess her politics.

Just after we sat, we talked a bit about Covid. She said she’d been only vaguely aware of my views or how controversial I’d become - surprising but not entirely, she’s had plenty else to worry about of late. She’d googled me and come across “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” though. Of course.

We ordered, ate, caught up, gossiped about family. The usual.
And then she said something along the lines of, Well. I would like to hear about your journey, how you developed these views.

Journey. Uh-oh.

Sure, I said.

One question I’d ask, one way to look at it - do you generally believe in the scientific method?

I think she said “scientific method,” not “science.” But she meant “science.”

She meant, Do you believe in science?

—

There is only one answer to this question, if someone is foolish and/or rude enough to say it out loud to you, the mRNA skeptic. I don’t care who that someone is: a relative, a friend, a frenemy, a television interviewer, a total stranger.

Yes, this question has only one answer.

What an idiotic thing to say, I said.

She was taken aback. After all, she had asked me if I was a moron, but she’d done so politely.

I don’t think it’s idiotic, she said.

Of course I believe in science, I said. A nuclear power plant sits not far from where I live. It exists because one group of brilliant scientists unlocked the secrets of the atom and another group figured out to how to use fission to heat water and turn turbines and make electricity. Which I use every day.

I could have made the same point even more simply: whenever I get on a plane I don’t expect to see the wings flapping.

To exist in the modern world is to know science exists. To agree to a prenatal genetic screen, to check your favorite team’s highlights on your phone, even to drive - is to understand the profound technological revolution humanity has undergone in the last three centuries.

—

These people. These smart liberal people.

They believe, truly, that anyone who questions the mRNA shots must be a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather who has no idea what the scientific method even is.

The mRNA jabs are extraordinary science. They are an incredible feat of biotechnology. We have figured out how to hijack our own cellular machinery in the same way viruses do. These shots build on generations of brilliant biological research, dating back to the discovery of the structure and function of DNA in 1953.

But that amazing history doesn’t mean that the modified mRNA in the Covid jabs is safe, any more than it means plutonium is safe.

In fact it means the opposite. It means they should be treated as dangerous until proven otherwise.

And the scientists who helped develop them knew that they might be dangerous. As they wrote in a widely read 2016 paper called “mRNA delivery using nanoparticles”:

Currently, no mRNA therapeutic is approved for use in humans, and a beneficial safety profile in patients still has to be demonstrated. A first clinical application will likely not be a prophylactic vaccine, because the tolerance for side effects is very low for a drug that is injected into healthy individuals. [emphasis added] Establishing the safety profile in a therapeutic application, such as cancer immunotherapy, will be followed by prophylactic applications.

In other words, mRNAs shouldn’t be used in large numbers of healthy people before we gained years of experience with them in cancer patients, who have far shorter life expectancies and a much higher tolerance for risk as they pursue cures.

When regulators approve drugs, they do so on the basis that those drugs are safe and effective." The first word is “safe.” Not effective, safe.

First, do no harm.
Continued https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/t...