After years of labeling commentary, articles and even search engine queries about vaccine injuries as misinformation, conspiracy theory, and “far-right,” lambasting social media companies for allowing vaccine injury stories on their platforms and even ridiculing a family whose children died from the vaccine, the Times conceded that “thousands” may have been injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.
Under the headline, “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?” Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli reported that the injuries aren’t unexpected because “all vaccines have at least occasional side effects.”
The article featured several vaccine-injured people, reporting on their medical issues and the “disbelief and ambivalence” they encountered from doctors and the media.
The Times also published two commentaries related to the investigative feature. One, by Mandavilli, summarized key takeaways from the investigation and the other, by David Leonhardt for “The Morning Newsletter,” reassured readers about the safety of the vaccines and downplayed the injuries.
The Times’ coverage is “better late than never,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland told The Defender. “The mainstream media, including The New York Times, is finally — three-and-a-half years late — acknowledging the devastating harm from the COVID shots,” she said.
“Their only redemption will be to cover this issue seriously now and to seek to hold those accountable who knowingly pushed extraordinarily dangerous, experimental products onto the whole global community,” Holland said.
The feature story included interviews with vaccine-injured doctors, nurses and researchers, like Dr. Gregory Poland, editor-in-chief of Vaccine, who said he could not get his colleagues to investigate his injury.
READ ALSO: AstraZeneca admits COVID vaccine can cause rare side effect
Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D., a vaccine researcher at Yale University, told the Times that people with post-vaccination injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted.”
Dr. Janet Woodcock, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told the Times she believed that some of the vaccine-injuries did in fact experience effects that were “serious” and “life-changing” beyond those officially recognized by federal agencies.
“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring home.”
The article also quoted other unnamed public health officials saying that the side effects — tinnitus, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, Bell’s palsy and others described in the article did not result from the vaccine. And it suggested that at least one of the injuries it profiled likely came from a “contaminated” vaccine batch.
It also discussed the challenges faced by people seeking compensation through the federal Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, which has compensated only 12 people for COVID-19 vaccine injuries since the pandemic began.
The article and the accompanying pieces reiterated the mainstream COVID-19 vaccine talking points that such injuries were rare — likely only among thousands of people — and that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks “for most people.”
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data show 1,637,441 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 26, 2024. The data includes a total of 37,061 reports of deaths.
The articles are part of a shift in mainstream media coverage that has begun to acknowledge some limitations to the COVID-19 narrative that has dominated the mainstream media since the onset of the pandemic.
READ ALSO: Man injured by Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine wins ‘landmark’ claim against employer
Dr. Pierre Kory, who has published recent op-eds in mainstream outlets said this week on “The Defender In-Depth” podcast that he thought the “Overton Window” was shifting because injuries and deaths following vaccination have become so widespread that mainstream media can no longer ignore them.
Kory has published op-eds in USA Today, Newsweek, The Hill, TrialSite News and The Washington Times, he said, seeking to “bring forth a discussion of caution around these [COVID-19] vaccines.”
Brianne Dressen, who was injured by the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during a clinical trial, told The Defender that she wasn’t surprised that the Times emphasized the alleged success of the vaccine program in an article about vaccine injuries.
“A few mainstream outlets are beginning to take a peek behind the curtain, albeit it is happening through a painstaking process of editors and lawyers to verify each and every word of copy,” she said. “Of course they cannot possibly write about injuries without hailing the great success of the COVID vaccine program.”
Leonhardt’s article said the vaccine injury subject is “uncomfortable” to read and write about because “it feeds into false stories about the COVID vaccines that many Americans have come to believe.”
He cited Robert F. Kennedy Jr., independent presidential candidate and CHD’s chairman on leave as a primary source for this “misinformation,” the scale of which is “staggering” he wrote, quoting Dr. Joshua Sharfstein of Johns Hopkins University.