Standing up to Tyranny: The Expert Panel on Federal Vaccine Mandates

Originally published on Medium 5 November 2021

Telling the truth in today’s cancel culture is not necessarily easy. You can pay a pretty heavy price for it.

So said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin at the meeting of the Expert Panel on Federal Vaccine Mandates held at the Senate Office Building on Tuesday 2 November.

Senator Johnson had invited the CDC to send representatives to attend. He had extended the same invitation to the departments of Defense, Labor, and Transportation, as well as NIH Director Francis Collins, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, and the CEO’s of covid vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna, and BioNTech. None of them accepted.

Referring to President Biden’s recent pronouncement that “this is an epidemic of the unvaccinated,” Senator Johnson responded “I wish that were true,” adding that in the United Kingdom, sixty-three percent of those who died of the covid were fully vaccinated.

Senator Johnson decried the forced vaccination of doctors and nurses, “the heroes of covid” who risked their health and lives treating patients and now are being threatened with the loss of their livelihoods for not getting the shot — even the ones who already contracted the disease and now have robust, life-long natural immunity. Noting that the vaccine does not prevent infections or transmissions, he asked “What is the point of the vaccine?” He went on to point out that the number of adverse events per year reported for the covid vaccine was 108 times greater that for the flu shot, and the number of deaths was a staggering 225 times greater.

Senator Johnson then introduced Brianne Dressen, a wife, mother, and preschool teacher turned patient advocate after she enrolled in the Pfizer trials and her health was destroyed by the shot. Dressen had this to say:

We are everyday Americans. We are Republicans, Democrats, Independents. This is not political. This is a human issue.

After receiving the shot, Dressen suffered a cascade of neurological symptoms. “I feel like I’m being electrocuted, 24–7,” she said.

“At first I thought I was alone,” she told the audience. “I found there were thousands like me.”

Seventy percent of the covid vaccine injury victims she spoke to had no pre-existing health conditions, and ninety-four percent had no problems with any other vaccine they had received. The vast majority of them had received all the recommended vaccines, including the flu vaccine.

We reached out to academics. None of them can get their research published. We reached out to the media. We were told “We can’t do anything to make the vaccine look bad.”

We are completely on our own.

All we have is each other.

We have been branded as anti-vaxxers. We had our Facebook groups pulled apart. I have lost contact with Facebook friends who were on the verge of suicide.

Dressen’s testimony was followed by that of a number of distinguished researchers and clinicians who decried the lack of access to the data and the speed at which the vaccines were rushed to the market. Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long, Brigade Surgeon for the US Army’s First Aviation Brigade, noted “We’re going to risk the entire fighting force for a vaccine with two months of safety data,” adding that in just a few months the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System had racked up more deaths associated with the covid vaccines that all other vaccines combined.

“These are soldiers, not lab rats,” she added angrily.

In addition, the audience heard directly from those whose lives were turned upside-down by the covid vaccine. One by one they recounted how they (or their loved ones) took the shot, in good faith, and suffered devastating consequences. Suzanna Newell of Saint Paul, Minnesota was a triathlete until she was vaccinated: “I aged forty years in one night,” she recalled. Twelve-year-old Maddie de Garay of Cincinnati, Ohio was enrolled in the Pfizer trial and suffered dizziness, tachycardia, and chest pains; she ended up in a wheelchair and reliant on a feeding tube. Her brother was also enrolled in the same trial; he happened to be in the placebo arm and escaped unscathed. And Ernest Ramirez of Austin Texas testified:

I was the father of a sixteen-year-old. I was a single parent. I got the vaccine to protect my son.

Me and my son, we were never apart — always together. I always said “It was you and me against the world.”

The younger Ramirez had big dreams. He joined the Junior ROTC program in his high school and planned to enlist in the United States Air Force. He got the vaccine as well, after the FDA declared it safe and effective for youths. The young man subsequently collapsed and died while playing basketball with his friends.

My government lied to me. They said it was safe. Now I go home to an empty house.

Holding up a picture of his son’s coffin, Ramirez told the audience “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

The highlight of the meeting was the video testimony of David Healy, Professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario and a fearless critic of the health services industry, who began with these words:

I am a doctor who treats patients. I also am one of the few people you will ever meet who has seen the actual case records from a company clinical trial.

Dr. Healy went on to discuss some particularly egregious examples of the way drug companies hide the harms in their trials. He mentioned one case in which a participant’s death was recorded as “death by burning,” neglecting to mention the patient had poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire. In another case, a patient who took Pfizer’s blockbuster drug Zoloft and ended up threatening people with a gun had been coded as “intercurrent illness.” In still another case, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been prescribed Zoloft because of problems adjusting to a new school ended up hanging himself, and when his parents went to court to try to procure a modicum of justice for their late son, the next thing they knew Pfizer’s legal attack dogs were sending forensic experts to their home to look for semen samples on the carpet to find support for their theory that the lad’s death had in fact been a case of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Dr. Healy concluded with these words:

If we accept mandates without data, we are opening the door to tyranny.

The full video of the proceedings can be found here.