The King of the Shills

Inside the upside-down mind of Orac

Well, gee, folks, it looks like we’ve gone too far this time. Another “fully vaccinated” success story has left the mortal plane, and, in our rapacious race to pin blame where it may belong, we have deeply upset David Gorski, a.k.a. Orac. He has taken us to the woodshed here and beaten us with a typical wet noodle.

Now, firstly, since we’re staying human here, condolences on the loss of his friend, Harriet Hall, the “SkepDoc”, who surely lived an exemplary life before succumbing to cardiac arrest at the age of 77.

She was triple-boosted as of late 2021, when she praised the ready access available at her local grocery store. This pattern presumably continued throughout the following year, and would likely include the recent bivalent clot-shot, though this has not been confirmed.

We do not, and probably will not, know whether her death was related to the injections she indulged so enthusiastically, because the relevant authorities have not implemented a protocol to test for this involvement, and there is no interest in assessing this hypothesis in her medical community.

It’s an edge case, to be sure. When such an individual passes away so close to their expected lifespan, it might be expedient to write it off. Of course, this was by no means the case when coding mortality due to the instigating virus; C-19 was attributed by default, even in the presence of clear alternative causes.

Gorski is far too familiar for many of us who traffic in medical “misinformation”. A repurposed oncologist who tilts at anti-vax windmills, he steadfastly denies any claim of injury, regardless of how true it may be. His articles are notable for unsupported assertions, grandiose declarations of infallibility, and a venomous prose style as tortured as his logic.

Announcing the greatest pain of her loss, “Unfortunately antivaxxers have glommed onto her death and have added to their “died suddenly” narrative, their conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines are causing a wave of people “dying suddenly.” I’m not surprised. I wish I were. As I said after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered an on-field cardiac arrest, most likely from commotio cordis, after my initial shock my very next thought was to wonder how long it would be before antivaxxers started blaming her unexpected passing on COVID-19 vaccines.”

There are few fanatics as dedicated to their Pharma faith as Orac. Even while allegedly mourning his friend, he has no shortage of vitriol for the people speculating on the cause of her death, while tacitly reserving this right for himself.

“The bottom line is that, sadly, Harriet was 77 and in poor general health, with cardiac disease, arrhythmia, and probably heart failure that together her (sic) at high risk for a sudden cardiac event or a stroke. I also know that antivaxxers, when they learn of her health problems and cardiac risk, will likely quite happily respin their story to claim that vaccines killed her because she had had preexisting heart disease. That is how ghoulish they are.”

Yes, ghoulish. To suggest that even someone with comorbidities is vulnerable to repeated application of a poison. That heart issues could be considered a contraindication for an experimental injection about which little is known, other than that it is definitively associated with an unprecedented level of cardiac risk.

In Orac’s clown world, the real villains are those who “take advantage” of someone suddenly dying to highlight the dangers of that which may have killed them. He appears to believe, or at least is willing to profess for the sake of rhetoric, that “died suddenly” is some spurious concoction brewed in the deranged minds of rabid anti-vaxxers.

“I described elsewhere how the “died suddenly” narrative had been percolating starting when the vaccines rolled out but lacked a pithy, memorable phrase. “Died Suddenly” was that phrase. It appears to have originated sometime in the fall of 2021, but it didn’t really take off in a big way until summer of 2022. Now it’s a catchphrase, a dogwhistle.”

Here is a typical story from a few hours ago at MSN.com, apparently a hotbed of “anti-vaccination activism”.

Bradford NHS doctor Paul Southern dies suddenly as tributes flood in for 'selfless' professional

A consultant at Bradford Teaching Hospital has suddenly died with tributes flooding in for him.

”Dr Paul Southern, who was a Consultant Hepatologist, Associate Medical Director and Chief Clinical Information Officer at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, suddenly died at the start of this week.”

Headline, subtitle, lede. They managed to hit that dog whistle pretty hard, huh? Maybe if there weren’t articles like this smacking us in the face every day, we wouldn’t maintain this bizarre belief that people are suddenly dying. Like, all over the place.

So, no, Orac, we don’t deserve the credit for the “died suddenly” meme that’s messing up your funerals. The credit belongs to the multitude of institutions who have studiously promoted these unsafe concoctions, the very media who has fought every step of the way against awareness of risks.

He quotes Paul Alexander as a testament to the vileness of antivax rhetoric.

“I do not want people to say ‘good riddance’ etc. No, we mourn, this is death and painful yet her position was flat wrong in any attacks on the unvaccinated. When she spoke ‘balance’ it was important and I thank her for that. Other than that, I wish her family peace as they grieve and her a direct route to heaven to our maker and huge love even as I say she was dangerously and recklessly wrong in her advocacy for an injection that killed. As smart as she was, she fell for the lies and did not look and the body of evidence that accumulated to show the shot was ineffective and dangerous and was subverting the immune system.”

Monstrous.

Orac doesn’t apply this double-standard to his own speculative article, naturally. He freely weaponizes his friend’s demise to advance his own brand of denialism and hate speech, evidently oblivious to the irony.

Amidst all of this wailing about exploiting death to promote speculation and ideological fixation, Orac goes on to prove, in typical patented fashion, that his objections are pure projection on a screen.

“Antivaxxers can try to claim that vaccines killed Harriet all they want, but we know the truth, that unfortunately there are things medicine can’t always fix or prevent and that none of us gets out of here alive.” Only Gorski knows the truth. His magic eight-ball tells him that the 3+ jabs are innocent. The rest of us are deeply confused.

The media doesn’t miss a moment of these death spectacles. Pharmaprop “debunkers” don’t heed their own calls to privacy, as they peddle their own brand of improbable speculation. What Gorski is calling for is unilateral disarmament. Only the faithful minions of Scientism are permitted to opine on the cause of sudden deaths.

Scanning obits for likely injuries and deaths is indeed a grisly way to pass the time. It’s an odd, morbid feeling, hunting for clues, trying to figure out if this one or that one was jabbed, weighing the possibility, doing the job that the government refuses to do.

On the other hand, if someone “died suddenly” with a bullet in their brain, no one would object to detectives investigating. Concerns for the privacy and dignity of the dead would be taped off and the quest for evidence would take top priority. The emotions of the grieving do not outweigh the urgency of identifying the potential murderer at large.

Certainly no one would be suggesting that it was just a coincidence, except for the complicit.

We don’t have the resources of FDA or CDC. We can’t order autopsies, or access undoctored data. Guesses are the only guide. Mistakes will inevitably be made, because crowd-sourcing safety monitoring to the overworked resistance movement is not “good governance”.

There is always the chance that one or the other is a genuine coincidence, but virtually none that all of them are. If only there were a system where adverse events could be reported and analyzed. If only there were some way to know whether that shot is really the culprit.

The reality is that the only people who care about “vaccine” safety are the people who wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot needle. So, sorry about your friend, Orac. Very sorry that the accredited doctors around her, like yourself, have been, and continue to be so incurious about the potential cause of her demise. Maybe if you’d asked the questions you mock us for asking, she’d be alive today. Or not.

We aren’t tracking the safety signal for our own health. It’s not our health at stake here. We already made up our minds. We’re doing this for you, who despise us. Those who condemn us are the ones we’re trying to warn.

Gorski seems far more afraid of his death being fodder for his enemies than he is of actually dying. You get the sense that if he dropped right after after his gazillionth booster, he’d use his last breath to deny that the jab was to blame.

“Unfortunately, I will probably be thinking that way until the day that I, too, die, either suddenly or not, after which antivaxxers will probably blame my death on vaccines, even if I meet my end being run over by a truck.”

Here’s our promise to you: if you are indeed run over by a truck, we’ll be sure to see if the driver was recently boosted. Somehow, we suspect it will look like the others: sudden, unexplained.