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Last Friday, Stanford Medicine confirmed that the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine can cause myocarditis. In a new study, the researchers detailed, for the first time, causation between the vaccine and heart muscle inflammation, particularly from two specific proteins causing increased levels of cardiac troponin, a protein in heart muscle. The myocarditis caused by the vaccine was linked to the myocarditis caused by a case of the virus itself, and perhaps most importantly, the dangers of myocarditis were found to particularly affect young men and adolescents.
Surrounding their acknowledgments of the potential danger of the vaccine itself and its corresponding causes, the researchers concerned themselves with reiterating the efficacy of the vaccine and the relative non-importance of such risks. The research team maintained full support for the vaccine and downplayed the chances of incurring myocarditis from the vaccine and from such a case of myocarditis being life threatening.
The extent to which the vaccine causes health defects, however, is not the most shocking or interesting part of this new development. Stanford’s report today cavalierly admits potential dangers to the vaccine following years of attacking and censoring anyone who questioned it during its introduction. Stanford engaged in censorship regarding COVID-19 policies, mandated the vaccine, and ran censorship campaigns that reached from campus all the way to Twitter’s online speech.
In April of 2021, Stanford mandated that every undergraduate, graduate, and professional student be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and less than a month later imposed the same mandate on all faculty and staff. Later that year, in November, Stanford doubled down on the policy, mandating booster shots for all students.
There were a few professors who spoke out. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford professor and current Director of the NIH, was one. In a piece published the summer following Stanford’s mandate, Dr. Bhattacharya argued that Stanford’s COVID mandate, as well as that of other elite universities, harmed public health by mandating a vaccine that could harm young people for a virus that had little to no risk for them. He explicitly cited myocarditis in young people from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as a concern, one that could outweigh potential harms of contracting the virus.
Dr. Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Trump administration advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, slammed the irresponsibility of the early vaccine push, and its pediatric testing led by Stanford. In an interview with Fox News, he slammed medical professionals and experts and universities across the country for “injecting experimental drugs into young children that have no significant benefit from the drug.”
Perhaps best summarized, Dr. Bhattacharya called vaccine mandates at universities “unethical”, while Dr. Atlas called the pediatric testing of vaccines on children a “violation of medical ethics.” Stanford plowed on, undeterred.
Stanford did not stop at a vaccine mandate. Like with the rest of their COVID-19 policies, they silenced dissent. In the wake of lockdowns and mask mandates on and beyond college campuses, Dr. Atlas spoke out and was promptly censured by the university. A year ago, the senate faculty disgracefully voted against repealing his censure, entrenching Stanford further in an anti-free speech and censorship campaign that particularly raged over the pandemic. Stanford also suppressed Dr. Bhattacharya’s research on COVID-19 mortality and transmission because it failed to support mainstream institutional narratives. The crusade of vaccination even surpassed Stanford’s religion of inclusivity as the university threatened deportation to any international student who refused the booster shot.
Perhaps the highest level of betrayal on behalf of Stanford University was their engagement in nationwide censorship of COVID policies, especially vaccines.
Through the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the Stanford Virality Project collaborated with then-Twitter to censor stories that they knew were factually true about vaccine side effects in order to stymie any doubt regarding the vaccine. They targeted anyone who disagreed with the government's opinion on vaccines, and reported natural immunity and vaccinated people being infected as disinformation. The Stanford Virality Project went so far as to classify a story about a post-vaccine death as disinformation.
Stanford went so much further than attacking free speech. As Dr. Bhattacharya put it, they engaged in actively harming public health and threatening the lives and well-being of millions. They did it on campus, in faculty meetings, and on international platforms. They attacked the highest professional voices at their own university, and recommitted to terrible policy at every opportunity. Stanford Medicine fails to see the irony in casually releasing this study on myocarditis after silencing others for making the same claim.
From government pressure to tyrannical scientific authority to self-righteous shaming to censorship, our country and institutions did everything in their power to compel a vaccine narrative. This most recent study is a reminder that they were wrong—wrong to silence, wrong in their pursuit of orthodoxy, and most crucially, wrong about life-threatening facts. Worst of all, they knew they were wrong, and they lied and obscured nonetheless. A medical and academic apparatus that puts public perception and political interests over health is not just backwards—it’s dystopian, and should scare us all.
