Fueled by the phrase, “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” last year many corporate media outlets began running a series of articles attacking people who chose to exercise their medical informed consent rights and not get vaccinated for Covid-19. The hit pieces laid the blame for the continuing Covid pandemic squarely on the shoulders of unvaccinated Americans. Why? Because in a crisis situation in which there appears to be no end in sight or any quick solution or easy exit strategy, identifying a scapegoat may often be the next best thing.

The underlying assumption behind the scapegoating of unvaccinated people by the media was that Covid shots available to the public were capable of preventing infection with and transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and, thus, represented the solution to ending the Covid pandemic once and for all. Those opting not to get the shots and remain unvaccinated were then, logically, to blame for the unnecessary continuation of the pandemic.

Of course, this underlying assumption about how unvaccinated people were the ones getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and spreading the virus was already on very shaky ground at the time. In January 2021, The Vaccine Reaction reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) had warned that there was no guarantee the Covid shots would prevent people from getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and transmitting it to others.

The TVR article, written by Barbara Loe Fisher, also noted a Newsweek interview with Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which reinforced the WHO’s admission that health officials did not know if the Covid shots could prevent infection and transmission. Fisher wrote: According to WHO officials, while it appears the vaccines can prevent clinically symptomatic Covid-19 clinical disease, there is no clear evidence Covid-19 vaccines are effective at preventing asymptomatic infection and transmission. Fisher quoted WHO chief scientist and pediatrician Soumya Swaminathan, MD, who said:

We continue to wait for more results from the vaccine trials to really understand whether the vaccines, apart from preventing symptomatic disease and severe disease and deaths, whether they’re also going to reduce infection or prevent people from getting infected with the virus, then from passing it on or transmitting it to other people. I don’t’ believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on. CDC Admits Fully Vaccinated People Can Catch and Spread SARS-CoV-2 During the summer of 2021, there was an outbreak of Covid in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in which 74 percent of the people infected with SARS-CoV-2 and diagnosed were fully vaccinated. After analyzing the data from the outbreak, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that vaccinated individuals can become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and transmit it to others.

That was a watershed moment in the pandemic because that is when it became clear that the available Covid shots could not be relied on to protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission. That is the moment in history that the rationale for blaming unvaccinated people for ongoing Covid pandemic ceased to make any sense.

But still, the media persisted, even after CDC director Rochelle Walensky, MD publicly stated on Aug. 5, 2021 that while she believed the Covid shots “work well” with the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus “with regard to severe illness and death,” they are no longer able to “prevent transmission” of the virus. On Aug 12, 2021, Salon published an article titled “It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms.” A few days later, on Aug. 16, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled ” We can’t blame the unmasked and unvaccinated for being irresponsible?