Relentless lobbying and erroneous data has begun sidelining vaccine safety. We are now the majority and need to come together to stop this.
By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
March 9, 2026
Joe Rogan recently had RFK Jr. on his show, and there, RFK presented an excellent summary of the wide range of remarkable (and previously impossible) things he and his team have been able to pull off after a year due to them having the president's complete support to challenge the vested interests that profit off of keeping us sick. As such, for those of you who want to know what MAHA is actually doing, I would highly recommend watching it.
Unfortunately, this segment also confirmed something I was quite worried about: RFK, someone I know sincerely cares about vaccine safety, did not once discuss vaccines with Rogan, even in numerous instances where it would have been the most expected subject to insert after related points were raised. Based on this (and many other shifts I've noticed recently), I am relatively certain the Trump administration received polling data that made them decide the vaccine subject needed to be avoided until after the midterms and that instead "safer" topics with a more widespread appeal needed to be focused on now. In this article, I will provide the data that shows why this is a mistake and the key steps we can take to correct it.
Note: much in the same way they are angling toward "safe" political health topics, within the integrative medicine field, one of my longstanding frustrations with the discipline has been that most practitioners prefer the "safe" remedies (e.g., supplements and herbs) that are relatively unlikely to generate controversy, but avoid the potent "controversial" therapies (e.g., the umbrella remedies) that get results but are less "safe" to prescribe to patients.
Doctored Data
For decades, a fairly simple formula has been used to control the populace:
• Enshrine chosen parties as credible sources.
• Buy out each credible source.
• Have each bought out credible source reinforce the credibility of the other co-opted sources until a monopoly is established.
• Have the credible sources work in unison to amplify chosen messages or psychological campaigns that supported vested interests.
• Prohibit credible sources from airing anything which threatens vested interests.
• Have all the smaller cogs in the system be pressured to conform to the chosen narratives, and ideally, to identify with them and attack anyone who challenges them so everyone stays in line.
Because of how vast and interwoven it is, I long thought this framework could never be broken, and that there hence would only be a small portion of the population that saw through it. However, the internet, by allowing the free diffusion of information, broke that monopoly on truth, particularly once Elon Musk bought Twitter, and provided a way to prevent that same formula being enacted online as the establishment sought to transform the internet into a landscape of gatekeepers (e.g., Google, Facebook and Wikipedia) that controlled most people's access to online information and "curated" all of it so only approved messages were seen.
A lot of my life has hence revolved around observing how this cruel formula is implemented within the mainstream media and scientific press so that I can:
• Be more equipped to discern what is true and what is false.
• Predict the future, as the formulaic step-wise nature of how this propaganda is implemented often is a "tell" for what will be enacted in the future (e.g., this is how I correctly predicted most of what was going to happen with COVID-19 at the very end of 2019).
• Look for loopholes in the matrix where truth is able to leak out and seize them (e.g., the censorship within mainstream scientific literature was gradually phased in a few decades ago, and largely constrained to Western countries, so a large part of "The Forgotten Side of Medicine" is digging up research outside those bubbles).
COVID Vaccine Polling
Because so many of the social institutions conspire together to reinforce narratives which are at odds with reality, "gaslighting" (abusively altering someone's environment so they start questioning what they are seeing with their own eyes) is commonly used to describe living through this.
Since the scientific literature effectively gaslights us by refusing to publish validated data which challenges pharmaceutical interest (while simultaneously allowing misinformation that promotes industry interests to proliferate throughout it), critical data, like information on COVID vaccine injuries, was largely absent from any credible academic sources. This in essence, is how they are able to convince people vaccine injuries are "rare" and greatly outweighed by the benefits of the vaccine despite injuries being frequent and sometimes quite severe.
Because of this, vaccine safety advocates got extremely frustrated, and eventually, Charlie Kirk figured out a way to bypass this blockade and show people they weren't crazy for thinking COVID vaccine injuries were very real.
Following this, a few parties like Steve Kirsch and his vaccine safety research foundation hired polling firms to directly survey the public on vaccine injuries and provided quantitative data on what was happening. In 2022, of those vaccinated:
In 2023, Professor Mark Skidmore hired a reputable polling firm (Dynata), which surveyed 2,840 respondents and found 15% of those vaccinated had a vaccine injury, 13% of whom categorized it as severe (along with 22% of respondents saying they knew someone with a severe vaccine injury). Since you just can't say that, his paper was retracted, and he was subject to an ethics investigation that eventually cleared him.
Note: Skidmore's paper emphasized an important point for all of these polls-since those severely injured were much less likely to be able to respond to a poll, they were likely underestimated in polling.
Likewise, in 2024, a 1000 person poll Kirsch commissioned found that 12.5%-20.3% of vaccinated respondents were injured from the shots (along with 7.6-12.2% knowing someone who was injured), with roughly two-thirds of the injured categorizing their vaccine injury as "serious" or "very serious." However, despite Democrat respondents reporting a higher rate of vaccine injury for themselves and those around them, they were much more likely to believe the vaccine was safe and effective (83.62% did) than Republicans (44.49%) or Independents (51.81%).
Note: in every poll I've seen, Democrats reported a somewhat higher rate of injury than Republicans (likely due to taking more vaccines) but simultaneously were much less likely to think the vaccine was unsafe or ineffective. Likewise, numerous polls consistently found those vaccinated were more likely to believe the vaccine was safe and effective. For brevity, I will omit that data (but for those interested it can be read here).
As no one wanted to touch this issue, only one polling organization independently investigated it, Rasmussen Reports (a conservative polling organization which has a reputation for getting accurate results due to them having listeners punch answers in response to an automated voice rather than directly talking to someone who may bias them). For American adults, they found:
• July of 2021: 32% believed public health officials were lying about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
• December 2022: 56% of 1000 respondents believed the vaccines were effective, 57% were concerned the vaccines had major side effects. Most importantly, 34% of those vaccinated reported minor side effects and 7% reported major side effects (e.g., those seriously impairing their quality of life).
• January 2023: 49% believed it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths and 28% personally knew someone whose death may have been caused by side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines.
• January 2023: 57% wanted Congress to investigate how the CDC handled assessing vaccine safety (presumably since many suspected the CDC had covered up the dangers of the COVID vaccination program).
• In March 2023, 11% of those surveyed reported that they believed a member of their household died from COVID-19, while 10% believed a member of their household died and that their death may have been due to a side effect of the vaccine.
• In September 2023, 47% of those surveyed stated they did not believe the vaccines were safe and 34% did not believe they were effective. As before, these results also politically stratified as Democrats were less likely to believe the vaccines were unsafe (14% D vs. 51% R) or ineffective (17% D vs. 57% R).
• November 2023: 24% personally knew someone they believe died from a COVID vaccine, and of those individuals, 69% would be likely to join a class action lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies.
• In January 2024, 53% believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths and 24% personally knew someone whose death may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
• In September 2024, 55% surveyed believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths - including 30% who say it's very likely.
• In November 2025, 26% reported they had minor side effects from the vaccine and 10% reported major side effects. Additionally, 46% believed it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths - including 25% who say it's very likely.
In short, the data shows you aren't crazy, and while the news is not reporting it, the majority of people are seeing exactly the same thing you are. There is no getting around the fact a lot of people were harmed by these vaccines and one of the best data compilations I've seen that puts all of this into perspective was a March 2023 estimate Ed Dowd produced from data sources available at this time (e.g., these polls and disability data). This deliberately conservative estimate showed:
Note: one of the interesting discoveries in these polls (and many others) is that the rate of respondents who reported being vaccinated is much lower than the official figures suggested. I suspect a key motivation for this was that each increasingly authoritarian COVID vaccine mandate could only be enacted if a sufficient number of people were "vaccinated". So in addition to pushing as many people as possible to vaccinate with the increasingly aggressive enticements we saw (scarcity sales, small payments, larger payments, prohibiting people from businesses, travel bans, and then mandates at school or work), they likely also directly inflated their figures.