Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study does not disprove a link between COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths among young people, contrary to claims.

The study, published by the CDC’s quasi-journal on April 11, analyzed death certificates from Oregon for people aged 16 to 30 who died between June 2021 and December 2022.

Among people who died with evidence of vaccination, three died within 100 days of a shot, Drs. Juventila Liko and Paul Cieslak with the Oregon Health Authority found.

None of those three deaths could be attributed to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination, or shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, according to the doctors. Two of the deaths were attributed to underlying conditions while the cause of death for the third was “undetermined.”

“These data do not support an association between receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young persons,” the doctors wrote.

The authors failed to note that a much larger, peer-reviewed study from South Korea confirmed vaccine-induced myocarditis caused eight sudden cardiac deaths (SCDs), all among people younger than 45. Myocarditis is a form of heart inflammation.

The new study “is at odds with a higher quality and peer-reviewed journal article published in the European Heart Journal,” Dr. David McCune, who was not involved with either paper, told The Epoch Times via email. “The study, from Korea, found a small but significant group of patients who had SCD and autopsy evidence consistent with vaccine-induced myocarditis.”

Multiple media outlets published stories on the new study, but none mentioned the South Korean article.

The stories also included false or misleading claims.

U.S. News and World Report’s story said that it was an “incorrect idea that COVID-19 vaccines are linked to death in young people.”

NBC’s article said that the study “debunks widespread misinformation that the mRNA shots were connected to sudden cardiac death in young athletes.”

NBC reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr. also wrote that “there is no evidence that COVID vaccines cause fatal cardiac arrest or other deadly heart problems in teens and young adults, a CDC report finds.”

“I don’t think that is close to an accurate assessment of the CDC paper or the overall level of knowledge we have about vaccine risk,” Dr. McCune said.

The reporters who wrote the articles for U.S. News and World Report, NBC, The Hill, and Medpage Today did not respond to requests for comment.

Other papers that support a link between deaths among young people and COVID-19 vaccination include a study that analyzed post-vaccination deaths in Qatar and determined there was a “high probability” that eight sudden cardiac deaths, including one person aged 11 to 20, were caused by the vaccination. Some death certificates have also described COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis as a cause of death for sudden deaths, including the certificate for an American college student who died suddenly after receiving a Pfizer shot.

Authorities in the United States acknowledge that the COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis but maintain no deaths have been caused by vaccine-induced myocarditis. They have refused to release autopsies conducted on people who died after COVID-19 vaccination. Several long-term studies have identified heart scarring in people who suffered myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination. Some experts say the scarring may be permanent and could eventually lead to death.

Dr. Ofer Levy, an adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told NBC that no vaccine has ever been conclusively linked to sudden cardiac death and that the new study “adds to evidence that people don’t drop dead from getting their mRNA COVID vaccines.” Dr. Levy did not respond when asked whether he was aware of the South Korean paper and other literature.

NBC also quoted Dr. Leslie Cooper in promoting the study while failing to note that Dr. Cooper is a consultant for Moderna.

Authors Respond

Asked why they didn’t mention literature that presents evidence of sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young people after vaccination, the authors told The Epoch Times in an email that they had. The studies they included are an Israeli paper that does not mention sudden death; a letter that noted sudden deaths among athletes, regardless of vaccination status, since the vaccines were rolled out; an analysis of 911 calls from Israel; and a case definition for myocarditis that says it can be a cause of sudden death. None of the papers cite autopsy data or other strong evidence that has emerged.

The authors also linked to a 2021 CDC statement and a 2021 CDC presentation, neither of which mention sudden death.

The authors did not say whether they were unaware of the South Korean study or chose not to include it.

The CDC should “not have published their study without acknowledging the international studies that have identified post-mRNA vax-related cardiac death in young people,” Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who was not involved in the research, wrote on the social media platform X.

In the paper, the authors also cited an earlier CDC study that found people who entered a health system were at higher risk of cardiac complications after COVID-19 infection versus after COVID-19 vaccination. The relevance isn’t clear since the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection, and some other studies have found that the risk of myocarditis is higher after vaccination among young people.

Asked why they didn’t cite any of those other studies, the authors referred back to the papers they did cite and said they “also clearly expressed the limitations in the research.”

Limitations of the paper include the small population size, which would make it “less likely” for Oregon to record “a rare event such as sudden cardiac death among adolescents and young adults,” the authors wrote in the study.

“Nevertheless, it is clear that the risk, if any, of cardiac death linked to COVID-19 vaccination is very low, while the risk of dying from COVID-19 is real,” Dr. Cieslak said in a press release issued by the Oregon Health Authority. “We continue to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for all persons 6 months of age and older to prevent COVID-19 and complications, including death.”

The authority didn’t list any data that show the currently available vaccines prevent COVID-19 complications such as death. U.S. regulators cleared them in 2023 without clinical trial efficacy data. Only animal testing data was available for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Novavax shots. Moderna presented antibody data from 50 humans. Observational studies have since provided mixed effectiveness data against infection and hospitalization.

CDC Journal

The CDC published the study in its journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which only publishes papers after officials shape them to align with the agency’s messaging. The CDC has been relentlessly promotive of the COVID-19 vaccines since they were rolled out.

Previous releases of documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that CDC officials engage in multiple rounds of editing of papers published in the journal.

The authors of the new paper acknowledged that the paper was edited prior to publication.

“CDC made no edits that altered the conclusions of the study,” they said.

The CDC journal’s editor-in-chief did not respond to a query.

The Epoch Times has filed FOIA requests to ascertain which edits were made, and by whom.

The authors also defended the choice to submit the paper to MMWR, rather than a traditional journal.

“Many times there is a large amount of observational data that is critical for time-sensitive reporting to inform public health practitioners and clinicians. These sorts of time-sensitive publications that might impact the actions of state and county public health leaders have long been published in the CDC’s MMWR,” they said. “In fact, there are numerous examples of CDC’s MMWR being the first source of information during many important historical events, including the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, the discovery of Legionnaires disease, the initial cases of H1N1 in 2009.”

Harvard is joining the ranks of other universities in recognizing the obvious: SATs are a great way to measure aptitude. And now that Harvard is busy grappling with other issues like plagiarism among its top ranks, it has decided to quietly shuffle SAT requirements back to where they were pre-Covid. 

Harvard will reintroduce standardized testing requirements for admissions starting with the Class of 2029, deviating from its prior commitment to remain test-optional through the Class of 2030.

This change, prompted by criticism as peers like Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown resumed mandatory testing, will affect applicants for fall and winter 2024, who must submit SAT or ACT scores unless exceptions apply. In specific cases where students can't access these tests, Harvard will accept scores from Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams instead, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Complete and utter defeat for the anti-test crusaders pic.twitter.com/ubfbg2QTxL

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 11, 2024

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi E. Hoekstra said:  “...standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond. More information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range. With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students.”

Uh, yeah. That's why it was a requirement to begin with. But we digress...

The Crimson wrote that despite a majority of undergraduates submitting standardized test scores over the past four years, the exact figure has not been disclosed.

Recently, Harvard officials, including Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons, were non-committal about reinstating testing requirements, noting ongoing policy reviews. However, a study from the Harvard-affiliated Opportunity Insights indicated that SAT scores are a better predictor of college success than high school GPA. Experts also suggest that requiring standardized tests could enhance racial and socioeconomic diversity at universities like Harvard.

Harvard economist David J. Deming commented that test scores provide the “fairest admissions policy for disadvantaged applicants.”

“Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT,” he continued.

Recall, we wrote just days ago that $500 tutors were back en vogue now that SATs were being reinstated. It was earlier this year when we noted that SATs were once again being reconsidered by colleges who had reduced or eliminated their requirement due to (pick one: diversity, racism, climate change, equity, gender affirmation). 

As a result of the comeback, Bloomberg noted that tutors, sometimes costing $500 per hour, are all of a sudden back in vogue. They wrote that demand for SAT tutoring and prep centers is surging as several top colleges reintroduce mandatory SATs, and students adapt to the SAT's new digital format.

Kaplan reported a significant enrollment increase, attributed to digital testing and the reinstatement of testing requirements by institutions and three Ivy League schools—Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown—have reinstated mandatory SATs, alongside MIT and the University of Texas at Austin. This shift has left many students scrambling for preparation before early application deadlines.

Companies like The Princeton Review have also seen a spike in interest for prep services.

We noted earlier this year in a piece from American Greatness, that according to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

My first article on the coming backlash - admittedly wildly optimistic - went to print April 24, 2020.

After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.

I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.

The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.

There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.

Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.

New literature is emerging to document it all.

The new book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony.

The revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the ruled.

With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population.

One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.”

She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that:

“The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed .... The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”

A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:

“The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

We truly want to believe this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while demonizing disagreement.

After all, all of these venues, in addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible results.

Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.

The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom—to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask—can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.

The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well, and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.

The issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting themselves.

That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.

This is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media, which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.

Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining.

When the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun, with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”

DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it. Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.

As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Donald Trump or RFK, Jr.

So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.

What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change?

These are legitimate questions.

For hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving themselves at public expense.

That seems correct. In the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 15 years ago, the street protesters spoke of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. They were speaking of those with the money inside the traders’ buildings as opposed to the people on the streets and everywhere else.

Even if that movement misidentified the full nature of the problem, the intuition into which it tapped spoke to a truth. Such a disproportionate distribution of power and wealth is dangerously unsustainable. Revolution of some sort threatens. The mystery right now is what form this takes. It’s unknown because we’ve never been here before.

There is no real historical record of a highly developed society ostensibly living under a civilized code of law that experiences an upheaval of the type that would be required to unseat the rulers of all the commanding heights. We’ve seen political reform movements that take place from the top down but not really anything that approximates a genuine bottom-up revolution of the sort that is shaping up right now.

We know, or think we know, how it all transpires in a tinpot dictatorship or a socialist society of the old Soviet bloc. The government loses all legitimacy, the military flips loyalties, there is a popular revolt that boils over, and the leaders of the government flee. Or they simply lose their jobs and take up new positions in civilian life. These revolutions can be violent or peaceful but the end result is the same. One regime replaces another.

It’s hard to know how this translates to a society that is heavily modernized and seen as non-totalitarian and even existing under the rule of law, more or less. How does revolution occur in this case? How does the regime come around to adapting itself to a public revolt against governance as we know it in the US, UK, and Europe?

Yes, there is the vote, if we can trust that. But even here, there are the candidates, which are that for a reason. They specialize in politics, which does not necessarily mean doing the right thing or reflecting the aspirations of the voters behind them. They are responsive to their donors first, as we have long discovered. Public opinion can matter but there is no mechanism that guarantees a smoothly responsive pathway from popular attitudes to political outcomes.

There is also the pathway of industrial change, a migration of resources out of legacy venues to new ones. Indeed, in the marketplace of ideas, the amplifiers of regime propaganda are failing but we also observe the response: widened censorship. What’s happening in Brazil with the full criminalization of free speech can easily happen in the US.

In social media, were it not for Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it’s hard to know where we would be. We have no large platform in which to influence the culture more broadly. And yet the attacks on that platform and other enterprises owned by Musk are growing. This is emblematic of a much more robust upheaval taking place, one that suggests change is on the way.

But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts. An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new elite replaces them with different ideas.

In this model, we can expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.

And yet, people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.

The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path.

The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.