(LifeSiteNews) — Almost a quarter of respondents to a new Rasmussen Reports survey say they believe they personally know someone killed by the COVID-19 shots, with even more indicating that they would be interested in joining a class action lawsuit against the shots’ manufacturers.
The survey of 1,110 adults, conducted in late October, found that 47% of respondents “know someone personally who died from the COVID-19 virus,” 24% “know someone personally who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine,” and 42% would be “likely” to join a hypothetical “major class-action lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies for vaccine side effects.”
“Among those who say someone they know died from the COVID-19 virus, 41% also say they know someone who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine,” Rasmussen says. “By contrast, among those who say they don’t know anyone who died from the virus, only nine percent (9%) say they know someone who died from COVID-19 vaccine side effects.”
Curiously, the survey found almost “no difference” between Republicans, Democrats, and the politically-unaffiliated on belief that personal acquaintances were killed by the jabs, but government employees “are more than twice as likely as private sector workers” to say they know such a person.
While not asking the same question, past polling by more left-leaning outlets has found comparable levels of concern over the COVID shots, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
Morning Consult’s U.S. Vaccine Tracker, which it stopped updating in January, consistently found those “unwilling” to take the shot hovering in the 20% range since March 2021. In May, 58% told Pew Research Center the risks of side effects were “medium” or “high,” though 62% also said they thought the benefits outweigh the risks. The Kaiser Family Foundation found in September that less than half of adults (47%) plan to get the latest vaccine, and Ipsos found last month that 37% of Americans are “not at all likely” to receive the latest booster.
On Thursday, Vaccine Safety Research Foundation founder Steve Kirsch published a Substack essay on Rasmussen’s survey, which he said “confirms (yet again) that the COVID vaccine is a train wreck, the biggest healthcare disaster in our lifetime.”
If the findings are accurate, he wrote, that would mean “56% of people who got vaccinated are or were vaccine injured in some way,” because “42% want to sue but only 75% were vaccinated. So 42/75=56%.” An,d if one accepts that a million people died from COVID itself, “then this poll suggests that 500K people died from the COVID vaccine (computed as 24/47×1.1M killed from COVID virus using the two numbers above from the survey).”
“[V]accine deaths are at least comparable to COVID deaths.” he argued. “But COVID deaths were inflated by at least 2X (because hospitals got paid when they reported a COVID death because the government was trying to encourage hospitals to kill people so they labeled everything they could a COVID death to maximize revenue). So we’re realistically looking at around 500,000 deaths caused by the vaccine if we put on our red pill glasses.”
Further validating the accuracy of Rasmussen’s findings, he argued, are the facts that the outfit found that a similar number of people said they knew a COVID jab victim in December 2022 and that the number of people who say they know one is roughly consistent across most demographic groups.
“The very sad reality is much worse than Rasmussen’s poll indicates because around half the respondents couldn’t see a vaccine injury even if it hit them in their own family just like it did to Congressman Sean Casten whose 17 year old daughter Gwen tragically died unexpectedly in a manner 100% consistent with a vaccine death,” Kirsch wrote. “See this article and this article. Did they ever rule out the COVID vaccine in Gwen’s death. No. They didn’t even test for it. They didn’t want to know. Why don’t they want to know? They urged their daughter to take the vaccine that killed her. They wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they learned the truth. So they didn’t look.”
Despite all the above, Kirsch predicted that the public health establishment and its allies will not begin to relent in their “gaslighting” on behalf of the vaccines until one of three things happens: “At least 15% of Congress becomes visibly vaccine injured. A state health official releases the record level data so that the community can prove the vaccines were a disaster” (which he dismissed as a possibility), or at “least 60% of Americans have been injured by the COVID vaccine.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) says that more than 270 million Americans, or 81% of the population, has received at least one COVID vaccine dose, with over 230 million considered fully vaccinated and only 56.5 million having taken the updated Bivalent booster dose. According to Worldometers, 1,181,151 Americans have died from the virus, although determining accurate COVID death numbers is complicated by inaccurate cause-of-death codings and financial incentives for hospitals to overcount COVID deaths.
While poll respondents believing someone was killed by a COVID shot is not conclusive on its own, a substantial body of evidence affirms that not only have the COVID-19 vaccines performed far less effectively than promised, they also carry significant health risks.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 36,324 deaths, 210,347 hospitalizations, 20,872 heart attacks, and 27,564 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of September 29, among other ailments. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary.
Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than overreporting.
A 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of underreporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
In 2021, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such underreporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under HHS’s Indian Health Service program, in which emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
In December 2022, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7 percent, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “25 percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”
Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”
Despite all of the above, a class action lawsuit against COVID vaccine manufacturers is currently relegated to the hypothetical realm thanks to the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005, which, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), empowers the federal government to “limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.” Near the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, HHS invoked the act in declaring the virus a “public health emergency.”
Under this “sweeping” immunity, CRS explains, the federal government, state governments, “manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures,” and licensed or otherwise-authorized health professionals distributing those countermeasures are shielded from “all claims of loss” stemming from those countermeasures, with the exception of “death or serious physical injury” brought about through “willful misconduct,” a standard that, among other hurdles, requires the offender to have acted “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”
Kirsch noted, however, that last month the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) announced a lawsuit seeking to “strike down the immunity to liability and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) provisions” of the PREP Act. The suit, filed on behalf of eight individuals harmed “severely” by the shots, argues for the “right to due process protections such as adequate time limits within which they can sue, the right to see any evidence used against them, the ability to present expert witnesses, and the right to appeal an adverse decision.”
This week, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who lobbied his state’s Supreme Court to approve a grand jury investigation of the subject, said he would support repealing vaccine manufacturers’ immunity from liability if elected, noting it has created “incentives” to “produce anything you can get to the market and then make money off it because you aren’t going to be held accountable for the safety.”
In recent months, some schools, hospitals, and businesses have resumed mask mandates, citing rising cases from new COVID variants against which the government admits current jabs may not be effective. The news has prompted speculation as to whether a return to broader lockdowns is forthcoming.
President Joe Biden has announced he is seeking funding from Congress to develop new COVID vaccines for these variants, prompting fears of new mandates, similarly rushed development, and whether they would have similar problems as the shots developed under his predecessor.