"vaxx" damage: the report finally comes out

Headline (paywall):

CDC Releases Hidden COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Reports
The agency was forced by a federal judge to disclose the reports.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released previously hidden reports of facial paralysis and other adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.

The 780,000 reports were received shortly after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out and show that people experienced a wide range of post-vaccination problems, including heart inflammation, miscarriages, and seizures.

“Loss of consciousness and seizure immediately following injection. Went to ER by ambulance,” one person reported.

Another stated, “Diagnosed with Bells Palsy today due to left-sided facial numbness and paralysis.”

People lodged the reports with V-safe, a text-message system created by the CDC to monitor for possible side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

The CDC, for years, declined to make the V-safe data public, instead publishing studies that described the reports as providing reassurance about the safety of the vaccines. However, according to data released in 2022, nearly 8 percent of the 10 million users required medical attention or hospital care after vaccination, and many others reported missing school, work, or other normal activities.

That topline data came from check-the-box surveys.

The same judge who ordered the release of that data ordered the agency in January to disclose free-text entries from a different section in which individuals could describe their experiences. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by former President Donald Trump, dismissed the government’s arguments that processing the responses and redacting sensitive information would require too much work.

The first two tranches, made up of 780,000 reports from some 523,000 people, include dozens of reports of heart inflammation, hundreds of reports of facial paralysis, and thousands of reports of tinnitus.

Suppressing such reports is an unimaginably huge ethical violation, especially if "science" prides itself on both its "openness" and its "constant quest for truth," both of which are laughable notions at best these days.

At the same time, there's the news, and there's personal experience. I know plenty of people who got vaccinated, and as far as I know, only my boss suffered any ill effects, and his symptoms were minor. I, by contrast, avoided getting vaccinated and had hoped to reap the vaunted benefits of natural immunity, but the only benefit I got, based on my recent second run-in with COVID, was no loss of taste and smell. Instead, this time round, I got saddled with severe breathing problems, along with some disquieting chest pains. Would I have been better off getting jabbed? It's hard to say, especially with my being in at least some of the danger demographics (obesity, diabetes).

I think back to how the news, especially right-leaning news, tells us all sorts of nightmare stories about Muslims. My own personal encounters with Muslims, by contrast, have been polite and positive. I do, in fact, believe there are plenty of Muslims who quietly agree with a sinister agenda, but it's hard to square that with the nature of my meetings with actual Muslims, who have all been friendly or at least cordial. Maybe that's a function of being in the West: if I were to tour a Muslim-dominant country, would I end up as yet another tragic statistic? Anyway, the news about COVID strikes me as contrasting with my personal experience of it. For three years, I was able to avoid being infected. So much time passed, in fact, that I began to wonder whether I'd been infected but was just asymptomatic. Then, last year, I got COVID, and the initial onslaught of the virus was both miserable and short, but there were lingering effects: loss of taste and smell for months. This time around, as I said above, my taste and smell were fine, but my heart and lungs definitely took a hit, and I'm still shaking that off even weeks after the initial infection (mid-March).

So there's the news about the thing, and there's the personal experience of the thing, and they often don't square up. It's a fractured, incommensurate world we live in, so we may have to get used to pigenholing the "truths" that come our way. Perhaps the news is right, and perhaps my personal experience is also valid. And these things belong in separate pigeonholes.

To be reconciled later.

UPDATE: my time in the hospital suggests I've been very, very wrong to draw a connection between heart/lung issues and COVID. More on this later.