Vax Expert: ‘Accountability’ Needed to Restore Americans’ Trust in Public Health

The bureaucrats responsible for bungling America’s response to COVID-19 must be “brought to court and held accountable for their actions,” Dr. Robert Malone argued Thursday on “Washington Watch.” He emphasized the “need to rebuild public trust” before another public health crisis, which could be caused by the Biden administration’s open border policies. “The only way this [restored public trust] is going to happen is through accountability,” he said.

In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 3% of kindergarteners in public school received vaccination waivers for the 2022-2023 school year, the highest level recorded and approximately double the rate of the 2011-2012 school year. In 10 states, the rate is higher than 5%, with Idaho registering the highest waiver rate at 12%.

“It’s rare now that I run into somebody, a young parent who isn’t talking about extending the schedule and, ‘which of these jabs can we drop?’” said Malone, chief medical and regulatory officer for the Unity Project, who performed earlier research in mRNA vaccine technology.

“Did the federal government’s handling of COVID and the Biden administration’s overreach with shot mandates, even for healthy young people with no comorbidities, facilitate a distrust of Americans toward vaccines, toward the medical community, and toward government?” Family Research Council President and “Washington Watch” host Tony Perkins asked Malone.

Malone replied that Perkins’s analysis was “exactly right.” He blamed heavy-handed moves like “redefining” the term “anti-vaxxer” to mean “anybody who is not okay with vaccine mandates, which almost immediately defined a large fraction of the population as anti-vaxxers.” Such moves, said Malone, “created not just a wariness of federal government policies and messaging, but a reexamination of the whole pediatric vaccine schedule.”

“I’m leery of anything the government tells me now,” Perkins agreed. “I’m looking at the facts. It looks like the medical community associated with the government is not doing this. But I’m looking at all the studies saying how wrong they were in their approach.”

Public health officials have claimed that “misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines ‘has bled through to routine vaccines.’” The federal government collaborated with media companies to censor information it labelled as “misinformation” about COVID-19. Meanwhile, governments of all levels imposed a patchwork of masking and vaccination mandates, based on the theory that these countermeasures effectively prevented the spread of the virus; any attempt to challenge this theory was labelled misinformation. Last February, credible studies found no evidence that masking slowed the spread but did find evidence that natural immunity was at least as effective as the experimental vaccines.

In Malone’s judgment, the untrustworthiness of public health orders — along with the zeal with which authorities silenced dissent — is the true reason for increased vaccine skepticism. “This was what I predicted about three years ago would be a consequence of the federal policies and the heavy-handed actions — as you say, overreach,” he told Perkins.

Malone warned of a public health threat facing the U.S. that is more dangerous than the waning vaccination rates with which public health officials are preoccupied — the wide-open southwestern border. “This flood of 3.2 million immigrants — at a minimum — across the border during 2023 is a major infectious disease threat,” he said. “We’re absolutely creating risk for tropical diseases.”

“One of the major potential risks is yellow fever,” said Malone, “because we do have the appropriate mosquitoes throughout much of the United States that can transmit yellow fever. But what they don’t have is infected people to bite and then spread to others.” Malone added that vaccination against yellow fever is not on Americans’ standard vaccine schedule because “it’s rather a nasty piece of work.”

In addition to diseases spread by mosquito, Malone warned of other pathogens that could be spread by border-crossing immigrants themselves. “These people are being shipped all over the United States by the airlines and others. We’re talking about distributed reach of sexually transmitted diseases [and] variants of salmonella that are pathogenic,” he said, providing two examples.

Malone accused the government of spreading more misinformation about the causes of the border crisis. “Now this is being spun as an issue associated with ‘climate change,’” he added, “when really what it is, is a consequence of federal and really executive branch policies.”

“I don’t trust my government right now, with what I’ve seen,” Perkins lamented. “I think we have to be able to trust our government. I mean, I think it’s important for the whole system to work.”

“There is a school of thought that we just need to burn the whole system down,” Malone responded. “I’m not of that school. I think, as you say, we do need a limited government, a small government. We don’t need a bloated bureaucracy and administrative state.”

“And we do, as you point out, need to rebuild public trust. And I think the only way this is going to happen is through accountability. There are individuals who are responsible for what’s happened over the last three years, and they have not been held accountable,” he added. “In this case, the usual D.C. attitude of, ‘you can never hold the administrative state accountable for their actions,’ needs to be broken. These people need to be ferreted out. We know who many of the names are, and they do need to be brought to court and held accountable for their actions.”