By Kevin Barrett, Ph.D.
America’s trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. According to the most recent Gallup survey, almost 70% of Americans trust media “not very much” (29%) or “not at all” (39%). Why so much mistrust? One reason is partisanship. On certain issues, the media marches in lockstep, and only one side of the story gets told.
The Covid era took media partisanship to a whole new level. Not only were Americans forced to perform certain actions (get vaccinated, wear masks, stay home, avoid non-approved treatments) but they were also prohibited or discouraged from accessing information that cast doubt on those and other policies.
The biggest sacred cow of the Covid era was the experimental mRNA vaccine. Media reporting on the “vax” was uniformly positive. Skepticism was derided, facts skewed, and spin administered in generous doses. Virtually everything the media reported on Covid vaccines was tweaked in such a way as to encourage people to get vaccinated. Even verifiably true information, if it cast aspersions on the “safe and effective” myth, was labeled malinformation—a spin-off of disinformation—and banned from social media.
Media censorship of negative information on vaccines, in a country where almost everyone either knew someone who had suffered adverse effects or knew someone who knew someone who had, created a bizarre contradiction between what the media was saying and people’s lived experience. Millions asked themselves: “The media and my doctor tell me it’s safe and effective, but someone I know had a terrible experience. What’s up with that?”
Social media groups sprang up featuring thousands of troubling reports about bad vaccine reactions, including deaths and disabling injuries. But the social media mavens took them down. The same kinds of stories cropped up in the alternative media, but mainstream gatekeepers derided them as hypochondria or “conspiracy theories.”
In July 2024, three-and-a-half years after the mRNA rollout, America’s self-styled flagship newspaper, The New York Times, finally told one of the countless vaccine horror stories. Headlined “Darrell Currie’s Life-Changing Illness: ‘It Felt Like a Bomb Went Off in My Brain’,” Jordan Campbell’s article describes a sudden debilitating condition that afflicted British sports broadcaster Darrell Currie in September 2022.
Campbell explains:
His career and, more importantly, his quality of life have been wrecked by this crippling mystery illness. He lives in chronic pain and has spent tens of thousands of pounds searching for answers or cures, two things that still elude him and have led him to dark places.
The narrative of Currie’s suffering goes on for more than 2,000 words before the reader finally learns its likely source:
After the first vaccine, I got terrible tinnitus in my ears within 12 hours, so it was definitely a side effect. … I questioned whether I should take another, but I did, as I had to work. … This is possibly the start of the story. After the second and third vaccines, I had weird feelings—pins and needles up my arms, across my face—it felt like my tongue was vibrating, my jaw was hardly moving and I had headaches.
Now doctors say those are signs of mild allergic reactions. Did the Covid vaccines potentially affect my immune system and so, when I then got Covid, could my body not react? Was it immune failure, attacking itself? A lot of doctors I am seeing now feel that is what has happened.
If Currie, a celebrity sports announcer, had to quit in 2022 due to a life-ruining vaccine reaction, why haven’t we heard about it until now? The Times article explains:
Currie has waited to speak about his suffering partly because he was concerned about the tone of the conversation around Covid vaccines and the attention it could attract to him.
The Times should blame itself, not Currie. Very large numbers of Americans, numbering at the very least in the hundreds of thousands, suffered bad reactions from the Covid vaccines, and a significant percentage of those was debilitating. But the media have assiduously avoided reporting them.
Medical doctor and Covid expert Peter McCullough told me:
A tsunami of adverse data reports are now coming in. Remember, at the time the mainstream media proclaimed the vaccines were safe and effective, when they were released Dec. 10, 2020, there was only one month for the primary series to be administered.
Will the Times report on Currie’s vaccine catastrophe open the door to more stories about mRNA damage? Will mainstream medicine, alongside mainstream journalism, acknowledge the scope of the bad reactions and the accumulating evidence that the vaccines may have done almost as much harm as good?
If the media want to regain their credibility, they need to start admitting their mistakes. Biased reporting of Covid issues is one of the many mistakes that await correction.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.
