The Overton window as it pertains to COVID-19 vaccine injury is shifting. The once verboten notion that vaccines previously lauded as the safest and most effective vaccines in medical history might inflict serious harm on some recipients, an idea long dismissed by doctors and lambasted in the press, has gained some acceptability in recent weeks. Members of the legacy media, or more precisely, the liberal media, have begun to discuss the topic absent a tone of condescension or condemnation.
Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who spent much of the pandemic era serving as self-appointed rottweiler of the public health establishment, recently did a segment on his NewsNation program that sympathetically featured a nurse practitioner claiming to have experienced life-altering side effects after being pressured by his employer to get a second COVID shot despite reporting ominous neurological symptoms following his first. Cuomo, in the segment, also alluded to being vaccine-injured himself and emphasized the need to figure out how to help vaccine-injury victims.
Earlier in the month, the New York Times ran an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Apoorva Mandavilli detailing the stories of several people with backgrounds in science and healthcare, all claiming to have been seriously injured by COVID vaccines as well.
Additionally, the article covered some of the obstacles faced by Americans seeking compensation. Medical records in the United States are not centralized. This makes identifying rare but serious side effects from COVID vaccines more difficult. Therefore, only a few side effects are recognized. Plus, there are only 35 people responsible for evaluating the roughly 13,000 filed COVID vaccine injury claims for whether they meet the strict procedural and eligibility requirements necessary to receive a maximum payout of $50,000.
The article’s general tone suggests the vaccine-injured are deserving of compassion and should be taken seriously while the aforementioned obstacles are problems that need to be solved.
As late as October 2023, Mandavilli, who spent the pandemic warning about the possible dangers of reopening schools and tweeting how the lab-leak hypothesis was racist, was still assuring people mild to moderate side effects from COVID vaccines were a good thing. Given this, her shift seems even more noteworthy than Cuomo’s.
However, what this shift in coverage of COVID vaccine injury means remains to be seen. Perhaps all the work done by skeptical journalists, doctors, scientists, and activists has convinced people such as Cuomo that the stories of those claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines ought to be heard. Maybe their work has made it possible for outlets such as the New York Times to treat the topic of COVID vaccine injury as acceptable.
Maybe simply enough time has passed since the height of the COVID pandemic to permit people to evaluate a stance that was a matter of personal and political identity a few years ago with greater objectivity today — sort of like questions of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a couple of decades ago.
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Or maybe different anchors and outlets simply know their audience has shifted and calculated that they should, too. A November 2023 Rasmussen poll indicated 24% of American adults believe they knew someone personally who died from COVID vaccine side effects. On May 10, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported only 22.5% of adults received their updated 2023-24 COVID-19 vaccine.
Perhaps there is no single answer — especially not one that applies to every person and outlet equally. Maybe we’ll never know. Then again, maybe we’ll find out who is sincere in their change in tone if the government tries mandating vaccines for bird flu.
Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.