Attacking Dr. Malhotra: This is their best shot?

Rudolph by Bob Moran. Used by permission. View or Buy Print.

Steve Kirsch has challenged Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, to host a debate between the two vaccine sides. There will not, of course, be any debate because the vaccine proponents rarely, rarely debate our side. It looked like Kirsch might get his wish on Twitter the other day but it was canceled at the last moment. No proponents of the vaccine showed up to any of the roundtable discussions that Senator Ron Johnson held and they were invited. Probably conflicts with their kids’ soccer games.

This latest challenge to Horton was issued after Kirsch was sent his Op-Ed in The Lancet entitled “Offline: The distance between us.”(opens new window) In the piece Horton, who most assuredly hears the WHO loud and clear, attacked Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s presentation he attended at Friends House in London. Horton does a nice job summarizing what Malhotra had to say, then, in a short paragraph, he attacks it. It is his attack that I want to address because it is typical of how the left attacks anything they do not agree with.

He begins the piece with this:

Critics might argue that his pronouncements on vaccines should be dismissed. But to understand why vaccine hesitancy has become such an important public health challenge, one must study his arguments and claims, even if one finds them misplaced.

Then he goes through Malhotra’s speech. It sounded like a great presentation to me. Then he attacks it in one paragraph. I’m going to quote that paragraph and add my comments.

As a disclaimer, I am not a medical doctor hence I have no right whatsoever to make these comments and what I should do is sit on my couch, watch the news, and wait for the next free fast food drive to motivate those of us who are vaccine hesitant to take the jab. If I’m going to risk killing myself I may as well eat french fries on the way out, right? Or are donuts a better option?

And now the prestigious editor of The Lancet:

On Oct 13, 2022, the British Heart Foundation issued clear advice to the public: “There is no evidence that people are at risk of cardiac arrest in the days or weeks following the [COVID-19] vaccine.”
[Note the appeal to authority. There’s no evidence presented, just a statement that there “is no evidence that people are at risk.”]
Malhotra’s method of argument deserves scrutiny to understand why it persuades some people.
[Fair enough. Yes, let’s explore why Malhotra is red-pilling some people.]
Frame one’s view as the reluctant endpoint of a personal journey.
[Is that journey not legitimate? Many, many people have traveled that path. Both Steve Kirsch and Dr. Robert Malone come to mind.]
Available Now!
Read the Review
Quote respected scientists.
[Would you prefer he quote scientists who are not respected? At least he admits the scientists Malhotra quotes are respected.]
Stand up to corporates.
[What’s wrong with this? Why does this make the arguments questionable?]
Place oneself firmly on the side of patients.
[This is really bad. We wouldn’t want to be on the side of patients. It would be preferable, apparently, to be on the side of Big Pharma…]
Emphasise well described concerns about the presentation of research evidence.
[LOL. What is wrong this? Nothing. If there are concerns, we should talk about them.]
Allude to correlations.
[I guess the problem here is if the correlations don’t work in your favor they shouldn’t be alluded to.]
Make the call for access to raw data an issue of trust and transparency.
[Sounds good to me. The other side has worked hard not to give us raw data or be transparent]
The meeting ended rowdily. “Lying ****”, shouted one audience member.
[I’m fucking appalled!]
“You are part of the fraud”, shouted another. “They want most of us dead”, said one more.
[Very possibly true.]
A physicist from University College London reported his “gut feeling” that mRNA vaccines were unsafe.
[Listen to your gut.]
A general practitioner argued that “most doctors are trained to do as they are told”.
[I would say that is one of the more terrible things that we have learned during this whole debacle. Most doctors are terrified to speak out.]
Someone suggested that WHO should be abolished and received enthusiastic applause.
[I’m applauding right now too!]
“People are dropping dead”, said another.
[Well…that’s because they are.]
The audience began to fragment amid shouts and insults. The last words I heard as I exited were from someone alleging the pandemic’s origin lay in a 30 nucleotide sequence amplified into a bioweapon.
[What other people do or say at the end of a talk does not credit or discredit what was said. This is a digression that is not meaningful, but that I suspect is meant to rile up his base while helping them forget that he presented no evidence whatsoever to counter Malhotra’s presentation.]
This descent into unreason is what happens when you inflame public anxieties. It needs to stop.
[And there it is: A baseless statement. First, Malhotra is very reasonable….as Horton unwillingly and unconsciously shows us. You can, we can, do what we want with the statements by the crowd (assuming Horton actually heard these statements….this is The Lancet, remember). Regardless, the statements have no bearing on the truth or untruth of the Malhotra’s presentation. On the other hand these last two sentences work very well for what has happened in the last three years. Public anxieties have been inflamed by the worldwide propaganda pushing the shots. It does need to stop. But that will be up to us.]

There is another possibility with this piece that I hesitate to put forward. Horton does an excellent job of summarizing Malhotra’s points. Here is some of what he writes:

He quoted Stephen Hawking: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
He argued that society was faced with a “pandemic of misinformed doctors”.
He suggested that “honest doctors can no longer practise honest medicine”.
He explained how the use of relative risk reductions can be misleading.
Malhotra moved onto his main theme—namely, his claim that there was an increased risk of heart attack after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
He implied that one could not fully trust the independence of vaccine regulators.
He introduced a new phrase—“the psychopathic determinants of health”, by which he meant the adverse influence of corporate power on medicine.
He spoke about his own father’s death, the primary cause of which was, in his view, the COVID-19 vaccine.

There is more than this and he laid it out very well. Then his rebuttal, for a rebuttal, is terrible. Almost obviously terrible. He basically lays out, again, Malhotra’s points with very little criticism.

Is Horton trying to get around “The Censor“? Is this actually a satiric piece? What if he is hoping to expose his readers to ideas that maybe they are quite unfamiliar with?

The very last sentences of his piece are: