1/ I'm not an anti-vaxxer. My kids have been vaccinated. I was vaccinated.

BUT I KNOW BIG PHARMA. As a @nytimes reporter, I saw (more than saw, I wrote these stories)

Amgen offer huge "rebates" to doctors to give doses of EPO at levels that had been shown to kill patients...

2/ Eli Lilly hide the severe side effects of a drug that was not just given to but essentially forced upon some of the most vulnerable people in society (those with severe mental illness)...

3/ And Merck - supposedly the BEST and most science-centered company in the entire industry - try to hide the fact that its (not particularly useful) aspirin substitute caused heart attacks in many patients.

These are not marginal companies, okay? This is the industry...

4/ It's not that they want to hurt people. But once companies commit to a new treatment, it is VERY hard to stop. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested. Billions or tens of billions in sales are at stake. The issue is generally less efficacy than side effects...

5/ And the execs of @moderna_tx @BioNTech_Group and to some extent @pfizer now have generational wealth riding on these vaccines. As in billions. (The CEOs of BioNTech and Moderna have both made $3 billion+ this year.)

That is about as dangerous as can be, given the stakes here.

6/ At this point Moderna or BioNTech are ALL IN. The vaccines are commercial products going into people's arms. You think they want discussion around the side effects of what they're selling? Or whether it makes sense to vaccinate anyone but the people at highest risk right now?

7/ These incentives should be obvious to EVERY serious investigative reporter who covers the drug industry (or doesn't). But for the last 10 months they have been so busy pretending #Covid is the plague to end all plagues to ask any hard questions...

8/ So, folks, we better all fucking hope that either the clinical trials captured the worst side effects OR that whatever more serious ones might be out there hit fast, BEFORE a couple of hundred million people get stuck.

Because by then it'll be too late.