This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
The party of “free speech” has struck again! The Republicans have censored scientific research because they didn’t like its conclusions, and that’s not me editorializing, that’s actually exactly what they said:
“The studies were withdrawn because the authors drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data. The FDA acted to protect the integrity of its scientific process and ensure that any work associated with the agency meets its high standards,” he said in an email to Reuters.”
Reporters at the New York Times, who broke the story earlier this month, discovered that back in October the Trump administration ordered the scientists to withdraw two studies that cost millions of taxpayer dollars and had already been accepted at major journals, because they found that the COVID vaccine is safe with one study concluding “Given the available evidence, F.D.A. continues to conclude the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.”. Was that an overly broad conclusion not supported by the underlying data? Well, the New York Times got their hands on it and found that the conclusion is based on an examination of “the records of 4.2 million Covid vaccine recipients and…their later experience with 17 conditions, including swelling of the brain, major blood clots, stroke and heart attacks. The study found rare cases of fever-related seizures and myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, known to be associated with Covid vaccines.”
That seems like a reasonable conclusion to draw from that data to me, but then again I’m not a stupid piece of shit Republican actively looking for ways to stop people from accessing safe and effective vaccines. The New York Times article details some of the other recent examples of Trump’s cronies attacking the science of vaccines, but I want to get to the most recent case: back in February, they refused to sign off on the submission of abstracts of studies to a major drug safety conference because those studies found that the vaccine for shingles is, in fact, also safe.
Usually when I talk about the importance of vaccines, I focus on measles, or COVID, or polio, as these diseases can be deadly to babies who can’t choose whether or not they’d like to be vaccinated against them. But shingles is important, too, and immunocompromised people can be vaccinated against it as an adult, and healthy adults over the age of 50 or so should also get vaccinated.
Why? Well, it’s not quite as deadly as diseases like COVID or the flu, but it can be horrifically nasty. Shingles occurs when the virus that gave you chickenpox as a kid is reactivated when you’re older. Instead of itchy little bumps, the virus travels through your nerve cells to create painful blisters and rashes. It could heal within a month, or it could leave you with chronic nerve pain that continues for years, and if it gets into your eyes, you could go blind. The vaccine, which was first approved twenty years ago and which has been improved upon in those decades, reduces your risk of getting shingles by 50-90% (depending on which vaccine you get) and if you do end up getting shingles, it will be much less severe. In 2007, a study found that vaccinating a million Americans over the age of 60 against shingles would result in healthcare savings of $82 to 103 million.
Seems pretty great, right? Well, what if I told you that the deal actually gets even better? In 2024, researchers found some evidence to suggest that getting shingles might lead to an increased risk in dementia. And then in 2025, researchers found even more evidence to suggest that getting the shingles vaccine significantly LOWERS your risk of dementia.
Across several natural experiments, these scientists found that the original less-effective shingles vaccine lowered dementia in aging populations in Wales and Australia, while also helping to prevent death in those already living with dementia.
Why is that? Well, the leading theory was that shingles attacks the brain and causes inflammation, which eventually leads to brain degradation. Preventing the reemergence of the virus would prevent that. Ongoing research that the Trump administration has not been able to quash suggests that the newer shingles vaccine is even more effective at protecting people from dementia.
But at the same time that all these researchers were finding this very strong correlation between the shingles vaccine and lower risk of dementia, other researchers were noticing a weaker, but still significant, drop in dementia risk that seemed to be due to other vaccines, like the flu vaccine and even BCG, a vaccine that was originally created to protect people from tuberculosis, but is now used against bladder cancer, via some still unknown mechanism. How would these vaccines be preventing dementia when they aren’t focused on diseases that affect the brain that way?
Well, back in March, some immunologists published a hypothesis that they thought was worth testing: what if all these vaccines aren’t just boosting our immunity to a specific disease, but also training what’s known as our “innate immunity”? Innate immunity is the part of our immune system that for a long time has been thought of as untrainable: it includes physical barriers like our skin and mucus lining, chemical signals that cause inflammation, and all-purpose immune cells. Maybe that frontline defense actually IS trainable, and we’re accidentally doing it with vaccines?
Happily, we didn’t have to wait long for that hypothesis to be tested. In this massive study published last month in Neurology, researchers examined 120,775 older individuals who got either the regular flu shot or the high-dose flu shot, which contains three to four times as much flu virus antigen. They found that the people who got the higher dose had an even lower risk of Alzheimer’s diagnosis than the people who got the regular dose, suggesting a direct correlation: more vaccine equals more immunity to dementia, which is compelling evidence for the innate immunity hypothesis.
So. I know this will shock you, but not only is our anti-science fascist government actively trying to get more Americans to get sick and die from preventable illnesses like COVID and measles, but it seems that they’re also going to end up creating more mental health issues for our aging population. Let this be a reminder to you to get your vaccines while you can. All of them. Well, okay, as many as your doctor says you can have.
