Writes the blogger eugyppius:
The number of unflattering press stories has been growing since the bivalents flopped last Fall.
[…]
It’s been a serious shift, the likes of which I’m not sure has unfolded in any other country. To give you a taste of it, I’ve assembled a representative selection of stories from the last eight weeks or so, in roughly reverse chronological order.
[You can read them on the page linked above.]
The trend is so dominant that it colours all other reporting on Covid and the vaccines. It’s hard to miss the subtle anxiety at work in pieces like this one from the Vienna-based Standard, asking whether we’ll have to vaccinate ourselves against Corona every year from here on out, or the not-so-veiled notes of hope in ZDF reporting on successful Phase 1 trials of the German nasal vaccine. What’s the big deal about regular vaccination and why should we care about new live attenuated vaccines, if the mRNA jabs were God’s gift to man?
[Links in above paragraph are on the original page linked above].
There are clear, encouraging patterns here. The reporting originally surrounded lawsuits brought against the vaccine manufacturers, but has steadily assumed a more general focus. Regional and local papers are carrying a big share of these stories, with major state media playing a supporting role. The publications most popular with German biens pensants, meanwhile, like Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit and even Frankfurter Allgemeine, are pointedly underrepresented. This is a trend driven from the bottom up by popular interest, and in that it is the opposite of much Covid reporting since 2020.
Of course, these stories have always been out there, but until the last few months, enthusiasm for the vaccines was sufficient to suppress them. As with all pandemic policies, mass vaccination exhibits qualities of inertia. Obsession steadily grew through the summer months of 2021, as the jab failed to eradicate Covid, and achieved a frenzied peak around December 2021. There was nothing to do about the insane mania and its manifold irrationality back then, and the steady disenchantment with these products will prove just as inexorable.
[…]
The pharmaceuticals have made a lot of money, but their mRNA vaccines have failed. The Robert Koch Institut have stopped updating their vaccine dashboard, after almost four months of totally flatlined uptake; one of the foremost mRNA promoters, Bill Gates, has called the jabs a disappointment and compared them unfavourably to masks, of all things; and BioNTech, facing a revenue decline of 70 percent, have announced an impending return to mRNA-based cancer therapies – their original focus upon their founding in 2008, where they’ve never enjoyed particular success. Perhaps if the vaccinators had proceeded cautiously, limiting their promises and jabbing only the most vulnerable on a strictly voluntary basis, they could’ve preserved some future for their doubtful products. Instead, they oversold and over-administered their snake oil, and two years later most people have decided they don’t like it very much.