Monday, August 11, 2025

3671. How Did COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Get So Out of Control?

 By Sam Friedman, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, August 10, 2025


ABSTRACT

Some on the Left in the United States (US) and other parts of the world have argued that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak and/or that the vaccines for COVID-19 have done more harm than good. Criticisms have been aimed at the rest of the Left both for uncritically accepting mainstream views on COVID and for not contesting the censorship which (they claim) dissenting viewpoints have encountered. They see these stances as having seriously weakened the Left, at least in the US. Their contention that the lab leak hypothesis is important puts more of a focus on finding “perpetrators” rather than changing the overall capitalist system. In this House Organ, I present evidence that global capitalism is making zoonotic leaps of infectious agents from animals to humans—and thus pandemics—become more likely and more dangerous, and that COVID-19 vaccines have reduced illness and saved lives. I also challenge the claim that dissenting viewpoints have been censored. When sections of the Left argue against vaccination and insist on the importance of lab leaks as an issue, this can make it more likely that health advocates will engage in single-issue politics and avoid socialism, anarchism, and other general left political perspectives.

The Left is Not Immune]

Some scholars and others on the Left have published or otherwise communicated a number of articles on COVID-19 policy, censorship, and the reaction of the Left to the pandemic, including articles in Capitalism Nature Socialism and in Socialism and Democracy by Victor Wallis (2024, 2024, 2025). 

CitatioCitati

A Laboratory Leak?

On lab leaks, I should start with two well-documented facts: (1) Lab leaks do occur (Wurtz et al. Citation2016; Manheim and Lewis Citation2021); and (2) zoonotic transfers of pandemic-causing infectious agents from other animals to humans also occur (Marie and Gordon Citation2023; Friedman, Johnson, and Pomerantz Citation2025; Williams et al. Citation2023). The current dynamics of global capitalist development make both more likely. Lab leaks occur because of the economic and military competition endemic to the global capitalist order that shapes the nature of such lab work in the first place, including labor processes that lead alienated lab workers to be careless or so overworked as to make errors (Roos Citation2014).Footnote1 Secondly, the processes that lead to zoonotic transmission and subsequent pandemics, including habitat destruction, industrial meat farming, and frequent rapid airplane travel for commercial and military purposes, have been widely described, as have the ways in which corporate-led globalization and capitalist development dynamics makes them frequent and increasingly unavoidable (Esposito et al. Citation2023; Friedman Samuel et al. Citation2022; Wallis Citation2023; Wallace Citation2020).

Given this shared understanding on the Left, I often wonder why any socialist would make a fuss about whether a lab leak or zoonotic transfer started COVID. Yet there are a number of leftists who insist that COVID began as a lab leak and think that this is politically important. This seems to me to imply a need to find specific human agents to blame while a larger focus on the system of capitalism as a whole becomes muted. In effect, this represents a form of reformist thought, and has certain similarities with the Trump blame game. Of course, reforms can take place, so there is nothing wrong with supporting an end to certain kinds of research practices that can lead to lab leaks or seeking tighter controls over such research. I doubt that such efforts can lead to much success in the long-run, given the prevalence of profit-related and military-related institutions facilitating this kind of research on infectious diseases. But revolutionaries have been wrong before in arguing that some reforms could not happen. However, insisting that this specific instance of an outbreak can only be seen as being due to a lab leak—particularly when there seems to be strong evidence supporting zoonotic transmission (as discussed below) — seems unwarranted and misleading.

Victor Wallis has explicitly supported the lab leak hypothesis in a recent Global Ecosocialist Network webinar with Ian Angus. As Wallis expressed it to the author in a personal communication (5/20/25), “Over time, however, increasing evidence emerged in support of the lab-origins hypothesis, perhaps most authoritatively from Jeffrey Sachs,Footnote2 who chaired an official investigation into the question, in the course of which he discovered that the protagonists who opposed the lab-leak theory had been lying to him.”Footnote3 The interview with Sachs (Citation2024), however, is filled with unconvincing innuendo, a lack of understanding of how science works, and a paucity of evidence. Much of what he has to say focuses around one paper about the evidence for zoonotic transmission from animals in the Wuhan market to humans (Andersen et al. Citation2020).

Sachs claims that this paper was dishonest because three days before it was submitted, some scientists who conduct such research discussed the possibility that it was a lab leak, and the public article says it was not. Notably, he did not name these scientists, nor did he say which of the authors of the Andersen paper (if any) were part of this call. He also claims that the paper failed to acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust, which is simply untrue.Footnote4 Most importantly, we need to consider whether the article was a fraud, as Sachs claims. Sachs cites discussions on and about February 1, 2020, when the scientists were discussing if it was a lab leak. He claims that the fact that it was submitted on February 4th as evidence of dishonesty. To be clear, the article does discuss whether or not a lab leak was a reasonable explanation for the pandemic. It does include the following sentence: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” What Sachs obscures is that the paper was not actually published until March 17th. During that time, several things happened. Most importantly, many additional weeks of new science became available. In addition, we would assume that the paper was sent to reviewers, they made critiques of the article, and the authors revised the paper in light both of new science and the reviewers’ critiques.

Even if the authors had believed it was probably due to a lab leak on February 1st, it is perfectly reasonable that evolving science and/or reviewers’ insights could have changed their minds—which is by no means a fraud or evidence of lying. Furthermore, the quotations that Sachs gives of what the researchers said on the phone call by no means show that they believed that SARS-CoV-2 was a laboratory product or that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a lab leak. It just shows that on or about February 1st, the researchers took this possibility seriously—and that by March, they were confident enough that it was a natural mutation to publish the article.

Sachs provides another set of arguments for the lab leak hypothesis. He argues that the furin cleavage site on its genome had to be created during gain-of-function research in a lab, and that a research proposal submitted to the US Department of Defense [sic] in 2015 (but rejected) showed how it could be done. He further claimed that “What's interesting about it is that for this class of bat viruses, which are called beta coronaviruses, which is what SARS comes from and what COVID-19 comes from, for that class of viruses, and there are several hundred known, none of them in nature ever had that particular piece of the genome, none other than SARS-CoV-2.” This part of Sachs’ argument rests entirely on the claim that the furin cleavage site does not appear in any similar viruses in nature. This argument, however, has been strongly refuted by data on viral recombination and other mutations (Lubinski and Whittaker Citation2023). Further, numerous other beta coronaviruses have in fact been shown to have furin cleavage sites, contrary to Sachs’ claim (Alwine et al. Citation2023). Although Sachs did not address this (insofar as I know), the existence of two distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 from early in the pandemic makes it very unlikely that a lab leak was responsible (Pekar et al. Citation2022, Citation2025). Further research is taking place on this question.

The Case For and Against Vaccines

The issues around COVID vaccines are more complex. There is a tendency by some on both the Left and the Right to fixate on people who are harmed by the vaccines without considering the vast number whose health and lives have been helped by them. In my experience, the articles and the statements I have read that attempt to estimate the number of people hurt by the vaccines often rely on weak data or inadequate statistical techniques. In this section, however, I discuss some of the better studies. I also discuss some of the weak ones—on which Wallis relies—in a separate section below.

Disregarding the Good the Vaccines Do

Victor Wallis (Citation2025) claims that the pandemic caused severe neglect of other health conditions, and that this led to excess deaths globally that were three times the number of deaths officially attributed to COVID-19. In this, I believe he shows a disregard for what the data really represents, which is emblematic of many who oppose the Covid vaccines. The causes of excess deaths are varied. Many of the fatalities were simply Covid-related where the infection by SARS-CoV-2 was not confirmed. The extent to which this contributes to estimated excess deaths depends on many things, including the availability of COVID-19 testing at a given place or time. The ways in which local or national data systems decide whether a death was “due to Covid” is another factor. Social and psychological distress due to COVID-19, which may result from having a relative die or become incapacitated by COVID-19, the economic collapse created by the pandemic, or untreated medical conditions, also can cause people to die from suicide, drug overdose, alcohol-related conditions, or stress that causes stroke or heart attack, for example. None of these can be attributed to the vaccine. Further, another cause of excess deaths—delayed access to hospitalization or to medical care—can be attributed to shortages of hospital capacity (plus the burden of caring for people with COVID-19). The first of these factors is clearly exacerbated under neoliberal capitalism, but pre-date both COVID-19 and policies related to it. Therefore, these deaths are clearly direct effects of COVID-19 rather than COVID-19 policies. It should be added that one major study found that vaccine uptake rates were related to lower excess death rates in 29 European countries between the start of the pandemic and the end of 2023, strongly suggesting that vaccination reduced excess deaths (Pizzato et al. Citation2024). (In addition, excess mortality was positively related to such indicators as poverty and income inequality and lower in countries with higher health expenditures.)

What about side effects of the vaccines? Contrary to Wallis's argument (Citation2025, 6) that these have been insufficiently studied and subject to government taboo, many such studies have actually been conducted and published in major peer-reviewed journals. I will review only two of these (including their discussion of previous work). One group of researchers (Yogurtcu et al. Citation2023) conducted a benefit-risk assessment of the Moderna mRNA vaccine in terms of myocarditis/pericarditis cases versus vaccine-prevented Covid in a male sample (since previous research had shown that men were at higher risk of these outcomes) for a United States Food and Drug Administration review of Moderna safety. They found that “Remarkably, we predicted vaccinating one million 18-25 year-old males would prevent 82,484 cases, 4,766 hospitalizations, 1,144 ICU admissions, and 51 deaths due to COVID-19, comparing to 128 vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis cases, 110 hospitalizations, zero ICU admissions, and zero deaths.” Another team of researchers in a multinational study of adverse events of special interest studied 99 million vaccinated individuals in the Global Vaccine Data Network covering ten sites in eight countries (Faksova et al. Citation2024). They found evidence that COVID vaccines do elevate risk of several conditions, but also that these risks are low, and they cite a number of other studies showing that the risks of these conditions are far higher among those who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 than among those who are vaccinated.

This leaves open the question of whether the vaccines reduce the number of people who become infected. Wallis (Citation2025, 6) says: “the now acknowledged facts (1) that the immunizing effect of the Covid jabs is short-term (a few months), (2) that they do not prevent transmission of the virus, and (3) that their adverse side-effects include, among other things, a non-negligible incidence of heart-damage.” (Since I showed that these side-effects are rare, and outweighed by the risks of the same side effects posed by infection with SARS-CoV-2, I will not discuss Wallis’ point 3 in this paragraph.) Personally, I find it hard to square such claims with the findings cited above that higher vaccine coverage is associated with lower excess death rates.

A systematic review relatively early in the pandemic found 42 studies that met criteria for consideration (Mohammed et al. Citation2022). This review showed that “the COVID-19 vaccines have successfully reduced the rates of infections, severity, hospitalization, and mortality among the different populations.” Such studies became more difficult and more nuanced later in the pandemic because the number of vaccinations people had received became more varied, the rate of partial immunity from having becoming infected was rising as more people had survived infection, and the virus itself kept mutating. Nonetheless, a European Centre for Disease Control (Citation2024) report on “COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization and death using electronic health records in eight European countries in the VEBIS monitoring network - October 2023 to April 2024” found that the booster shots being administered still had considerable effectiveness.

Most vaccine skeptics fail to take into account that vaccination not only reduces the probability that a person becomes infected, but also reduces the probability that she or he will infect other people. Prior infection also seems to do this. Here, it is useful to quote the entirety of the abstract of a study of prisoners in California (Tan et al. Citation2023, with emphasis added):

SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals and reinfections among previously infected individuals have become increasingly common. Such infections highlight a broader need to understand the contribution of vaccination, including booster doses, and natural immunity to the infectiousness of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infections, especially in high-risk populations with intense transmission such as prisons. Here, I show that both vaccine-derived and naturally acquired immunity independently reduce the infectiousness of persons with Omicron variant SARS-CoV-2 infections in a prison setting. Analyzing SARS-CoV-2 surveillance data from December 2021 to May 2022 across 35 California state prisons with a predominantly male population, I estimate that unvaccinated Omicron cases had a 36% (95% confidence interval (CI): 31–42%) risk of transmitting infection to close contacts, as compared to 28% (25–31%) risk among vaccinated cases. In adjusted analyses, I estimated that any vaccination, prior infection alone, and both vaccination and prior infection reduced an index case's risk of transmitting infection by 22% (6–36%), 23% (3–39%) and 40% (20–55%), respectively. Receipt of booster doses and more recent vaccination further reduced infectiousness among vaccinated cases. These findings suggest that although vaccinated and/or previously infected individuals remain highly infectious upon SARS-CoV-2 infection in this prison setting, their infectiousness is reduced compared to individuals without any history of vaccination or infection, underscoring some benefit of vaccination to reduce but not eliminate transmission.

Hedberg, van der Werff, and Nauclér (Citation2025) report on a population-based cohort study of Long COVID in Stockholm. (Wallis’ articles do not discuss Long COVID, which may reflect the extent to which it has become more prominent in the last few years.) Hedberg found that vaccination was protective against Long COVID (among those who became infected) and that “the adjusted risk ratio for developing persistent PCC compared with unvaccinated individuals was 0.81 (95% confidence interval [CI], .59–1.10) for 1 dose, 0.42 (95% CI, .35–.52) for 2 doses, and 0.37 (95% CI, .27–.52) for 3 doses.” Similar results were found both before and after Omicron became prevalent.

Young People and the Covid Vaccine

Victor Wallis (Citation2025, 6) also argues that “Whatever temporary protective effect the jabs may have had on vulnerable patients during the most severe early stages of Covid-19, it has been clear all along that in the case of young and healthy individuals, the “vaccine” poses a greater danger of injury than does the virus itself.” As discussed above, vaccination continues to reduce probabilities of becoming infected, infecting others, becoming hospitalized, and death in a variety of populations. Nonetheless, Wallis and others have argued that children and youth should not be vaccinated because they face almost no risk from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Before going into the evidence that this evaluation of risk to young people is false, I want to make a prior point about its human implications: Even if it were true that becoming infected posed no risk to young people, this disregards the fact that these same infected young people pose a risk to their parents or other care-givers, their teachers, and for the older ones, their co-workers. That some on the left might disregard this suggests either that they do not understand that such diseases are infectious or they overvalue libertarian individualism to the exclusion of solidarity and community health.

But are children and young people likely to be harmed by SARS-CoV-2 if they get infected? First, I will present evidence that they are indeed at risk. In a later section of this House Organ, I will consider some of the sources Wallis cites and show why they should not be believed.

As part of the RECOVER study, a research team examined the prevalence of Long COVID in children and adolescents (Gross et al. Citation2024).Footnote5 Among those who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, 14 percent of the adolescents and 20 percent of the children seemed to have Long COVID, which can result from mild or even asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. The authors do warn that this may not have been representative of the population as a whole, but these numbers are high enough to be of serious concern—far more so than the numbers of vaccine side-effect cardiac cases that Wallis views as “non-negligible.” A recent preprint from the RECOVER study (Zhang et al. Citation2025) suggests that re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 poses significant additional risk of developing Long COVID in children and adolescents, but these results must be considered to be preliminary because they have not been peer-reviewed.

It is also important to note that during the early years of the pandemic COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the United States (Flaxman et al. Citation2023), although the risks varied by age, being highest in the first year of life (4.3 per 100,000) then lower (0.6 per 100,000 for ages 1 to 4) and slowly increasing to 1.8 per 100,000 for those 15–19). These amount to meaningful but not dominant rates as compared with other causes of death. As the authors put it, “COVID-19 ranked consistently in the top 10 leading causes of death in CYP [children and young people] in all age groups: seventh among those younger than 1 year; seventh among those aged 1 to 4 years; sixth among those aged 5 to 9 years; sixth among those aged 10 to 14 years; and fifth among those aged 15 to 19 years. COVID-19 accounted for 0.7% of deaths among those younger than 1 year; 2.5% among those aged 1 to 4 years; 3.8% among those aged 5 to 9 years; 3.5% among those aged 10 to 14 years; and 3.7% among those aged 15 to 19 years of all causes of death by age group.”

Relying on feeble science

Socialists and others who write on pandemics have a duty to make sure their sources are good ones. Here, I give examples of why several of the references that Wallis relies upon are not at all well-founded.Footnote6 As I discuss below, while Wallis sees anti-vaccine articles of this sort as having been the victims of censorship when mainstream scientific journals reject them, I think that these articles are so bad that the rejections were justified. Indeed, I have recommended much sounder articles for rejection as part of the routine editorial peer review process.

Many of these studies fail to take account of the most basic tenets of epidemiologic methodologies or, indeed, any good science. First, as I discuss below, many of them rely on VAERS or V-safe data.Footnote7 These data are very hard to use, and have well-known sources of error that can lead to either massive undercounts or massive overcounts of bad side effects of vaccination. They are intended as alarms to alert public health and medicine that there might be a problem that needs careful study. Yet much of the anti-Covid-vaccine literature ignores this and acts as if they were accurate data.

Second, it is self-evident that some people will get sick and even die shortly after being vaccinated. This is because people get sick and die for all sorts of reasons. One could, for example, count the number of people who get sick or die shortly after reading this article. If enough people read it, you will get alarming numbers before further thought. Because of this, scientific research relies on control groups or comparison groups to answer one or both—preferably both—of the following questions: Did the people suffering Adverse Events after getting the vaccine do so any more than is true for the general population? In a controlled randomized experiment, this question takes a slightly different form: Did those randomized to get the vaccine suffer Adverse Events at a rate greater than those randomized not to get the vaccine?

If the answer to either of the above questions is Yes, a third question needs to be considered: Was the damage done by the vaccine as assessed in answering these questions comparable to or greater than:

  1. the extent of the same type of Adverse Event (e.g., myocarditis) among those who get infected with SARS-CoV-2, taking account of the proportions of vaccinated and unvaccinated people who get infected—since the infection itself can cause other harms like myocarditis to become more likely; and

  2. the damage prevented by the vaccine in reducing the probability of infection. As I have discussed, the vaccines have saved vast numbers of lives, and this cannot be ignored.

As discussed above, ample evidence shows that the “goods” of the COVID-19 vaccines greatly outweigh the “bads”. Victor Wallis and others, however, seem to sincerely believe that the vaccines are extremely dangerous, basing this assertion on others’ writings. Wallis, for example, claims that “Notable among these were the dangers posed by the jab to pregnant women, many of whom suffered miscarriages, while those who later gave birth had toxins in their breast-milk.” He bases this on Naomi Wolf’s (Citation2024) analysis of a Pfizer document on Adverse Effects (AEs) reported for or by recipients of its mRNA COVID vaccine who were pregnant. The numbers in the Pfizer document, however, do not support any claim that the vaccine was harmful. Both for vaccinated pregnant women and breastfed infants of vaccinated women the number and severity of adverse effects resemble what would be expected for a similar number of unvaccinated women. Of the 673 reported adverse events, 458 were during pregnancy and 215 during breastfeeding. The 51 spontaneous abortions, the only “serious” adverse events, were not necessarily related to the vaccine. Further, there is not a single case of spontaneous abortion that took place during the first three days post-vaccination.

We thus need to consider what percent of pregnancies spontaneously abort, ‘normally’, in the first trimester, and whether 458 is within that range? This depends on how one defines spontaneous abortions. Standard estimates suggest that approximately 10-20 percent of pregnancies spontaneously abort during this time frame, using measures of pregnancy (a prerequisite for spontaneous abortion) that are probably similar to those used by women who would report to VAERS. Unfortunately, neither Pfizer nor Wolf provides data on how many pregnant women received the Pfizer vaccine during this period (through February 28th, 2021), so it is hard to answer this question.

Here, I present some “back of the envelope” calculations. By March 12, 2021, approximately 66 million inoculations with one of the vaccines had been administered in the USA—20 percent of the population (USA Facts, downloaded June 12, 2025). If I estimate that 60 percent of these were Pfizer vaccines, that amounts to approximately 40 million people.Footnote8 It is estimated that 3.9 percent of women of reproductive age in the United States are pregnant at any given time (Strid et al. Citation2025). In February of 2021, approximately 76 million women in the US were of reproductive age, of whom an estimated 3.9 percent are pregnant at any given time, amounting to 2,964,000 women. Since many of the earlier people to receive the vaccines were health care workers, women were probably more likely than men to receive the vaccinations. But I will disregard this and assume that 20 percent of these women received the vaccine, and 40 percent of these received the Pfizer vaccine. That amounts to 16 percent of 2,964,000 women as a rough estimate—that is, 474,000 women. Ten percent of these women, 47,400, is a minimum estimate of those women who received the Pfizer vaccine who would be expected to have a spontaneous abortion. Compared to this, the 458 cases Pfizer reported is minuscule (< 1%). This has two implications. First, very few of these abortions were reported as at all suspicious. Secondly, Wolf, and thus Wallis, failed to fully consider the meaninglessness of what they were reporting.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine also covers the period through February 28 (Shimabukuro et al. Citation2021). It reported that receiving the mRNA COVID vaccine did not result in any increase in spontaneous abortions. The percent of spontaneous abortion in women among vaccine recipients,14 percent, was the same as is observed in the normal population. They concluded the vaccine was safe for pregnancy.

Pfizer also presented data on Adverse Events in breastfed infants. Naomi Wolf claims that breastfed babies received terrible “toxins.” Of 215 Adverse Events reported, most were asymptomatic or common discomfort from many vaccines, such as arm pain or fever. Only two were more significant, cases of facial paralysis and drooping eyelids. These symptoms may or may not have been associated with the vaccine, though they also have some similarity with Bell's palsy—an uncommon Adverse Event of vaccines (Faksova et al. Citation2024) which was discussed above.)

In his work, Wallis (Citation2025) suggests that the CDC and corporate media downplayed the existence and meaning of Adverse Events data. This is false: these data are on the web and can be easily accessed, and everyone getting a COVID-19 vaccination is told about it and asked to report any adverse symptoms, no matter whether they think they are actually a result of their vaccination. There is no secret “deep state” conspiracy or censorship occurring here. It should be added that these systems (as is clearly stated on the webpages people use to get data) include reports of symptoms and events that have nothing to do with the vaccination except for following them in time, as well as those that might be results of the vaccination. In addition to this source of overcounting of Adverse Events, undoubtedly many people do not report such events, which means the VAERS and V-safe systems function only as an alert of possible problems that then need to be followed up on. The implication is that these data sources are remarkably less useful than vaccine skeptics seem to think.

Nonetheless, Wallis references an Alliance for Human Research Protection document report on 17 states that states “782,900 people reported seeking medical attention, emergency room care, and/or hospitalization following COVID-19 vaccination. Another 2.5 million people reported needing to miss school, work, or other normal activities following an adverse health event after getting a COVID-19 vaccine (Sharav Citation2022).”Footnote9 A review of the research literature from a pro-vaccine perspective does not deny the incidence of serious adverse effects but concludes that the effects are ‘mostly mild or non-severe.’ That severe effects are rare, however, does not mean that they are negligible.

The question must now be asked: so what? Even if these data were far more useful than they are, what would that mean? Let's assume that all of the 782,900 people seeking medical attention had significant adverse effects. First, we should keep in mind that the vaccine helped people avoid COVID-19. By September 17th, 2022, there had been over a million deaths due to COVID in the US and considerably more hospitalizations (CDC Citation2025). By September 28th, 2022, fully four fifths of the US population, over 260 million people, had received one dose; and 68 percent (225 million) two doses. A third of the population (about110 million) had received booster doses.Footnote10 In other words, for each time a person was vaccinated, 296/100,000 (0.3%) sought ‘medical care’ using the VAERS/Vsafe data. A study (Dreyer et al. Citation2022) used web-recruited volunteers who received a COVID-19 vaccine between March 19–July 15, 2021 and analyzed self-reported data on short-term side effects, medical consultation, hospitalization, and quality of life impact following completed vaccination regimens (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J). Of 6966 participants (including recipients of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in similar proportions), 3.1 percent sought medical care and 0.3 percent were hospitalized. The authors concluded that the vaccine was safe. By comparison, the September 2022 V-safe release reported that only about ten percent of this fraction ‘sought medical care.’ Dreyer's paper reported on the extent to which people reported various symptoms, by percentages and a variety of demographic variables, including age, and provides statistical analysis of the veracity of the results. Therefore, if we look at events per individual dose in these data, the fraction of people seeking medical care per dose, is 131/100,000 (0.1%).

Put succinctly, everyone getting vaccinated was told about these data systems, which is hardly hiding them. Their scientific and clinical meaning is limited and hard to interpret, and when put in context, suggest that the vaccines were quite safe. I discussed scientific research on this in the section above on “Disregarding the good the vaccines do.”

COVID Censorship

When I read Victor Wallis (Citation2024) analysis of what he calls a policy of COVID-19 censorship, I was struck by his enormous number of citations to books and articles that were published despite such alleged censorship. Many of them were works that I have never read, and based on what he says they argue, hope never to have to read. Many of his citations are to authors who made similar points very early in the pandemic. At that time, I did take some of their arguments seriously. However, when I looked further into how they treated data and their inadequate ways of using statistics to analyze the data, I unfailingly found that their arguments had little support. Other researchers have used independent data to demonstrate problems with what they were saying on many occasions, as I have discussed above in regard to the lab leak hypotheses and the effects of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Here, though, I want to ruminate about the concept of censorship. It is an important subject, and one the Left should take seriously. Even though I think much of the research that Wallis cites is extremely weak, I am glad that some of it gets published. But censorship is a tricky issue. And one for which I have no easy answers, other than to say that I think Wallis’ discussion of censorship skirts over the issues I raise here. In fact, his argument resembles in many ways the complaints the Right makes about Left censorship and wokeism whenever somebody criticizes what they say or refuses to give it headline billing.

Here are some examples of the difficulties in discussing censorship. Wallis has at one time or another been an editor of various leftist journals. Would it be censorship for them to reject an article that espoused extreme forms of neoliberal economic and political policy and the reduction of social welfare spending to zero? I doubt that any reader of this House Organ, including Wallis, would call the rejection of such an article censorship. Or to take another example: would it be censorship for a journal on geography and geology to reject an article replete with original measurement data and statistical models that concluded that the Earth is shaped like a cube?

How is this any different from a scientific journal rejecting an article as poor science? Journals do use peer review systems to assist in such decisions, and reviewers (as I know from my experiences both as author and as editor) are usually quite critical and independent in what they say. Indeed, with most of the high prestige journals, only a small percent of the articles submitted get accepted. Under these circumstances, what does it mean to claim censorship when an article is rejected?

Of course, Wallis does point to other examples, such as when social media corporations exclude content they do not like as “misinformation” or as “antisemitic.” This probably should be viewed as censorship and opposed. As we can see from the extent to which the “censored” articles and books that Wallis cites nonetheless got published elsewhere, efforts to exclude misinformation are counterproductive, at least when well-funded groups are willing to publish these works and the corporate media is willing to treat their findings as news. Beyond that, any real left is democratic to the core, and thus should be maximalist in supporting free discourse.

Marxists and some other currents on the Left usually take historical approaches as part of thinking through such issues. I have always found Thomas Kuhn’s (Citation1970) historical analysis, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, very enlightening. It shows that scientific disagreements, particularly those that stem from different epistemic commitments or conclusions, are often contests for power that are resolved in rather nasty ways. Many current observers probably would agree that the nastiness is certainly present in the current debates. As an example, the current Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy, Jr., whose writings Wallis cites approvingly in his work, is using state power to dismantle much anti-racist medical research and research on vaccines, with drastic consequences for the careers of tens of thousands of people (many of them socialists) and the health of many millions. This certainly fits the model Kuhn laid out as happening historically. It is not a practice socialists agree with, but it is the reality we need to understand and surmount.

To conclude this section of the paper, what I have written should leave the reader dissatisfied. It leaves me dissatisfied as its author. We face a deeply contradictory reality, and the power to act on issues like censorship, research funding, and publication is overwhelmingly in the hands of capitalist actors who control the means of production, distribution, and rule. Having said that, I am not sure if a successful abolition of capitalism and creation of a non-alienated democratic world will resolve these issues or not. To put it bluntly, we do not know how such a new world would or should respond to a major new pandemic if people have conflicting opinions about how to respond to it. We would hope we will do so with solidarity, support, and discussion, but are not sure how we should organize to make this likely to happen.

Some Notes on Misunderstandings of the Politics of COVID

Victor Wallis (Citation2025) has argued that the Left has failed to understand that it was in thrall to capitalism's narrative about the pandemic, and that this led to the Left's failure to develop an effective response. His view of contemporary capitalist society around the pandemic seems to be primarily an analysis of corporate greed and of neoliberal “common sense.” This analysis fails to consider how the systematics of capitalism limit the actions of corporations and governments, or how corporate reliance on human beings as managers and as workers limits their ability to keep secrets.Footnote11 His analysis of capitalist institutions seems incomplete in another way: When he writes that “the hegemony of capital is embodied in the power of big corporations and of the organizations in which they come together, such as the World Economic Formation and the Council of Foreign Relations,” he omits the institution in which capitalist hegemony and power finds its greatest support and embodiment—the State—which, it should be noted, includes the CDC, NIH, and FDA, all of them central institutions in COVID policy. No article can do everything, but the application of his considerable knowledge on the nature of the capitalist state to an analysis of the government's handling of the pandemic could have enriched his work. Wallis further argues that the failure of the Left during the pandemic worked to the advantage of the Right. There is some truth to this argument. However, blaming the ascendancy of the Right on the fact that many on the Left accepted the view that vaccines are useful and that the pandemic stemmed from the workings of the capitalist system (rather than a lab leak) is extremely suspect. There were two much more important reasons for the failure of the Left to make hay during the pandemic (other than the fact that some of us interpret science and evidence differently from Wallis). One of these is that the Left came into the pandemic weak, disorganized, and, of course, underfunded—in contrast to the Right, which came into it much stronger, much better organized, and extremely well-funded (which befits its capitalist roots). The other factor, which Wallis never mentions, is that during the first year of the pandemic, the Left in the US (and to a degree internationally) marshaled most of its efforts into supporting the anti-racism movements of 2020. In addition, the failure of this movement to live up to its potential was due to a large extent to the ideological confusion (or lack of cohesion) of the Left and its co-optation into the Democratic Party campaigns of 2020 (McNally and Post Citation2021). I do not see beliefs around lab leaks, vaccines, or zoonotic leaps of the virus as playing much of a role in this. I would add that Trump and the Right effectively mobilized racist and anti-immigrant sentiments in response to the Black Lives Matter uprising.

Finally, Wallis ignores the much-too-weak efforts of the Left to organize around the pandemic, He never mentions the Peoples CDC or the Mask Blocs, or the various radical Long COVID organizations. It may, of course, be that he has never heard of them, but more likely that his vision of the Left focuses more on those critiquing specific corporations or industries rather than on small grassroots organizations.

Why Does All of This Matter?

Climate change, zoonotic pandemic outbreaks, and the other facets of ecological breakdown require urgent political action. However, it is highly doubtful that substantial progress can be made on these fronts without a deep and substantial transformation (or total elimination) of global capitalism. I believe that this will require replacing capitalism altogether with a sustainable and human-friendly new set of social relations. This will require broad-based popular mobilization. In the United States, as well as in other countries, many thousands of young people are engaging in COVID-related actions designed to curb the disease. These actions include mask blocs to hand out free masks to members of the public and to encourage people to wear masks. Almost all of these youth understand the value of the COVID vaccines for protecting public health, particularly the health of society's most vulnerable members.

We must also remember that healthcare workers are among the most activist elements of the labor movement in the United States. They range from the people who clean the floors and the bedpans to nurses, researchers, physician assistants, and many doctors. Most of them agree with the scientific findings that the COVID vaccines are a good thing and should be celebrated. They also see zoonotic transmission as an extremely serious ongoing threat to public health in terms of unleashing new pandemics.

To the extent that anti-vaccine elements on the Left and the Right embrace the lab leak hypothesis and condemn COVID and other vaccines as more dangerous than valuable, they run the risk of opening a fissure with these activists. This is no small matter. These activists, many of whom self-identify currently as “on the Left” (progressive, socialist, anarchist, or just generally “left”), devote much of their available time and energy on COVID and other health-related issues and organizing efforts. Given the weakness of the organized Left in most countries of the world at this time, and specifically in the United States, turning away from these activists would be a mistake. Instead, the Ecological Left and socialists should form stronger bonds and alliances with health care workers and professionals with COVID-active youth in the struggle to forge a healthier and more ecologically secure future for all of us.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Notes

1 Wikipedia (Citation2025) provides a list of laboratory incidents that may or may not be reliable. See also Manheim and Lewis (Citation2021).

2 In addition to his lack of scientific credentials, Sachs’ credibility is reduced by his disastrous history. He was a main strategist behind the “shock therapy” that dominated the transition of the Former Soviet Union to the form of kleptocratic oligarchic capitalism (sometimes called political capitalism) that dominates Russia and to a lesser extent Ukraine today. As Azarova et al. (Citation2017), among others, has shown, this caused many millions of deaths over the next decade.

3 This refers to the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. Although prestigious, there is nothing “official” about The Lancet Commissions.

4 Here is the text of the Acknowledgments section of the article, with bolding added: “We thank all those who have contributed sequences to the GISAID database (https://www.gisaid.org/) and analyses to Virological.org (http://virological.org/). We thank M. Farzan for discussions, and the Wellcome Trust for support. K.G.A. is a Pew Biomedical Scholar and is supported by NIH grant U19AI135995. A.R. is supported by the Wellcome Trust (Collaborators Award 206298/Z/17/Z/ARTIC network) and the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 725422/ReservoirDOCS). E.C.H. is supported by an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship (FL170100022). R.F.G. is supported by NIH grants U19AI135995, U54 HG007480 and U19AI142790.”

5 For a socialist discussion of Long COVID, see Johnson and Friedman (Citation2024).

6 We are by no means the first to criticize the science that many critics of the COVID vaccine rely on. See for example: Jaramillo (Citation2024).

7 VAERS stands for “Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System” of the US Health and Human Services. It is still on the web, and still accessible, although I cannot say how the Trumpires will have modified this by time you read this article.

8 This was estimated from a chart on Wikipedia that cited CDC data that seem not to be on their website any more, a result of the Trump assault on data. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_the_United_States, Accessed May 30, 2025.

9 See Sharav (Citation2022). However, a review of the research literature from a pro-vaccine perspective (Dhamanti I Citation2021) does not deny the incidence of serious adverse effects but concludes that the effects are ‘mostly mild or non-severe.’ That severe effects are rare, however, does not mean that they are negligible. See note 21.” Our response here also covers this claim as well as that he made in his article on censorship.

11 Some people on the Left have claimed (for example on the SftP list serve) that Pfizer and Moderna deliberately hid the bad effects of their vaccines on human beings and/or grossly overstated their efficacy. Given the pressures of the year 2020, I believe that research staff members would have leaked this and that the reactions of the press would have been severe. Further, the review panels were aware of the possibility of fraud and took action to prevent it. Simply put, any CEO who had attempted such a fraud would have risked mob violence and judicial prosecution, and would likely have been personally reluctant to see family members vaccinated with a fraudulent product. The context at that time was sharply different than for many other medicines and vaccines, where fraud might be more likely.

References

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