Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

By the Spring of 2021, Americans were inundated by a cacophony of demands that everyone immediately line up for the shot that would supposedly end the pandemic.

The screams of certainty were deafening.

It was everywhere you turned: TV, radio, newspaper, social media, and medical authorities at all levels.

Several features of this campaign were suspicious.

People had begun to notice that the virus itself was nowhere near as deadly as had been claimed. Yes people got sick but, as with the flu, most everyone shook it off in time. Why get vaccinated for a pathogen against which your immunity can be earned the old-fashioned way? It never made sense that this was somehow essential for the whole population.

Then there was the question of whether it was going to be effective. Coronaviruses are fast-mutating, and the whole history of vaccines suggests they are not capable of keeping up. It’s even worse: some specialists at the time said that mass vaccination against one variant drives the virus to mutate even more, while disabling the capacity of the immune system to resist. That suspicion was confirmed true by the time the year was up.

Then there is the pressing question of safety. It was a new technology and hence an experiment. Absolutely no regular member of the public knew precisely what was in it yet. And yet everyone was forced to line up, roll up their sleeves, and accept it. No drug in the history of the FDA had been rolled out this way.

As for the claim that the shots are “safe,” that was never believable. To say “we don’t know” would have been the only honest statement, simply because there was no record of experience with these vaccines. You cannot declare something to be safe when there is no actual evidence or possibility of evidence within the time frame. It might be or it might not be. That should have been unbearably obvious.

Even at this point in the trajectory, the massive vaccine push had already overreached. Many people of intelligence knew this. There was clearly something odd about how all major pundits, as well as movie stars and social-media influencers, hectored the public. Many of these same people only six months earlier were telling the public to be skeptical of the vaccine because it was being pushed by the Trump administration.

Now at this late date, we are starting to get details about what was going on behind the scenes.

It turns out that the CDC started to see evidence of problems in the spring of 2021, namely the risk of myocarditis.

What did they do with that evidence? They buried it.

The Epoch Times has unearthed a startling email sent by the CDC to either Moderna or Pfizer letting them know that an CDC alert was likely coming.

“The pros and cons of an official HAN are what the main discussion are right now,” Dr. Sara Oliver, the official, wrote.

“I think it’s likely to be a HAN since that is CDC’s primary method of communications to clinicians and public health departments, but people don’t want to appear alarmist either.”

Despite the warning and the heads-up that this was going to be communicated with the public, the action alert was never sent. This was from May 25, 2021. During the same week, the CDC had previously told vaccine makers: “Wanted to make sure you were aware before anything was made public.”

This close collaboration between government regulators and agencies and the private manufacturers is suspicious enough. But to fail to alert the public of known risks is gravely irresponsible. We are talking here about people’s lives and health. They are supposed to be guardians of both but here we see the very opposite happening. They put marketing the shot above the health of the population.

At the time, something felt very wrong about the whole vaccination campaign. In the United States, we don’t do things simply because someone in authority says we should. We are skeptical of such invasions of our bodily integrity in the absence of transparency. When intimidation replaces rationality, there is something strange going on.

Many people got the shot anyway because the propaganda was so overwhelming. Some people went along despite their best instincts simply because they became exhausted from resisting. Even by the spring of 2021, mandates in business and government were starting to appear. Over time these grew more intense as the Biden administration tried every possible means to force the shots on the military, health care, transportation, and every business in America. The latter mandates were shot down by the Supreme Court but many stayed.

It became so insane that city governments like New York, Boston, and New Orleans locked down their whole towns to the vaccinated only. The unvaccinated could not go to theaters, libraries, restaurants, bars, or other indoor venues. They were blamed for prolonging the pandemic and declared generally unclean. All of this happened by the end of the year.

The health risks of the shot were known by the government and the vaccine makers but never revealed to the public. And why? It’s pretty simple. They knew that a truth-telling announcement would collapse demand for the shot. It was already sketchy and faltering so they decided to create the appearance of a united front. This was not only in the United States but in the UK and Europe too.

Clearly, a handful of pharmaceutical companies had by then captured control of myriad government agencies around the world, even the World Health Organization itself. It was so bad that health agencies shelved their entire mission in order to operate as marketing agencies for a particular technology. It was so intense that agencies buried even scary and known risks. We know this for sure now, thanks to sleuthing reporting.

How precisely this happened cries out for explanation. More strangely, most of us didn’t know that this had happened or was happening.

As it turns out, you can explain nearly everything that happened during the darkest months and years of our lives based on the one factor of panicking the population in order to maximize vaccine acceptance throughout the whole population. That was the reason for the prolongation panic, the disease-avoidance theater, the screaming media, the nutty mandates and restrictions, and all the rest. It was all designed to prepare the people for the shot.

It took me and others a very long time to see this. In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense what was going on. But how precisely this came to be—how democracies based on the idea of popular control of government became marketing agencies for Big Pharma—deserves years of investigation and deep reflections on the structural problems with government.

Meanwhile, we now have a health crisis to deal with as a consequence, not only of ill-health from lockdowns and missed diagnostics but also from the shots themselves. We don’t know the scale of the problem because the CDC has not been transparent about that either.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your government. Is it any wonder that trust today is at rock bottom?