The great martial artist Bruce Lee reputedly said that all mistakes are forgivable—if one has the courage to admit the mistake.
Paul Fenyves, a primary care physician in New York City who specializes in internal medicine, seems to have learned this lesson. Fenyves, a primary care doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, recently admitted he was wrong to support vaccine mandates.
“I was initially supportive of COVID vaccine mandates in the Fall of 2021. At the time, I was told that COVID vaccines don’t only protect the individual receiving the vaccine, but they also benefit the community by reducing spread of the virus,” Fenyves wrote on the Substack Sensible Medicine.
Convinced that mandatory vaccination would create a “wall of immunity” that would bring the pandemic to an end more quickly, Fenyves said it seemed “reasonable to prioritize societal welfare over individual autonomy,” noting that early clinical trials of Pfizer’s vaccine were shown to stop 95 percent of infections.
“Surely a vaccine that prevents almost all infections would halt community spread, right? Wrong,” he writes. “Perhaps there was a time when COVID vaccines could significantly reduce community transmission, but that time was short-lived, and the virus quickly evolved and learned to evade vaccine-induced immunity.”
For Fenyves, his awakening moment came in December 2021, when Portugal experienced a massive surge of COVID despite a vaccination rate of more than 90 percent.
Fenyves concedes there are other reasons one could support mandatory vaccination even if it doesn’t reduce community spread, noting that some contend forced vaccination is moral because it’s done “for their own good.”
“I find these arguments to be weak justifications for violating an individual’s autonomy and mandating a medical intervention,” he writes. “Furthermore, these arguments are completely inadequate when applied to young people, whose risk of hospitalization from COVID is low, and whose likelihood of benefiting from vaccination is similarly low.”
Of Knowledge and Humility
Some may argue that Fenyves is right about vaccine mandates, but for the wrong reasons.
Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, argues vaccine mandates would be wrong even if there was a community benefit because the social costs are too high.
“My conclusion was always that the societal harm of mandates far exceeds any benefit, and as such I always opposed mandates,” writes Prasad in an introduction to Fenyves’s article.
As early as August 2021 it was clear that “vaccine breakthroughs” were quite common and that naturally immunity conferred powerful protection against COVID. Why was it not until December 2021 that Fenyves realized he was wrong about vaccine mandates?
These are fair points, but they should not overshadow the larger lesson Fenyves is sharing, which is that scientists and public health officials must act more humbly with their immense power and recognize the limits of their knowledge.
“Those in the medical community who, like me, argued that vaccines should be mandated to protect the community should feel chastened,” writes Fenyves. “When considering mandating vaccines in the future, we should proceed with humility, acknowledging that our knowledge is far from perfect and our truths are often transitory.”
‘The Curious Task of Economics’
Two words in the last sentence are incredibly important: knowledge and humility.
These same two words are found in F.A. Hayek’s famous 1974 Nobel Prize speech, in which he warned against scientists and planners acting on “a pretense of knowledge.” Instead of recognizing the limitations of knowledge in an infinitely complex world, Hayek saw modern humans “dizzy with success” over the marvels of modern science, which had convinced them they possessed enough knowledge to engineer society effectively.
“The curious task of economics,” he famously wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
The antidote to this fatal conceit—which Hayek warned leads to “grave consequences”—is humility.
T.S. Eliot once observed that humility “is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve,” and a lack of it is what lurked beneath the deadly collectivist schemes of the twentieth century, from Stalin’s Five Year Plans to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and beyond.
The “fatal striving to control society” is born of arrogance, Hayek understood. And it was this arrogance that led public health officials and politicians to decide they had enough knowledge to make life-and-death decisions for others during the pandemic, to decide what they had to put into their bodies.
Fenyves is right that a healthy dose if humility is in order, and that the knowledge we possess is far from perfect.
If we fail to learn this lesson, the consequences could be even worse the next time government officials attempt to prevent a crisis from happening.
This article was reprinted with the author’s permission. It was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education. Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
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30 Responses
Gee, that’s nice. Are you ready to apologize for the human destruction you caused? Ready to accept your punishment?
I am waiting for Cornell U to drop its mandate. I had been participating in the ornithology department’s bird studies. I emailed repeatedly that I would not make any reports as long as Cornell was committing crimes against humanity. I cannot support that. If Cornell will drop its mandate, I can resume my practice of submitting data for their studies. I urge people to write to the doctor and ask him about getting Cornell to drop the mandates.
If you support…or supported vaccine mandates…I support you having to take every last one until Uncle Joe and Pfizer are satisfied.
Yes. if there are 10…you are mandated to take 10. No exceptions. No exemptions. Take your damn medicine.
Too little, too late. The knowledge was always there. As with all inconvenient truths, it was buried, denied, or spun into the choking silk of the narrative. Deceitful and unforgivable.
All well and good but the death and destruction cannot be undone nor can it be forgiven. This nonsense was a satanic ploy by all the demon possessed world leaders the government politicians health care workers and the hateful msm who pushed these death jabs on everyone via guilt trips and now proven lies.
There cannot not will not be any amnesty for such people.
Too little too late trying to get off the Nuremberg hook.
It’s only legal repentance because they’re now realising what is coming for them.
Lawyer up Dr.
Fenyves says that in the fall of 2021 he “was told that COVID vaccines don’t only protect the individual receiving the vaccine, but they also benefit the community by reducing spread of the virus.” That’s interesting. I was told the same thing. So was everyone else reading this post. I (no doubt along with most of the subscribers to this website) was more than a little bit skeptical right from day one. Fenyves, along with almost 100% of his M.D. colleagues, swallowed every last micro-gram of all the lies hook, line and sinker, with no questions asked. And we are all told over and over, “Trust your doctor because he/she is so well educated and knows and understands all the underlying science.” Um, what’s wrong with this picture?
Absolutely! Very Good point Greg. How could they not know, what a lot of us without medical backgrounds were skeptical about from the very beginning.
Professionals tend to go with the crowd of peers. Lister and Pasteur were mocked by their contemporaries. Look at how Sully Sullenburger was hassled for making his life-saving decision. That’s what’s wrong. People can be very Borg-like at times.
Well you know Greg, the mass formation psychosis was especially effective on the medical community. Because they received all this internal messaging, backed by medical journals. This segment of society continues to live in an echo chamber. We have long since lost the war on cancer, and every other health ailment which the medical industrial complex profits off of, and receives subsidies regarding.
Brought to you by Phizer. Or one of those. Check whom really controls the publications which led our society down this path. Hint, it was not your local small town newspaper.
If only Americans understood our own history. The vaccine subsidy program was taxation without representation from the damned start. Nobody would have supported forcing everyone to pay a thousand dollars for this, but that’s what we all paid, whether we took the vaccine or not, via taxation subsidies to big pharma.
Furthermore; ‘Public Health’ is so damned idiotic. It’s remarkable people will even repeat that line. There is no such thing as public health, as there is no such thing as the publics eyes, the publics arms or the publics leg. The publics wallet, the publics favorite movie, the publics favorite food, the publics savings account, the publics housing. These are collectivist concepts which are truly dangerous to embrace. America is founded in INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY. Our health is our business, and nobody elses. The free world is for the brave, the fearful should stay at home. Damned company doctors, people whom trust them without question are among the most gullible least independent people in the world. As if people were still unaware after over a half century of the constant flow of bribes and favor money big pharma consistently channels to the medical community and guides legislation with political bribe monies as well. Yet, yes, much of ‘the public’ is that mis informed and gullible too.
What really went warp speed over the past two years was the pace by which the public was screwed by persons running monopolistic racketeering corporations, yet again, whom should otherwise be in federal prison wearing shackles and orange jump suits. Know your history or be condemned to repeat it. Lady justice is peeking as liberty dies with a whimper. I’ve asked the question before and I’ll ask it again; does anyone have a pitchfork I can borrow? As I tell people; I can’t opt out twice. Vote with your wallet, vote with your feet.
i totally agree with Merv ..too little far too late ..people DIED ..no excuse you should not have just followed blindly ..you have to live with that ..
“I was told…”
Nice article. Now do something about your new found awakening. You obviously have some statis in the medical field, then use your voice to better humanity and right a wrong. I am curious how Fenyves reacted to the unvaccinated prior to his awakening.
Guy sounds like a complete doofus; ” the virus quickly evolved and learned to evade vaccine-induced immunity.”. IF viruses exist they are not living things. They do not “learn” nor “evolve”.
I’m a mining engineer so I have no medical background. Yet in early 2020 I started to research this Covid thing. By May 2020 I had found videos & papers from Dr Judy Mikovitch, Dr Sheri Tenpenny & Prof Dolores Cahil. The air of authenticity permeated them. I started my first blog then because I could see the need to warn people of what was coming. Since then I have spent over 4,000 hours following the real science & have posted over 1,600 articles. Why could any doctor or health official not have done the basic research & come to the same conclusion I did, based on their better knowledge? There can be only one reason, the love of money, the root of all evil. They have sold their souls to the devil & will have an eternity in hell to properly repent, since millions of them haven’t yet.
There was also loss of their jobs,license, homes,families and possibly freedom if they did not comply. Most were not brave enough to buck the system. They & nurses were the pawns unless they were the high profile promoters.
Lookout, see my above post. The medical community lives in an echo chamber. Nearly their entire journalistic exposure revolves around approved messaging which is promulgated from the top down. Very little of what you may be posting and writing about is read or distributed within the medical community itself. One of the reasons for this is the time pressure that insurance and administrations place on medical industry workers. That idea of the doctor whom actually cares about you died with the advent of high medical costs and medical insurance. The notion that doctors are even able to accept new ideas and new approaches is likewise a pie in the sky pipe dream, because if something is not covered by insurance, no deal and don’t touch it is the medical communities immediate response.
The American health care system used to be the envy of the world. We paid cash for most visits and procedures, and medical insurance was only for truly catastrophic events. Flash forward to today with the top heavy bureaucracies and excess taxation which funnels obscene cash to the medical industrial complex; We have among the highest health care costs in the world with a consistently quite low success of health rate.
All of it brought to you by the federal reserve. 100 years of not being federal, and not having any reserves. Americans quite literally pay over half of everything they earn to the government. The end result is severely mismanaged systems with absolutely imbalanced and unfair distribution of funds. The root cause of our societal woes is taxes. As the ignorant public continues to vote for larger government and continued taxation increase, don’t expect any lasting solutions. If you want to help someone for a day, give them money. If you want to help someone for a lifetime, build an institution which will stand the test of time, which can continue to help them. Yet, look how the monied corporations have rose up against our liberties, just as Jackson fortold centuries ago. History repeats. The solution of course, is to always focus on shrinking the size of government. Read my lips; No New Taxes.
Taxed on income, taxed on spending, taxed again and again and again. Who can take your money? Tell you to behave? Make the founding fathers roll over in their grave. The government. Oh the government can. Who can tax the sunrise, who can tax the trees? Let you run a business and collect up all the fees. Take it all away and give it to some other guy, the government, oh the government can.
And now we have literal fascism as the big corporations control all that tax money and subsequent public policy. So much for individual liberty and a government controlled by the people for the people. So you see, don’t blame the individual doctor, he’s just following the same program most Americans are, blissfully ignorant of our own history and how our own liberties were established to be enumerated for posterity into the future. Americans are too busy with their hands out begging to put them to work, as our collective wealth is pilfered by every last party enjoying government grants subsidies and special favors. Over half of all Americans are now directly or indirectly employed by the government (That number climbs when including every person who’s employment revolves around government subsidies). Our vote at the ballot box no longer matters. So much so they’ve stopped hiding it and just steal that now too.
If you were dumb enough to take the jab, that’s on you, not the doctors and researchers. Have to applaud these guys for their humility. The rest of you have learned a valuable lesson. Live and learn: do your own research!
When people are bombarded daily with fear porn they lose their ability to reason. When so called experts keep telling you a product is safe and effective they believe it in desperation. The criminal cover up of all this is pervasive still and once they have bought the narrative most will stick with it rather than see the other side. Not dumb ;just misinformed. The crime they commit is the blaming ,discrimination and disgusting treatment of those who chose not to vaccinate.
That is a tough argument; Ignorance is no excuse. Or perhaps failure of media to be unbiased. The individuals fault or the collectives fault?
Nah, I’ll stick with individual sovereignty; Good ideas do not require force.
Learn to discern. We knew it was a damned scam and knee jerk reaction before it even happened. Oh boy, here comes the government, puppets on strings for all these big corporations, and they’ll have brand new controls and brand new products we will be compelled to participate and purchase. People whom did not see this coming a mile down the tracks were blind, the propaganda was extra thick.
We got out of costco with like 3k worth of goods the two weekends before the rush. We had opt outs and planned NOT to take any vaccines, before warp speed was announced. We never stayed at home, did not mask, and our entire family was never tested, traced, or jabbed, not one single time. I’ll repeat that, not tested, not traced, not jabbed, not one single time. Fools rush in. It’s the concept of dependency and it’s a damned shame so many Americans feel they need to be dependent. I’d rather die cold and alone if that’s what it comes down to, rather than take the governments help. It’s a freedom and liberty thing. Now get off my damned lawn, you’re trespassing and we don’t need any damned government census persons either!
Sometimes the man whom reads no news, is better informed than the man whom reads newspapers all day long. The human condition is predisposed to liberty, when not consistently oppressed. If you want independence, true liberty and freedom, it starts with your own mind. Personally I have found that a one a day commercial advertisement limit keeps the hounds, and the propaganda, at bay. Try to live that way now and then, unplug and refuse any commercial exposure. You’ll realize how hopelessly ingrained in the matrix you currently are, but it’s never to late to flush yourself right out of there and breath the fresh air of freedom. “Come out of her my people, come out of Babylon.”
The excuse that doctors did not know or where lied to does not fly this time. Even as a lay person ;I was able to access the product package insert early on for these shots online and it clearly stated that they did not know if it would prevent infection or transmission, but MAY make the infection less serious if you got sick. It also stated that EVERY side effect MUST be reported to VAERS since it was EUA; but doctors & hospitals refused to do so. Pharma & Gates lied & bribed the media & politicians BILLIONS to spread the” safe& effective”LIE ; then greed and power took over. Fauci insisted on expensive Remdesivir as only treatment in hospital along with ventilators . A drug so toxic that it was first one removed from the Ebola trials for destroying kidneys. Then hospitals [that had been previously in the red] making a fortune killing patients with these treatments.
Pharma’s other lie was leaving out the part that they knew of over 100 serious possible side effects BEFORE the release, lied about the results of the so called human trials AND they left out the PROPRIETARY ingredients that turned out to be toxic. Then there was the criminal PCR test developed by Drosden, who turned out to have fake PHD; approved in one day by WHO with no peer review . Even though CDC admitted by end of 2021 was inaccurate[90% false positives], is still being used to inflate the numbers. Lastly they prevented early treatment that would have save 80% of the sick AND covered up the fact that the batches of vaccines are wildly different in the levels of “active ingredients” [graphene oxide in hydrogel] and some were traced to the most deaths and damages to people where others were mostly saline. There are many that deserve the firing squad for this and destroying the economy.
Sure CAWS, all valid argument points. However, you make these arguments from the consumer perspective. The insurance and hospital complex administrators call the shots, not the doctors. Imagine actually being a doctor trying to hold yourself to this standard. There are 10,000 different medicines you are able to prescribe via a medical index, common tools for any health care provider. If each insert took you about an hour to ‘review’…
The problem with health care is the 50 billion YEARLY dollars funneled via government subsidies and grants. The problem is taxation without representation. Get your mind around it. Then hope beyond all hope that the RFK Jr & Barnes lawsuits against the cdc actually stick.
A “Physician” saying “I was told” REALLY?!!!!! We are expected to believe his big brain could not think this through and figure it out?! I consider myself average and I knew this in the beginning!!!!! This one should have his license taken away not the caring, truth telling doctors like Dr. Nass & McCullough. If you are going to say you are wrong admit that you knew early on and didn’t do anything about it. When will we get to the WHOLE truth?
Yeah, and the doctors are also employed by the medical industrial complex. Imagine having to see a new patient every 20 minutes, all day long, every day of the week, for the rest of your working career. The illusion that anyone is receiving best of ability care is just that, an illusion. Otherwise we’d see far less profitable advisement, such as try not eating sugar, stay away from genetically modified foods, avoid pesticides. You simply must come to understand, if you want to make any sense of the mass formation psychosis the majority fell to, that all healthcare and treatment is a for profit exercise and not rooted in best patient outcomes. Hospitals should never be cool or trendy, yet, that is the current solicitation effort which has been underway for decades now, ia; DTC direct to consumer advertisements. People to this day still call in frantic seeking the next booster or pharma product they observed on television commercials. The medical community is no exception, they willingly consume every last bit of the propaganda.
How about a flash from the past; Pop quiz: Who first said; “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”?
Jackson: There are no inherent evils in government. It’s evils exist only in it’s abuses.
“I was told…” as mentioned by Fenyves above, why didn’t you do your own research, like those of us accused of being anti vaxxers? There was so much data available, as well as interviews, articles and speeches by brilliant scientists and doctors who had the courage to speak the truth.
“Surely a vaccine that prevents almost all infections would halt community spread, right? Wrong” he also writes. Amazing even with the benefit of hindsight he’s still getting it wrong – Pfizer confirmed recently that the v@xx does nothing to prevent transmission, but medical professionals already knew this – they had to treat the patients whose v@xx status was already known!
Now he and others, in positions of influence and power are pleading ignorance?
“Fenyves said it seemed ‘reasonable to prioritize societal welfare over individual autonomy’ ” – Oh, if only that were true in this case. You cannot prioritize anyone’s welfare with a bioweapon. This substance (not a vaccine, by the way) is untested, unproven, fast tracked and slammed into the arms of billions of people worldwide. His statement is sheer nonsense in this case.
It’s not a question of acting humbly as the article above suggests. Its about restitution – pay your enormous debt to society, to the families who lost loved ones, to the people with a time bomb ticking inside them, to the people injured and paralysed, unborn babies, to the ones shunned by society family and friends because of so called experts promoting a false narrative, people who lost their jobs and businesses. Do all this and fully acknowledge the damage you are responsible for if you want society to forgive the crimes you’ve committed.
The just deserts is they took this substance into their own bodies. Justice is already served.
Explore these new concepts and illuminations regarding failed medical practice points: Viruses can be transmitted by high energy radio frequency. And cancer is actually consistently misdiagnosed because it’s a micro parasite. Ever wonder why they don’t want the public consuming anti parasitic medicines like ivermectin?
The medical industrial complex seeks to harvest customers diseases for profit. And now you know why natural health care is not included in your insurance package, and why you need insurance in the first place to afford their ‘care’.
I live in Vancouver BC Canada, where they are continually pushing boosters with constant ads on bus stops, radio and TV for boosting children, pregnant women and all adults. They terminated tons of healthcare workers for not getting shots and we currently have a huge healthcare/medical shortage of doctors. nurses, paramedics and hospital staff. They have continued this campaign regardless of all the data from other countries showing the risk/benefits do not have any scientific proof that is justified. Many Covax deaths and injuries and nobody is talking about this; the govt. funded news is silent on this issue. It’s truly tragic as the fallout is putting many Canadians into debt, despair, homelessness, and mental health including suicides at an all-time surge, particularly from a drug overdose. Parts of our city look like a war-torn country. Fully UNvaccinated Canadians are still treated like second-class citizens when it comes to job hiring, and travel and currently there is a woman in Alberta who was turned down from receiving a life-saving transplant due to her medical status. We need more physicians to wake up, speak up and stop complying. personal health should not be politicized.
I have found no conclusive data that show vaccine people live longer healthier lives than vaccine free people, living in the same health condition in developed countries on earth.
I have found no coralation between vaccine mandates and life expectancy in developed countries on earth.
No ? mandate.
All anyone needed to know at the outset was that anyone expressing skepticism was immediately derided, deplatformed, defunded, silenced and censored. NOT debated and shown to be the fools they supposedly were. If a HS grad like me can figure it out, why couldn’t all the smarter than thou MD’s see it? So many doctors are highly educated but not innately intelligent
You should also subscribe to Childrens Health Defense, Bittersall.
When reviewed, it turns out most ‘doctors’ and everyone below them in the chain of command, receives approximately 2 hours of vaccine education through their entire school careers. Even the supposed specialists are often kept in the dark. The messaging is consistent and in robust quantities, but the actual education is misleading and obscured, obtuse.
Repeat after me; Safe AND effective.
Here is how it works; Vaccines are the most wildly profitable items the medical industrial community has ever ran across. Therefore, this product is promoted above all others. What, do you think they run hospitals and develop NIH policies because they actually care about people? We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave those kids alone. All in all it was all just bricks in the wall. Don’t forget to use that new app to ‘get your docs in a row’. It never ends.
Oh wow, just a follow up. This is a very informative article which puts a different spin on the topics of; how did we get here, who’s running this show, and why our own leaders appear so ignorant and aloof, so irrationally supporting lockdowns and other asinine measures. Spoiler alert, it’s the CCP’s fault. For you Mr John Miltimore, a must read, as this article specifically mentions the type of person whom would errantly go with this, then rescind, the who, the how, the why.
A must read article which leads the readers through several turns and new revelations. This story starts in one place, ending in another. Trust me this is worth your time to read all the way through, don’t skip any of the written portions. We can thank the hardline communists and their submissive wealth sycophants in other nations whom trade with them, for the past few years of liberty destruction and pain.
And it’s only going to continue as long as we listen to these people. Which is why for one, I support isolationism and find the concept of globalism as well as collectivism to be utterly failed societal constructs which are antithetical to everything good and just in this world.
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/the-china-situation-isnt-as-bad-as
The China Situation Isn’t As Bad As It Looks. It’s Far Worse.