LA Times publishes letter urging people to flood VAERS – Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – with phony reports of side effects. These include “The hair on my head is growing back” and “My abs now look like Caeleb Dressel’s.”

The author, and the editors, apparently are so devoted to the Covid vaccine that they want to inhibit reporting of side effects. This bizarre ideation may have psycho-pathologic implications. It surely has major legal and moral problems:

• Making a false report to a government agency is a federal felony. [18 USC 1001]
• Inducing another to make a false report is also a felony. [18 USC 1622]
• If two people combine to make a false report, it is conspiracy. [18 USC 371]
• Flooding reporting site will block real reports, which could result in injury or death.
• It’s a vaccine, not Holy Water; factual criticism should be encouraged, not condemned as a sin.
• Asking questions or reporting side effects is in fact “following the science,” which these people claim to admire but in reality try to block.
• Preventing people from learning possible side effects of vaccine is the opposite of science, and in addition prevents obtaining informed consent, as required by law and medical ethics.

This type of thinking is as illogical and unscientific as the most rabid anti-vaxxer’s rants. But somehow it has become mainstream. How sad.