Former president Donald Trump has hurt his chances for a second go of the presidency if he plans to run.  By recently saying, "The vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind," he dismayed a large swath of supporters who consider the COVID shots one of mankind's greatest failures.

Why does he champion the shots?  It could stem from pride.  If there is one trait Mr. Trump is not known for, it's humility — the opposite of pride.  While he has admitted to minor mistakes such as intemperate tweets and such, it's hard to see him admitting to being mistaken on what he no doubt considers to be one of the crown jewels of his presidency: the rapid development of these so-called "vaccines."  (An actual vaccine is supposed to confer decades-long immunity.)

One of the hardest things in the world to do is admit to being wrong.  Pride is widely considered to be the worst of the seven deadly sins.  There's also plenty of pride going around within the CDC, FDA, and NIH these days, with devastating consequences as the COVID shots maim and kill more and more people and as life-saving drugs such as ivermectin are suppressed.  By ruefully acknowledging the COVID shot blunder, Mr. Trump would actually gain his supporters' respect.

Or perhaps he genuinely thinks the COVID shots are a success.  If so, he nevertheless surely must realize by now that, unlike real vaccines, they don't prevent infection and transmission.  The best they can do is perhaps reduce COVID symptoms for a few months.  And they appear to even confer negative immunity — making it more likely that the jab recipient will get COVID, at least with omicron.  Buried in a German government report (p. 14) were data indicating 4,020 cases of fully jabbed people versus only 186 who were not jabbed.  That's 96 percent to 4 percent, in a country where 71 percent of citizens are fully jabbed.  This is consistent with studies indicating that the jab may alter the immune system — for the worse.

Is Trump not aware, moreover, of the more than 20,000 COVID shot–related deaths and countless more serious injuries listed in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which is estimated to represent only a small fraction of the actual numbers?  Tech entrepreneur and Vaccine Safety Research Foundation executive director Steve Kirsch estimates the actual death count to be at least 150,000 and is willing to give anyone $1 million to prove him and his analysts wrong.  (That must be petty cash for Mr. Trump, so we likely won't be seeing him step up.)  And athletes and airline pilots, suspiciously, are dropping and dying by the hundreds.

Sadly and sinisterly, most of this is ignored in the mainstream media and even the mainstream conservative media.  But has not Mr. Trump come across the many alternative news outlets that report on such matters?  Perhaps not, since Google and other search engines including DuckDuckGo seem to suppress them.

It's no surprise that the COVID shots are such huge failures, considering that they were hurriedly developed under a program the Trump administration dubbed "Operation Warp Speed."  With a name like that, consider the intense pressure pharmaceutical companies were under to rush through a COVID vaccine.  They did so in less than a year, whereas vaccine development normally takes many years.  The mRNA technology had been around for decades but had never been approved for a disease.  Johnson & Johnson's and AstraZeneca's adenovirus technology had been approved only once before, for Ebola.  It's highly suspicious that these biotechnologies just happened to be deployed at the height of COVID.  Did they fix the flaws just in time?  Or did the intense societal pressures prompt them to deploy despite the longstanding flaws and hope for the best?

A year later, considering the jab's ineffectiveness and serious side effects, it's looking like a "yes" to the second question.

In addition to that, the COVID shots were unethically developed, using material from the bodies of victims of genocide.  What if they were tested with or contained bodily material of Holocaust victims?  Or what if some primitive society somewhere still practiced human sacrifice of small children, and it was found that pharmaceutical companies used those victims to develop vaccines?  There would be international outrage.  Well, genocide victims are being used in COVID shot development: pre-born babies.  Trump's presidency, to his credit, was strongly anti-abortion.  But he seemed to put those sentiments aside when it came to the COVID shots.

One reason Trump won the presidency in 2016 is that he was willing to run with an issue that establishment politicians were too afraid to touch: illegal immigration.  The COVID shot debacle is another hot-button issue shunned by establishment politicians but ripe for some daring maverick to grab hold of.  If Trump won't do it, someone else will.

Patrick Chisholm is author of Holy Health: How Church Makes You Healthier and Happier and blogs at Seventimes70.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.