Dr. Pierre Kory: To Expose the Truth, “You’ve Got to Navigate Through the Censors”

This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Is the “Overton Window” — the range of narratives acceptable to the mainstream media and policymakers — expanding to include perspectives that contradict the official narrative on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments?

Speaking on this week’s edition of “The Defender In-Depth,” Dr. Pierre Kory said he believes it is — at least in the mainstream media.

Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), cited several op-eds he wrote with journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer since August 2023.

The op-eds were published in mainstream outlets, each of which incrementally expanded the range of counternarratives considered acceptable for publication.

The first op-ed, published in August 2023 by USA Today, addressed the unexplained increase in excess deaths in 2021 — without mentioning vaccines.

Subsequent op-eds published in Newsweek, The Hill, TrialSite News and The Washington Times further expanded the counternarrative.

Kory and Pfeiffer’s most recent piece, published on April 25 in RealClear Health, highlighted the COVID-19 vaccines as the likely cause of rising cancer rates in young people.

The “Overton Window” appears to be opening regarding mainstream media’s willingness to publish views critical of the establishment’s COVID-19 narrative, Kory said — but that’s not true for medical and scientific journals, where Big Pharma still controls the narrative, which leads to censorship.

‘The window of what’s acceptable has changed’

Through the op-eds he’s co-authored, Kory said he sought to “bring forth a discussion of caution around these [COVID-19] vaccines.”

“We’re trying to introduce a discussion on really what we’re finding is the immense dangers of these mRNA vaccines,” Kory said. While such narratives are already familiar to those in the medical freedom movement or who follow independent media, they’re “not mainstream.”

“We had to be very careful [when] approaching mainstream outlets to try to engender this discussion,” Kory said. “We probably self-censored ourselves.”

The USA Today op-ed referred to the timing of the “huge spikes in deaths which occurred in 2021,” particularly among young people — without mentioning vaccines.

“We put forth damning data of temporally associating these deaths with the vaccine campaign. However, we did not mention ‘vaccine,’” Kory said. “We just left with the question, ‘What could be causing this?,’ knowing full well that our hypothesis — and I think it’s almost proven now — is that it’s the vaccines.”

By October 2023 though, the word “vaccine” made its way into another op-ed published in Newsweek. Kory said:

“We said, we are basically imploring, exhorting our government to look into this, look into could these be the effects of lockdowns? Could it be mandates and school closures? And then we said, could it be maybe something with the vaccines?

“So, we put vaccines in there as possibilities, but that’s a big shift from not saying vaccine in August to October, to putting in the vaccine.”

But by April, the “Overton Window” had widened enough that direct references to harms likely caused by the COVID-19 vaccines were included in op-eds published by mainstream media outlets, including RealClear Health. Kory said:

“In this last one … we literally wrote an op-ed talking about all of the many reasons and mechanisms for why these huge explosions in young people with cancer are due to the mechanisms of the vaccine. And so, that’s a pretty robust and open discussion calling into question their safety, and it was published in RealClear Health, which is kind of like a center-right, very well-read outlet in Washington, D.C.”

The RealClear Health op-ed included references to DNA plasmid contamination in COVID-19 vaccines, presenting “a hypothesis that the vaccines are likely causing these big spikes in certain cancers among young people,” Kory said.

“I think that’s a very different discussion than what we had in August,” Kory said. “I think that the window of what’s acceptable has changed.”

Reality of vaccine injuries ‘inescapable’ for media

Citing a recent op-ed by the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker, Kory said “the shifting of that window is not organic” but is “actually being controlled by those in power of information and discourse in the media.”

But what is causing this shift if mainstream media narratives remain just as tightly controlled as before?

Kory hypothesized that “the lived reality of so many people” who have experienced adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination or who have lost loved ones as a result of vaccine injuries is becoming harder to ignore.

Kory’s Substack posts attract frequent comments from people who say they or their families experienced vaccine injuries. “The reality of the dangers of these vaccines is inescapable, and I think that may be driving some of these editors to allow this discussion.”

Yet, the “Overton Window” has not opened evenly across all mainstream media outlets. Kory said that when he drafts an op-ed, he “starts high with the biggest ones” — but has stopped trying outlets like The New York Times, noting that “the appetite for discussion does not occur on the left” and in outlets favoring the Biden administration.

One exception, however, is The Hill. Kory said that while this outlet is not widely known outside of Washington, D.C. government and policymaking circles, it’s the most widely read news outlet among government staffers and politicians in the nation’s capital.

“It’s kind of the inside media outlet for our federal government, and that’s a center-left publication and we got one in there,” Kory said.

Aside from the five op-eds he has published since August, Kory has published over a dozen op-eds throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, in outlets such as Fox News, calling into question COVID-19 policies and the data used to support them.

The “Overton Window,” according to Kory, is only applicable to “what we can publish in mainstream media in a time of unprecedented censorship and propaganda,” noting that when he speaks publicly, he is “blunt” and “direct” and “do[es] not self-censor” his words or “modify them for public consumption.”

“When trying to publish in mainstream media in this really dark time of censorship of science and propaganda, false science, you have to be really careful … you’ve got to navigate through the censors.”

By getting these op-eds published, Kory said, “Suddenly you’ll have lots of other audiences that want to hear what you found.”

“That’s what those op-eds do,” Kory said. “They’re all successful and they generate discussions, conversations and exposure of important information to a large audience … it’s intellectually satisfying that I’m bringing out important data.”

Medical and scientific journals ‘run by Pharma’

There’s no similar widening of the “Overton Window” among medical and scientific journals, because “our science is corrupted,” Kory said.

“Those journals are run by Pharma,” Kory said. “They literally live on a stream of funding from Pharma. You cannot get paid by someone and then put out stuff that’s going to hurt the people who are funding you.”

“It’s a closed, really rigid, corrupt system that is not about the free and open, transparent dissemination of scientific information,” Kory continued. “It’s very, very curated — and it’s curated to serve the interests of their funders, end of story.”

Kory advised the public to “go to sources without conflicts of interest” for “medical education and just health topic information in general,” citing outlets like The Defender, FLCCC and the Informed Consent Action Network as examples.

“Those are all nonprofits that are donor-supported, and so they don’t have the pharmaceutical conflicts of interest,” Kory said. “All of those sources have been a welcome destination for citizens who start asking questions when they see that their reality does not match what’s coming out of mainstream sources.”

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