Medicine's Habit Of Changing Its Own Rules

"Do no harm" was forgotten.

Medicine is an evolving profession however, it’s basic philosophy remains the same, the diagnosis and treatment of disease of conditions. An underlying premise is "primum non nocere" meaning first do not harm. This dates back to Hippocrates. It’s a tenet of the profession that is still supposed to be a guiding principle.

In clinical medicine, it’s imperative to constantly weigh risk versus reward.

Take the example of colonoscopies. For people over 50, screening for occult blood in the stool is recommended. If the test comes back positive, a colonoscopy is performed to detect and remove polyps—growths that may eventually turn into bowel cancer, along with other conditions of the bowel. Colorectal cancer ranks third in incidence and second in mortality worldwide, so it’s important to detect it early.

But here's where good medicine shows its nuance. If a 70-year-old has a polyp removed and a clear follow-up colonoscopy, doctors often recommend no further screenings. Why? Because after age 75, the risks of complications from the procedure—including perforation and adverse reactions to anesthesia—often outweigh the benefits of detecting cancer early. This is a perfect example of how medicine is supposed to work: treatment is tailored to the individual, and doing no harm is part of the calculation.

You wouldn’t give a colonoscopy to a toddler, after all—because there’s no risk of colon cancer at that age.

COVID-19 and the Missing Risk Analysis

During the pandemic, however, a different logic seemed to take over.

As COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, the messaging became uniform: everyone—regardless of age, health, or risk—should get the shot. But it was already known early on that children were at extremely low risk of death from COVID-19. And yet, this basic fact had little impact on public health messaging or policy.

Worse, as cases of myocarditis and other adverse reactions emerged—particularly in young males—the narrative didn’t change. The shots were still heavily promoted, even mandated, for school-aged children. Those who raised concerns or questioned the need for vaccinating low-risk groups were often labeled as anti-science or conspiracy theorists.

Eventually, several countries revised their guidance, no longer recommending routine vaccination for healthy children. But the shift came late—long after millions of kids had already been vaccinated.

What happened to assessing individual risk? One of the games that the health authorities played was how they defined a vaccine.

This was the old definition of a vaccine prior to September 2021:

"A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease."

This was the new definition from September 2021:

"A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases."

At this point we already knew there was a problem with the COVID-19 shots.

This change removed the requirement for a vaccine to provide immunity or prevent infection, and allowed COVID-19 vaccines—despite not fully stopping infection or transmission—to still be considered vaccines by definition. There’s a difference between providing immunity and an immune response.

But this semantic shift concealed a more important biological truth: COVID-19 infects the mucosal lining of the upper respiratory tract. Intramuscular injections like the COVID-19 vaccine stimulate a systemic immune response, not a strong mucosal one. So while the vaccine may have helped reduce severity of illness in some cases, its ability to prevent the initial infection or halt transmission was limited.

This is basic immunology, yet it was largely ignored in public discussions.

They changed their own rules. despite the knowledge that this is why vaccines are not very effective against respiratory viruses. Even more eggregious was the fact that officials gaslighted everyone when they stated that you could still get COVID-19 and that it didn’t stop transmission of the virus––the damage was already done.

This wasn’t about being "anti-vaccine." It’s was about being, pro-ethics, and pro-science. Instead the doctors and scientists were silent on critical analysis, dismissed patient-specific risk, and abandon transparency. This eroded trust and went against the very requirements of proper medicine. They changed the rules to suit a universal vaccination agenda.