Reason Magazine’s Unreasonable Take on COVID Vaccines
And Everything Else
I don’t know if Reason magazine has ever been the libertarian champion its proponents once claimed; in my recollection, it was always a sort of milquetoast publication that kept itself within a two-state buffer from the border of accepted thought. But COVID and Donald Trump crippled and twisted it to a new low.
Consider this article, published on October 24, 2025, as evidence of my point:
https://reason.com/2025/10/24/vaccine-skeptics-said-that-covid-shots-would-cause-mass-death-were-still-here/
It appears that Ronald Bailey’s whole flex is “See, the shots haven’t killed us yet!”—a factual but very dishonest take. It’s so absurd that I had to double-check that it wasn’t satire before writing this response. Sadly, it isn’t.
“For years, prominent wellness influencers and other internet personalities have predicted that mRNA vaccines will lead to mass casualties” is such an obvious attempt to gaslight that I have trouble finding a comparison. It’s like writing an article debunking Christmas by pointing to adults who claimed they would catch Santa in their chimney within the next few winters. Someone like that probably exists in this mad world, but no serious publication is debunking them.
The honest take is that it was the vaccine pushers claiming we would all die in a long, dark winter if we didn’t buy what they were selling. If this writer and publication were meant to be serious, this is the article they would have written:
Vaccine Pushers Said Skipping COVID Shots Would Cause Mass Death. We’re Still Here.
The author concludes by praising Trump (something they refused to do during his first—or Biden’s only—term) for Operation Warp Speed and his habitual booster intake. The neocons, leftists, and pharma-dealers seem oblivious to the fact that they were the ones who politicized the issue. They were the ones who tried to exclude us from society; they were the ones who said we should be punished, have our rights trampled, and our liberty taken if we refused to bend the elbow.
Most people on the liberty side of this simply wanted to be left alone. We said the vaccines hadn’t had time to be thoroughly vetted and we didn’t want to be guinea pigs for what was essentially a glorified cold. After the first wave, we understood what the virus was and who was at risk, and we believed the risks of a government-pushed drug with unknown effects were greater than the risks of not taking it. For that, we were told we would die cold, gruesome deaths.
We are still here
.
Still here! Still not getting the shot, lol. Reason magazine had potential at one time but to my knowledge they've always talked liberty but rarely walked liberty. I'd say they're "statist libertarian" at best, if such a thing could exist.
There's been plenty of death and illness that can be attributed to the shot. How many athletes and celebrities have just dropped dead out of nowhere? My elderly neighbor who had been in cancer remission for many years, two weeks after getting vaccinated had it recur. My friend who got vaccinated plus one booster almost immediately had serious menstrual issues that required iron transfusions and later an ablation. Shortly after that she admitted herself into a hospital and nearly had a heart attack. Her husband who also got vaccinated plus a booster now randomly has Parkinsons. Coincidence? Maybe. However, it seems odd that previously healthy people now are all having serious health issues after getting vaccinated.