December 30, 2021
Will the NYT start asking some questions about how safe COVID vaccines are, now that they've lost an editor?
By
Monica Showalter
It had to have been a hard blow when the New York Times' deputy Asia editor, Carlos Tejada, unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack. He had just turned 49.
After all, for the Times, guys with his skills are pretty hard to find. I didn't know him, but I used to work as an editor at a big newswire in Singapore myself, and recognized his name as that of a superb reporter and writer, a guy with little bias, lots of foreign knowledge, and a byline worth reading.
According to his New York Times
obit, he was also a superb editor, someone who could scruff out stories from the filings of weak reporters. The Times doesn't say so, but since I know about editing in Asia, that likely was editing stories from the filings of non-native speakers of English, as well the filings of U.S.-born freelancers and staff, who might have been good reporters, but were wretched writers -- people who couldn't write ledes (yes, that's the word used in the industry), organize sentences, or sometimes, even spell (I can name names at the Times, I knew editors there). Tejada was the guy who could turn these shambles into publishable stories. In addition, he was an old Asia hand, with experience and knowhow around the region, including some knowledge of Mandarin. Guys like that are diamonds to big newspapers with expensive foreign operations. Tejada had been poached from the Wall Street Journal in 2016, which meant that the Times had been watching him for awhile as he honed his skills at the Journal, before moving in to make him a better offer.
Next thing they knew, Tejada died suddenly, leaving behind a wife and two small kids last Dec. 17. After that, other outlets, notably
Alex Berenson, a former Timesman himself on his Substack page, published what might have been a pertinent issue: That Tejada had gotten a Moderna booster shot a day earlier, following two Johnson & Johnson vaccine shots. Based on
his picture in the Times, a recent one, taken only a few weeks earlier at a November gathering, he looked fit, healthy, and happy.
Something sounds funny here.
Now, it's possible the Moderna booster had nothing to do with this. It's possible he had an underlying condition such untreated high blood pressure which triggered an "event." All the same, most people don't drop dead at age 49. But we hear a lot about this around cases of healthy young men, such as athletes, dropping dead of heart issues after their COVID shots. The press hasn't asked many questions about it. They, including the Times, have busied themselves with promoting the 'get vaccinated' line on political grounds as if no other questions need be asked in what may well be an unfolding story. Tejada was the editor who fluffed up the copy of the first COVID stories coming out of China, as
Berenson's Substack piece shows. Now, Tejada himself may be the latest or last chapter in the question about whether these vaccine solutions to the problem are really safe, and whether vaccine mandates are a good idea.
The New York Times has lost someone good from their team following a booster shot, which ought to be prompting them to ask some questions at this point. Are these boosters -- in Tejada's case, a mismatched booster, given that his original shot was the Johnson & Johnson -- a factor in his early death? And apparently, he'd had
two of those. The Twitterati, as Berenson
notes, have been all over this. We know the readers are asking.
It would seem natural that maybe the Times would be interested in knowing whether the booster was what killed him, in order to just make sense of this loss, which hit them hard. They ought to be writing stories about it, about what they find. Will they?
As Berenson
wrote:
RIP Carlos Tejada, Dec. 7, 1972 - Dec. 17, 2021.
If this does not wake the Times nothing will.
