The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I’m willing to look back at intervals of my life characterized by bad assumptions, faulty conclusions and passionate attachment to falsehood. It took me years, for example, to really understand religious legalism, to understand how you could slip into it without knowing it, and how we’re capable of thundering on about truths that aren’t truths at all. We all get it wrong, sometimes. People I dearly love and respect disagree with me about what I call, with good reason, the “Commie Virus” and our response to it. I truly hope I’m wrong about the dangers of the vaccine, and if circumstances merited it, I would like to be able, someday, to humbly apologize to our public health authorities, saying something like, “hey, I guess you really were looking out for us.”
Unfortunately, they aren’t making that very likely. I keep telling people, after 20 months of this pandemic, that I really don’t understand our global response to a virus that, by historic standards, is a bit of a dud. It’s certainly not polio or smallpox. It’s not going to kill 30% of the people infected by it. It’s not going to empty the entire village. It’s not going to leave bodies piled up on the street. It isn’t the Spanish flu. It isn’t the black death. It seems to be pushing the elderly and the sick over the edge, which is horrible, of course, but it apparently didn’t even require the emergency hospital ships and tents set up to handle the hordes of deathly ill people predicted by the “experts.”
And please. Give me some credit. I know people who died of Covid, and people who struggled with it in hospitals. I’m not saying it isn’t real, but is it the “Nazi air raid” brand of existential peril? Are you really standing in solidarity with the Noam Chomskys of this world — the sort who believe the un-vaccinated should be isolated and starved? If you are, please don’t ever make the “holocaust trivialization” claim around me. You would have made a very competent Jew killer, and the scary thing is you don’t even know it. You’re the kind who only needs a tiny bit of fear to be cheering on the internment camps.
We’re now entering an even more confusing chapter of this crisis, if that is possible. We’re being asked for abject obedience to a profession that hasn’t earned that obedience. The same scientific elite that gave us miraculous protection against polio and small pox is the same fraternity that treated people like cattle in the Tuskegee Study. The same extraordinary researchers who are controlling glaucoma, reducing cancer, and transplanting lungs are part of a system responsible for the third leading cause of death in America: medical errors. (When you think about it, if you really wanted to kill someone, a hospital wouldn’t be a bad place to make the attempt.) As a 77 year old relative of mine said, as he was hacking and hoarse with Covid, (now recovered), “I’m not going to a hospital. You check in, but you don’t check out.”
We’re now being ORDERED to take an experimental vaccine, or sacrifice the most fundamental liberties we enjoy as members of society. It’s actually a bit more dramatic than that. It’s basically, as Noam Chomsky sees it: “take the jab or starve to death.” You can refuse the vaccine, but you can’t work, can’t worship, can’t buy groceries, can’t enter buildings, can’t be treated by a doctor. Will we need separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, or would you prefer we die first? Don’t answer that question.
Now, have I taken vaccines in the past? Yes. Have I taken them without even thinking about them or researching them? Yes. I took a shingles vaccine a few years ago and only mildly worried about a report I vaguely remembered, indicating that vaccine can actually bring on the condition it is attempting to prevent. On balance, I trust most doctors. I trust the process as well. I take comfort in the self-correction built into an honest debate, when it isn’t clouded by conflicts of interest. Before 2015, apparently, the “science” was saying: don’t feed your infants anything made with nuts or they may develop nut allergies. It turns out just the opposite is the case, but you would have been scolded, mightily, for ignoring the “science” that wasn’t “science” after all. The experts get it wrong a lot, and it takes time — decades — to find out who, and what, was right.
Now that these vaccines have been rolled out across the globe, literally by the billions, we can say a few things very confidently..
- They don’t last. Contrary to what we were told, boosters will be required, and no one seems to be answering the very obvious question that inspires: how many boosters, and for how long?
- In rare cases, they produce horrifying results — heart inflammation, cardiac arrest, brain bleeds, blood clotting.
- Unlike small pox and polio vaccines, they don’t prevent infection or death. We are asked to endure the risk of an experimental injection in return for a more mild “breakthrough” version of the condition. And, um, yes, you still could die from Covid.
All of this left me pondering an insurance question for you risk-management types. If the vaccines are safe, can you buy disability insurance to specifically protect yourself against an adverse reaction? If a brain bleed and a heart attack is so extremely rare, then it should be a pretty good money-maker for an insurance company. Right? No such policy? Why?
On the broader question of the social compact: we’re asking five year olds to get a vaccine to protect themselves against a condition they have ZERO chance of enduring, and why? To protect older, nervous, paranoid people from asymptomatic infection. We engage in a version of that when we send young men off to war, but if those young men are injured, we take care of them. Are we taking care of the vaccine injured? Do we even have a plan for doing so?
We don’t really have to ponder the risks manifested by the data coming in on this right now. We have only to consider a reality we should have thought about a lot more seriously when the vaccines were developed. Do we really want to take a drug that has no long term testing at all? Is that wise? You may take that risk happily, but are you really going to mandate it for everyone else around you?
I’ll be ecstatic if I’m wrong about this vaccine. I have dear ones who have taken it. I want them to have long, happy, healthy lives. The body itself is a God-breathed miracle and I’m guessing it can fend off even disastrous trust in a liar like Dr. Fauci, but — at this point in history — do I have faith in this month’s version of the “science?”
Not on your life — or mine either.
