The Worst Decision I Ever Made
How and Why COVID Compromised my Judgement so Thoroughly
I’ve recently started to reflect on how my thinking has changed since the end of COVID mania. Looking back on it, the most impactful choice I made, the one that everything hinges on, was my choice to get the COVID 19 vaccine. I regret it more than I thought was possible to regret a decision that has had little observable effect on my life. Yes, I’ll say it: The worst decision I have ever made in my life was my choice to allow myself to be injected with an experimental messenger RNA platform to vaccinate against the COVID-19 Coronavirus. No, I have not received a vaccine injury as far as I can tell (sometimes I wish I could blame all the problems that come with getting close to 40 on the jab). But I have come to believe that there was an immense risk which could have resulted in great harm to my health. Still, nothing bad has happened to me yet so it seems that the risk I took didn’t ultimately hurt me. The bullet was in another chamber.
So why would I pick this of all things as the worst decision I’ve ever made? It’s not failing to ask out the pretty girl in gym class? It’s not wasting three years in graduate school only to decide I suck at academia and want out? It’s not saying “yes” to 7th Sangria Swirl on that epic night when I decided I was finally leaving California? No, because unlike freshman year, this was a choice to do something rather than a choice to do nothing. Unlike my decision to try (and ultimately fail) at graduate school, I had the capacity to know it was a bad decision before I made it. And unlike my choice to experience a massive sangria hangover, I chose to not see the potential consequences of getting the COVID shot.
I guess I should start at the beginning though. While I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, I believe that my three years in a Biophysics PhD program gave me better grasp than most laymen about how this vaccine is supposed to work and the inherent problems in it.
The COVID Vaccine Platform
I’ll start off with what I understand the COVID vaccine platform to be (I’ll be sticking to the mRNA platform since that’s what I took). This way people who disagree with my assessment can stop reading immediately and leave a nasty comment about how stupid I am. Note, there are many people who explain this in more detail and with undoubtedly much more accuracy.1
As I understand it, the platform is essentially two different components: the lipid nanoparticle, and the messenger RNA (mRNA) strands.
The purpose of the lipid nanoparticle is to facilitate delivery of the mRNA to the interior of cells. Lipids are the same material that make up cell membranes, and, taking a very simplified view, they are basically small structures of oil suspended in the watery environment of the cytosol (fluid within cells) and the intercellular fluid (fluid between cells). Similar to how two small beads of oil will join together if they are sitting on the surface of a body of water, the lipid nanoparticles and cell membranes will join together, fusing the contents of the nanoparticle into the cell’s interior. Without this delivery mechanism, relatively little messenger RNA would ever reach the cellular machinery that builds proteins.
Messenger RNA is a chemical instruction for a ribosome to build a particular protein from amino acids. Proteins are the biochemical molecules that do things within cells. If there’s some useful life function occurring at the cellular level, you can almost be sure that it’s proteins that are making it happen in some way. The messenger RNA in the COVID vaccine gives the ribosomes instructions build the spike protein found in membrane of the coronavirus particles. Another unique factor of the mRNA in the COVID vaccine was the replacement of uridine bases with a pseudouridine that had the effect of stabilizing the mRNA. As I understand it, these pseudouridines made it more difficult for the RNA to be removed by the standard mechanisms generally do this in cells. The goal was to keep the mRNA in the cells longer, and increase the likelihood that a ribosome would read and translate the RNA into the spike protein.
The idea is that the body’s own cells will manufacture the spike protein that the coronavirus will eventually use when it attempts to invade the body’s cells. If the body can make enough of the protein in advance, the immune system will recognize it as a potential threat and attack it to eliminate the cells that are producing the foreign proteins. After the body has gone through this process, it will effectively remember that it has seen this foreign protein before and that it has a way to fight it. Of course, the cells that actually produced this protein aren’t so lucky. Once the body views them as compromised the only way forward is to eliminate them for the health of the organism. Unfortunately, that’s the rub.
The Problem with Nanomedicines
Even though I ultimately chose not to stick around for the PhD, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a lab group doing some amazing work with a nanomedicine called PEBBLES2 (scientists love their acronyms). I thought these things were seriously cool. They were designed to enter cancer cells where they had a variety of functions: a magnetic component to provide MRI contrast, a fluorescent dye to allow a surgeon to clearly visualize the shape and location of a tumor, and the ability to dump free radicals (essentially cell-poison) when exposed to ultraviolet light to make sure to kill any cancer cells the surgeon may have left behind. To this day, I still think the story Dr. Kopelman told me about this technology is one of the most inspiring told to me by a research scientist. But the hardest part is getting the medicine to go where it’s supposed to go and not to where it’s not supposed to go. I never fully understood how this was intended to work consistently even with cancer cells, which are sufficiently different from non-cancer cells to make targeting them feasible.
It turns out that this is the exact same problem the lipid nanoparticles carrying messenger RNA have: they have no targeting mechanism. The reason you are injected in your deltoid muscle is that the cells of your deltoid are cells you can spare. Yeah, they’ll die in the immune response, but a massage and a few extra overhead presses and you’re good as new. But what ensures that the lipid nanoparticles go only into the cells of your deltoid? Not a damn thing.
It’s not that big a deal for your immune system to target the cells of your shoulder muscle, but the cells of your heart? Your brain? Other organs? These are potentially very serious problems that are baked into this vaccine platform. If the lipid nanoparticles leave the area of the deltoid through the bloodstream, they can go to every tissue tissue in the body (the brain being a possible exception due to the blood-brain barrier). If this is what can happen, what would we expect to see? The immune system would attack any tissue that expressed the protein, causing inflammation in that tissue. The medical suffix used to describe inflammation: —itis. Myocarditis.3 Pericarditis.4 Encephalitis.5 You might also expect to find chemical signatures of dying tissue—signatures like troponin6 (The footnotes indicate things I’ve seen reported on in the last three years, but certainly do not represent knowledge I would have had at the time I made the decision).
In the years since the rollout of the COVID vaccine, I’ve looked for evidence of these effects, I have been convinced that they are real, and that they have harmed people.7 But I had the knowledge and experience to know this was possible before seeing this evidence. I had the background such that I should have been able to say, “the lack of effective cellular targeting poses a serious risk that I must see addressed before I will be willing to take this vaccine.” But I didn’t say that. I never even thought about it. When I hear some of the horrific stories of the vaccine injured I feel equal parts gratitude that I have been fortunate enough to avoid such consequences, and disgust because I should have been equipped to make a better choice than I did. And yet, for some reason, I chose to refuse to think.
A Matter of Leverage
Thank you to those who have stayed with me through my divergence into my understanding of nanomedicines and mRNA vaccine technology. I believe it to be relevant because it shows what I knew or had learned about these things prior the vaccine being introduced. I had been a part of research that led me to appreciate the difficulty effectively targeting specific types of cells with nanoparticles, and I had enough understanding of cell biology to know that the lack of targeting in the lipid nanoparticles could result in autoimmune effects throughout the body. Now maybe you believe me about the way these things work, maybe you think it’s plausible but not certain, maybe you think I’m full of it. But the important thing for my story is that this was what I understood to be true, and yet I drew on none of that knowledge and experience when I agreed to be vaccinated. Why? It turns out that I had vastly underestimated the power of social pressure.
When the first round of vaccines became available in early 2021, I was teaching my first year at a private school in Tennessee. Essential workers were deemed to have first access to the vaccines, and by the grace of the bureaucracy, teachers were in that category. I got the shot almost as early as I could. It’s hard to describe the mindset that led to me making that choice, but it definitely started with a single emotion: misery. I was absolutely miserable in my job that year. Teachers reading this will know the burn out that starts to come on after spring break, as you get closer to summer vacation. In the 20-21 school year, I felt that way by October.
Trying to teach with a mask was a special form of torture. Within about two weeks of doing it, I started to develop tension headaches that ran along the back of my head and neck between my ears. They settled in by the end of my first period and didn’t stop until after I got home. I stopped eating lunch because I was just never very hungry when dealing with constant, low-level pain at the back of my head.
I would choose between cloth masks and the common, blue surgical masks. They both sucked. God forbid you sneeze or drool on the cloth, and the smell of the surgical masks, though subtle was maddening to deal with hour after hour, day after day.
Not to mention that I could no longer rely on facial expressions build rapport, read student reactions, or gauge the attitudes of my colleagues. To this day I still don’t know what many of the students or people I worked with actually look like. Even worse, I was also mandated to enforce these rules that the students hated every bit as much as I did. I became the one who had to tell them to “keep your masks on until we get to the lunchroom” or “try your best to stay six feet apart as you do this collaborative lab activity.” The inconsistency and dare I say it, the idiocy, of the rules I enforced was humiliating in its own right. It became an absolute chore to get through each of my physics classes—a subject I had once loved to teach.
There were times where it felt like the only reprieve was when I got home from work and collapsed on my sofa as the tension in my head started to ease. Of course, a half an hour later I was already dreading having to go to work the next day.
All this to say, that at that point in time I really only wanted one thing above all else: for it all to stop. Stop having to wear masks. Stop having to yell at students when they used it as a chin diaper. Stop telling students to social distance (except when, for whatever reason, it was deemed unnecessary). Stop hating my work. Just let things be fucking normal. And ultimately, that was why I got the COVID shot. Because I wanted so badly for things to be normal.
In retrospect it seems like a beyond stupid reason to choose to take an experimental vaccine. And to be honest, I never said to myself, “Once you get this vaccine things will go back to normal.” I never put it into words, probably because if I did I would have known it was bullshit. No way in hell an organization with as much inertia as my school was going to change its mask or social distancing policies in the middle of school year because some of its employees might be vaccinated. And while they encouraged us to get vaccinated, they certainly didn’t require it. I just had this faint hope that I never put into words that if I got the vaccine I could stop doing all the COVID bullshit.
It didn’t help that there were a lot of voices (friends, strangers, media) that were saying the same thing: “Vaccines are the way out of this.” “Getting vaccinated protects the most vulnerable.” “It’s truly a remarkable feat of the human mind that a vaccine came so quickly.” And, what became my favorite: “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” To be honest though, none of those voices really moved me one way or the other. I just wanted my job to be something I liked again.
It wasn’t direct social pressure through talking heads, celebrities, politicians, family, or peers that led me to get the shot. It was the indirect social pressure that was exerted on my employer to enact these “recommended protocols,” turning my work into something I hated, that made go stand in that line to get my COVID shot. It was for no other reason than the faintest hope that getting vaccinated might end this miserable period of my life, that I chose to be among the first subjects to receive an experimental vaccine platform. And none of what I knew about cell biology, nanomedicine, or what risk COVID posed to me personally entered my mind as I got jabbed.
The Worst Decision
The first inkling I had that something was off with this whole COVID vaccine thing was the fact that the woman at the “vaccine selfie booth” seemed genuinely offended that I had no desire to get a “social media ready image” of me “doing my patriotic duty to be vaccinated.” The emotion I felt was disgust, and though I couldn’t put it into words then, if that feeling could talk it would have said something like, “Bitch, the only fucking reason I’m here is because all these COVID rules have turned my life to shit and I want it to go back to the way it was. Getting this treatment doesn’t make me awesome. It makes me desperate.” Nevertheless, I did go back for two more rounds, so I guess the disgust wasn’t enough to change my decision-making process.
All of my life, I’ve taken a certain amount of pride in my ability to make decisions for myself. No, it’s not like I’m Eric Cartman waddling around shouting “I do what I want!” to justify my life choices. It’s more that I think I have the capacity, the patience, and the confidence to look closely at what authorities tell me, then decide if I think they’re right or wrong. For example, one of my first cardiologists told me that my heart condition required me to stop weightlifting, since weightlifting causes blood pressure spikes, which can exacerbate the heart condition. I didn’t agree immediately (because I think resistance training is probably the exercise I do with the highest and most noticeable benefits), but nor did I immediately reject the recommendation out of hand. I checked it out. What I discovered is that it’s the valsalva maneuver (holding your breath as you complete the weight lifting motion) that causes the spike in blood pressure. Breathing correctly results in no such measurable increases in blood pressure. This more nuanced view was eventually confirmed by my current cardiologist who has encouraged me to keep lifting weights. While time and resources don’t always allow me to dig as deeply as I might prefer, it’s this approach and mindset that I’ve tried my best to cultivate when listening to advice from experts. And it’s this approach that was completely absent when I chose to get my COVID vaccine.
Why? Why did I fail to use the relevant knowledge I had in my head? Why didn’t I employ my epistemological standing order to check it out for myself to see if it makes sense? As shameful and embarrassing as it is to admit, the “why” of it is small and pathetic. It’s because they made me work in a mask. I wasn’t forced by a vaccine mandate. I wasn’t threatened with loss of my job. I wasn’t even given a false promise that I could take the mask off if I got the vaccine. None of that happened. I ignored knowledge that was relevant to decision. I violated my rule to rely as much as possible on my own judgement when making these kinds of choices. All because they put me in a fucking mask.
I’ve made a lot bad decisions in my life, but the reason this one takes the cake despite the relative lack of bad consequences it that I broke some of the most fundamental rules I have for myself. A: Don’t ignore something you know to be true, which I did when I didn’t think about the problems the lack of a targeting mechanism would present for this platform. B: Emotion does not give accurate information about the external world, which I ignored when I made the decision based solely on hope that things might go back to normal. And it burns me to this day that a mask was all it took to break me.
What I’ve Learned
In the immediate aftermath of the 20-21 school year I quit my job without having a new one to go to. I knew without a doubt that my mental health would fair even more poorly if I was required to do it again for another year (at the point I made the decision, keeping these protocols around wasn’t entirely off the table). So that was the first and most concrete thing I learned: I absolutely cannot work a job that requires me to wear and enforce mask rules all day, every day. Other realizations took a bit longer.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have some thoughtful friends and acquaintances who have argued (and convinced me) that the situation I was in was not a mere minor inconvenience especially given the fact these types of rules were effectively imposed from on high. Though I might find it humiliating that my judgement was compromised by having to wear a mask every day, it was not a small inconvenience to someone who relied extensively on speech and facial expressions to for his work. Additionally, it isn’t inconsequential that I was also required to enforce these rules that I viewed as the source of much of my misery. I won’t say that I knew the masks were bullshit at that point but I absolutely knew they made my students look as miserable as I felt. It’s demoralizing to be the one who inflicts that kind of thing on others. So, I’ve also been fortunate enough to take away the idea that this was something done to me rather than something I did exclusively to myself. If the COVID shot had resulted in complications or injury, the problem would be mine to deal with, but responsibility for some of this has to be placed on the people who set up these rules.
But the last thing I learned was the most frightening: I can absolutely be broken by social pressure. When I first got these shots I tried to rationalize it to myself. Tried to convince myself that I wasn’t going along with social pressure, that I had been convinced by their argument. But that isn’t true. I never even really thought about the argument. No, I made a decision solely because of the social pressure to do so. For a person who has spent his adult life idolizing names like Howard Roark and John Galt, this admission is beyond painful. But being honest with myself about it is the first step in building a defense against it.
Still, sometimes I shudder when I consider different hypotheticals. If a mask was all it took to cripple my ability to make rational decisions, what might I do if real social pressure were brought down on me. What if instead of having to wear a mask it was having to get by in the winter without heat? Would I give them my guns? What if it was a restriction of the food supply? Would I eat the bugs? Would I own nothing and be happy? I truly hope I never have to answer those questions.
I will say that I have become more leery of different aspects of social pressure when I perceive them coming into play. And I have a visceral, instinctive-level disgust for it. I’ve told people I work for that the day a job requires me to put my pronouns or a land acknowledgement in my email signature is the day I quit. But it extends to new issues that enter the culture every day. The idea that Zelensky and Putin are effectively reincarnations of Churchill and Hitler. That Anthony Fauci is “America’s Doctor.”8 That the Swelce phenomenon is the epitome of wholesome, romantic perfection that we plebians can only aspire to (and the only possible reason you wouldn’t agree is that you’re an envious chode). All of these things start the danger flags waving in my head. Am I being paranoid? Maybe. But massive waves of social pressure coupled with widespread condemnations of whole groups of people is the exact animus that led me to make the worst decision of my life. I’ll retain my paranoia for now.
Am I better or worse for having gone through not only making this choice, but also coming to terms with it? Well, I wouldn’t give back the knowledge of myself and what I can be made to do under the right circumstances. I’m also immensely grateful that this decision hasn’t resulted in perceivable harm to my health. I firmly believe that it could have. That said, I’m probably significantly less trusting and more conspiratorial than I was three years ago. It’s a trade I can live with.
Robert Malone’s Subtsack is an excellent source for this type of information.
Additionally, Bret Weinstein always has descriptions of the technology and underlying biology that are clear, and in-line with what I understand to be true. The most recent place I heard him give it was on his most recent JRE appearance
Kopelman Lab was working on this for years, and though I have since lost track of the project, it was hearing a story like the one from this 2005 Science Daily Article that ultimately made decide to attend the University of Michigan for graduate school:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050323133412.htm
I believe Dr. John Campbell had the best discussion I’ve seen on this topic:
Dr. Campbell has done several long form interviews with two vaccine-injured young men in the United Kingdom. The two I’ve watched are linked below:
A particularly disgusting example of this sort of propaganda is the following children’s book:
Messner, K. (2021). Dr. Fauci: How a Boy from Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor. Simon and Schuster.
Thank you for writing this. I am very grateful that I always had total freedom to make this choice without anyone suffering for it other than me, which made it pretty easy. In a bizarre way, being a PTSD-brained freak saved me. When the President of the United States (a male authority figure) said on September 9, 2021, that his patience was wearing thin and he wanted me to immediately submit to having my body penetrated with a medical instrument of his choosing, against my will and without my consent, a line was crossed. At that moment he triggered (in the PTSD sense, not the colloquial sense) my survival mechanisms. The instant he said that, the decision was made and there were no circumstances under which I would comply. I have no family and if my income goes away, the only person I have to keep housed and fed is me. I was fully prepared to get out my phone and tell agents of the state that they had better have guns and be prepared to save my health by putting their "vaccine" into my cold, dead arm because that would be the only way it would happen. In the two and a half years since, I've reflected often that I was grateful he showed his true, authoritarian colors then--because I never even *considered* getting their goddamn jab after that. Having a strong tendency towards radical autoimmune reactions (like half an inch of psoriasis that can occur overnight, if I get upset enough) I'd probably be dead if I had.
I also viscerally hated the masking, and I attribute my rejection to the fact that masking is anti-life. Our life is considered to begin when we take our first breath after birth. And our life is considered to have ended after we have taken our last breath. Spiritual traditions talk about a supreme being "breathing" life into the first human or even into the universe. Breath is Life, so anything that inhibits the breath is anti-life. I think some of the fucking authorities who instituted these masking mandates knew this.