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.
You're welcome, Holly. Thank you again, for cross posting (it will probably double my total Substack views 😊). And, yes, I think that was a crossing of the Rubicon for many people. The moment at which they said, in the immortal words of Elon Musk. "Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is."
I saw your post thanks to Holly's share. I had 2 Pfizer shots and a booster before I found Dr. John Campbell. Now I worry about it every day. I am 77. I wish I could support you and Holly but I still have to work at Lowe's just to make ends meet.
Same! I've worked at a local hardware store the last 9+ years. We were declared 'essential' workers during the pandemic but getting the jab was left up to our individual discretion though pressure was fully evident.
Thanks for writing this article. You publicly admitted a personal screwup, in a manner which benefits others which, IMHO, puts you at the head of the pack. 👍🏼
"The instant he said that, the decision was made and there were no circumstances under which I would comply."
Yep. I don't remember if that was the exact moment at which I made up my mind for good on the jabs, but that's when my reasoning changed. Before, it was something like "This thing hasn't been tested long enough, and all the pressure makes me suspicious of what's really going on."
After 9/9/21, my reasoning (if you can call it that) for refusing the jabs was "Because I was born free, and I'll die that way."
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.
So many Kafkaesque moments…where to begin? How about the simple fact that the obvious downsides of wearing masks were not acknowledged? Let’s say that masks work to significantly reduce transmission (!). In a sane world, the message should have always been, Hey, we know that wearing masks is a true imposition and not even possible for some people, and we will be altering our recommendations as soon as is humanly possible. Instead, the whole narrative just passed right over that and it was treated as though the authorities were not demanding anything harder than avoiding the ingestion of raspberry ice cream in order to save billions of lives.
There is a Norwegian study and other studies that show such face covers do not work. They actually work to prevent humans from making connections and to distrust one another. XO
It was scary to watch so many people that I believed were thoughtful, smart people swallow it all. Maybe I didn't because I had stumbled upon unorthodox thinkers like Bret and Heather before it happened. Now my eyes are fully opened and I no longer trust any 3 letter agency, medical or governmental. It would be easier and less isolating to still be asleep.
I took 3 Moderna shots. While I think I have probably escaped any ill effects, this COVID vaccine experience has completely destroyed my trust in any and all governmental institutions. It is a sad realization.
I had a massive heart attack after my second vaccine despite being an active and fit long term vegetarian. When I asked for it to be reported to VAERS I was told that it had nothing to do with the vaccine and shouldn’t be reported. Maybe they were right, maybe not. Sadly the inquiry was not allowed. This is the biggest current injustice to millions of people. For people like me who lived, the past is the past, we just want to know if we are in the clear now and to understand our future risks
It’s a travesty that nobody from these organizations/agencies supposedly devoted to the safety of these treatments isn’t looking more closely at cases like yours. I’m so sorry this happened to you. And that you were gaslit on top of it.
You would think that data collection would be a good thing , if not usable now maybe later.
Predetermining results by health care professionals is why I question medical advice. Think statins and heart disease from the 90’s. Was it statin's or the fact that running and not smoking happened at the same timeframe. The COVID response certainly raises a giant red flags!!
I don't think you should beat yourself up too much - we all fell for the psychological pressure to some extent. And that's what so much of covid was about; *psychological* pressure.
I knew from quite early on, from analysis of the 'official' ONS data in the UK (I'm based in the UK), that something wasn't adding up with what I was being bombarded with by government and the media. It was at odds with the data. The incongruencies just began to pile up, one after another.
Even the official data, which we know to have significantly over-exaggerated the impact of covid (things like the "28 day" rule for death notifications), showed that in the first year of covid, supposedly the most deadly time, there were only 3,729 covid 'deaths' in the under 50's in the UK. With about 37m people in this age range in the UK that's about 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000.
Certainly bad enough to worry about, but not bad enough to completely lose our shit over, either. Definitely in bad flu territory rather than Ebola territory - but we were all pressured to think of this more in terms of Ebola territory.
For the more elderly, of course, the risk ramped up significantly. But mass vaccination should *always* have been about a comparison of the risks and benefits. The reason I chose not to get vaccinated, initially, was simple. I could not see how sufficient safety testing had been possible in such a compressed timescale - despite all assurances to the contrary.
At that time I still believed in the "vaccines are medical miracles" mythology. Further reading has convinced me that vaccines are a bit of a mixed bag; some seem to work very well and others do not.
As I learned more about the whole mRNA platform I began to wonder about things like the dose/response and whether the stuff actually stays where it's supposed to - and for how long our cells are turned into spike factories. The insistence that kids were vaccinated, when they were at a covid risk almost indistinguishable from zero, made me realize that something else, other than concern for people's health, was at play here.
There was so much that just didn't stack up - lockdowns (easy to show from the UK data that the 2nd derivative of the mortality curve had gone negative before lockdown), asymptomatic transmission (hard to see how an asymptomatic individual is producing enough replication-competent virions to yield a significant probability of secondary infection), masks (the typical surgical mask operates as a barrier not a filter - and so the exhaled breath is just re-directed rather than 'cleansed' of virions), social distancing (based on the false assumption of droplet spread, even though we already knew it was an aerosolized process), fomite transmission (all of those deadly covid particles just lurking on surfaces waiting to infect us) - and so on. None of what we were being told was correct in any meaningful sense. It was all, largely, theatre - successful in scaring people, but not even slightly successful in mitigating transmission or the impact of covid.
So, even though my initial decision not to get vaccinated was based on scepticism over the claim of comprehensive safety testing, I was also aware that most of what I was being told about covid simply wasn't accurate. This provided a further red flag when it came to the vaccine. If 'they' could get this much wrong, why should I trust what they're saying about the vaccine?
I was lucky. I had enough time on my hands to wade through a lot of the data and read lots of stuff - and also the capability to perform my own analyses (I'm a theoretical physicist). Most people did not have this luxury and believed what they were being told - and it's hard to blame them for going a bit covid-nuts.
But those of us who were trying to warn others, to say "hang on a minute, there's stuff not quite adding up", were heavily censored - another red flag that this was about more than simply health. There are many other red flags (like the attempt to hide the full trial data used by the FDA for up to 75 years, for example. Or the reluctance of governments to release the full record-level data).
I'm glad you managed to avoid serious consequences. My son-in-law also avoided them. But others have not been so lucky. The continual denial that there are vaccine-injured, or that these are "incredibly rare", is another of those red flags.
It’s a good point, and I know this reads a bit like self-flagellation, but believe me, I’ve done that, and I think moved past it. I really wanted to be as honest with myself as possible, and not spare my feelings in my self-assessment of why I did what I did.
I want to leave a positive, supportive comment but words fail. So I’ll leave you with the knowledge that I am at least have positive and supporting feelings to offer you.
I will blame those covid nuts who came unhinged in their verbal attacks on the non-conformists. I'm for individual thinking and choice, especially in this instance where one's choice has zero effect on others.
You may have heard about it, but look up “Diamond Princess Cruise”. It was the first pure quarantine situation under COVID and told us everything we needed to know about whether it was lethal or not. The “experts” knew about it and shoved this garbage down our throats anyway.
“I don't think you should beat yourself up too much - we all fell for the psychological pressure to some extent.”
No, not all did. Many knew from the very beginning that it was BS. As soon as one red flag popped up, every single statement by the authorities and “experts” should have been scrutinized. Those who did know it was all bunk paid severely for trying to share this knowledge or at least to live by it.
For me, from very early on the lockdowns made no sense unless they were purposely doing it to manipulate people into wanting a vaccine. Ditto with the masks. Thank you for writing this. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to teach under those circumstances. If you want another interesting read on education, I highly recommend John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education.
I still am. The school year just ended for me here in Japan. It officially ends in March but the English classes finish earlier than the medical classes do. The school year starts April 1st in Japan. The finishing school year is my first on campus in three years. I did not wear a mask but the students did and do. 41 out of 54 wore them as they gave their speeches for the speech contest.
For the first time in my 20 years at this school, students lodged formal complaints against me, and they were over my masklessness. Every day going in to school was filled with dread. I wondered, “Is today the day of the big mask confrontation leading to my dismissal from my last med school position?” I locked eye on every single white coated dweeb who crossed my bow challenging them to say something. All just sheepishly directed their eyes downward. They know, the Faucing cowards.
I would learn that another of us part time English treachery and two of the MDs teaching also went without a mask the whole school year. It is comforting to know you are not alone when confronting the borg, but if we could ignore the mask mandates, why did others choose to continue to follow them?
I wouldn't wear a mask and I did not wear one happily. But, as time went on, and I had one negative interaction after another with a clerk, a nurse, a person on an elevator, I got to the point where I didn't want to go food shopping because i didn't want a fight with some rando stranger. Fortunately, a supermarket a block from me allowed non-masking. Their stance was 'not all people can wear masks for health reasons. We have no right to question someone's private health matters, so we take the position if a customer is not wearing a mask they likely have a legitimate reason.' Pretty enlightened for that time period. I had the odd customer berate me, and once a clerk did, but his superior pulled him aside and told him company policy. I had lots of negative interactions though over a couple of years. Many stores I won't go back into as a result. Even now.
I am still required to at work, a medical university. Masking made my favorite job the most tiresome and least pleasant previously imaginable. The last day was the last of two days of a speech contest. 41 out of 54 speakers of my group wore masks at the podium. Only three teachers out of around 15 were unmasked. One of these, an Australian gave feed back, lamenting the lack of interaction from the audience. She told of the importance of smiling at the speaker….while she was herself wearing a mask.
Otherwise, my experience is much as you relate here, except is is ongoing. Mask “recommendations” lasted until May 8th, 2023 and were followed by 99% of the population here. Many stores refused to let me enter without a mask. Unless I had to get something from that particular store, I did not enter and will not ever again. The only places I wore a mask into were ones I had to, such as the bank. No greater proof that the world lost its collective mind exists than the guard at the bank stopping me from entering because I was unmasked. Yet, more was found. The human entertainers at Sea World in Japan wore face covering when swimming with the aquatic animals. My kids’ swim coaches wore clear plastic masks mounded in the shape of the lower half of a face while swimming.
Strangely, this all started after 18 months into the panic. Everyone except I were wearing masks but few did as much as give me a dirty look. Then suddenly, school officials barged into my classroom and prompted a confrontation over masks in front of my nursing students. I refused, they brought in a plastic barrier and placed it between the class and myself and we switched to zoom lessons for the rest of the school year.
Same at another school but that was at the end of an online lesson. Not wanting to have the confrontation in front of the class, I wore it as there was just 10 minutes left in the class time. After the class I told them that if I had to wear a mask for an online class at broadcast from the school that I would just conduct the lessons from home. Surprisingly, they immediately said that was fine, but I would still have to wear a mask. I replied “no” and left. That night there email “special permission” for me to conduct my online lessons from home without a mask. All the other teachers wore masks for their online lessons. Madness.
Shortly thereafter, clerks, guards, mad maskers on the street and even my own wife and kids would tell me to mask up, but I refused. It has not been a fun for years and the madness continues.
A lot of us got the shot because we believed we had to - even before my work instituted a vaccine mandate, my wife was coming unglued from such a long separation from her family in the US, and then all the hoops she had to jump through to see her dying grandfather in a nursing home barely 5 minutes away from us. We knew she was prone to bad vaccine reactions, but she couldn't take the psychological load anymore and so she traded it for a physical one. Luckily most of the vaccine-specific symptoms have faded over the years, but she never should have had to make that choice.
We live in Ottawa, too, so it was an extra slap in the face to see the Freedom Convoy folks branded as fascists (or whatever) when they were the only people who EVER seemed to care about the well being of people like my wife. We had friends who said TO HER FACE that they still supported the mandates, even after hearing and supposedly sympathizing with her experiences. The idea that we could have a better idea of what was good for her health than some government policy maker was never considered.
This resonates a lot with me. I teach 5th grade, and the masking and mask enforcing was one of the most miserable things I've ever had to do. First, I'm hard of hearing, and trying to understand my students was a constant nightmare as they were masked.
But even worse: I knew... I KNEW that the results of masking would be catastrophic on those younger kids who were just learning phonics and basic reading skills. I was being required to hurt kids' learning--I will never stop despising that I went along with it.
And when I got the RNA vaccine, the reason was much like you. There was no direct reason. But the comprehensive social pressure led me to just get the damn thing.
I certainly don't know as much about these specifics vaccines as you (my undergrad focus was astrophysics, not biology), but I knew that there was no way the effectiveness nor the long-term side effects could possibly be known. It was, by definition, still very experimental. And I knew I was acting as a coerced guinea pig. I had proclaimed months earlier that I would never be among the first to get them. But months of misery made me wilt and just get the stupid thing in hopes that maybe it would be good and maybe it will start things going back to normal.
Side note: my students now were in 1st grade when schools shut down and 2nd grade during the year of the mask. I have never had so many 5th graders struggle with basic reading skills in my entire career. It was 100% predictable, and 100% inflicted by the education decision-makers.
You are not alone. I've always been a cynic. I was born that way. I refused and refused and then they came up with the stupid Omicron scare, and I caved. Not only that, I took my sons and husband along with me. We just got the 2, but every single day, I hate that I let them scare me. And, I mean I HATE it. I am ashamed of myself. And, next time it will probably be something real and I'll probably die and that will be fine. Because never again will I allow myself to be scared when I know better. Thanks for sharing.
I know exactly the feeling your talking about. It's like a combination of the hatred I feel for bullies and for preening peacocks. Because that's they what people like Fauci and everyone who did this to us is. Fucking bullies that go around patting each other on back for how awesome they are. So infuriating.
I got vaccines due to fear. I work in a hospital system, and my particular hospital took most of the COVID patients. Our hospital was filled with dying patients, gasping for breath— all alone, and relatively neglected by nursing (due to their fear). I did understand that the vaccine I accepted was lacking in any long term outcome data. I took it anyway. I learned a lot about myself and how i make decisions often due to fear. The self awareness is a good thing. Ive had no immediate injury from the vaccines, but who knows what might happen to some of us 5-10 years from now?
I absolutely love this. It is incredibly honest and powerful witness testimony. If only we all had the ability to examine ourselves in this depth of reality and confession. This text should be taught in ethics classes for a week or two at the beginning of each school year and to government employees everywhere once a month. Cannot be emphasized enough how important this commentary is.
Thank you for sharing this! Colleges that permitted religious exemptions or stopped requiring the C19 shots altogether were the only ones that I would consider for my son to attend. We have a clotting disorder (we clot too much), and after much research I decided that this experimental shot was not for us. We had been disinvited or never invited to baby showers, weddings, parties, etc., as a result of our vaccine status.
My husband and adult daughter chose to take the C19 shots, but my son & I did not. I fear for my daughter who possesses the same gene that also makes her a hyperclotter. She could have easily received an exemption from her PT job at the time, but she decided she “needed to do it” as she was also in a graduate program in Clinical Psych (despite opting for remote classes only!). Both my husband and daughter now regret taking them. Yet at the time, my husband was downright hostile to me about it, calling me an idiot; we argued over this issue many times. Still stings when I remember how badly we were treated simply because we elected not to get the experimental C19 shot.
It’s difficult when your spouse doesn’t understand. I deal with this attitude many times with my husband and also my son. I talk to my daughter when the hurt is too overwhelming.
I was in Mexico end of 2021. I would have coffee with a very sociable friend of mine. He knew everyone. All the exPats. A number of 50 year old single women who had left Canada without a spouse! Spouse took it, she wouldn’t. Isn’t that hard to imagine? Being in a situation where couples split over a medicine (…poison).
For me, it was either get vaccinated or get fired. I'm not independently wealthy, so I did what I had to do to keep a roof over my head and food on the table.
I would chalk it up at least as much to youthful inexperience as anything. Wisdom often comes from making bad decisions, and I probably have about 30 years on you in that department (I'm early gen-X). I don't have near the body of knowledge on physiology you do, but I do know the protocols that FDA makes pharmaceutical companies go through to get a drug to market and knew immediately we were being told bald-faced lies about the safety of the vaccine in late 2020 when it first came out.
If you haven't seen Dr. Jordan Peterson's talks on how it was that so many otherwise good people just went along with the NAZIs, it's sobering and quite instructive. This video is part of it, but I can't find the exact one I'm looking for. Most people think they'd have never gone along with the NAZIs, but Peterson points out why they're wrong, and estimates that probably 90% of people would go along with them.
Yes. It was the same language they used for OxyContin back in the day. Going after the drs for being hesitant to treat pain and when people needed higher doses of their “non-addictive” opiate, they called it breakthrough pain.
Watched this video and I have also been aware of how susceptible we are to the herd. I like to think I wouldn’t have been a Nazi, but knowing how we can lie to ourselves, who knows. What I wonder these days is will anyone ever recognize and acknowledge the propaganda of today and what’s happening right now.
This is a fair point. I can't speak really speak to it because my judgement didn't feel impaired, though it clearly was. Was some part of it physiological? It would not surprise me at all. A video I didn't link in the footnotes was John Campbell's conversation with a psychologist who lost her license (in the COVID hellscape of Australia) when she violated gag orders. She brings up a lot of good points about how judgement can be compromised due to psychological pressure as well.
I have POTS. It means slight or more pronounced brain hypo perfusion while standing/sitting. When it became really bad, I stopped being the same person as I used to be.
I also suffered from one constant migraine for years.
While I didn’t think I couldn’t think clearly, or be the same person, my husband was able to see it and point it out. While he did that, I still had no idea what he was talking about- I couldn’t perceive personality changes or impaired ability to think things through.
Now, that I recovered fairly well, I remember what I did, the way I thought, the simplistic way I thought about things. But it took 3 years of recovering until I was able to realise these things.
When the brain suffers, the brain is rarely able to perceive it, as it still produces rational thoughts, thinking, etc.
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.
You're welcome, Holly. Thank you again, for cross posting (it will probably double my total Substack views 😊). And, yes, I think that was a crossing of the Rubicon for many people. The moment at which they said, in the immortal words of Elon Musk. "Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is."
I saw your post thanks to Holly's share. I had 2 Pfizer shots and a booster before I found Dr. John Campbell. Now I worry about it every day. I am 77. I wish I could support you and Holly but I still have to work at Lowe's just to make ends meet.
Email me! I'll put you on my comp list.
Same! I've worked at a local hardware store the last 9+ years. We were declared 'essential' workers during the pandemic but getting the jab was left up to our individual discretion though pressure was fully evident.
Thanks for writing this article. You publicly admitted a personal screwup, in a manner which benefits others which, IMHO, puts you at the head of the pack. 👍🏼
"The instant he said that, the decision was made and there were no circumstances under which I would comply."
Yep. I don't remember if that was the exact moment at which I made up my mind for good on the jabs, but that's when my reasoning changed. Before, it was something like "This thing hasn't been tested long enough, and all the pressure makes me suspicious of what's really going on."
After 9/9/21, my reasoning (if you can call it that) for refusing the jabs was "Because I was born free, and I'll die that way."
Amen
Thank you Holly for curating articles on Substack that have added such value to my education. I so appreciate your recommendations!
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.
So many Kafkaesque moments…where to begin? How about the simple fact that the obvious downsides of wearing masks were not acknowledged? Let’s say that masks work to significantly reduce transmission (!). In a sane world, the message should have always been, Hey, we know that wearing masks is a true imposition and not even possible for some people, and we will be altering our recommendations as soon as is humanly possible. Instead, the whole narrative just passed right over that and it was treated as though the authorities were not demanding anything harder than avoiding the ingestion of raspberry ice cream in order to save billions of lives.
I agree. This whole exercise was diabolical.
Thank you Karen. You probably already know this - "live" spelled backwards is "evil"
There is a Norwegian study and other studies that show such face covers do not work. They actually work to prevent humans from making connections and to distrust one another. XO
It was scary to watch so many people that I believed were thoughtful, smart people swallow it all. Maybe I didn't because I had stumbled upon unorthodox thinkers like Bret and Heather before it happened. Now my eyes are fully opened and I no longer trust any 3 letter agency, medical or governmental. It would be easier and less isolating to still be asleep.
I took 3 Moderna shots. While I think I have probably escaped any ill effects, this COVID vaccine experience has completely destroyed my trust in any and all governmental institutions. It is a sad realization.
For me, not just governmental, but medical. Sad and frightening.
I had a massive heart attack after my second vaccine despite being an active and fit long term vegetarian. When I asked for it to be reported to VAERS I was told that it had nothing to do with the vaccine and shouldn’t be reported. Maybe they were right, maybe not. Sadly the inquiry was not allowed. This is the biggest current injustice to millions of people. For people like me who lived, the past is the past, we just want to know if we are in the clear now and to understand our future risks
It’s a travesty that nobody from these organizations/agencies supposedly devoted to the safety of these treatments isn’t looking more closely at cases like yours. I’m so sorry this happened to you. And that you were gaslit on top of it.
You would think that data collection would be a good thing , if not usable now maybe later.
Predetermining results by health care professionals is why I question medical advice. Think statins and heart disease from the 90’s. Was it statin's or the fact that running and not smoking happened at the same timeframe. The COVID response certainly raises a giant red flags!!
I don't think you should beat yourself up too much - we all fell for the psychological pressure to some extent. And that's what so much of covid was about; *psychological* pressure.
I knew from quite early on, from analysis of the 'official' ONS data in the UK (I'm based in the UK), that something wasn't adding up with what I was being bombarded with by government and the media. It was at odds with the data. The incongruencies just began to pile up, one after another.
Even the official data, which we know to have significantly over-exaggerated the impact of covid (things like the "28 day" rule for death notifications), showed that in the first year of covid, supposedly the most deadly time, there were only 3,729 covid 'deaths' in the under 50's in the UK. With about 37m people in this age range in the UK that's about 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000.
Certainly bad enough to worry about, but not bad enough to completely lose our shit over, either. Definitely in bad flu territory rather than Ebola territory - but we were all pressured to think of this more in terms of Ebola territory.
For the more elderly, of course, the risk ramped up significantly. But mass vaccination should *always* have been about a comparison of the risks and benefits. The reason I chose not to get vaccinated, initially, was simple. I could not see how sufficient safety testing had been possible in such a compressed timescale - despite all assurances to the contrary.
At that time I still believed in the "vaccines are medical miracles" mythology. Further reading has convinced me that vaccines are a bit of a mixed bag; some seem to work very well and others do not.
As I learned more about the whole mRNA platform I began to wonder about things like the dose/response and whether the stuff actually stays where it's supposed to - and for how long our cells are turned into spike factories. The insistence that kids were vaccinated, when they were at a covid risk almost indistinguishable from zero, made me realize that something else, other than concern for people's health, was at play here.
There was so much that just didn't stack up - lockdowns (easy to show from the UK data that the 2nd derivative of the mortality curve had gone negative before lockdown), asymptomatic transmission (hard to see how an asymptomatic individual is producing enough replication-competent virions to yield a significant probability of secondary infection), masks (the typical surgical mask operates as a barrier not a filter - and so the exhaled breath is just re-directed rather than 'cleansed' of virions), social distancing (based on the false assumption of droplet spread, even though we already knew it was an aerosolized process), fomite transmission (all of those deadly covid particles just lurking on surfaces waiting to infect us) - and so on. None of what we were being told was correct in any meaningful sense. It was all, largely, theatre - successful in scaring people, but not even slightly successful in mitigating transmission or the impact of covid.
So, even though my initial decision not to get vaccinated was based on scepticism over the claim of comprehensive safety testing, I was also aware that most of what I was being told about covid simply wasn't accurate. This provided a further red flag when it came to the vaccine. If 'they' could get this much wrong, why should I trust what they're saying about the vaccine?
I was lucky. I had enough time on my hands to wade through a lot of the data and read lots of stuff - and also the capability to perform my own analyses (I'm a theoretical physicist). Most people did not have this luxury and believed what they were being told - and it's hard to blame them for going a bit covid-nuts.
But those of us who were trying to warn others, to say "hang on a minute, there's stuff not quite adding up", were heavily censored - another red flag that this was about more than simply health. There are many other red flags (like the attempt to hide the full trial data used by the FDA for up to 75 years, for example. Or the reluctance of governments to release the full record-level data).
I'm glad you managed to avoid serious consequences. My son-in-law also avoided them. But others have not been so lucky. The continual denial that there are vaccine-injured, or that these are "incredibly rare", is another of those red flags.
It’s a good point, and I know this reads a bit like self-flagellation, but believe me, I’ve done that, and I think moved past it. I really wanted to be as honest with myself as possible, and not spare my feelings in my self-assessment of why I did what I did.
I want to leave a positive, supportive comment but words fail. So I’ll leave you with the knowledge that I am at least have positive and supporting feelings to offer you.
I will blame those covid nuts who came unhinged in their verbal attacks on the non-conformists. I'm for individual thinking and choice, especially in this instance where one's choice has zero effect on others.
You may have heard about it, but look up “Diamond Princess Cruise”. It was the first pure quarantine situation under COVID and told us everything we needed to know about whether it was lethal or not. The “experts” knew about it and shoved this garbage down our throats anyway.
“I don't think you should beat yourself up too much - we all fell for the psychological pressure to some extent.”
No, not all did. Many knew from the very beginning that it was BS. As soon as one red flag popped up, every single statement by the authorities and “experts” should have been scrutinized. Those who did know it was all bunk paid severely for trying to share this knowledge or at least to live by it.
For me, from very early on the lockdowns made no sense unless they were purposely doing it to manipulate people into wanting a vaccine. Ditto with the masks. Thank you for writing this. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to teach under those circumstances. If you want another interesting read on education, I highly recommend John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education.
I still am. The school year just ended for me here in Japan. It officially ends in March but the English classes finish earlier than the medical classes do. The school year starts April 1st in Japan. The finishing school year is my first on campus in three years. I did not wear a mask but the students did and do. 41 out of 54 wore them as they gave their speeches for the speech contest.
For the first time in my 20 years at this school, students lodged formal complaints against me, and they were over my masklessness. Every day going in to school was filled with dread. I wondered, “Is today the day of the big mask confrontation leading to my dismissal from my last med school position?” I locked eye on every single white coated dweeb who crossed my bow challenging them to say something. All just sheepishly directed their eyes downward. They know, the Faucing cowards.
I would learn that another of us part time English treachery and two of the MDs teaching also went without a mask the whole school year. It is comforting to know you are not alone when confronting the borg, but if we could ignore the mask mandates, why did others choose to continue to follow them?
I wouldn't wear a mask and I did not wear one happily. But, as time went on, and I had one negative interaction after another with a clerk, a nurse, a person on an elevator, I got to the point where I didn't want to go food shopping because i didn't want a fight with some rando stranger. Fortunately, a supermarket a block from me allowed non-masking. Their stance was 'not all people can wear masks for health reasons. We have no right to question someone's private health matters, so we take the position if a customer is not wearing a mask they likely have a legitimate reason.' Pretty enlightened for that time period. I had the odd customer berate me, and once a clerk did, but his superior pulled him aside and told him company policy. I had lots of negative interactions though over a couple of years. Many stores I won't go back into as a result. Even now.
I am still required to at work, a medical university. Masking made my favorite job the most tiresome and least pleasant previously imaginable. The last day was the last of two days of a speech contest. 41 out of 54 speakers of my group wore masks at the podium. Only three teachers out of around 15 were unmasked. One of these, an Australian gave feed back, lamenting the lack of interaction from the audience. She told of the importance of smiling at the speaker….while she was herself wearing a mask.
Otherwise, my experience is much as you relate here, except is is ongoing. Mask “recommendations” lasted until May 8th, 2023 and were followed by 99% of the population here. Many stores refused to let me enter without a mask. Unless I had to get something from that particular store, I did not enter and will not ever again. The only places I wore a mask into were ones I had to, such as the bank. No greater proof that the world lost its collective mind exists than the guard at the bank stopping me from entering because I was unmasked. Yet, more was found. The human entertainers at Sea World in Japan wore face covering when swimming with the aquatic animals. My kids’ swim coaches wore clear plastic masks mounded in the shape of the lower half of a face while swimming.
Strangely, this all started after 18 months into the panic. Everyone except I were wearing masks but few did as much as give me a dirty look. Then suddenly, school officials barged into my classroom and prompted a confrontation over masks in front of my nursing students. I refused, they brought in a plastic barrier and placed it between the class and myself and we switched to zoom lessons for the rest of the school year.
Same at another school but that was at the end of an online lesson. Not wanting to have the confrontation in front of the class, I wore it as there was just 10 minutes left in the class time. After the class I told them that if I had to wear a mask for an online class at broadcast from the school that I would just conduct the lessons from home. Surprisingly, they immediately said that was fine, but I would still have to wear a mask. I replied “no” and left. That night there email “special permission” for me to conduct my online lessons from home without a mask. All the other teachers wore masks for their online lessons. Madness.
Shortly thereafter, clerks, guards, mad maskers on the street and even my own wife and kids would tell me to mask up, but I refused. It has not been a fun for years and the madness continues.
The idiocy is too much.
You have real character, Alexander. This is an example to everyone of how to be an upstanding, honest person.
Coming from you, Josh, that means more than you can imagine.
A lot of us got the shot because we believed we had to - even before my work instituted a vaccine mandate, my wife was coming unglued from such a long separation from her family in the US, and then all the hoops she had to jump through to see her dying grandfather in a nursing home barely 5 minutes away from us. We knew she was prone to bad vaccine reactions, but she couldn't take the psychological load anymore and so she traded it for a physical one. Luckily most of the vaccine-specific symptoms have faded over the years, but she never should have had to make that choice.
We live in Ottawa, too, so it was an extra slap in the face to see the Freedom Convoy folks branded as fascists (or whatever) when they were the only people who EVER seemed to care about the well being of people like my wife. We had friends who said TO HER FACE that they still supported the mandates, even after hearing and supposedly sympathizing with her experiences. The idea that we could have a better idea of what was good for her health than some government policy maker was never considered.
This resonates a lot with me. I teach 5th grade, and the masking and mask enforcing was one of the most miserable things I've ever had to do. First, I'm hard of hearing, and trying to understand my students was a constant nightmare as they were masked.
But even worse: I knew... I KNEW that the results of masking would be catastrophic on those younger kids who were just learning phonics and basic reading skills. I was being required to hurt kids' learning--I will never stop despising that I went along with it.
And when I got the RNA vaccine, the reason was much like you. There was no direct reason. But the comprehensive social pressure led me to just get the damn thing.
I certainly don't know as much about these specifics vaccines as you (my undergrad focus was astrophysics, not biology), but I knew that there was no way the effectiveness nor the long-term side effects could possibly be known. It was, by definition, still very experimental. And I knew I was acting as a coerced guinea pig. I had proclaimed months earlier that I would never be among the first to get them. But months of misery made me wilt and just get the stupid thing in hopes that maybe it would be good and maybe it will start things going back to normal.
Side note: my students now were in 1st grade when schools shut down and 2nd grade during the year of the mask. I have never had so many 5th graders struggle with basic reading skills in my entire career. It was 100% predictable, and 100% inflicted by the education decision-makers.
💯
And the results were 100% intentional.
Absolutely 💯
You are not alone. I've always been a cynic. I was born that way. I refused and refused and then they came up with the stupid Omicron scare, and I caved. Not only that, I took my sons and husband along with me. We just got the 2, but every single day, I hate that I let them scare me. And, I mean I HATE it. I am ashamed of myself. And, next time it will probably be something real and I'll probably die and that will be fine. Because never again will I allow myself to be scared when I know better. Thanks for sharing.
I know exactly the feeling your talking about. It's like a combination of the hatred I feel for bullies and for preening peacocks. Because that's they what people like Fauci and everyone who did this to us is. Fucking bullies that go around patting each other on back for how awesome they are. So infuriating.
Yes. We are feeling the exact same feeling.
I got vaccines due to fear. I work in a hospital system, and my particular hospital took most of the COVID patients. Our hospital was filled with dying patients, gasping for breath— all alone, and relatively neglected by nursing (due to their fear). I did understand that the vaccine I accepted was lacking in any long term outcome data. I took it anyway. I learned a lot about myself and how i make decisions often due to fear. The self awareness is a good thing. Ive had no immediate injury from the vaccines, but who knows what might happen to some of us 5-10 years from now?
I absolutely love this. It is incredibly honest and powerful witness testimony. If only we all had the ability to examine ourselves in this depth of reality and confession. This text should be taught in ethics classes for a week or two at the beginning of each school year and to government employees everywhere once a month. Cannot be emphasized enough how important this commentary is.
Thank you for saying so!
Thank you for sharing this! Colleges that permitted religious exemptions or stopped requiring the C19 shots altogether were the only ones that I would consider for my son to attend. We have a clotting disorder (we clot too much), and after much research I decided that this experimental shot was not for us. We had been disinvited or never invited to baby showers, weddings, parties, etc., as a result of our vaccine status.
My husband and adult daughter chose to take the C19 shots, but my son & I did not. I fear for my daughter who possesses the same gene that also makes her a hyperclotter. She could have easily received an exemption from her PT job at the time, but she decided she “needed to do it” as she was also in a graduate program in Clinical Psych (despite opting for remote classes only!). Both my husband and daughter now regret taking them. Yet at the time, my husband was downright hostile to me about it, calling me an idiot; we argued over this issue many times. Still stings when I remember how badly we were treated simply because we elected not to get the experimental C19 shot.
It’s difficult when your spouse doesn’t understand. I deal with this attitude many times with my husband and also my son. I talk to my daughter when the hurt is too overwhelming.
I was in Mexico end of 2021. I would have coffee with a very sociable friend of mine. He knew everyone. All the exPats. A number of 50 year old single women who had left Canada without a spouse! Spouse took it, she wouldn’t. Isn’t that hard to imagine? Being in a situation where couples split over a medicine (…poison).
Astonishing.
It is mind boggling when you think of it.
I feel very lucky my daughter didn’t get it. Every time the social pressure started to get to her, something came out of blue to convince her not to.
For me, it was either get vaccinated or get fired. I'm not independently wealthy, so I did what I had to do to keep a roof over my head and food on the table.
I would chalk it up at least as much to youthful inexperience as anything. Wisdom often comes from making bad decisions, and I probably have about 30 years on you in that department (I'm early gen-X). I don't have near the body of knowledge on physiology you do, but I do know the protocols that FDA makes pharmaceutical companies go through to get a drug to market and knew immediately we were being told bald-faced lies about the safety of the vaccine in late 2020 when it first came out.
If you haven't seen Dr. Jordan Peterson's talks on how it was that so many otherwise good people just went along with the NAZIs, it's sobering and quite instructive. This video is part of it, but I can't find the exact one I'm looking for. Most people think they'd have never gone along with the NAZIs, but Peterson points out why they're wrong, and estimates that probably 90% of people would go along with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM2o9e-pwoE
Yes. It was the same language they used for OxyContin back in the day. Going after the drs for being hesitant to treat pain and when people needed higher doses of their “non-addictive” opiate, they called it breakthrough pain.
Watched this video and I have also been aware of how susceptible we are to the herd. I like to think I wouldn’t have been a Nazi, but knowing how we can lie to ourselves, who knows. What I wonder these days is will anyone ever recognize and acknowledge the propaganda of today and what’s happening right now.
I believe that the ordeal of the effect of the mask on you impaired your ability to think rationally.
Your brain had too much CO2, it was unable to produce complex thinking.
I know a bit about impaired brain and inability to think clearly, properly, rationally.
Suffering from daily headaches just adds to the inability to think clearly.
We think we can be the same people when ou brains are affected. We as people/personality/cognitive abilities are a direct result of brain processes.
This is a fair point. I can't speak really speak to it because my judgement didn't feel impaired, though it clearly was. Was some part of it physiological? It would not surprise me at all. A video I didn't link in the footnotes was John Campbell's conversation with a psychologist who lost her license (in the COVID hellscape of Australia) when she violated gag orders. She brings up a lot of good points about how judgement can be compromised due to psychological pressure as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iqa4CoMciU
I have POTS. It means slight or more pronounced brain hypo perfusion while standing/sitting. When it became really bad, I stopped being the same person as I used to be.
I also suffered from one constant migraine for years.
While I didn’t think I couldn’t think clearly, or be the same person, my husband was able to see it and point it out. While he did that, I still had no idea what he was talking about- I couldn’t perceive personality changes or impaired ability to think things through.
Now, that I recovered fairly well, I remember what I did, the way I thought, the simplistic way I thought about things. But it took 3 years of recovering until I was able to realise these things.
When the brain suffers, the brain is rarely able to perceive it, as it still produces rational thoughts, thinking, etc.
It’s the others that have to suffer the effects.