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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’m just somewhat grateful we did the J&J shot. Haven’t heard as many negatives about that one. The social pressure was indeed unbelievable. I dug in my heels just on principle - but lost multiple friends over my resistance to the Marxist crqp of ‘greatest good for greatest number’. Fortunately I wasn’t employed at the time or it may indeed have driven a different outcome. Good to read your reflections!
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.
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 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
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.
You have real character, Alexander. This is an example to everyone of how to be an upstanding, honest person.
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.
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.
Thank you for saying so!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
I’m just somewhat grateful we did the J&J shot. Haven’t heard as many negatives about that one. The social pressure was indeed unbelievable. I dug in my heels just on principle - but lost multiple friends over my resistance to the Marxist crqp of ‘greatest good for greatest number’. Fortunately I wasn’t employed at the time or it may indeed have driven a different outcome. Good to read your reflections!