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Samizdata quote of the day – Let’s not re-write the recent past Becoming vaccinated was the easy choice, not the hard one. There was never any evidence it was the sensible choice and it could be argued – and this may seem harsh – that if you were determined to be part of the group, wilfully and determinedly deaf to any counter-argument or even call for caution, absolutist in your own belief in you virtue and knowledge, irrationally frightened of death, unthinking, superficial and glib, fearful of other people’s opinion of you, filled with desire/fear to comply with the powerful for safety or favour, then becoming vaccinated was the only choice. But these are not exactly admirable qualities.
– Common Knowledge Edinburgh
I suspect this article will annoy some people as it is a divisive issue. I do not agree with every point of the article either (I am not anti-vaccines per se, I just don’t think this particular one made any sense), but it does raise points worth pondering.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I accepted two Astra-Zeneca injections – for reasons of politics (I am engaged in local government – and it would have been de facto impossible for me to continue as a local councillor had I refused the injections), not because I thought it would be good for my health.
I never thought the injections were a “vaccine” or that they would do me good, in my mind it was a simple choice – have something that might (or might not) kill or injure me, or go on the dole.
I choose the injections.
By the way – I still do not know if I am in the clear, some problems may take as long as ten years to emerge. But I will be dead long before then anyway.
My choice – and I made it.
“Paul, you always knew – that makes you WORSE than all the people who sincerely believed the official line”.
I suppose it does, although I do not really know anyone who sincerely believed the official line.
I did not go around shouting about the lockdowns either – even though I knew they were medically useless, indeed horribly counter productive.
All I did was write a few things on-line – knowing that the Social Media companies shadow banned such posts, so hardly anyone would see them.
Essentially I did nothing – I might as well have just talked to myself.
The masks were funny – the holes in them were hundreds of times bigger than the virus. Outside Tesco supermarket there was a bin full of the masks – so if any of us forgot the masks (after we were forced to wear them) we used to pick up a used one out of the bin – must have been great for spreading diseases.
Ironically I did not have to wear a mask, as I have COPD I had a medical exception – but I could not be bothered to argue the toss with officials and the police. So I wore one in all the places one was told to – I even bought some (I have few spare ones out of the small packet of masks I bought). There were normally masks on the streets and so on – indeed there still are, they do not seem to be biodegradable, they really must be polluting the environment.
I remember super market staff asking me why they had to now wear masks when they had been working without masks and must have been exposed to the virus thousands of times – my reply was that the government was following the “advice” of officials and “experts” and that their “advice” was (as normal) utterly insane – but the supermarket staff already knew that, I was not telling them anything they did not already know.
I have a feeling a lot of people knew the truth – even as we obeyed all the utterly insane regulations.
Sitting here I can not think of anyone I know who had the injections because they sincerely believed they would be good for their health. It was all to keep their job, or to travel, and so on.
Mr Ed summed it up “Paul the regulations were clearly written long before Covid – and they are demented, for example bookshops closed and bikeshops opened”.
We were all concentrated in a few shops (oddly enough owned by vast corporations) with all other, independent, shops being closed down (at least officially) – it was very Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030.
Oh yes – I knew about how Early Treatment could save people as well, I knew that fairly early on.
Did I tell people – when I knew lots of people were dying?
Not really, just a few on line things that I knew hardly anyone would read (because such posts get shadow banned).
I rationalised my inactivity, whilst people were dying in very large numbers, by telling myself “no one would believe me, I am not a doctor, if I make too much trouble I will get PUNISHED”. And, of course, “it is all hopeless anyway” (my Depression is very convenient sometimes – it gives me an excuse to not do anything when I know I should protest).
I remember a German family who lived near us when I was a young child telling me (back when I was young child) they had similar attitudes in another historical period.
I was no better than they had been so many years ago.
It would be nice to think that my posts and comments during Covid got the attention of 77th Brigade (British Army) the “counter disinformation” people – Orwellian double-speak as they specialised in opposing the truth and pushing lies.
However, I would be astonished if they even noticed me.
I think he ignores some reality.
Epidemiology has had a rather wonderful 100 years. When I was a kid, I got the smallpox scratch. I got the polio shot. I got the DPT vaccine. I got the MMR vaccine. My parents didn’t question the expert recommendations, because their records were so good. And, by and large, the “experts” were right. Many lives have been saved over the decades because we all decided to trust the experts. That’s what good epidemiology is.
But “Expert” as a title has changed. For all of those previous decades, expertise meant doing the work, and being good at what you professed to do, which allowed the “Expert” label to build more and more goodwill (in the corporate sense.)
“Expert” has now become devalued, because more and more experts fail to do the work, fail to explore, and simply rested on their expert-titled laurels. The “experts” who told us that the new vaccines were safe and effective simply digested part of their existing goodwill for energy – profit – instead of working to explore the questions of safety and efficacy. But they got the benefit of that goodwill from the majority of first-world humanity, because all of those people remembered when “expert” meant something.
We never had to really question and investigate the experts for those previous vaccines, because the experts did the work, and we expected the new experts to do the new work. So, I have much less contempt for the vaccinated than does this author. They had reason to have faith in the old system. They just didn’t realize that the old system has been trashed for the benefit of the new “expert” class.
You noted:
“I am not anti-vaccines per se, I just don’t think this particular one made any sense…”
Please note that the jab is NOT a vaccine, it is an mRNA injection which turns your body’s cells into protein production machines. They were supposed to be the spike proteins (binding sites) on the exterior of the virus so that it would (hopefully, experimentally) let your immune system have a look at those proteins and react with an immune response if you became infected.
Didn’t work, did it? This fake “vaccine” did NONE of the things that a vaccine is supposed to do, which are:
1) Prevent you from catching the disease, and
2) Prevent you from transmitting the disease
The latest claim, that it decreased the effects of the disease, is totally without support.
Now the horrific side effects of the jab are coming out…the test subjects of pregnant women who lost their babies at an 80% rate. The blood clots, the myocarditis, the pericarditis, etc. ad nauseum.
Edward Jenner is shaking his head in disbelief as he spins in his grave.
It is not a vaccine.
Clearly, Blackwing1 understands squat about immunology.
Which does not mean that (s)he is wrong about this particular vaccine being noxious, of course.
I myself sort-of drifted into not taking it: at first i thought that people who need it more than me should get it first, then in the summer of 2021 i felt that there was no drastic urgency, then i saw that the virus was getting much less dangerous, and finally i decided that the risk of taking it PROBABLY outweighs the risk of not taking it, for me. Thanks to my diet.
Quoth bobby b:
I agree entirely.
P.S. I should add that I remain unvaxxed. It wasn’t easy in Progressiveville, but I had lost some faith in “experts” when the research funding system was taken over by politics. Used to be, you’d get ten studies on “why this is good”, and ten studies on “why this is bad.” Now, the second set of studies get no funding.
I retired from my final job in Cacafornia at the end of 2019, and my wife announced “We need to leave California. We’re moving to Texas!” So we sold our house in Sacramento, CA and bought a new (bigger, cheaper, on more land) house on the outskirts of San Antonio, TX. I was, as I said, newly retired, so no employer was demanding that I get the jab. I wasn’t planning to travel anywhere that required it, so, being the ultimately lazy man that I am, I just didn’t.
I still haven’t, so my laziness has paid benefits. We never caught the WuFlu either, so we lucked out all around. And recent pronouncements by Cacafornia governor Navin Gruesome has convinced me that she was either prescient or just more observant than I, so being in Texas has worked out all around.
My wife is a retired nurse, so we aren’t “anti-vaccine”. But she didn’t trust THIS vaccine, and she’s certainly been right.
That “anti-vaccine” label has been a powerful tool in the jabbers’ box.
Before CovidVax, if you were “anti-vaccine”, you were probably not well-informed. No, Thimerosal wasn’t the killer it was made out to be, but it sure got traction in some groups.
So “antivax” had the legitimate sting of “poor science”, and “flat-earther.” That label was enough to set more than a few no-vaxxers back on their heels.
It’ll take time to get past that. But the “this isn’t really a vaccine” argument is the best answer to it.
I’ve gotten all the injections simply because I moved in to take care of my mother. She’s a over-70 thyroid cancer survivor and I didn’t want her to have to worry about one more thing. I thought the whole thing was just an exercise in scare tactics, but giving her just a little piece of mind was worth it to me.
The experts know that wearing masks is almost entirely ineffective against an aerosol virus. They’re just happy to lie in the case of Covid.
It’s not that the science has changed. There were plenty of experiments and trials, and the results are well knows.
In this case it isn’t a false new set of “experts”, because this was actually settled science. It was real experts flat out lying.
bobby b: “We never had to really question and investigate the experts for those previous vaccines, because the experts did the work, and we expected the new experts to do the new work. So, I have much less contempt for the vaccinated than does this author. They had reason to have faith in the old system. They just didn’t realize that the old system has been trashed for the benefit of the new “expert” class.”
I could not agree more. I took my two AZ injections as early as I could get them, partly, because I still believed in the expert’s advice (I was raised in a doctor’s household), and partly because I wanted to protect my wife, who has Hashimoto’s disease. I wanted to be fully mobile, just in case.
But then I could not longer ignore the mounting evidence, that there were ‘problems’, and I began to investigate as a layman. And what I discovered would be so horrible, if true, that I refused the booster. I knew before, that attempts to gene therapy failed, because the weren’t any mechanisms to regulate the production of the desired substances, there genes provided, but this time, the experts assured us, it would be different. But I could no longer see, why.
I think the vaccine made sense for a lot of people who had significant risk of severe injury or death from contracting covid. But I think it was incorrectly pushed on people who had negligible risk from covid.
There are several vaccines in common use today that do not stop you catching the disease in question, nor stop transmission.
And:
And:
That would be true if the damn thing actually prevented you from getting it, which it doesn’t. It doesn’t even make sense for people living with such a person as it doesn’t stop you spreading it either. The evidence it even mitigates the effects is ropey to say the least.
In short, it doesn’t appear to work at all, assuming preventing the spread was actually the intention.
I’m a type two diabetic which supposedly means that my immune system is compromised. I tried to research the pros and cons of having the Covid jab as well as I could. I had the initial jab plus two boosters but decided not to have any more after that. Meanwhile, I looked into the issue of diabetes and immune system issues, basically if your diabetes is well under control there aren’t any.
I admit to being rather cavalier when it comes to my own health and rather cautious when it comes to government/authoritarian interventions. No mask, jabs or agreeing to be imprisoned in my own home. Well, so far it has kept me alive.
But was it claimed they did stop you catching the disease in question & stop transmission? Because that was indeed the claim with these vaccines:
I would note that the Gates quote say “reducing”, which as far as I know is defensible.
Likewise the Pfizer CEO says “protection”, which is not a claim of immunity, and fits resistance just fine.
(Maddow is, of course, a partisan hack fool, Fauci is a political tool, Biden’s a simpleton, etc.)
But on the other hand, nobody who paid attention to epidemiology ever thought the vaccines were a slam-dunk perfect protection; coronaviruses mutate enough that it ain’t gonna be like polio, and we’re lucky it wasn’t even as mutable as the flu, where the strains vary so much that the wrong-strain vaccine regularly does nothing at all.
THe idea that vaccination did nothing at all to prevent infection seems untentable at a glance at the studies, though you are completely right that People In Charge oversold it as A Perfect Solution, as part of their “do literally everything wrong and destroy all our credibility” plan for handling Covid.
Equally, it seems pretty well established that vaccinations have been good at reducing severity, though I have no idea how well the original shots and boosters do against current mutations.
(“Government and some industry are stupid, manipulative liars who oversold vaccination as Something That Must Be Done”? Yes.
“The Covid vaccines simply don’t work at all and never did”? No.
“mRNA isn’t really a vaccine because it makes your body make the thing rather than putting the thing in you”, well, that’s utter bollocks, like people – and i have SEEN THIS MYSELF – claiming HIV isn’t a real pathogen because you can’t culture it in agar.)
It is all very well saying: “the ‘vaccines’ didn’t work”, but in an important sense they did. They protected vulnerable people from serious illness and death. This was clearly demonstrated by the omicron outbreak in Hong Kong early last year. Living in Hong Kong, I kept abreast of the reports and a huge proportion of the people who died were unvaccinated, even though the unvaccinated were a minority of the elderly population. Yes, the people who died were elderly and often ill, but the Pfizer vaccine in particular protected many others.
I do not believe that healthy adults or children needed to take the vaccine and also believe that forcing them into it one way or another was utterly wrong, but the vaccines protected many vulnerable people from sickness and death and trying to deny that is bonkers.
Strange you Sigivald forgot Walensky which is only the CDC director…
Btw there are Polio outbreaks because of Polio vaccines so i don’t understand why you bring that up looking at gist of your argument.
It seems to me that Sigisvald makes some important points. I’ll check it again tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.
For now, a reply to Thomas Fairfax:
It has been a long time since i studied immunology (which has made huge steps forward since) but as i understand, no vaccine will prevent you from “getting it”.
A vaccine will simply speed up your immune response to “it”.
That should also reduce the risk of your spreading “it” to other people: the earlier your immune response, the shorter the time you can spread the disease.
I dunno… I must be an outlier, or something. I read everything I come across, and if I find something that piques my curiosity, I follow up on it and read up on the issue.
I forget exactly when, but I think it was during the mid- to late-1990s that I first heard about mRNA vaccination as this coming “great thing”. They were predicting annual vaccinations for the common cold, and all the usual crap they spout. I remember talking about this very issue with a guy who worked around the CDC and at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases). I’d brought it up in conversation late one night on a command post exercise where there was nothing to do but watch the simulation play out on the servers and stand watch on the whole thing, which led to a lot of interesting and educational discussion. He agreed, basically, that the premise was scientifically sound and held a lot of promise, but the caveat was that they’d run into all sorts of issues with side-effects, not the least of which were cardiovascular, clotting, and reproductive problems in the test animals. This was in the early 2000s, before 9/11.
I watched that space, hoping to see some progress on mRNA safety, because as my informant pointed out, mRNA has a lot of potential for use in counter-biowarfare applications. Up until COVID came around, I never saw much in the way of progress in the open literature, so far as testing safety went. When they announced that mRNA was the basis of a lot of Operation Warp Speed, my first thought was “Oh, cool… They’ve cracked the safety issues…”
Then, I did some reading. Turns out, no, what they cracked was the FDA safety protocols, and what else they did was game the system. Nothing had changed; the animal tests were still showing the same results circa 2020 that they were showing in the late 1990s.
This information wasn’t hidden. It was out there; all you had to do was be a mildly curious and interested layperson, and the whole charade of “mRNA safety” would have been apparent to you. That, apparently, was none of the “experts” or the “media”. I do not recall seeing a single one of these supposedly “expert” science “journalists” raising those issues, which to me, they should have been. I mean, I had questions, and I’m a nobody layman. Why weren’t they grilling any of the bastards up on the podiums when they were doing the press releases? Why didn’t anyone question Trump, when he made his ignorantly triumphant and grandiloquent announcements?
I still feel like the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes. I have yet to see anything, anywhere, that indicates that mRNA “vaccination” should have been released for general use outside the laboratory, yet here we are.
My personal instinct is, follow the money. I think there was a huge component of opportunistic money-grubbing going on with this, deliberate monetization of something that sure seems like it’s more harmful than Thalidomide. And, it looks like nobody is willing to question the basic narrative, despite things like the Phizer revelations brought out by Project Veritas.
I feel like I have to ask a lot of people around me: What are you, stupid? Did you not pay attention? Did you not see these things? I’m not even all that smart, and I sure as hell did. Which is why mRNA technology ain’t going in my body any time in the near future…
Perry,old chap,
The only people trying (desperately) to re-write the past 2 years are the Political classes, Big Pharma, MSM, & their associated aiders & abbetors. All have acted appallingly in the interests of the common weal.
They obviously think they will get away with it & be able to introduce their wet dream of digital ID & subjugation to their projek.
We will see…..
Yes Perry – their claims were clearly false.
If they are not prepared to admit their claims were false, then they (or other powerful people like them) will do such things again.
As you are fond of saying “the state is not your friend” – and that was proved, in a most horrible way over the last few years.
The various governments, international organisations (such as the World Health Organisation) and big pharma Corporations (who are joined at the hip with governments and international organisations), must be exposed.
Not exposed out of a sense of revenge – although revenge is understandable when one remembers that most of the people who died from Covid could have been saved by Early Treatment (Early Treatment SMEARED by Tony Fauci and the rest of the Corporate State – so they could have Emergency Authorisation for the “vaccines”), and that many people have been injured or killed by the “vaccines” (and that butcher’s bill keeps rising).
No, not revenge, the point is to strip the international Corporate State, the international establishment, of its power – so that it can not do such things, or worse, again.
And it can only be stripped of its power if it is discredited – if its basic statements and policies are exposed to the public as, at best, utterly mistaken.
Sadly the establishment will do anything, anything at all, to prevent itself being exposed and discredited.
For they know that if they are exposed and discredited they will lost their POWER.
dgm – Perry knows that very well, as do all of us.
Whether the international establishment will manage to finish their project of international “governance” and control of every aspect of human life via a “digital currency” (a natural development of the present fiat money – which is only of value because the state says-it-is and which is mostly just lights on computer screens – not even token notes and coins) and a “digital identity”, is a question that will soon be decided.
The international establishment are, sadly, very far advanced in this project already.
Their ruthlessness is quite shocking – for example I find it very difficult to believe that they did not know there were various Early Treatments that could have saved most of people who died of Covid.
Think about that – they stood by and allowed very large numbers of people to die, indeed they actively smeared the treatments that could have saved them.
However, the alternative possibility does exist – namely that they all really did-not-know, that they were honestly mistaken, trapped in a terrible “Group Think”.
“One can not make an omelette without breaking eggs” appears to have been the attitude.
If one is really creating a “better world” a certain number of casualties seem to be acceptable – at least to the international elite.
However, an alternative possibility does exist – namely that they really did-not-know, that they were honestly mistaken, trapped in a terrible “Group Think”.
It would be interesting to put that to the test though and ask BBW if you’re on the list. Since you are an elected official, however minor, that might be of interest.
Could even be some money in it if 77th Brigade’s abuse is deemed egregious. That’d be nice.
John Galt.
I am not worth persecuting – what have I done to oppose international policies I knew, from the start, were both wrong and, indeed, evil (yes evil)?
Essentially I did nothing at all.
Just a bit of internet chatter – that is it, which only a handful of people ever got to read.
I could, and should, have done a lot more – but I did not.
I took the vaccine and a couple of boosters. At the time I believed covid to be sufficiently dangerous to a naive immune system that it was worth it. I still think that was the case. We then got lucky (or perhaps it was inevitable) and the viruses became less virulent. At the same time, people’s immune systems became less naive. At this point vaccination against covid probably does not not make sense for most people (but do your own research, I have not put much effort into it).
Talk of vaccine passports and enforced vaccinations was always wrong. Lockdowns were always wrong. The correct solutions are always free choice and freedom of association. Access to good information helps. Absent good or complete information, decisions still have to be made. They should be left to individuals.
I think MRNA as a technology has a lot of promise. Between that and various kinds of information technology, we could be on track for preventing nearly all disease in relatively short order. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Rob Fisher – I believe you were mistaken Sir as there was little benefit (contrary to the endless lies of various governments and mainstream media) and a lot of risk from the injections. But I am very glad indeed that (at least so far) you have had no ill effects from the injections. I keep my fingers crossed that you have dodged the bullet.
As for the failure to engage in Early Treatment, which would not have cost much money and would have saved most of the people who died, the decision seems to have been based on the desire to create conditions (i.e. lots of casualties – and the lie that there was no effective Early Treatment) to justify emergency authorisation in the United States.
Mark Steyn has now been constructively dismissed from GB News – as he would not sign a contract that made him responsible for all “Ofcom” fines but which also refused to allow him to defend himself (leaving the defence in the hands of a “Compliance Officer” who was certainly no friend of Mr Steyn).
Appalling people such as Dr Matthew Sweet are busy gloating on Twitter, even though he knows perfectly well that Mark Steyn almost died from two recent heart attacks – Dr Sweet’s Guardian-BBC style stuff was so disgusting I could not bare reading it any more and “blocked” him. “Blocking” is no way censorship – other people can read his ravings, I just do not want to see it.
Many people say they are prepared to die for Freedom of Speech – but very few actually mean it, Mr Steyn is one of those view. He will be dead soon – the stress of these attacks from people (“vile creature” if you like Conservative Central Office) such as Dr Matthew Sweet will bring on a third heart attack which will kill him – that and the despicable betrayal by people who should have supported Mr Steyn.
To those who do not know – Dr Sweet and other establishment types were often invited on the programme to make their case, but refused to do so as they preferred the path of force-and-fear (of Ofcom and other bully-boy organisations) to the path of reason.
Debating with dissenting doctors or meeting the victims of the injections, or the relatives of the people killed by the injections he pushed, was not the cup of tea of Dr Sweet.
Something that Rob Fisher wrote is, now my old head has had a chance to think about it, very interesting.
“we could be on track for preventing nearly all disease in relatively short order” – and “let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
Perhaps, perhaps, the international establishment really were honestly thinking in these Utopian terms – about ending “nearly all disease” in “relatively short order” – but only if they could get emergency authorisation for their MRNA technology.
Old fashioned Early Treatments for Covid 19 stood in their way – and “one can not make an omelette without breaking eggs” – yes the old fashioned treatments, if used EARLY, would have saved most of the people who died of Covid – but then they would not get the green light for their new technology, the technology that would end “nearly all disease” in “relatively short order”.
The casualties may (may – perhaps), in their minds, have been worth it – if (if) the Utopian aim could be achieved.
“We are creating a better world”.