The Mainstream Narrative is Putting Lives at Risk

Now that the US FDA has fully approved the Pfizer vaccine, and vaccine mandates and passports are accelerating down the pike, I want to provide some friendly push-back, if I may.

To be clear, I respect each and every one’s right to make medical decisions for themselves. These are confusing times with a lot of confusing information out there. On top of that, each individual has their own unique medical conditions.  So individual cost/ benefit analyses are very personal matters. I offer no push-back on anyone’s decision of whether or not to take a Covid vaccine. Your decision is completely your business.

However, the more our society mandates these vaccines that use a novel technology with no long-term testing, and the more our society requires Covid vaccination passports for people to simply meet daily needs, the more and more I will push-back. Promise.

So here’s my friendly version of push-back:

Hold on. Doesn’t the mainstream narrative say that all of the vaccine-hesitant are “putting lives at risk”

But is it not the mainstream narrative which has:

* suppressed information about early treatment protocols for Covid*, and told people to stay home without treatment until they struggle to breathe (by when the majority of damage from Covid has set in);

* suppressed information about how strong the signal around BMI is for the potential of Covid harm, the only stronger signal being that of age (which nobody can do anything about);

* considered firing doctors and nurses who have been working tirelessly for one and half years on the front lines of treating people with Covid, working this whole time without a vaccine, but now firing those same doctors and nurses for not getting a vaccine;

- is the mainstream narrative not the one “putting lives at risk”?

Hold on. Doesn’t the mainstream narrative say that all of the vaccine-hesitant are ignorant?

But now it’s telling us that there are a significant number of doctors and nurses who have been on the front lines of treating Covid patients for a year and half, and that many of them are refusing to get vaccinated? Does that mean those doctors and nurses are ignorant? Ignorant of what? Does that even make any sense?

And the administrators who want to fire those doctors and nurses, and leave themselves short-staffed to handle a continuing pandemic, those are the smart ones in the room?

Is this not disrespectful to the point of defying common decency? Does the mainstream narrative not have it backwards about who is being ignorant here? Is the mainstream narrative not the one “putting lives at risk”?

Why do I remain Vaccine-Hesitant?

You may ask, why do I personally continue to be so vaccine-hesitant despite all of the abundant evidence for how successful the Covid vaccines are at reducing symptoms in the short-term?

If you did ask that, thanks.

My reasons for being Covid vaccine-hesitant are all about Time Time and yes, also about Time.

I believe that Time is the board for this evolutionary game we are caught in. The Covid vaccines may indeed reduce symptoms in the short-term, but it is the medium and long-term which captures my interest.

Within my last blog post, “Homo Narritivus”, I laid out some surprising information about what happened in India just a few months after our narrative managers were so clamorous about the rise of the Delta variant there. Feel free to check that post out and then look into what is happening in India yourself.

Since that post, I will simply add a stress here that it would serve anyone to look into how different states within India have put into place different Covid protocols, and how those different states within India have fared with those different protocols. So have at it.

I admit, however, that the data from India can seem a wee bit murky. So in this post, I won’t talk about India any more. 

Instead, I will talk about England, because it is the best example to explain my vaccine-hesitancy in relation to the Medium-term outlook within Time. So here goes:

My Main Medium-Term Reason for Vaccine-Hesitancy at this point:

I’ve been looking at the numbers for England – a highly developed nation with over 68 million people with a national health-care system with excellent record-keeping that regularly updates their data. Their numbers should matter. And I should add – England is a country that was a little ahead of us here in the US in their push to vaccinate against Covid-19. So their numbers can be downright instructive regarding what’s to come for us.

England’s total hospitalizations and deaths of the fully vaccinated are substantially increasing Over Time. By “fully vaccinated”, I specifically mean those who have had two doses of Covid vaccine for over 14 days.

I am using data from Public Health England's (PHE) regular "SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern and Variants under Investigation in England" Technical Briefings, all of which are publicly available online.

Hospitalizations*:

PHE data through June 21, 2021 shows 11% of Covid- Delta hospitalizations were fully vaccinated.

PHE data through July 19, 2021 shows 21% of Covid- Delta hospitalizations were fully vaccinated.

PHE data between July 19 and August 15, shows 40% of Covid-Delta hospitalizations were fully vaccinated.

PHE data between August 15 and August 29, shows 49% of Covid-Delta hospitalizations were fully vaccinated.

This is the crux of the problem: too much data these days fails to segregate the most recent data from past data (There’s Time again). So it fails to provide an accurate picture of change. This failure has been, and will continue to be, deadly. We are dealing, in my opinion, with a fast moving situation. So data that does not reflect the changing conditions can kill us.

So therefore, to recap, the percentage of Covid- Delta hospitalizations in England who were fully vaccinated is rapidly increasing over Time, and is already almost equal to the percentage of English who are fully vaccinated.

Deaths:

Through July 19, 49% of all Covid-Delta deaths were fully vaccinated.

Between July 19 and August 15, 62% of all Covid-Delta deaths were fully vaccinated.

Between August 16 and August 29, 68% of all Covid-Delta deaths were fully vaccinated.

So therefore, the percentage of Covid- Delta deaths in England who are fully vaccinated is and has been very high - higher than the percentage of English fully vaccinated, and yet it too is increasing over Time.

Base-Rate Fallacy?

We don’t want to fall into the base-rate fallacy, so we need to compare these percentages to the overall percentage of England’s population that was fully vaccinated over 14 days. 

One needs to note here that a lot of reporting in the media about “% vaccination numbers” excludes those under 18. But the PHE Hospital data doesn’t exclude those under 18, so we won’t either.

NHS Data says 34.0 million people in England had two doses by August 15, 2021.

Worldometer says the Population of England as of July 10th 2021 was 68.25 million.

Summary about England:

Therefore 50% of England was fully vaccinated for over 14 days by August 29, 2021.

The fully vaccinated were responsible for 49% of the hospitalizations and 68% of the deaths due to Covid-Delta for the two weeks ending Aug 29. 

What is going on here?! Check out the above graph. Do you see what is happening Over Time?

Am I getting something wrong with this data? Investigate it yourself. This is impeccable data from a country of over 68 million people! We will likely never get better data than this. Please use it.

Do governments not collect this kind of data in order to inform official policy? Because this is alarming.

To me, this data begs us to question the use of Covid vaccines for anyone but those facing the most severe risk from Covid. But as I said at the beginning, each person’s risk/ benefit analysis is personal.

But without any doubt, this data screams for us to stop vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and vaccine shaming immediately!

Some of My Long-Term Reasons for Vaccine Hesitancy:

There is so much to say here. But after the above, nothing should need to be said. But I will give a few reasons anyways.

First, a new study shows that not only does the evolving virus look poised to acquire complete resistance to all existing “wild-type” spike vaccines, but that the virus could easily mutate Over Time in such a way so that the existing vaccines could potentially enhance the disease (this is known as ADE - Antibody Dependent Enhancement).* (FYI: this paper is a pre-print, so not peer-reviewed. So who knows? We’ll see.)

If this did happen, it would make any disasters our ERs are presently experiencing seem like a cake-walk. Let’s pray that it does not happen.

Second, there are incredibly important reasons to test vaccines Over Time for multiple years – as we always used to do. It can take years for unexpected side effects to show up. I know many billions of our public tax dollars were spent on mRNA technology R&D. And even more billions of dollars in private profits are now being made from the Covid vaccines.

But there are simply too few previous long-term case studies of mRNA technology being actually used medically on humans at all. Let alone for a vaccine. The primary previous use of medical mRNA on humans was with late-stage cancer patients, who would understandably be more willing to take a risk with a novel therapy. The scientific community used to have respect for the “precautionary principle”. Remember that? I don't see it much anymore.

Third, there are incredibly important reasons that we followed in the past, where we would never roll out a vaccine into an active outbreak when that vaccine only reduced symptoms, but did not provide sterilizing immunity.

If all you do is reduce symptoms, but allow infection and transmission to continue, then you are providing an evolutionary playground Over Time for the pathogen to adapt around the vaccine in every vaccinated individual. That’s a very bad idea. However, that is exactly what we are doing with these novel vaccines. And “adapt around” is what the viruses have done and will continue to do. We would never have attempted it in the past, but I guess it’s OK now just so long as society can continue to blame the variants on the un-vaccinated.

If there was even the slightest bit of laboratory evidence that the existing vaccines could potentially but realistically enhance this disease over time, we should stop even thinking about mandatory vaccinations right now and completely rule out that possibility.

But alas, there is a bit of evidence. See the scientific paper linked to at the very bottom. (Once again, I admit it is not yet peer-reviewed.)

However, if there was even the slightest bit of evidence from the real world – from a developed country with impeccable data for millions of people that shows that, Over Time, fully vaccinated people have rapidly increasing hospitalization rates, and that overall already have significantly higher death rates than the un-vaccinated, then we should stop even thinking about mandatory vaccinations right NOW!

But alas, there is plenty of evidence. Admittedly, I’m not clear on what better evidence you might need than England’s. Please check out all of the data for yourself in the links and spreadsheet below. Don’t trust my numbers? Fine. Dig through the publicly available source data yourself. It jumps out at you.

If, after investigating this evidence, you feel like you still want to take the vaccine to reduce your short-term symptoms, then go ahead. I still respect your right to make your own medical decision for vaccines utilizing novel technology for which there is no long term testing. Your analysis of the risk/ benefit ratio for you is just that – your analysis for you. We will all have to live with the consequences of our decisions on this.

Wrap Up

In my opinion, we cannot vaccinate our way out of this. I will, however, openly admit that the new mRNA technology is very clever. It is very clever indeed.

However, it seems crazy to me that we think we are going to win this evolutionary race by utilizing this clever new technology of ours. We can’t provide enough existing vaccines to a significant portion of the globe right now, try as we might. But we are to somehow believe that we are going to be able to race to manufacture global levels of updated booster shots invented on-the-fly playing whack-a-mole with the continuing rapid mutations from an evolutionary sprinter like Covid? Uh-huh. Right.

In my opinion, a bunch of people are racing to reduce their symptoms in the short-term by taking vaccines utilizing a novel technology. That might work out for them. It might not. My guess, informed by the very best data we have at hand, is that time is not on their side. The virus bats last.

I could be wrong. Of course I could be wrong! This is the future we are talking about here. The future is notoriously hard to predict. We all could be wrong about everything we’ve ever said (the most likely option really).

But after reading all of this (and thank you so so much if you actually made it all the way through – really, really thank you), if you still want to shame others who make a different analysis as you as being ignorant or selfish, and if you want to force them to go along with you by threatening their job or their right to shop for food – well then I truly hope that you can clearly see why an intelligent person might just want to tell you to go shove it.

Are you OK with vaccine mandates being rolled out everywhere? Are you OK with Vaccine Passports being rolled out more and more?

Please do your part to Stop the mandates and passports.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Health and happiness to you all. I mean that. Take care,       

                                 

P.S. None of the above is to say that I as an un-vaccinated person might not get sick from Covid and be permanently harmed. Or even die. I might. I know that’s true. This certainly isn’t the Black Plague, and it’s certainly not the common cold either.

Hey, you made it totally to the end! Amazing. Just amazing. Thanks again.

Here’s a very short story and a “poem” just for those special few. It too is about Time. Consider it a “bonus track”, if you will:

When I was 21, I was working on a compost pile on my campus’ organic vegetable farm. One minute I was feeling fine. The next minute, I was deathly ill. With excruciating effort I walked the trail through the woods to the main campus, got on a bus, walked a block home, and completely passed out in bed. I was totally out. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sick in my life.

After a few hours, I woke up, still feeling horrible. I reached out from my bed and grabbed a piece of paper and a pen. While laying on my belly with my head over the edge of the futon that was on the floor, I wrote down the following. Immediately after writing, I passed back out again until the next morning, when I woke up feeling fine, like nothing had ever happened:

Killing Time

We kill Time

but Time is where the sun is

how far away you are from camp

how prepared you are to spend the night huddled and alone

Time is having not much longer to sleep, for day comes

close on the heels of a slivered moon rising in the night

Eternity dreams

Eternity dreams too within the smallest of moments

not only at the edges of this great expanse of time

Time is our greatest gift, because it is from time

from the smallest of moments bubbling forth

which we draw our own powers to give

Our use of the world is a giving

make no mistake

a giving of our attention, our respect, our care

Convenience kills

Convenience kills what eternity dreams

Behind all of the plastic trash on all of the plastic shelves

packed full within a hollowed out place-less-ness

lies only our fear that we have nothing left to give

Get the science straight

barely behind that final fear

our black hole awaits

All right, so there are voices, inner and outer,

telling us we have nothing left to give

that our care will never be able to flesh itself out

that we feel alone because we deserve it

that the holes in our guts are too horrible to look at

let alone cross

and since we deserve loneliness

we would have to cross totally alone

All right, so now we know how the disease spreads

so now we recognize the voice of a forked tongue

so now we can remind one another

* “hospitalizations” in this post always means someone previously tested for Covid who entered an ER and was admitted overnight. FYI: I’m using as the “Hospitalization” data the rows entitled “Cases where presentation to emergency care resulted in overnight inpatient admission (exclusion)”. This row excludes data from patients who were first diagnosed with Covid after entering the hospital. Someone could also run the numbers on the adjoining row that includes that data. I haven’t yet.  

*“The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant is poised to acquire complete resistance to wild-type spike vaccines”; https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1.full.pdf (This is admittedly a pre-print, and not yet peer-reviewed. And admittedly, the paper is pointing to in-vitro work, and not in-vivo. This is the paper that points to the fact that in a lab they have seen a mutation that could realistically cause ADE in humans, but they don’t use that acronym. Once again, the virus bats last).

*Early Treatment Protocols per the FLCCC Alliance, (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance), for just one example.

DATA:

My spreadsheet I used to compute percentages, with links to original source data:

PHE Data

Ooops. I thought that link would work for everyone. I just found out that it doesn't. Sorry about that.

Try this link. Hopefully it works for everyone:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AQgsHB6PBaw8-5g-eAKdhsurj9nEeIKp9YRhBrF18_Q/edit?usp=sharing

If you want me to send this to you as an Excel spreadsheet, just let me know. I've tried to copy and paste it at the bottom as best as I know how right now. 

COMMENTS NOTE: So I've received multiple comments and emails that attempt to cite "Fact Checks" that "dispute" my conclusions. Before sending me a comment with such a linked "Fact Check", please read the following:

All such “Fact Checks” cited were written over two months ago. The latest data-set they refer to is from June 21^st, 2021. This was the data summarized in PHE Technical Bulletin #17 “SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern and Variants Under Consideration”.

This is the data represented by the First set of bars on my graph. I used that data-set as the reference point by which we can spot the subsequent trend.

The rest of my graph represents the data as published by PHE over the last two months for which we have data, as documented in the last 5 PHE Technical Bulletins - #18, #19, #20, #21, & #22.

If you read my post, you will notice that “My reasons for being Covid vaccine-hesitant are all about Time Time and yes, also about Time.”

After that sentence, I capitalize and underline the word Time in my post over 10 times. I attempt to stress how important Time is to understand what is going on in this fast moving situation.

It seems rather common for folks to spend a couple of minutes “googling” a fact check, but then to not take one minute to see if that “fact check” truly disputes any actual fact they were trying to check.

Considering what’s at stake here, I recommend that we try to not do that.

I spent a lot of time creating this spreadsheet that I shared at the end of my blog: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AQgsHB6PBaw8-5g-eAKdhsurj9nEeIKp9YRhBrF18_Q/edit?usp=sharing

I created it for two reasons. 1) was to be able to segregate out the most recent data from the previous data. As I stated in my blog - “This is the crux of the problem: too much data these days fails to segregate the most recent data from past data (There’s Time again). So it fails to provide an accurate picture of change.”

And 2) was to be able to calculate percentages.

All of the data entered into the spreadsheet came straight out of the PHE Technical Bulletins #17, #19, #21, & #22. The spreadsheet gives the actual page numbers for each of the bulletins I used data from.

Will the US follow the trend from England - where every week the pandemic becomes less and less a “pandemic of the un-vaccinated” and more and more a “pandemic of the vaccinated”? Who knows?

Israel is also good to look at regarding what the future has in store. Israel was even ahead of England in their roll-out of the jabs. They are already talking about the Fourth jabs.

What is the cumulative effect of jab after jab? Again, who knows? That also has no long-term testing. Think about that.

Whether or not you want to take that risk is up to you.

I personally choose not to hand over the future of my immune system to the pharmaceutical industry.

And this is my main point: Nobody making a choice as I am should be discriminated against, fired, or culturally shamed for making a different informed choice than another.

And yet that seems to now be the rule of the day.

“Othering” people like that is a slippery slope. History tells us that it doesn’t always work out so well.

I have no intention of letting this new cultural “Othering” continue without providing push-back with heart and with facts.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Addendum on 10/31/2021: Corrections and updates to both the spreadsheet and chart included in this blogpost are included in the next blogpost - "Shall We Make a Deal?"   https://cluelesshonky.blogspot.com/2021/09/lets-make-deal.html

Further information regarding the corrections can be seen in the Comments for that post.