Learning about vaccines… as opposed to jabs. War, what war? A skirmish in the battle of the sexes.
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The Covid pandemic has been an opportunity for all of us to learn perhaps more than we ever wanted to know about viruses and vaccines. Here are some of the sources that I have found most interesting.
First about smallpox. A large outbreak in Leicester, England in 1885 predates the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller foundation and Bill Gates. Yet, the measures taken and the lessons learned appear to be highly applicable today. Especially, the lessons ignored! The doctor who wrote this ten-page piece provides the following outline:
-Dissolving Illusions (Background information on the primary source)
-History of Smallpox Vaccination
-Skepticism and Rejection of Smallpox Vaccination
-Mandatory Smallpox Vaccination
-Effects of Mandatory Smallpox Vaccination
-Smallpox Vaccine Injuries
-Historic 1885 Public Protest
-The Leicester Model
-History Repeats in the Present Day
I should also note that despite this article from the National Library Of Medicine being generally pretty positive about smallpox vaccination, it does conclude Edward Jenner's biography with the quixotic observation that "After a decade of being honored and reviled in more or less equal measure, he gradually withdrew from public life and returned to the practice of country medicine in Berkeley." Obviously, the smallpox vaccination was not considered an unmixed blessing.
Same with polio. Here is a paragraph (obviously anti-vax) on the Salk vaccine
…Similar disastrous results also happened with the polio vaccine. The majority of polio cases actually do not cause symptoms in those who are infected. Symptoms occur in only approximately 5 percent of infections with a case fatality rate of only about 0.4%. Even during the peak epidemics, poliovirus infection resulting in long-term paralysis, was a low-incidence disease that was falsely represented as a rampant and violent paralytic disease by fund raising advertising campaigns to fast-track development and approval and release of the Salk vaccine with Rockefeller as the key supporter. Because of outside pressure, the US licensing committee in charge of approving the vaccine did so after deliberating for only two hours without first having read the full research.
Suffice it to say that vaccines have never been received with overwhelming joy and acclamation. I recently mentioned a review I had done on one of the rare books that assesses them impartially. Even Danish author Peter Gøetzche, while conceding that some vaccines are useful, says that the vaccine manufacturers are uniformly and universally corrupt. In his conclusion, he writes:
"Furthermore, people with an influence on guidelines often have financial conflicts of interests in relation to the vaccine industry. Even when there are no such issues, the authorities sometimes spread information that is seriously misleading. After having read what the US diseases US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) writes about flu shots, I don't trust anything this agency writes about the necessity of being vaccinated."
"It has been abundantly documented that we cannot trust the drug agencies either. In their work, they rely far too much on what drug companies tell them even though they know very well that fraud, bias, and underreporting of serious drug harms in industry sponsored trials are common. It cannot be repeated often enough that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, which demonstrates that the drug agencies are dysfunctional; they did not protect us against the lethal harm to drugs."
We in the United States have been awash in propaganda from the pharmaceutical companies and our government for so long we have no notion that it was ever otherwise. We have been treated since childhood to the stories of the incomparable benefits provided by vaccines.
Now, upon the abject failure of the Covid 19 vaccines and the entire skein of untruths used to force the jabs on everybody the entire realm of vaccination will be subject to a long overdue reassessment.
In that vein, this will be a time to reexamine the power that the government and corporations have over our lives, and to question whether it is excessive.
Most jurisdictions mandate childhood vaccinations. The benefits are poorly quantified, and the adverse effects almost entirely ignored or downplayed. Witness the chorus of catcalls that met critics such as Robert F Kennedy Jr., Vernon Coleman and Del Bigtree with his movie vaxxed. Now that we have seen two years of denigration of critics of the response to Covid 19, and the absolute vacuity of the arguments, it is time to think again about the safety most of us have taken for granted with regard to vaccines.
We should, in any case, reclaim our bodily autonomy. The personal protection factor far outweighs the community welfare factor when it comes to vaccines. We have been clubbed with the "herd immunity" argument since the beginning of this Covid affair and it has had no substance whatsoever. I had investigated measles in regard to my own children's vaccinations and concluded that herd immunity doesn't make much sense there either. According to the smallpox link above, the herd immunity argument failed in Leicester more than a century ago. Without that argument, compulsory vaccination doesn't make sense. That would hurt the bottom line of a bunch of villainous corporations, but I don't think it would do the polity any harm. Let's take back our medical freedom and that of our children!
That's a wrap for today, covering only the question of vaccines. There is a far larger issue with regard to how much control government, insurers, employers and others have over all of our medical decisions. More to come.
On the home front, Grandpa Sasha has now been in the hospital for a month. He went to install plumbing to hook up his kidney dialysis and to await an operation on his legs, possibly an amputation because he has lost circulation due to what the Germans call "smokers' leg." At least that's my garbled understanding. He caught Covid while he was there.
It is a mild case, similar to that which everybody in the family had, and he seems to be recovering. Grandma Nadia slipped him the oxycodone I mentioned a week or so ago without mentioning it to the doctor. A smart Soviet! She says it works. He is sleeping well.
Zoriana and Marianna have coughs and runny noses again, the kind of thing that led to my being under the weather from November through January. Maybe I've learned something. I am rinsing my nose daily with Betadine on the assumption that it should be effective against any rhinovirus, not just Covid.
A guy has to celebrate his occasional victory in the battle of the sexes. I noticed the bread was stale as I was going to make toast for myself this morning. I proposed to the kids that we use it to make French toast. Just as it was all done in the frying pan, Grandma showed up to get them some cereal out of the refrigerator. I told her "Don't bother – their breakfast is all ready."
She wrinkled her nose and said it was totally unsuitable. I replied that eggs, milk and bread are hardly unhealthy and asked the kids if they were enthusiastic about it. Yes and yes!! We three had French toast.
You should not be expecting news about the war. After all, according to Joe Biden, it doesn't start until tomorrow. President Zelensky looks to me to be presidential in his speech last night. You can put the text through a translator. In it he refers to the oligarchs who have left the country. I had not previously seen it in the news here – thanks to a couple of you for the tip off. In other news, the exchange rate remains at 28.50, unchanged from yesterday.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men are once again hiding from a very ordinary virus, the good looking women persisting in the battle of the sexes despite an occasional setback, and the children enjoying a one-day reprieve from both nursery school and Ukrainian language instruction.
I certainly am one of those who has learned more about viruses and vaccines than I ever wanted to know. The history of diseases is a subject I have long neglected, perhaps because I assumed we advanced to the point where the horrible plagues of times past were far behind us. One lesson I have learned is that the health of a population is more closely tied to economic well-being than the presence of miracle drugs. Well-nourished people with steady incomes are less likely to succumb to disease than poor, starving people who don't know what tomorrow will bring. That's why it's so crazy that health officials even considered shutting down the economy in March 2020, even if only for 2 weeks.
In addition to vaccines, forced quarantines also have a history of questionable effectiveness. My ancestors came to America during a cholera epidemic and were forced to stay for a week on "Quarantine Island" near St. Louis. I wrote about their experience here:
https://stephenjwood.substack.com/p/quarantine-in-the-time-of-cholera?r=17305e