Should you get vaccinated?

A checklist of things to think about if you are still undecided.

SHOULD YOU GET vaccinated for COVID-19?

I’ve no idea. Are you old, or young? Unhealthy, or healthy? Fearful, or confident? Able to take time off work if it makes you sick, or not? Maybe. Maybe not. Only you can decide.

A better question: should I have an opinion on whether you should get vaccinated? Specifically, should I have an opinion on whether you, for my benefit, submit to injection with a hastily developed, highly experimental, pharmaceutically active substance that is designed to attack your immune system in possibly unexpected ways, and which may harm you?

The answer to that is complex.

My right not to be harmed by your preference collides head on with your right not to be harmed by my preference. “Infection is different”, we say. “You aren’t just threatening me. You are threatening many. Submit to my opinion!”.

Where infection is clearly harmful, and where pathogens are stable and vaccines against them are effective, and where vaccines are demonstrably safe, we agree, and inject ourselves and our children with vaccines for diphtheria, hepatitis, polio, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, influenza, and rotavirus. And all is well.

---

But to what opinion should we submit if infection is not significantly harmful to us, if the pathogen is unstable and vaccines against it are only partially and temporarily effective, and if vaccines are not yet demonstrably safe?

What should we do if vaccination immunity is less effective than natural immunity?

What should we do if, by submitting under coercion to a controversial experimental mass medication program, we legitimise medical apartheid, bio-surveillance, pseudoscience, a culture of authoritarian intolerance that threatens our undermine our entire way of life, and possibly one of the most dangerous public experiments in history?

Well, that requires a little more thought.

---

Here’s how I think about this situation. I think of these as conditions that must be satisfied before I’ll consider anyone’s opinion on whether I should submit to vaccination against COVID-19:

1. Does it benefit me? Does infection present me with a significant risk of developing serious symptoms, and does vaccination significantly reduce that risk?

2. Does it benefit others? Does vaccination significantly reduce my infectiousness, or the likelihood of me denying others access to hospital resources?

3. Is it safe? Is there evidence of the absence of harmful side effect, rather than merely an absence of evidence of harmful side effect?

4. Is the information necessary to evaluate these questions freely available, and reliable? Is debate uncensored, and do experts with relevant knowledge and opinion have equal participation in it?

5. Am I or others being coerced?

If COVID-19 vaccines were demonstrably safe and voluntary, and if I was confident about the quality of information about them, and if they didn’t produce worse immunity than I currently have then: yes, I’d accept vaccination, even if it offered me no personal benefit.

But even if it was safe and beneficial, I will never accept it if it is coercive or imposed under conditions of censorship, because the health of our democracy is far more important than a single disease.

So will I consider the Government’s opinion on whether I should get vaccinated? Here is my current score card.

Does it benefit me? No. The risk profile in my age and health cohort is well defined and very low. I’ve had COVID-19, and it was no worse than moderate flu. I already have durable immunity. I’m indifferent to a vaccine with even a 100% reduction in risk when my starting risk is effectively zero, and the effectiveness of these ones are far lower. The evidence seems to show that symptom severity is declining as the pathogen mutates.

Does it benefit others? Apparently not, and me getting vaccinated may even harm others. Current evidence seems to show that vaccination does not prevent infection, or significantly reduce the probability of infection, or significantly reduce the probability of reinfection, or significantly reduce infectiousness. Actually, the reverse: the largest study so far in one of the most highly vaccinated countries seems to show that double-jabbed, previously uninfected people are 13 times as likely to get infection, and 7 times as likely to develop symptomatic disease, compared with the naturally immune like me. It suppresses symptoms, but doesn’t prevent infectiousness, creating “super spreaders” out of the falsely confident. Indiscriminate mass vaccination of healthy people is accelerating the mutation of the virus into vaccine-resistant forms, increasing the risk to those who do benefit from it.

Is it safe? Unknown so, as a precaution, I must assume not. The information required to answer that is the product of at least one long term (according to the US regulator, one to two year) clinical safety trial designed specifically to evaluate side effect safety. The first of these, to my knowledge, will not report its findings until the middle of 2023. Until then, there is no evidence of the absence of harmful side effect, only the absence of evidence of it—a vital epistemological distinction that, apparently, is not clear to many who advocate vaccination. Harmful side effect is non-theoretical, significant evidence is accumulating in US and European “vaccine injury” registers of frequent and serious injury, and I’m not confident that these are being recorded, reported, and responded to reliably. It’s unlicensed, and the recent resignation of two senior US Food and Drug Administrator’s vaccine regulators following the apparently non-compliant “licensing” of the Pfizer vaccine leads me to assume that the integrity of the safety licensing process is compromised.

Is required information freely available, and reliable? No. Gross errors, contradictions, failures, omissions, and reversals in official statements, predictions, and policies are pervasive and unexplained. Suppression and censorship of alternative valid expert interpretation and opinion about COVID-19 and its vaccines, and professional, legal, personal, and physical threats to those who express them, are pervasive.

Am I being coerced? Yes. Infrastructure and systems capable of supporting bio-surveillance and medical apartheid—including vaccine “passport” based discriminated access to society, coercive vaccination programs as condition of university attendance and employment, and differential travel burdens—are funded, in active development, and undergoing rollout.

So, for me, it’s currently a “no”. Possibly even a “hell, no”.

How about you. Should you get vaccinated?