Love this opinion piece. Too large to post all of it.
I dabble in street art. I do paintings on large pieces of plywood that I scavenge from construction-site dumpsters. I display some of these at the community gardens I manage in New Brunswick, NJ. Using long, star-bit screws to make them hard to remove, I fasten others to abandoned buildings in...
markoshinskie8de.substack.com
Last week, someone—with a law degree—whom I know and who lives a few blocks away, walked by as Ellen and I chatted after dinner. She saw this artwork and said, “I didn’t know you were a painter.”
I said, “Yes, it’s my anti-vaxx message. The shots don’t work.”
I could tell she didn’t share my view. She said, “Well, I guess that’s true to some extent.”
I calmly responded, “It’s fully true. Not only have the shots failed, they’re also injuring and killing many people.”
She changed the subject to how the summer was going and soon departed.
Why does the denial regarding the shots’ failure run so deep?
I sent her this e-mail the next day:
“I assume you supported vaxxing and boosting everyone. I wonder what facts support your opinion. The news about the shots has been bad for over a year and becomes worse each week.”
She responded, only:
“Hi Mark. I made my decision after speaking with doctors, nurses, and health workers, especially those who worked in the hospitals during the early days of the pandemic. I also spoke with them afterwards. Their experiences and advice informed my decisions.”
Though I asked my neighbor for the factual basis for her opinion, she provided no facts. Instead, she based her opinion on other peoples' opinions. She exhibited no independent thought, cited no data and expressed no scientific principles. Nor did she deny that she wanted everyone
else to inject simply because some doctor, nurse and/or health worker had offered some unspecified account of medical drama.
I couldn’t help but perceive her implicitly-disparaging, widely-shared premise that MDs/nurses know more than laymen do and that we non-experts should defer to and comply with those wearing medical garb.
During my annual physical, in October, 2021, my doctor asked me if I would inject. She told me the jabs would stop infection and spread. I told her I didn’t believe that; vaxxed people I knew were getting sick. I asked her if she was seeing the same thing. She admitted she was. But she quickly retreated to the shopworn, fallback--and by now, disproven—view that, well, the shots lessen hospitalization and death. I told the doctor that, given my age and state of health, there was essentially no risk of me being hospitalized or dying from this overblown virus and thus, no reason for me to jab.
Returning to August, 2022, I responded as follows to my neighbor’s e-mail:
“Many doctors are poorly informed about many health topics. I wouldn't listen to a doctor who told me to inject an experimental substance for an illness that posed functionally zero risk to anyone healthy and under 70. Any doctor--or any politician--who told anyone the shots would stop infection or spread--and many said this--was wrong. I know dozens of vaxxed people who got sick; some ended up in hospitals. One died. In contrast, none of the unvaxxed people I know has gotten sick. The shots cause many problems, including but not limited to, compromised immunity.”
I continued:
“How could any MD know the shots were ‘safe and effective’ based on dubious three-month clinical trials conducted by corporations that stood to make tens of billions of dollars from these shots? Often, effects from new drugs don't show up for years: Vioxx, Depo-Provera, HRT, et al.
The vaxxes have already injured or killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Pharma-sponsored media is hiding this information.
Everyone should make their own decisions and live with the consequences. The problem with the shots was that many people misinformedly, unconstitutionally insisted that everyone inject. Anyone who supported mandatory shots (and school closures, etc.) listened to dishonest people and internalized their lies. Much of the world reopened schools by Summer 2020 with no problems.
I'm curious. Do you know how inaccurate the Covid tests are? Do you think that avoiding human contact and wearing a mask (as she does, outside) will make a virus die off?
Tremendous damage has been done by all of the political theater of the past 29 months, with no benefit to show for it. The CDC quietly revised its guidelines last week and, in so doing, effectively admitted this, as did a Johns Hopkins study published in February, 2022.“
I might also have added but didn’t, that many doctors and nurses—the smart, unbought ones—strongly
oppose the shots.
My neighbor hasn’t responded to my message/questions. If I’m wrong about the shots, I’d like to know why.
I forwarded this e-mail exchange to several people. One, a yoga instructor, replied:
“I would be interested to delve a bit deeper into the specifics of what [your neighbor] discovered when she spoke with all of ‘those doctors and nurses, especially those working in the hospitals during the early days and then again after.’ How many doctors and how many nurses worked directly with patients in the hospitals? What were those hospitals, and what work did they do, exactly? Did she follow up with these same people afterwards? What, exactly, did they tell her? Were they reporting direct experience, or passing on what they heard from other sources? She said their experiences and advice informed her decisions. Was it their direct experience or was it just advice they offered?
We now know about the failures of remdesivir and the misuse of ventilators from the early days that unnecessarily killed many ill people in hospitals. There were hospitals where patients were not properly attended to because the staff was too frightened to care for them. There were financial incentives in place to use ventilators, to slap a Covid diagnosis on everyone, and strict protocols that prevented staff to employ what are now recognized as effective treatments. How much of this did your neighbor learn when she spoke to her sources?”
These are questions that any decent attorney would ask during cross-examination. But many pro-jab attorneys didn’t ask these in their own lives. My neighbor is the type of attorney who doesn’t cross-examine witnesses.
My inquiring, insightful, yoga-instructing correspondent continued:
“There is a wall of silence inside of hospitals these days. Dr Pierre Kory has direct testimony from front line hospital workers on this very subject. Steve Kirsch has reported on this and so has
A Midwestern Doctor. Doctors and nurses see what's going on and cannot discuss it openly. They are silent because they don't want to lose their jobs. The young doctors are staring at six-figure education loans and no income to repay it if they are let go. Much about this on Substack.
In my experience—and I married into a family of doctors—docs love to talk about all the Covid patients in the hospital, but they are vague with the details when you ask specific questions about hospitalized people, their age, co-morbidities, ‘with or of’ Covid, etc. Vaccine status reporting in hospitals is deliberately inaccurate to inflate the number of unvaccinated.
Finally, I don't know any doctor who did independent research on the vaccine trials. They were told to tell patients to get it and that's what most of them did. The docs I know are less informed about the vaccine than you and I are. They are the last people I would ask for advice about this.”
I had the same questions as did my yoga-instructing correspondent. I also shared her perceptions of modern medicine and wondered about their level of direct involvement with Covid patients. The instructor thinks much more clearly and critically than does my neighbor, the attorney, and many other vaxxed attorneys or doctors. TV ads tell you to “ask your doctor.” But the vaxx fiasco has shown that such deference is not generally deserved.
In the same way, support among legions of graduates of “elite” colleges for the extreme, ineffective overreaction to a respiratory virus—the lockdowns, school closures, masks and mass testing and vaxx mandates—shows that these graduates are vastly overrated and that their professors didn’t teach them how to think. These schools may have admitted students and hired faculty based on demographics and/or their willingness to parrot PC tenets, not for exhibiting clear, independent thought.
Last week, the CDC significantly revised the guidelines that, for the past 29 months, led to social, psychological and economic catastrophe. The CDC also announced that, given its recent and overdue loss of face, it’s doing a makeover.
Those responsible for the overreaction should apologize in detail and be imprisoned. Instead, we’ll get new acronyms and other cheesy bureaucratic gimmicks. They’ll hire a tony, heavily-connected DC PR firm to slickly reinvent and rebrand this politically-tainted entity.
For 29 months, many Democrats like my masked attorney/neighbor and the complicit media have naively followed—and insisted that everyone else follow—poor advice offered by random “medical professionals” and “government experts.” They’ll buy this next phase of the scam, as well.
Such widespread critical thinking deficits have enabled massive, comprehensive, lasting damage.
Namaste.
amp.cnn.com
markcrispinmiller.substack.com
nypost.com
en.wikipedia.org
