Thoughts about "the jab"

My attempt to explain to a close family member why I don't want the Covid shot

I wrote the following email to a relative who has expressed some concern that my wife Rose and I have remained unvaccinated. He is a little worried that we could get covid and die, or suffer complications like long Covid or loss of taste. He’s a little worried about our young sons as well, and further worried given my wife’s current pregnancy. He’d very much like us to talk to a very trusted doctor friend of his, who is an expert on infectious diseases, to make sure we are making an informed decision.

My mind is quite made up about the shot and I don’t share his fears. Nonetheless, he has expressed these concerns in good faith and it seemed to me the least I could do to attempt, in a non-argumentative way, to share my perspective for the sake of better mutual understanding even if disagreement ultimately remains. What follows is a slightly abridged version of what I wrote.

If we are to have a chance at continued cohesion as one nation, it will be due at least in part to personal bonds leading people to attempt to explain themselves to each other across divisions like this. Maybe sharing the following can be helpful in a few other such conversations.

Letter following…

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Dear [],

First of all, let me just reaffirm that I know everything you are saying is out of concern and love for me and Rose and the boys! I feel like in response I owe it to you to tell you where we're coming from. We may or may not agree at the end of the day but at least we’ll have made an effort to understand each other!

To some extent (and this really is a sad thing actually) my trust in the conventional medical system has been eroded by this whole thing. The brazenness with which Fauci and some of the other big organizations have lied, not to mention the high likelihood that they actually funded the creation of this plague in the first place, makes me hesitant to accept the opinion of members of the medical community (even truly good ones like [your doctor friend]) without much more careful scrutiny than I would have given them 5 or 10 years ago. Have you seen the exchanges between Rand Paul and Fauci in congress? I think it's pretty clear that Fauci lied under oath and very likely that he did so because he's trying to cover up his own responsibility for this mess. 

What's more there is real division even in the medical community itself; there are tons and tons of good and earnest doctors who have voiced serious concerns (for example his 25 year veteran Air Force doctor who overseas the health of 4,000 airmen and says that the shot is a higher risk for her airmen than the virus, or Dr. Robert Malone, pioneer of the very mRNA technology used in the shot, or the two local Southern CA doctors who went viral in mid 2020, or many many more…). The point is not that all of the claims made by these individuals are correct, but simply that “the medical community” is not nearly the monolith of established wisdom which some would have us believe. As with any important issue, there are real disagreements, including (or even particularly) amongst experts. Moreover, those who speak out against the “official” account almost always do so in the face of brutal censorship and at serious risk to their own careers (note that the Bakersfield doctors’ video can no longer even be accessed without some purposeful digging for it) which leads me to assume that there are probably far more than we know who share the same or similar opinions.

I also think the entire phenomenon of “Covid-19” as we have experienced it is very overblown. The majority of Democrats (51%, along with 22% of Republicans) surveyed by Gallup polling thought that the chances of hospitalization for unvaccinated people from covid were 50% or higher. The real number is... wait for it...  approximately 2 percent!!! Average people are vastly over-hyping this thing. 

Not that it isn't a potentially truly deadly virus, it certainly is, but the risk for healthy people of my and Rose's age (let alone kids) is very low. Did you know that according to official CDC and Police data, more kids have been shot to death in Chicago than have died of Covid altogether? In that context the push to vaccinate kids with a very rapidly tested vaccine makes absolutely zero sense to me. And according to what seems to be the most reputable paper on infection fatality rates, published in Nature (which to my understanding is nearly the gold standard for peer reviewed journals), 30-35 year olds have between 1 and 3 hundredths of a percent of a chance of dying if we get sick. And the vast majority of those deaths involve comorbidities, which Rose and I don't have (except maybe for pregnancy). So let's say our risk is a quarter the average risk for our age range (I actually think it's more like 10% or even lower given our lack of comorbidities) but let's say 25%. Our likelihood of dying is now down to approx. 0.005%. And that is assuming 100% chance we get sick! 

Let’s take for comparison the time I rode my motorcycle to a wedding in Dallas. A 700 mile round trip. I decided to do it on my bike pretty much on a whim, the day of the wedding, without any particularly serious consideration. Odds of dying on a motorcycle are about 24 per 100,000,000 miles. So my likelihood of dying on that trip was 700 x 24 / 100,000,000 or 0.0168%... roughly three times my odds of dying from Covid infection! Similarly, with about 1 death per 100,000,000 miles of car travel, our 4,000 mile round trip from here to visit in the midwest yields probability of mortality of 0.004%, just less than Covid infection. But the amount of concern people have about me or Rose getting Covid is substantial, involving research and podcasts and articles and hours of conversation, etc, while absolutely nobody is going to say much more than a brief “be safe!” or “say a travel prayer!” when it comes to a long drive with essentially the same risk. The point here is of course not that we should stop taking trips, or that travel prayers are a waste of time, but rather that somehow Covid has gotten a hold of our collective imagination so strongly as to lead us to manage risk in a way totally inconsistent with what we had hitherto accepted as normal. I do think about the risk in all these cases but to some extent the whole thing is kind of a red herring.

OK, but just because it's a minor risk for people our age, almost not even worth spending any real time thinking about, why not get the shot anyway, just in case? For me the shot would become worthwhile if I was reasonably certain that the likelihood of negative effects from it was substantially less than the decrease brought about by the shot in odds of negative consequences from Covid. I have absolutely not been convinced of that at this point. Taking the risk number above, already a very small number, the shot decreases but does not totally remove that risk. Moreover even the LA Times has now admitted that the effectiveness declines rapidly over time, something like 50% every six months. If I'm signing up for boosters every 6-12 months then I'm even less interested.

Did you know that more people died in the Pfizer clinical trial than in the placebo group? Moreover there's weird stuff going on in the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) data. I'm no expert to really process that data in detail, but things like whatever is going on at the far right of figures like below at least make me nervous:

(All deaths reported to VAERS, presented at https://openvaers.com/covid-data)

Also did you know that roughly 70% of Covid deaths in Great Britain at this point are fully vaccinated people? (See table 4 on page 15 of this paper, the most recent Official British Government Vaccine Surveillance report.) Nobody knows this, we all assume that “barely anyone” who is vaccinated will get really sick! Anyway, back to the math. Let's take that 0.005% chance of dying from Covid above, and let's say that the shot reduces it effectively down to zero, for as long as the shot is really effective, say (being generous to the shot) 1 year, at which point I probably need a booster whose risks we'd have to evaluate on their own. Leaving that aside let's say that during next year my chances of actually getting Covid (I think I'm bound to get it eventually, but maybe not in the next year) are 50%. OK, so 50% of 0.005% is 0.0025% chance of mortality, reduced by the shot to zero. What risks am I taking on for that? Well, per Science magazine's coverage of an Israeli study this summer, at the very least I'm probably looking at about a 0.01-0.02% chance of myocarditis in my age range - in other words, I'm roughly 10x more likely to get myocarditis because I had the shot than die because of not having the shot. Obviously death is worse than myocarditis, but is it worth removing a tiny tiny risk of mortality while undergoing ten times that risk of a seriously life altering injury? I'm not so sure.

Of course there is some risk of myocarditis from Covid too, but as best I can tell it is much much lower than the myocarditis risk from the shot. And none of this is even considering the actual risk of death from the shot, which can happen as well, not to mention many other possible side effects. And none of that is even yet bringing up unknown long term effects which we can't possibly be sure about until we've had enough time to do long term trials!

This last point really bears repeating. Many of us now don’t trust the the big establishment medicine, we have never trusted big pharma, we don’t trust the politicians pushing this, and we know that this shot is using new (mRNA) technology, and has (of course) not been through long term trials, which means claims about its long term effects are of necessity educated guesses. Even if all the math above checked out for the shot this last risk would still make me think twice, or more. Two things I know as an engineer: projecting into the future based on current patterns is absolutely helpful and necessary, and you can and eventually will screw it up, no matter how careful you are. So to me that future risk from the shot is a partially unquantifiable risk. Do I want to voluntarily take that risk based on pressure and reassurances from people I don’t trust?

All these risks are still small, and of course I know lots of people who have gotten Covid and/or the shot and apparently came out the other side just fine and dandy. But if we are going to make an informed decision based on accurate information, this is the best I've been able to come to, and it doesn't really seem to favor the shot at my age.

We also still haven't gotten to birth defect risk, fertility risk, etc, for Rose. Again, I realize there's risk on either side of the equation but as far as we are concerned the burden of proof is on the party pushing the intervention, not vice versa, and that proof has not been apparent... not even close.

Anyway... maybe that at least gives some insight into how we are seeing it, even if we don't totally agree! In the above figuring I've tried to use reputable sources and to round all the numbers in the direction not in my favor. I'm just an aero engineer, admittedly not a doctor, but I think it's often valuable for people to do a little "back of the envelope" calculating like the above when they want to look into something. There have been too many instances to count in history of the “official” account having something a little weird going on, and to me there are signs all over this thing that there is corruption and profit seeking and other perverse incentives becoming very major impediments to the truth. In such a situation one can no longer simply “trust the experts,” one is forced to think at least a bit for oneself, and the more I do so, the more I am inclined against this shot, at least until we have much more long term data about it. For a really good (and as far as I can tell very factual) coverage this is a great podcast: 

Obviously all these calculations change based on age, and I am simply talking about whether the shot makes sense for me and Rose. I would certainly have to think it through again if I were suddenly thirty years older.

Also everything I have said so far has been about the merits of the shot for its recipient (me or Rose); we have not yet addressed the whole question of spreading the disease to others, ending the pandemic by mass vaccination, etc. Suffice it to say for now that I have also not seen convincing evidence that the shot substantially decreases viral transmission, at least not for more than a few months. Israel got to tremendously high vaccination numbers and still had infection numbers entirely comparable to everywhere else. And at this point the pandemic is pretty clearly endemic, with animal reservoirs and parts of the world which will never fully be vaccinated, and eradicating it is, unfortunately, not going to happen. So I feel no motivation at all to take the shot “for the common good”. 

If there was real convincing evidence that the collective benefit was so great and so certain as to outweigh the individual risk, I would absolutely be the first to sign up. This is what courageous and good people do - IF the evidence is present and clear. 

Classical just war theory is a great analogical case - a nation can go to war, and brave young warriors can be deeply honorable, even duty bound, to answer the call, risk their lives, and cause destruction, if (and only if!) there is near absolute proof that the war meets rigid conditions, including it being necessary as a last resort, and also - having a reasonable chance of success. A young band of warriors (or a major nation state) which risks life and limb in a brash and unwinnable or avoidable conflict may very well have had courageous intentions, but is nonetheless finally more foolish than heroic. 

In the case of the vaccine, I have seen many people run off like young rash warriors, ready to "take the hit" as necessary for the sake of the greater good, without ever seeming to take a real pause to ensure that our approach is well thought out, and that it has reasonable chance of success. Those who do take such a pause are often yelled and jeered at as “evil” and yet at this point not only is success in terms of actual eradication of the virus by vaccination not possible, there is even some possible evidence that vaccination is driving virus mutation, making for worse and more immune resistant strains. As would be the case in a foolish war, the blame here rests much more squarely on the shoulders of our leaders than it does on those well intentioned people who were merely trying to do their part as it was presented to them; the latter might very well be worthy of real honor for their efforts, especially if they were in a situation where they had no alternative or couldn't know the whole situation. Nevertheless, I have no inclination to voluntarily become part of either unjust wars or ill conceived medical campaigns if I can avoid it, and so lacking much better evidence than I have yet seen or really expect to see that vaccination is somehow a true global good I won't be jumping in to make any sacrifices which don't make sense for me and my own family, all of Fauci's incredibly condescending and tyrannical claims that “you'd only refuse the vaccine if you're just thinking of yourself” notwithstanding. 

Apart from whatever effects the vaccine has in protecting the vaccinated individual, the only thing vaccination does absolutely for sure is make big drug companies money!

One more aspect of this which we have yet to talk about is the whole issue of rightful authority vs. tyranny. In my opinion Covid has been the excuse for absolutely egregious government and private tyrannical overreach, from shutting down worship while leaving casino's open, to massive and over the top social media censorship of “misinformation” much of which did in fact later turn out to be entirely true. In my opinion threatening someone's job on account of vaccination status, for example, is in this situation both entirely immoral and in many cases actually illegal. Anyway, that's a whole other thing but there are certainly cases of tyranny happening (and I am NOT referring to you here by the way, you have been kind and gentle throughout). If forced to stand with the group with tyrants in it or the group with tyrannized in it, I'd rather choose the latter. It really just doesn't pass the BS meter that if this thing is so great they also have to push it so hard.

At the end of the day my opinion is that a lot of what is driving this in the popular mind is a world in which people no longer truly believe in life after death, and must therefore fight off death with every possible means, to a point bordering on irrationality. On the flip side though, for those of us blessed to believe that we are really only getting prepared for eternal happiness in Heaven, all this need not be so desperate! To paraphrase the Navy SEAL Jonny Kim, "the moment that you accept that you could die any moment in battle is the moment that you actually become the safest." Too much fear and worry actually makes us much less safe, even here on earth!

I think it is good for us to be able to talk about these things even if we draw different conclusions, and as I said I take any effort you put into the subject as an act of love for all of us, and hope you will do the same for me!

All the best,

Liam