Fever dreams, part 2: five years since the shutdowns
mRNA vaccines, Covid blogs, and contracting the dread disease
This is Part Two of a series reflecting on the fifth anniversary of government-imposed Covid shutdowns and restrictions in the US. In Part One, I recalled what I learned during that first year of enforced isolation about Covid’s origins, Covid deaths, masks, and the Covid tests. In this Part Two, I focus on what I learned about Covid vaccines and my growing compulsion to pour my thoughts into my writing, as well as my personal experience getting Covid…
I was in the daycare center that my mother once ran with her friend decades ago, but it was like a hospital. On the way there I had been bitten on the leg by a spider and had some kind of mental disturbance because of it. Some nurses were there and one said something about the spider venom containing an “RNA blocker” and that I was fortunate because it would give me insight. Other people in robes, as if in a choir, were standing there. One was having some kind of mystical experience and was singing, eyes staring into the distance. The nurse pointed to this person as if to say, see?, that’s what you get to experience with an RNA blocker.
-Dream I had in September 2020, three months before the first Covid vaccine was released in the US
Sometime in mid-2020, I started reading about preparations begun early in the pandemic for the development and introduction of a Covid vaccine. I noted the singular focus on fast-tracking a new vaccine and the odd certainty that seemed to prevail among health officials and the media on the futility of trying to re-purpose existing drugs, alone or in combination, to fight the illness.
I watched as frontline doctors who had seen success in battling Covid in their patients through trial and error were demonized and de-platformed for having discussed these successes in videos on social media, daring to depart from the narrative put forth by federal health officials who, despite never having treated a patient their entire careers, maintained there was little that could be done pre-vaccine.
I was alarmed to learn that the most likely contenders for the first US vaccines were based on an entirely novel, highly experimental form of technology never before authorized for use in humans, and never tested at scale prior to 2020. These vaccines, by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, would be based on messenger RNA (mRNA).
mRNA vaccines, so called because they involve the injection of encapsulated synthetic mRNA molecules instead of natural viral material to induce immunity, were expected by their manufacturers to be regulated as gene therapy by the FDA early in their development, though people who still called them that after Covid were vilified.
Their similarity to other gene therapy products was not because they made changes to a cell’s genetic code, although at least one subsequent study hinted at the possibility they could, but because they used mRNA, a gene-based cellular messenger, to biologically “program” the cell’s ribosomes to manufacture proteins that mimicked those of the actual virus, which proteins the cell would then exhibit on its surface to be targeted by the immune system.
Cutting-edge applications of technology like this in medicine had always involved decades of research and various phases of successful testing before being introduced to the public. But now a dreaded global pandemic had so traumatized the country that few cared about the details of what was behind the vaccines or how rushed the development and testing had been. The first small-scale human study involving an mRNA vaccine, for rabies, had occurred barely five years earlier. There were still problems getting the technology to perform as designed just a few years before Covid.
In October 2019, Tony Fauci and BARDA Director Rick Bright had almost given away the game at a health summit when they discussed the need for a “disruptive” event to quickly transition from the old “egg-growing” way of making vaccines to new mRNA-based technologies, without going through the usual phases of clinical trials, which, according to Fauci, could take a decade. Bright called for an “entity of excitement” that would be disruptive and “not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes” in order to push forward the transition. This was two months before Covid began sweeping across China. Both Fauci’s and Bright’s agencies had funded bat coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Chinese lab near where the outbreak began.
I attended an outdoor gathering of people at the apartment complex in which I lived at the time and listened as one lady expressed her hopeful anticipation of the new vaccines so we could all go back to normal, inviting others to chime in and nod their agreement with her sentiments. Having already decided I wouldn’t be getting one, I kept my mouth shut and my head still.
The pharmaceutical companies stood to make tens of billions of dollars on these products for which they were shielded from any legal liability under federal law, so they didn’t mind the rush either. Donald Trump, ever the opportunist, saw where things were going and jumped on the bandwagon of “Operation Warp Speed” in order to take credit in time for the coming election.
The partially government-funded large trials (~30,000-40,000 people in each of the two) were initiated and rushed to completion by Big Pharma in 2020. The testing period didn’t last long enough to measure possible long-term adverse effects. That was supposed to come later as the trial continued, but at some point after vaccine release most of the placebo group got the shot as well, essentially invalidating any subsequent results.
These omissions paved the way for the vaccines to be considered “safe and effective” for emergency use authorization by the end of 2020 despite their highly experimental nature and rushed development and testing.
When the first shots were authorized in the US for release in December, health officials misled the public by implying they had gone through decades of research. That was certainly true for a handful of relatively obscure mRNA drugs that had been developed for rare conditions like some uncommon cancers, but mRNA vaccines were much newer and research had been sporadic since the first small studies in animals in the 1990s. Vaccines operate on very different principles from drugs and engage the highly complex human immune system, sometimes in ways that aren’t fully predictable.
I began reading reports of some sudden deaths and injuries that were occurring post-vaccination, sometimes within hours, knowing that the voluntary vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) had severe limitations in its design and execution.
A Harvard study funded by the Department of HHS in 2010 had concluded that fewer than one percent of vaccine injuries were actually reported to VAERS. Yet even with these limitations the number of Covid vaccine injuries being reported was exponentially higher than for any previous vaccine.
In January of 2021, amidst all the hand-wringing over the 2020 election and January 6th, the first wave of Covid finally peaked and reported cases began to plummet almost overnight, a trend that would last for months.
This case collapse could not have been caused by the Covid vaccine. At the time the precipitous drop in cases began, around mid-January in most places, the vast majority of Americans had yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine, let alone the two doses needed to be considered fully vaccinated. In my state of Arkansas, for example, less than four percent of the population had received their first shot. Only a few tens of thousands had completed two doses nationwide as the shots had only become available to a small subset of people in late December.
Whether the decline was due to a critical mass of infections having been reached for herd immunity (likely), or due to natural seasonal variability for this new coronavirus (possible, but would be odd given that flu typically peaks around this time), or due to changes with the PCR tests that occurred at about this time to correct the problems with them I highlighted in Part One, the important thing was the worst was over and all of my loved ones had survived that first crazy year of Covid.
Everything I described in Part One and all of the above I read in that first, surreal year of Covid. About Covid’s strange origin story, about how a death was determined to be a Covid death, about masking and its advocates’ deceptions, about the flawed Covid tests, and about the brave new world of mRNA vaccines.
And as I read, I wrote.
This site was brand-new when the pandemic began but very quickly became essentially a Covid blog (before it became essentially a Ukraine War blog). That first year was entirely dedicated to various aspects of the pandemic. Even well into the second year I was still writing about it, and to-date my second most read article ever was a late 2021 retrospective timeline piece entitled Two Years in Wonderland, which was followed by Leaving Wonderland in late 2022.
At some point in that first year, a friend who seemed always to pride himself on accepting only official narratives about most topics reached out discreetly to inform me that I was embarrassing myself with what I was writing about Covid. I told him he might be surprised to learn the names of some of our common friends that we both respected who had reached out to compliment and encourage me on that very same writing.
I was feeling very good about myself, about my choices, about my writing, and about what I had learned over the preceding year. And then the Delta variant arrived by summer and the second wave washed over the country, ultimately infecting me for the first (and thus far only) time upon my return from a Colorado mountain-climbing trip in August 2021.
I was unvaccinated and this would be the real test. Would I end up on a vent, weeping and gnashing my teeth over my hubris? Would I become a poster boy for my intransigent refusal to just get the damn shot, my story slowly gaining traction in the Twittersphere as a lesson to be learned? Would Bette Midler re-post it on social media and heap scorn? “This f**ker reaped what he sowed!”
As it would transpire, I spent two days in bed with major fatigue and a low-grade fever (though never a cough and no trouble breathing), a third day feeling somewhat better but nursing a sore throat, and a fourth feeling mostly better but noticing I couldn’t smell or taste a damn thing. That lagging symptom lasted a week or two before my senses slowly started to return and food began to not taste like cardboard.
I had not (and haven’t since) gotten a Covid test, but there was no doubt it was the culprit. I got an antibody test afterward so I could excitedly announce I had natural immunity, but I did the first blood draw too soon. No antibodies detected. I waited another week and paid to have another test. Bingo.
It was about this time that the Biden Administration decided to take the scare and blame tactics to a new, shameless level, declaring a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Biden’s handlers used him to try and browbeat 40% of the population into taking an experimental medical product that they had no interest in. If that didn’t work, they were going to try and take away their jobs, and in many cases they did just that until courts put an end to it.
Finally, in December, as a last gasp for Pfizer, our honorary president, geriatric and muzzled with his signature jet-black mask, solemnly stared through a camera lens into the heart of a wayward people and damned us for our sins, declaring: “for the unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” It came off sounding like a hope or a threat and not at all like a regretful final plea.
But by then events had overtaken the narrative of doom. The mercifully mild Omicron variant that would carry us out of the woods, while the vaccines got the undeserved credit, had begun to prevail. That eminent virologist and health expert — err, software mogul — Bill Gates announced the end of the “acute phase” of the pandemic for 2022. For the media, it was as if the Pope had blessed red meat on Friday. That was the signal to promote letting things get back to relative normality.
Looking back, the surreal nature of it all has only grown over time, not lessened. Did that really happen? I feel like I’ve lived three lives since 2019. At the same time, inexplicably, the twenties feel like they’re flying past like loose-leaf calendar pages in a hurricane.
I want to think we’ve learned something as a people about putting too much trust in authority. That unchecked power corrupts. That public health officials do not embody science, no matter which party appoints them. That the emperor has no clothes.
But I fear our rulers are too wily for us. There will be no new Covid pandemic for the same reason there was no new Kennedy assassination and no new 9/11. Once a crisis for the ages has served its purpose of ratcheting up fear, enabling government power and control, and further enriching elites, a new, different crisis must be invented to terrorize the public for that next great leap toward authoritarianism.
And when that crisis comes along, and the skepticism of the masses is once again put to the test in a new and different way, will their gullibility have finally reached its limits? Well, as much as I hate to say it, don’t dream it’s over.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.