Leaving Wonderland
Covid narratives collapse in 2022
It’s becoming clear that history will not be kind to those who pushed mRNA shots on an unwitting public. That includes the pharmaceutical companies, their government enforcers, the media companies that work for both of them, and virtually every other mainstream influencer you can imagine. The evidence is now clear: the shots are not just ineffective but counterproductive and potentially harmful.
Unlike traditional vaccines that introduce weakened or inactivated viral material into a person’s body, vaccines based on mRNA technology are still an experimental form of vaccine, different from, and more complicated than, anything that has come before. They essentially hijack a person’s cellular machinery (the cells’ ribosomes) and program them using messenger RNA to manufacture proteins that mimic those of a real coronavirus. That’s not a conspiracy theory; even proponents will acknowledge that this is how they work. It’s also essentially how a real virus works. But it’s one thing to perform the time-tested method of introducing real viral material into a person’s body to elicit immunity and quite another to think we can safely and effectively elicit it using bio-technology to replicate how a real virus works in humans without a decade or more of testing and trials.
Despite a decade of research, as recently as a few years ago there were still major problems with the technology that had not been overcome, and no mRNA vaccine had ever been tested at scale in a human population prior to 2020. Then, with the excuse of a pandemic and aided by an unprecedented government and media scare campaign, it was tested in a few tens of thousands of people in a few months, declared safe and effective, and injected into (eventually) billions of arms.
Pfizer and Moderna made tens of billions of dollars from government contracts for the shots. Use of existing drugs that in combination with others had shown efficacy against the virus was suppressed, those using them ridiculed or demonized. Doctors who didn’t conform to the “safe and effective” vaccine narrative were coerced, their licenses and livelihoods threatened. Few were in a position to resist the pressure.
The peak of the worst wave of infections in the United States, during the predominance of the Delta variant, had come in early January 2021 as Joe Biden was about to be inaugurated. In the early to mid part of that month, deaths came to a remarkably sharp peak and then suddenly and dramatically began a collapse that lasted a period of months. This could not have been caused by the vaccines. When the dramatic drop in reported cases and deaths had already begun, less than five percent of Americans had been injected with one dose of the newly authorized vaccines; only one percent or fewer had received two shots.
A more likely cause of the collapse in cases and deaths was a change in guidance from the World Health Organization at about this same time (coincidentally, also just in time for the inauguration). The result of the new guidance was to more or less fix an acknowledged but underreported problem of overly sensitive PCR tests picking up left-over material from previously cleared infections and returning false positives. This created a highly inflated picture of how many people were actually then dying from Covid rather than from one of the other life-threatening conditions they had, like advanced diabetes, heart disease, pulmonary diseases of various types, cancer, or just old age. The average person whose death was attributed to Covid (due to a positive test in the weeks or days before death) had three of these “comorbidities” and was in his or her 80s.
After another, thankfully smaller, wave of infections later in 2021 was milked for all the sensationalist headlines it could produce to beat down the resisters, the milder Omicron variant appeared and dramatically changed the picture for the better. The dominance of Omicron over the last year greatly reduced the statistical risk of death from Covid (the risk had always been low, even for “high risk” segments of the population, with survival rates of 99+ percent for almost everyone). Hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the virus plummeted, such that Covid is now considered no more threatening than flu.
Over the same period, skepticism toward the vaccines steadily increased and uptake collapsed. Governments all over the Western world have billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-purchased vaccine inventory that they can no longer convince taxpayers to inject. This has emboldened Courts to strike down vaccine mandates and reinstate many people whose livelihoods had been taken away for choosing bodily autonomy over boosting Pfizer’s bottom line.
There are good reasons for the newfound skepticism. The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative was exposed this year as the lie it always was as millions of vaccinated and boosted contracted symptomatic Covid — a higher proportion than the unvaccinated. Studies have shown efficacy of the vaccines quickly waning after each shot, and then turning negative, meaning after a certain period of time those injected are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. Two recently released studies showed such people were twice as likely to be infected, with one of the two finding that risk of infection rose with the number of shots.
Any government or pharmaceutical industry functionary who still claims that the vaccines prevent Covid, out of desperation or sheer force of habit, are promptly forced to clarify, admitting that, actually, they don’t. A representative for one of the the vaccine manufacturers admitted in an EU legislative hearing that the shots were never even tested for prevention of infection or transmission, only for reduction in the severity of symptoms. With this admission, any remaining shred of justification for vaccine mandates and social shame tactics evaporated. Taking an experimental shot to protect grandma is no longer in the cards for millions who were previously susceptible to such coercion.
But beyond the problems of efficacy, there are emerging signs of other problems of a more serious nature, involving safety of the mRNA vaccines as a class. There has been an alarming and significant increase in “all-cause mortality” in the countries that have relied on mRNA vaccines during the pandemic. This increase in mortality does not appear to be due to Covid. Deaths attributed to the virus have drastically declined with Omicron. Nor is it due to the usual likely suspects tracked by statisticians, hence the reason it’s evident only in the catch-all “all-cause” category.
What is the likelihood that this unexplained, sustained increase in mortality across Western countries is not caused by the most obvious possibility: the mass administration of brand-new, inadequately tested mRNA vaccine technology? Every day new stories pop up about previously healthy young or middle aged people dying suddenly. Athletes collapsing on the playing field. Mothers or fathers dying in their sleep from strokes. Eighteen-year-old kids diagnosed with myocarditis.
If you venture beyond mainstream media you’ll see many more of these than elsewhere, reported on by people much less reticent about drawing the most obvious conclusion. They may be wrong, of course. These are anecdotes. It’s always been the case that seemingly healthy people could be suddenly stricken by the unexpected. But for those paying attention, the sheer volume of such stories today raises serious questions. So much so that even mainstream outlets have taken notice and offered up some of the most dubious explanations: stress and anxiety about Covid, climate change, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS), or Long Covid, a new condition without a coherent clinical definition consisting of an amorphous grouping of complaints also suffered by people who have never had Covid. Anything but the most obvious potential culprit.
Part of the reason people are so easily conditioned not to connect the dots is that they’ve been misled into believing that Covid vaccines are no different than other vaccines, which they believe to be safe. This conflation of two very different technologies has led people to think they’re essentially the same thing as the myriad other shots that are required to attend school or to travel to certain countries. If you try to explain the reality that the mRNA vaccines are more akin to gene therapy than to a traditional vaccine, you can watch as their eyes glaze over. They know a technical, jargon-filled explanation is coming that will include claims they’re ill-equipped to understand, let alone evaluate, and they immediately check out mentally. They don’t want to know how they work or how they’re different. They just know that good old Dr. Fauci (who they’d never heard of prior to 2020) and all the people they trust on TV advocate them and that anyone who questions them is an anti-vaxxer.
But the best way to judge what a person really thinks is by observing what he does, not by what he says. By that measure, the collapse in demand for the new Omicron bivalent mRNA shots is encouraging. Many people may still not be willing to admit they’ve been lied to and have lost faith, but a good chunk of them aren’t getting any more boosters. And they’re certainly not subjecting their children to them, knowing they’re more at risk from a lightning strike or unattended bathtub than from Covid.
So while there are some who still cling to the irrational fears to which their personal and political identities seem to be tied, like an ironic badge of honor, most have emerged from the fever dream and moved on with their lives — a little dazed, a little disillusioned, and a lot more wise to the ways of the corrupt pill-pushers in the biomedical-industrial complex to which our federal health agencies answer. And that’s what’s made 2022 the first truly hopeful year of the post-Covid era.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.