AS FAR as the mainstream media goes, the vaccine-injured are unicorns. Their symptoms are delusional or fabricated for ‘anti-vax’ activism. But the real fantasy is in the purported ‘miracle of science’ of the vaccine – novel mRNA technology that is proving to be anything but safe and effective. Any medical treatment has risks as well as benefits, which should have been properly assessed in clinical trials before mass vaccination began.
So strong is faith in heroic medicine that many recipients cannot begin to connect their subsequent maladies to the jabs. A classic of the genre is the latest column by Scottish journalist Emma Cowing in the Daily Mail. ‘A miserable way to find you CAN’T avoid Covid’ is the title of Cowing’s account of catching Covid-19 for the first time.
‘Aware I had recently been in the company of someone who had ended up with Covid, I decided to take a test, and watched with horror as that treacherous first line turned red . . . It wasn’t the first time I had been in contact with people who had tested positive, and yet each time I had got away scot free. I might have known that such pride comes before two lines on a plastic test kit.’
The lateral flow test taken by Cowing is as dubious as the concept of asymptomatic transmission, or indeed of the virus itself. Was there really a coronavirus with the same symptoms and mortality rate of influenza, which almost completely replaced influenza in the last three years? Despite such similarities, the approach taken to Covid-19 was unprecedented: lockdown, school closure, masks and universal vaccination, all pushed by propagandised fear. Just as Dr Mike Yeadon detailed at TCW’s Celebration of Dissent last Thursday. Cowing however believes that we let our guard down too early: ‘The truth is, we have all got pretty complacent. Just a fortnight ago I was in London, and, despite travelling everywhere by Tube, didn’t even think to wear a mask. I think nothing of hugging friends, or sitting in meetings with doors closed and no windows open.’
It’s always a trip to London, isn’t it? City of the medieval Great Plague, and now the Great Unwashed on public transport. As a journalist, Cowing was able to identify her pathogen with specificity: ‘A little research tells me that what I have is likely the relatively new “Kraken” strain, an Omicron sub-variant that took hold in the US and has now made its way over here. It is particularly contagious and fast-moving.’
I’m not sure that Cowing’s research went beyond the archives of her own newspaper. Kraken hasn’t caught the public imagination, a clear sign of Covid-19 fatigue. But for Cowing, the analogy is validated by her debilitation: ‘I have a range of symptoms that I never knew were features of Covid. Cramp in my legs and feet, excruciating pain in my lower back that saw me lying on the floor for an hour in search of relief, a burning pain in my arms and legs. Even my hair hurts.’
Hardly able to work at home, Cowing took days to write her short piece. She is trying to keep her nasty symptoms to herself. ‘All conversations with my husband, who is still testing negative, have taken place from behind a door and I have confined myself to one bedroom, with occasional trips to the kitchen for food and water while wearing a mask, careful to wash my hands and disinfect anything I touch.’
Ironically, the likes of Cowing would regard Covid-19 sceptics as delusional, and the claimed vaccine-injured as hypochondriacal. The latter would not doubt that Cowing’s apparently neurological symptoms are painful and distressing. But it’s a shame that this is not reciprocated. And more importantly for Cowing, she needs to break the spell that clouds her comprehension of why she is so ill. Instead, Cowing doubles down on Covid-19 narrative: ‘Yes, Covid-19, in 2023, even for the quadruple-vaxxed like myself, is no joke.’ Because of the vaccine, Cowing has less to fear than those afflicted by the initial outbreak, when there was no relief by needle, and ‘when many young, healthy individuals were ending up in intensive care’.
Like millions of others who believe that it is somehow a positive to contract the very illness that they were supposedly inoculated against, Cowing worships at the altar of the pharma gods. Her blind faith, her ‘doubling down’ and the cognitive dissonance it exposes, is terrifying.
‘Thank goodness for the scientists who created the vaccine. It is because of them that normal life has been able to go on at all. And as I pop some more painkillers and settle down for another nap, I have never felt more grateful.’
A rational response by the quadruple-jabbed Cowing would be to report her symptoms on the Yellow Card system, as these are not the effects normally expected of an endemic respiratory virus, but more likely adverse reaction to the injections. After all the hubris, it is time for belated backtracking by journalists who have failed in their fundamental role of investigating and telling the truth.
