THE problem with the Covid-19 vaccines is that we simply do not have enough information about their side-effects, and no one should be shamed (especially not by the President of the United States)
or have their lives restricted for having this reasonable, wholly unselfish concern.
Such information does not exist at all for under-18s. The small-scale trials were designed only to test the vaccine on adults. Yet, largely because of media hysteria which has been recently accompanied by outright incitement, local officials have taken it upon themselves to start vaccinating 17-year-olds, citing the bogeyman ‘Indian variant’ in our midst.
The vaccine nudgers in government and the media, aided this week by a multi-million-pound YouTube ad campaign to persuade young people to get vaccinated, deliberately miss the point about the supposedly ‘extremely rare’ side-effects of these experimental vaccines, which include fatal blood clots in some cases.
The trouble is that if our ‘brilliant’ scientists knew nothing about the blood clots when the vaccine was first administered to citizens in December, what else don’t they know about?
Last week, the British regulator MHRA reported 41 new cases and nine more deaths as a result of one of these side-effects, a particular kind of clot known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis alongside low platelets or thrombocytopenia. To date, there have been 209 cases and 41 deaths reported in the UK for the AstraZeneca vaccine alone. The first were reported in January.
According to an analysis of published MHRA data by Dr Hamid Merchant, a total of 532 ‘blood system events’, including 20 deaths, came through the UK’s Yellow Card system relating to the AstraZeneca jab between January 4 and March 14. There were thousands of non-blood-related reports besides.
Let’s recap on the public guidance regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine. First we were told ‘this vaccine is safe, get vaccinated.’ Then they said, ‘the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks, get vaccinated.’ Then the goalposts were moved further: ‘The benefits of that vaccine outweigh the risks if you are over the age of 30, but get vaccinated.’ And now, ‘the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks if you are over 40, but get vaccinated, or else!’
If this is how much ‘the science’ has changed in a few months, what will ‘the science’ be a year or two from now? What will we know in the future that cannot be established now? Scientists have not begun to discuss other fatal adverse reactions to have emerged, most significantly the neurological ones for which the AstraZeneca trials were paused.
If countries such as Denmark and Slovakia can suspend the rollout of a vaccine as a precaution, why are individual citizens stupid or callous if they decline the vaccine as a precaution?
In the United States, the government has recorded more deaths after Covid vaccinations than from all other vaccines administered in the country between mid-1997 and the end of 2013, as was reported by Tucker Carlson on Fox News earlier this month. Nothing to see here, of course.
Any reasonable government would have at the very least stopped blackmailing people into getting vaccinated by now. Instead, they have the brass neck to demand that we put our lives in their hands as if we owe it to them. Coerced vaccination is not merely mandatory vaccination, it is mandatory trust, both in government and in ‘the science’, whatever that is.
It is worth reminding those with short memories that tobacco was ‘safe’ for decades. The scientific community promoted smoking not only as safe, but healthy. They were, of course, assisted by celebrities, some of whom would later become senior politicians. And for some 50 years, the overwhelming majority of people were dumb enough to believe it. Who could have guessed that inhaling tar into your lungs twenty times a day, every day, for years, might be bad for your health? We see grim warnings about heart disease, lung cancer and infertility on cigarette packaging today only because scientific outliers of yesterday eventually overwhelmed the consensus with evidence.
More recently and more relevant to the present fiasco, the swine flu vaccine, Pandemrix, was declared safe by regulators in 2009. It was safe, for most. But for some 1,000 people, most of whom were not at any significant risk from swine flu, the vaccine triggered narcolepsy, a crippling chronic sleep disorder that leaves sufferers unable to stay awake. It was only after it was too late for them that the authorities conceded there was a link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy.
One of the victims of Pandemrix, 23-year-old Katie Clack from Peterborough, committed suicide in 2014 because her narcolepsy left her with ‘no quality of life’.
In 2018, the progressive news website Buzzfeed published a powerful feature about NHS workers who had their lives and careers ruined by the side-effects of the swine flu vaccine. Nurse Meleney Gallagher, who now has narcolepsy, told Buzzfeed: ‘I was pressured into it.’
That was in a different era. Earlier this month the same website published a slavish article with the headline: ‘15 anti Vaxxers who were roasted on the internet.’
If history is anything to go by, the idiots out there who think it’s acceptable to bully their vaccine-hesitant friends, colleagues, strangers and even close family are going to look very silly ten years from now.
Harry Dougherty will be investigating and tracking the under-reported adverse reaction story in the coming weeks for TCW.
