So, “vaccine hesitancy” is the latest witch being hunted by the global Ministry of Truth. For the past few years, we’ve been treated to an endless cavalcade of hysterical campaigns against every Goldstein imaginable, from “white supremacy”, to “denialists”, to “Covidiots”.
But, if the media-political elite really want to encourage vaccine take-up, perhaps they might start by earning our trust.
Which would, of course, necessitate an end to the lies, propaganda and double-talk. Especially about the Covid vaccines.
Perhaps the Covid vaccines really are as safe as houses. I’d certainly hope so — in fact, I fervently wish it is so.
If politicians and journalists would start talking straight and stop publishing obvious propaganda, I might start believing them.
Whenever I talk to people about vaccines, the same questions come up over and over again: have we tested them for long enough?
And how do we really know they are going to be safe, long term?
It seems like a compelling point.
And it is. The normal timeline for vaccine development is years, at the least. Within months, the various Covid vaccines were being rushed to market.
In fact, though, we already have a vaccine that is produced in less than a year, every year: seasonal flu vaccine. But seasonal flu vaccines are a cumulative project, using virus samples collected through the previous years’ flu seasons.
But the Covid vaccines are an entirely new class of vaccine, so comparing their development and trial to previous vaccines is a pea-and-shells tactic.
Most phase-three vaccine trials – that’s the big one you do before you apply to roll it out – follow up volunteers for just 12 months, Jim Buttery, head of signal investigation at Victoria’s immunisation safety service, tells me.
This testing schedule has produced many safe vaccines.
Absolutely, it has. But, just because it has produced “many safe vaccines” is no guarantee that any new vaccine must therefore be safe. That’s a basic failure of logic. Still, the point remains: we now do have about 12 months of extremely large-scale data. That data certainly shows that adverse reactions are relatively rare — though certainly not non-existent.
That’s fine: it’s all about balancing different risks. Although that went completely out the window with Covid in the first place.
To get the answer, we need to look not at vaccines but at the thing they are acting on: our immune system. Remember, a vaccine by itself does not do anything. It’s the immune system that needs to spot it, respond, and develop immunity.
If something is going to go wrong, it will probably go wrong there[…]
“The immune responses act very quickly. If they don’t, we wouldn’t be able to fight infections. They need to get on top of the pathogens before they replicate and kill us,” says Stephen Turner, head of microbiology at Monash University’s biomedical institute.
Except that, as we know, the Covid vaccines don’t work at all like previous vaccines. They’re an entirely new technology. A very promising technology, but so are many technologies that are held up for years, if not forever, at the behest of the “precautionary principle”.
The precious “precautionary principle” that the green-left have used to stymie all sorts of useful new technologies has vanished like the winter snow we were promised we’d never see again.
Without 10-year safety data, “you have to always think from the best analogy”, says [Robert Booy, senior professorial fellow at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance]. “The best analogy is, we have a dozen or more routine vaccinations, for which we know the long-term safety profile is excellent, and adverse events that are important happen within six minutes or six weeks of getting the vaccine.”
The Age
But, just because those dozen or more routine vaccinations have proved to be safe, long-term, is no guarantee that the next — especially one using a novel technology — will be. It’s like arguing that a company has developed dozens of long-term-safe medications before, so their new morning sickness medication must be as safe as houses. No need for long-term trials.
In the meantime, we’re being bombarded with relentless propaganda campaigns. Of the worst kind: authoritarian governments are dangling the carrot of graciously returning to us freedoms that they had no right to take in the first place; the stick is the police state and the hysterical campaigning against “subversives”.
The new fear propaganda is just a twist on the last, but as with all of them, the intent is the same. Like communist states forever hunting “rightist subversives” and “counter-revolutionaries”, our new overlords aim to keep the masses afraid, and turn them against each other.
Their new “counter-revolutionary” witch-hunt is “vaccine hesitancy” and it no more breeds confidence in the state than an old-fashioned purge.
What’s needed is not the jackboot, but simple honesty and straight talk from the media-elite.
So far, we’ve had precious little of that — so why would anyone trust them?
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