Why I Don’t Want to Get Vaccinated for COVID: Part One

Everything in this series of articles is my own opinion. My decisions are my own and not recommendations to anyone else. While at this stage I have chosen not to vaccinate against Covid, I have taken a considerable amount of time and effort to help improve my odds, not just against Covid, but all infectious diseases.

A few months ago I wrote up an action plan to attempt to prepare myself for Covid. But when it came to number 6 on my list, “get the vaccine”, I proceeded to investigate the pros and cons. I always do due diligence before making a purchase. The pro’s were “the vaccine was safe and effective”. However, when I began to look at the cons, what I discovered was a rabbit hole that just doesn’t end…

But first, let’s get the formalities out of the way. I’m not anti-vax, I have had other vaccinations. Nor do I think Covid is a hoax – it can be a dangerous disease. At the moment my provisional opinion is that the mRNA vaccine is a very clever technology that has the potential to prevent many deaths in the elderly and vulnerable populations.

I do have a distrust of politicians, I have no faith in mainstream news, a deep suspicion of corporate industries who are beholden to shareholders and I have an uncomfortable understanding of human behaviour with a long history of suffering perpetrated by well-meaning societies.

I am always open to changing my mind if I have good counter arguments and convincing evidence. But so far I haven’t seen that. My main points for my stubborn reluctance to get vaccinated are as follows.

1. Mandates

I was going to get the vaccine but when Labour said they were essentially mandating it and seemed quite happy creating a second class of citizens inside our society, I changed my mind. I have an extremely non-compliant personality and because they said I now have to, I won’t.

Digital certificates that allow the government to add or remove privileges depending on behavior they deem appropriate are a dangerous precedent for any democratic society. Especially when there is no due process. When government starts to overreach its authority, the hill I choose to die on will always be the first one. Even if I were vaccinated, I still wouldn’t use the certificate.

I have always wondered what I would have done if I was growing up in Germany in the 1930s… which side of the wire would I have been on? Would I have been a Helmuth Hübener, an Albert Speer, or just one of the many that stood by and did nothing? It’s only when I realised I was capable of being cruel, that I knew I might not.

To be fair to the Germans, I could have picked pretty much any period in history as an example of our human condition: France 1789, Ukraine 1932, Spain 1933, China 1966, Bangladesh 1971, Cambodia 1975, Rwanda 1994, Darfur 2003 (just to name a few – it’s a really long list). In 1963 Stanley Milgram demonstrated to the world that what happened in Nazi Germany could have happened to anyone, anywhere. Human nature is not inherently kind. No matter what the best intentions of a policy, it will always have the tendency to progress toward the worst possible outcome.

2. Trust in Medicine

While I have a great deal of respect for the medical profession and welcome the many advancements that have been made in medicine that have saved my life on a number of occasions, I still reserve my right to make my own decisions. I have encountered multiple medical conditions that I have questioned and argued for reconsideration of both diagnosis and treatment given to me by doctors. On ALL occasions I achieved considerably better outcomes because I did so. I’ve lived long enough to know that, no matter how esteemed the qualifications of an expert opinion is, it’s not always the best possible advice – especially if it’s new. Just like the Pirate’s Code – medical recommendations are only guidelines.

I often hear accusations of “you are being selfish” directed at those who choose not to be vaccinated. I disagree. I believe the path I have chosen to protect myself and those around me will deliver a better outcome than that which has been dictated for me by the government. They may be right… but it’s possible they are wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Science is procedure of mistakes, it is provisional; everything we know is true, until it isn’t. Remember the erroneous mainstream consensus of what caused stomach ulcers? And then there was Ignaz Semmelweis, that upstart doctor who wanted to wash his hands. Dietary and cholesterol advice from official health institutions has been wrong for over 40 years. Because most people believe something to be true, doesn’t make a good argument.

Mainstream health care is really dragging its heels on adopting the science coming from the fields of lifestyle medicine. I don’t think non-medical pre-emptive health is a speciality found in much of the medical profession (especially at the top levels; those who are establishing the guidelines) and it can take decades to achieve paradigm shifts. They seem to have little faith in the natural immune response of healthy human beings and place too much reliance on medication.

There are many who take health seriously and don’t want to be part of the unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the processed food industry. They spend a considerable amount of time and effort exercising, eating whole foods and many other non medical interventions to improve their immune response that will greatly improve their odds of achieving a better outcome from infectious diseases and protecting others by reducing transmission.

Current medical advice is being dictated by epidemiologists and virologists whose only solution to poor health seems to be to vaccinate everyone for everything. They are a conducted choir, all singing from the same, drug industry influenced, ICMRA chorus sheet. This is not 5,000 doctors recommending the vaccine. It is just a few. The profession of general practitioners is a hive mind. If your doctor offers you medication before they ask you what you eat, how you sleep and how you exercise, you aren’t talking to a medical practitioner who is interested in your health but to a middleman for the pharmaceutical industry.

David Sackett, a pioneer of evidence-based medicine, described preventative medicine as arrogant. This is because experts address healthy asymptomatic individuals with recommendations on what to do to stay healthy and thereby claim to know what is best for them. Furthermore, there is an assertiveness about the premise that the interventions will do more good than harm, while the uncertainty of facts and probabilities regarding the risk and the effectiveness of the intervention is not emphasised enough. These tendencies can damage the trust held by the public, which influences the efficiency of the interventions and the legitimacy of experts and medical institutions.

“All those who have suffered from the harms of the vaccines, all the children for whom the risks seem to out-way the benefits, and all those whose livelihood and social interconnectedness are threatened by vaccine mandates are paying too high a price for the full certainty of those who think they can predict the future”.

Dr Iona Heath, ex president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, UK