Imagine you had the freedom to choose whether or not to get vaccinated. Imagine a New Zealand where ‘Unite Against Covid’ advertising doesn’t appear on MSM, social media, billboards and buses and isn’t written or talked about either. In other words, a perfect world, perfectly neutral about what can be expected from a relatively new virus and experimental vaccines.
Imagine that your doctor or Ashley Bloomfield representing the Ministry of Health, or your employer, are unequivocally ambivalent about Covid and vaccination. They tell you the decision about whether to vaccinate is “yours to make”, because at this point the jury is out. We don’t have the information to make a completely informed decision about the likelihood of a complete recovery from the virus or the vaccine’s long term efficacy or safety.
Imagine countries, airlines, cruise ships and hotels all singing from the same song sheet: “Work for us, come visit with us, travel with us, stay with us, vaccination is your choice, we won’t make it mandatory”. Or your relatives and friends saying, “It’s your choice,” and “we will respect your decision.” It’s a pipe dream that did not and will not happen.
Utopia has been destroyed by the worst aspects of human nature: greed, selfishness, jealousy, anger and laziness, not forgetting that particularly pertinent trait of fear prevalent throughout the Covid pandemic.
Fear drove decision making but, in an ideal world, fear would be mitigated by the truth, which of course wasn’t available at the outset of either the pandemic or worldwide vaccination programmes.
Truth comes from knowledge, and knowledge is gained after accessing and correctly interpreting the facts.
In a perfect world, the truth would be presented without bias and the facts allowed to speak for themselves, but in our imperfect world, inconvenient facts can be deliberately hidden.
There is an unassailable aspect of our lives that politicians and media cannot manipulate to suit themselves. It is our personal experience and that of our family and close friends. Nothing challenges personal experience because it speaks to us much more effectively than someone else’s words or opinions.
On 2 December 2020, the UK approved the Pfizer vaccine and rolled it out that winter. In January 2022 UK Covid experts said four shots of vaccine won’t be necessary. NZ expert Dr Michael Baker recently disagreed with them touting a fourth and annual shot.
“One of the reasons is this is a new vaccine and it’s a new virus, it may take a few years before we know the absolute optimal timing for every dose in the vaccine schedule,” he says.
Newshub 10 February 2022
Even someone who gets it wrong most of the time got something right this time. How could anyone have predicted the safety and efficacy of the experimental Pfizer vaccine before it was rolled out here?
We live in an imperfect world but all is not lost.
We can, and should, evaluate the vast amounts of daily Covid data. Classify them first into reliable and unreliable sources and then for motive and reliability against existing supporting data. But even that is not enough. Even the best experts make mistakes and in our panicked information-centric world everyone, including the experts, are at risk of being duped or over-ruled – as UK’s Dr John Campbell was when he apologised for wasting everyone’s time analysing a conference paper on ivermectin after the paper was subsequently retracted.
Going after the truth requires energy, which the gullible and lazy lack, and a commitment to finding the truth even if that truth turns out to be unpalatable. It’s worth considering whether your favourite source of Covid information has such integrity before accepting their advice.