OPINION
NewZealandDoc
Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021, refusing to be inoculated, after working in the public sector in New Zealand.
Recently I attended the funeral of one of my former patients, a remarkable woman for very many reasons. She was in her late fifties and she suffered from several significant chronic illnesses, so her death was not unexpected. I am not at liberty to reveal anything that could lead to her identification of course, but I can say that in addition to long-standing physical problems she had what we in psychiatry like to call a ‘major mental disorder’.
Unfortunately the ‘system’ did not do a very good job with her — the system of basic psychiatric care — and she suffered as a result. When I took over her care we were able to develop a very solid partnership and she had a long period of mental and emotional stability before she passed away. But this is not the subject of my report, though perhaps in future I will weigh in with observations about general psychiatry and some glaring shortcomings.
I will add, however, that she was one of the few patients in my care who spoke openly to me about not wanting to take the COVID jab.
As the service began, stirring up memories and appreciations, the man sitting to my right turned to me and said, “An awful lot of people have been dying in their fifties lately.” I nodded in affirmation, and he followed this up with “I thought I could count on getting into my seventies, but I guess not.”
There was an air of resignation, an acceptance of a new ‘reality’ in the way he spoke to me.
I said something to the effect that this wasn’t normal and I also remarked that I had a theory about what was happening, but the time and place were not conducive to a discussion: we were there after all to pay homage to the deceased. I made the assumption that he would have dismissed my ‘theory’ — but who knows?
I conclude from his brief aside that a regular fellow like the man beside me has begun to notice something disquieting and that others too are noticing. Will they however move along a trajectory of new expectations, or will they make the connection as Denis Rancourt and others have between the covid jab and excess morbidity and mortality?
My friend Ed Curtin, in an enlightening essay on ‘coincidences’ calls attention to one facet of propaganda that is often overlooked, namely, the inculcation of convictions based on slow and steady processes, through imperceptible influences and relentless repetition over time.
I’ve had the impression that the covidian onslaught has been purposefully benumbing us and inuring us to a strange new world of earlier death. We’re meant to believe it’s normal for kids to have heart attacks, for athletes to drop dead on the playing field in unaccustomed numbers, for aggressive and untreatable cancers to emerge all of a sudden.
What would have been unthinkable not so long ago is strangely coming to be accepted as the way things are. Back in the Seventies, it took a mere fifty deaths for the Swine Flu vaccine to be stopped in its tracks. But for the COVID jab juggernaut, the association of millions of fatalities is as nothing.
Ben Franklin once wrote that the only certainties of life were death and taxes. I wonder whether the man to my right today has silently amended this famous utterance to ‘early death and taxes’. Or whether four hard years under the COVID propaganda machine have not permanently lowered his expectations, and that he will be curious enough about what is happening to the friends and acquaintances around him to start asking a few questions.