A concerned relative sent me this editorial about COVID-19 vaccines. My response is below.

Editorial

One of the primary objections to COVID vaccinations on both the holistic/wellness Left and the “Don’t tread on me” Right is that vaccines are “not natural.” Nature has given us immune systems, so why not rely on them and some extra vitamin D to battle the coronavirus, rather than on something cooked up by scientists? Let’s reflect on that question. SARS-CoV-2, which has killed 4.1 million people, including 610,000 Americans, originated in horseshoe bats in China (whether or not that virus was tweaked in a lab). If you’re infected with this bat virus, it breaks into your cells, hijacks their genetic machinery, and churns out billions of copies of itself. This viral army can overwhelm immune defenses and attack blood vessels, the lungs, the heart, and even the brain. You become a coronavirus factory, spewing out clouds of highly contagious virus from your nose and mouth.

You’ll probably survive, but many describe COVID as the most agonizing illness of their lives. A substantial percentage wind up in a hospital; to get enough oxygen, some need a ventilator tube pushed down their throat. At least 10 percent of COVID cases turn into long COVID — lasting fatigue, headaches, pain, and brain fog that make it difficult to exercise or work. Is that “natural”? In one sense, yes: Throughout human history, most people died young, often of viral and bacterial infections. In the mid–19th century, the average life span in Europe was about 40 years. Life spans have doubled largely because science figured out how to prevent infectious diseases. Vaccines have played a critical role, freeing us from smallpox, polio, and many other natural forms of misery and death. So far, we’ve given nearly 400 million shots of COVID vaccine to Americans; the vaccines work, and serious side effects are vanishingly rare. It’s far, far more risky — and selfish — to let a bat virus invade your body and turn you into a menace to everyone you meet. Nature is not always your friend.

William Falk, editor-in-chief, The Week, The “natural” fallacy

Response

  1. There are others opposed to the vaccine[note 1] on various grounds, including anti-Trump Democrats and a large and growing portion of the healthcare community, a segment that includes everyone from nurses to doctors to medical researchers. Whether or not their opposition is due to the vaccine being “not natural,” this opposition seems to have contributed to and supported the reticence in others to allow themselves to be injected by what may well turn out to be an advanced form of poison.

  2. Yes we do have immune systems and vaccines, too. But we also have other non-vaccine drugs that have proven effective at combatting diseases, including COVID-19. Why is Mr. Falk pushing the false dichotomy of vaccine / no vaccine? And why does he downplay prophylactic measures?

  3. I submit that Mr. Falk has no idea how many persons have died either worldwide or in the U.S. (he writes Americans, which could include everyone on three continents). We know for a fact that countless persons have been said to have died from COVID-19 but did not. We also know that many thousands of the initial deaths in the U.S. were due to COVID-19 patients being shoved into nursing homes, propagating many needless deaths. (See, for example: “Five governors besides Cuomo who sent COVID-19-positive patients into nursing homes.”)

  4. Mr. Falk paints a bleak picture of the spread of this disease but real life seems not to bear him out. There are any number of instances of mass gatherings that resulted in few if any COVID-19 infections, including those without any suppression by masks or vaccines.

  5. Mr. Falk writes “you will probably survive.” That single phrase negates virtually his entire position.

  6. I would ask Mr. Falk what a “substantial percentage” is, and how he knows it.

  7. Mr. Falk has no idea what he’s talking about in terms of average lifespan. Either he’s uneducated or he’s misrepresenting the facts to make his point.

  8. Mr. Falk seems to be saying that if you call something a vaccine, then it automatically becomes good for humanity. Clearly, given the numbers of horrible side effects and deaths from the various coronavirus vaccines, this is not the case. Something he forgets to mention is that these vaccines are a completely new and largely untested mRNA form. To say that this new type of vaccine is just as good as previous vaccines is disingenuous at best. It’s also worth noting that the medical establishment in general has gone so vaccine crazy that infants are given multiple vaccines all at once, as opposed to the combinations of one or two vaccines at a time when we were younger. Some persons say there are links between the multi-vaccines being given and the explosion of autism and other disorders these days.[note 2]

  9. “Playing a critical role” is not the same as being the reason why people are living longer. I would be interested in seeing the data that support his claim on this point, especially as it serves to further his false claim about average life span.

  10. As Mr. Falk celebrates having millions of COVID shots having been given to Americans, he fails to address the nearly simultaneous rise of the Delta, Delta +, and Lambda variants that everyone says are much worse. It seems that either Nature is being perverse or that those who have been inoculated are somehow spreading COVID and COVID variants. If this latter is the case, then further vaccinations will give rise to a worsening of the situation. Gibraltar, which is the only country with 100 percent vaccinations of its population, has just been placed on the “do not travel” list by other countries. If the vaccine is effective, this is inexplicable. Meanwhile, states such as Wyoming (and South Dakota, if I remember correctly), never fell for the coronavirus fear porn and are doing quite well, as is Sweden, which originally went along with masks (and etc.) and then followed the science and allow people to go about their lives as they wished.

  11. Mr. Falk’s “exceeding rare” evaluation of serious side effects is either uninformed or deceitful. During the Swine Flu epidemic, relatively few vaccine deaths were enough to halt inoculations. Now we are told that that the tens of thousands who have suffered serious side effects and/or death are a trifle not worthy of our consideration. It is also instructional that the side-effects of the Swine Flu vaccine were considered to be worse than the disease itself.

  12. Mr. Falk says that nature is not always our friend, even after granting that perhaps there was gain-of-function research involved with weaponizing the original bat disease. (Of course, we now know there was such research, and that Dr. Fauci helped promote and fund it. That’s not nature … that’s the shadow government in the U.S. using our tax dollars to help the communist tyrants in China in their creation of a bio-weapon.) If Mr. Falk is looking for someone to label as a menace to our health, perhaps he should start with those who created and helped create this, including Saint Fauci.

  13. Like so many who argue in favor of vaccines, Mr. Falk makes zero mention of those who caught the coronavirus and recovered / survived on their own, or who have natural immunity. How is it that they with their adequate immune systems and antibodies are not considered safe, while those who are taking an experimental vaccine are?

  14. After trumpeting the wonders of this vaccine, Mr. Falk fails to address why masks are again required for the vaccinated.

[Note 1] For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the word vaccine as it is used in the mainstream media, even though the coronavirus medications from Pfizer, Moderna, and others are not vaccines.

[Note 2] It might be interesting to discuss whether or not having all these vaccines is making matters worse and not better. Certainly they create a “nicer” world in the short term, but what if in the long term they are artificially keeping alive some who would have died, and are now not as well adapted to the rigors of future diseases? What if the millions (billions?) of offspring from these vaccinated persons are similarly not equipped for future diseases? That is, what if these diseases are Nature’s way of selecting the fittest among us to carry on? As they say, you can’t fool Mother Nature, so if we have inadvertently bred millions or billions of sub-par humans, eventually there must be a reckoning, and the longer it is put off, the worse that reckoning will be. That’s the way corrections work, whether in nature in the stock market or wherever. Finally, remember Thalidomide, Fenfluramine / phentermine, Diethylstilbestrol, Cerivastatin, Rofecoxib, Valdecoxib, Troglitazone, Terfenadine, Phenylpropanolamine, and Mibefradil? And let’s not forget Quaaludes, DES, and Vioxx. Each was approved by the FDA and then pulled from the market after their deleterious side effects became known. COVID vaccines have not even been approved yet, nor have they been around long enough for a full evaluation. I hope I’m wrong about the COVID-19 vaccine, but if I’m not, billions of persons around the globe are going the be in for a world of hurt.

Some other points of interest (updated sporadically)

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Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2023