We Are Not at War With Viruses
Challenging the Fundamental Premises of the Vaccine Mandates
The “official” narrative within the debate of mandating vaccines has, due to its widespread promotion, become quite clear at this point.
The idea is that we are being “attacked” by a virus, and that we need to take the vaccine to protect others from getting infected. Within this framework, mandating the vaccine seems like an obvious choice. After all, we all acknowledge our sovereign rights to bodily autonomy, as long as we don’t harm others, and thus mandates can appear as a mere extension of already existing limitations of conduct. In other words, we accept that we are not free to hurt others.
Yet, if we truly wish to understand those of us who are opposed to mandates, we will need to accept that this opposing perspective isn’t just a position within the above-mentioned framework, but one that it challenges the fundamental premises of it.
We can break down the premises of the framework as follows:
- The virus is attacking us, or at least a danger to us.
- By not wearing masks, isolating, getting vaccinated, we are spreading the virus and thus directly causing harm to others.
Let’s start with the fundamentals.
It is clear that we have had a problematic relationship with viruses. The Black Death, Spanish Flu, and other pandemics all linger in our minds as warnings of the potential harm that viruses can cause.
Yet, as we focus on these viruses as if they were forces attacking us, we have had a tendency to limit our scope, thereby loosing sight of the bigger picture and general context of the viruses.
Viruses exist in the billions. In these numbers they are in every breath we take, the water we drink, in the soil we eat from and even all around our bodies. Our bodies are not constantly at war with billions of viruses, but instead we have evolved along side them, staying in a constant relationship with them. A sort of harmony.
This seems incongruent with history, until we look at the context of the great pandemics.
Around the time of the Black Death, we were living in close confinement with each other and even many animals. Our diets were often poor and a variety of factors made life quite miserable. Thus, in this setting, we became incredibly unhealthy, and thereby lost our ability to stay in harmony with the viruses of the time.
The Spanish Flu came shortly after WW1. A period marked by the onset of industrialisation, and more importantly the fact that chemical warfare decimated the European continent. As we now know, these chemicals have horrifically detrimental effects on our bodies, and thus we again saw that we, by our own actions, created a vulnerability in ourselves.
We created the destruction of our own health, and thus incapacitated our own bodies’ ability to stay in relationship with the viruses.
This pattern repeated itself in the century since, yet our focus, at least when it comes to resolving the pandemics, has been almost entirely focused on vaccines.
The CDC conducted a study in 2010, (Guyer et al. 2000 Pediatrics 106(6):1307), shows an interesting observation; that for most of the viruses of the last century considered harmful, including measles, tuberculosis, pertussis and scarlet fever, the mortality rates were reduced to insignificant levels, either without the introduction of vaccines, or with the vaccines being introduced when only a low level of mortality remained.
This is not an attempt at dismissing the validity of vaccines in general, but instead it is a reminder to look at the bigger picture of health.
What is clear is that it is our overall health and well being that really determines our relationship with viruses and thus whether they are a danger to us or not. Ultimately the study concludes that:
“Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century”
This brings us to the second premise, that being the causing of harm to others by not following the mandates.
This is the point that is the most immediate for us in our daily lives, and is where most of the “debate” is centred.
As asserted above, it is our overall health that will determine how well we handle viruses. Covid has not been an exception to that rule, as the vast majority of mortalities have occurred in conjunction with several co-morbidities.
In other words, the less healthy people already were, the more likely their hospitalisation or death has been.
Thus, it seems that we are misplacing fault when we blame people not following mandates, as the actual root cause lies in the general ways in which our industries and ways of life damage our own health.
Despite the claims of some, our health is generally worsening, especially in the realm of chronic disease and cancer. Chemical agriculture, pharmaceuticals, poor diets and various forms of pollution all contribute to this problem. The severity of these root causes are perhaps part of the reason why we fail to recognise them, as doing so would challenge our fundamental economic structures.
Structures through which, we are creating vulnerability within ourselves.
In this respect, there are things which we can control, such as diet, rest, exercise, emotional/mental-health, but also things that are, at least immediately, out of our direct control, such as pollution and industry/ agricultural chemical usage. Factors of both categories are generally worsened for those of us with less economic means.
Thus, when we finally reach the point at which the virus is spreading among us, implementing the policies of masks, isolation and vaccines, really only serves as a band-aid placed on a tumour. The root-cause is left unaddressed and we polarise over policies that will solve nothing.
Sweden has often been criticised for its relatively modest restrictions, yet as we compare the outcomes with other European countries, such as Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, which all have implemented very harsh restrictions, the outcomes are mostly similar.
Ultimately, the virus swept over us all like a wave, as they all do, and what really determined the outcomes for individuals was their health.
Thus, this debate is missing the reality of the situation, almost entirely.
We are, through our destructive industries and lifestyles creating a vulnerability within ourselves. Just like in times past, we are the makers of our own demise.
There is no real solution which doesn’t address the root-causes of the problem, and that involves challenging the basic economic structures we operate under and how we relate ourselves to the natural world in general.
And what is the long-term plan for these policies in the long term? To inject ourselves with endless amounts of booster-shots? To wear masks perpetually? Isolate further from each other?
That is dystopia.
One can argue that this is a dramatic overstatement, and that we simply need to handle this one situation and all will return to normal.
But this is a belief founded in illusion.
An illusion kept alive by governments and the pharmaceutical industry, who continue to tell us that we just need one more step. Just one more liberty sacrificed. Slowly and incrementally implementing things we would never consider doing a two years ago.
As these policies fail, which they do, the opportunity to reflect on the faulty approach to solving the problem, is instead used for scapegoating those who refuse to comply.
We won’t know this until we look to alternative news sources of course, as most of mainstream media is decidedly committed to supporting the “official” narrative no matter what.
And when we do look outside the neatly arrayed stream of information coming from governments and mainstream media, the picture shifts dramatically.
The parts of the world with the highest rates of vaccinated individuals are seeing some of the highest levels of spread from the virus.
A new study from Harvard looks at 68 countries and concludes that increases in Covid-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination. (Citation lower)
The study has the following findings that, among others, are relevant to this discussion:
I. The countries with higher percentages of the population vaccinated have higher Covid-19 cases per 1 million people.
II. Notably, Israel ,with over 60% of its population being vaccinated, had the highest Covid-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.
III. Iceland and Portugal with more than 75% of their populations fully vaccinated have more cases of Covid-19 per 1 million than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their populations fully vaccinated.
IV: Across the US, there appears to be no significant signalling of Covid-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of the population fully vaccinated. Of the top 5 counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99,9–84,3%), the CDC identifies 4 of them as “High” transmission counties.
V: Conversely to point IV, of the 57 counties that have been classified as “Low” transmission counties by the CDC, 26,3% (15) have percentage of population fully vaccinated below 20%.
The study concludes that:
“The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants. Other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination rates. Such course correction, especially with regards to the policy narrative, becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines.”
The findings are a clear confirmation of the failure of this policy. We are trying to defeat an element of existence and this failing attempt comes to our own detriment. And as we manage to challenge a single virus, the result is simply that it mutates. The study mentions the advent of the Delta variant, that can be seen as a simple and predictable result of our efforts to eliminate the virus. What is worse is the fact that our bodies needed to find relationship with Covid, in order to develop what we call natural immunity.
The results of not being able to develop natural immunity are also becoming clear, especially in the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity acquired through infection and vaccine-induced immunity from the Pfizer shot.
The study published Aug. 25 on medRxiv, studied the medical records of more than 673.000 Israelis (age: 16+), and found that those who had recovered from Covid had much less chance of getting the Delta variant, developing symptoms or being hospitalised, when compared to people classified as being “never infected and vaccinated”. The latter group was found to be 6–13 times more likely to experience breakthrough cases of the Delta.
Even the former Biden White House Sr Advisor for Covid response, Andy Slavitt, admitted in mid August that “everyone will get the virus” referring to the Delta variant.
We were never supposed to “beat” Covid, but instead to do what we do with every other virus; come into a relationship and become healthier for doing so.
We need to listen to what this symptom is trying to tell us; that our way of life, our industry and our agricultural systems are fundamentally detrimental to our own well being, and that only by ameliorating them directly will we solve the problem.
Ultimately, the way forward lies not in forcing each other to do anything, but instead for us all to take responsibility, collectively and individually, for finding some semblance of harmony with nature, both for the sake of the natural world and for ourselves.
Sources:
Subramanian, S V, and Akhil Kumar. “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.” European journal of epidemiology, 1–4. 30 Sep. 2021, doi:10.1007/s10654–021–00808–7
Alternative views: A few places to start:
The Jimmy Dore Show (Political analysis)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3M7l8ved_rYQ45AVzS0RGA
Kim Iversen (Political analysis)
