It Isn’t Illogical

March 7, 2021 Longrider French Matters, General News, Health and Fitness, Political 14

Kim Wilsher bemoans the vaccine scepticism in France. She seems to think that it is illogical, then cites this:

The reasons for French vaccine scepticism have already been well documented: previous health scandals have sown doubts; the French distrust their politicians and Big Pharma and rail against being told what to do. President Macron’s ill-advised trashing of the AstraZeneca vaccine based on erroneous interpretation of the scientific data didn’t help.

Still, it is surprising to encounter such illogical, even unenlightened thinking in the country that produced both Louis Pasteur and René Descartes.

The logic is right there in that first paragraph. It may in time be proven that the sceptics are wrong. However, given the track records of those involved, that scepticism is well founded.

I’ve made it clear here before – I am not opposed to vaccination. I’ve had the usual childhood ones and a few years back a tetanus booster (probably due another one by now). Vaccination is a good thing. However, I have never bothered with the flu jab. I did consider this ill advised when I caught a dose of the flu in January 2018 just when I was caring for my terminally ill wife.

When recounting this a couple of years later to a friend in the nursing profession, she told me that if I had, I’d have been wasting my time. We had a bad flu season that year and the vaccine was based on the wrong variant, so it would have made no difference.

It is this that is at the heart of my reluctance. If Covid really was a disease with the potency of the Black Death and was a stable pathogen and the vaccine was a definite cure-all, then sure, I’d take it. But as it is, we are dealing with an RNA virus that constantly mutates and the likelihood of the vaccine behaving as the flu one does makes it a bit pointless – not least because it doesn’t stop you getting it and doesn’t stop you spreading it. It might mitigate symptoms. That’s it.

There is one other concern and it is a valid one. We have no long term data on this vaccine. It has been rushed to market and the trials are ongoing – on the general population. While it is likely that the long term risk is low, I’d like to know what it is before I take it. This is a perfectly reasonable position to take. It does not make me an anti-vaxxer, nor does it make me some kind of anti-scientific conspiracy theorist. A distrust of people who have a track record of duplicity is the reaction of a sane person, frankly.

14 Comments

  1. Although you have reservations about the various Covid vaccines LR, you must surely have gained some satisfaction from watching the screw ups within the EU. Not only did they hamstring themselves with bureaucracy, but then they though that they could then help themselves to ours after they messed up. It was an excellent demonstration that we were right to leave.

  2. I found this yesterday, the true face of big pharma. Its easy to see, knowing these things, why such distrust exists.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIRDjY9xMts

    There is also rapidly mounting evidence that care home deaths shortly after the jab are many times that which we are being told.

    My brother passed away in hospital in the early hours of this morning. His condition had been picking up through last week, then a few days ago the hospital declared that he had covid and he had the jab. I don’t know where the covid could have possibly come from, since even before the supposed pandemic he lived alone for years as a virtual recluse. I can make a few very good guesses though.

  3. The thought occurs to look at this from the other direction- not that the covid vaccine was super fast but that the regular process for the approval of medicines is so slow, and that this shows what can be achieved by speeding up the process.

    Part of the reason we have ‘big pharma’ is the sheer cost and time it takes to get a drug to market (mainly caused by the regulators desire to cover their asses and prevent a scandal if a drug they approve has problems), plus the effect this has to treatments (there was a good article in Reason a few years ago on this issue).

    Of course, we want medicines to be safe and to prevent the repeat of incidents like Thalidomide but these need to be balanced.

    • Didn’t Trump’s administration introduce a “right to try” law for people to get treatments that hadn’t yet gone through the trials early, as otherwise they would die before approval anyway?

  4. The thought occurs to look at this from the other direction- not that the covid vaccine was super fast but that the regular process for the approval of medicines is so slow, and that this shows what can be achieved by speeding up the process.

    Time may well prove you right. But here’s only one way we will find out.

  5. Politicians are ignorant about the consequences of their actions and Macron, Merkel and Kim Wilsher confirm this

    Two Good Articles on Vaccine, Ethics and Morals

    Vaccine Passports Make a Mockery of Consent

    …Justifying comparisons along the lines of driving licences or hard hats do not resolve the issue, because there is a qualitative difference: this is not a proficiency test or a piece of clothing, it is a medical procedure.

    That medical procedures require the explicit and free consent of the individual concerned, is accepted by legal authorities and international bodies. The National Health Service website clarifies British law:

    “a person must give permission before they receive any type of medical treatment, test or examination”. Such consent must be voluntary, meaning “the decision to either consent or not to consent to treatment must be made by the person, and must not be influenced by pressure from medical staff, friends or family”…

    …If you lose your job after not receiving a vaccine, that is the consequence of a choice made by a third party possessed of power.

    ‘Choose this treatment, or lose your job’ is a mockery of consent, it is coercion or even blackmail…

    …if the main reason to get vaccinated is to benefit other people, then if you compel vaccination (by making it a condition of livelihood or liberty), you are forcibly carrying out medical procedures for the benefit of someone other than the patient. And that is the very essence of medical abuse…

    The Contradictions of Vaccine Politics

    ..I always have two simple questions for those who would berate me for refusing to collaborate with the Covid theatre that is “the vaccine”.

    The first – if the vaccine works, why would anyone else who chose to get it remotely care whether or not I did?

    The second – if the vaccine doesn’t work, why on earth would I want to get it?

    I am yet to receive a satisfactory answer to these questions….

    …Politicians the world over, not least our own prime minister, invested big-time in the vaxxer solution to their political problem – how to climb out of the ever-growing hole they dug for themselves when they abandoned forty-plus years of medical science in February 2020 in order to follow the pied piper of Beijing into lockdown purgatory. The vaccine emerged as the silver bullet that would get them off the hook when the punters finally woke up to the fact that the pandemic was largely a “Wag the Dog” event, concocted by politicians and others invested, for a variety of reasons, in the “convergent opportunism” that the crisis occasioned…”

    https://thefreedomsproject.com/item/625-the-contradictions-of-vaccine-politics

    • One of the things I’ve always liked about the French is their willingness to stand up to their politicians. See for example the gilet jaunes protests, that, curiously, were very much downplayed this side of the Channel.

  8. The Influenza virus genome is made up of discrete packets of RNA. When a co-infection occurs in a pig, human et al then these packets get swapped and a completely new ‘flu virus is created. A Corona virus has a single strand of RNA which can mutate on reverse transcription but you get a modified version of the same virus. So there is a good chance of an older vaccine having some benefit, unlike the ‘flu vaccine.

  10. Update:

    …How accurate and usable is the adverse event Yellow Card reporting system in the UK? Given the highly experimental nature of the Covid-19 vaccine, was due diligence given to making sure those rolling it out, and indeed those receiving it, were well versed in this system of reporting?

    I have noticed that young doctors I work with are rather perversely trained not to respond to their instincts and clinical observations…

    …Using the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) reporting system for adverse effects following the vaccine is a shockingly unlikely thing to happen among hospital doctors where I work. From many discussions I have had over the years, I know that this is also the case in various hospitals where colleagues work. None have had any training in using the online system and many seem surprised to learn of its existence.

    The net result is that many adverse events do not get reported by medics. Most are not even noticed…

    …Members of the public, as well as healthcare professionals, are free to lodge a Yellow Card event at this site.
    https://coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/

    Has every person getting the jab received clear instructions on how to do this? Did every individual really receive the information necessary to give informed consent?

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/are-doctors-failing-to-record-bad-reactions-to-covid-jabs/

    imo Yellow Card reporting system has been deliberately
    – Kept Secret
    – Designed to be too complex and time consuming if found to submit report

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