Tag: Nature

I have some good news though. There may be some actionable data that will reduce my hesitancy and perhaps yours.

(Okay, this is a really long post. I’m sorry but there’s a lot of it that I felt I needed to explain.)

I know we’re all sick and tired of the COVID doom articles and talking heads. After two solid years of DOOM, and “bring out your dead.” It’s understandable that we’re all shoving this to the back our minds as just another bunch of pointless noise.

As I wrote a while ago it’s becoming the same noise as The Russians are gonna nuke us at any moment. After a point you just want to get on with your life and take a Devil may care attitude.

That’s the risk the climate change activists have been running into for years. BLM has encountered it as well.

When a problem is too big, or so far out of individuals control, they ignore it in favor of living in the “now”.

I personally have always tried to dial my wastefulness down to a close to zero as I personally could. While I like driving, I try to drive as little as possible. I combine stops and save gas at the same time.

I recycle anything and everything that can be recycled. I prefer scooping nuts and dried fruits out of barrels rather than buying stuff like that pre-packaged. I try like heck to capture rainwater or snow in places in my yard so that it goes into the ground instead of running down the street into a culvert. I’ve replaced every light in my house with LED or (much as I hate them,) CF bulbs. I pick up other people’s trash on hikes and do my personal best to leave a place as clean or cleaner than when I arrived.

I’m not rabid about it. For me, this is a personal choice that helps a little, and represents a philosophy of being ecologically responsible. It’s my choice, I’m not going to force my beliefs on you.

The thing is, I’m doing all I can within the limits of my reach. Hopefully, I’m showing by example how being a caretaker of the environment isn’t a burden. Being an example, I hope that others will follow my lead and join me, but I don’t demand it.

All that being said, I’m not willing to pay some group (over which I have no control) an arbitrary carbon tax. I’m not willing to sit in the cold and dark because some jackass in a mansion thinks I should be reminded that manmade climate change is real.

Our planetary climate is changing. It has for 4.5 billion years and will likely continue to change for another couple of billion years. When the sun of our solar system begins to expand the planet’s climate will change a lot. This is well beyond my lifetime and ability to stop. It’s just physics!

So for me, climate change doomsayers became background noise. I’ve lived long enough that I remember when these same people said we were going to be in an ice age in 20 years. They were wrong.

The planetary ecology is far too complex for humanity to predict. We can model it, but our models cannot account for all the variables, because we don’t know all the variables to put into the model.

Let’s just agree that climate changes. Let’s do what each of us can to be responsible and clean up our messes. That’s it, that’s the best we can do, and as we develop new technologies, let’s use them to make things better.

BLM is the same thing. Yes, racism exists. Yes, we need to do better. Burning down city blocks doesn’t address racism. It does however contribute to man made climate change.

I personally don’t like racism of any kind. If you’re making value judgements about people based on the color of their skin, you’re being racist. It’s that simple, and in my thoughts it’s cut and dried. No one gets a pass for singling someone out based on the color of their skin.

I’m a moron, I don’t have the brain power to deal with nuances of skin tone. I also don’t have the time.

BLM, made their statement. They brought an issue to everyone’s attention and now they’re done. Message received. Time to move on.

BLM doesn’t see it that way, they keep hammering and so in my world they become background noise.

I’ve explained the above as a rather long preamble because it will help you understand a little about how my personal thought processes run. Now, to the point I was going to make in the first place.

For two solid years we’ve all been inundated with COVID doom. This has been a planet wide phenomena.

The virus is still 99% survivable without any medical intervention. That’s a fact. Cold & Flu are also 99% survivable without medical intervention. This too is a fact. I’m not going to quibble about the fractional percentages because it’s pointless.

Any of the aforementioned conditions are much worse if you have comorbidities. If you’re fat, if you have diabetes, if you suffer from breathing issues, if you’ve got, or recovered from cancer, if you’re very old, or very young, or are in any way immune-compromised. This too is a demonstrable fact.

The greater number of comorbidities you personally have, the greater the percentage that COVID, the Flu or a Cold will kill you. This too is a fact.

They used to call this having one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. (That’s probably not politically correct anymore in this humorless world we occupy.)

At one time the statement was a common truism, and widely accepted is an acknowledgement that Life is fleeting. Death comes to us all, sometimes sooner and sometimes later but Death will visit all of our homes many times in our lives, and eventually each of us one final time.

This is living in the natural world. It’s normal.

As humans, we always attempt to control the natural world because it’s our nature to do so.

We make drugs, and figure out what’s ailing us, then search for solutions. We’ve created vaccines to protect us from a wide variety of illnesses and generally speaking, we’ve gotten pretty good at it. Many of us take the yearly Flu vaccine and think nothing of it.

So why have I been personally slow to get the COVID vaccine? What is the source of my hesitancy?

Data.

It’s that simple. When J&J came out with their COVID vaccine I was going to take it. Why? Because it was made using the tried and true methods that the annual Flu vaccine is made with. That in my opinion added a level of safety.

But… then there were reports of reactions to the J&J vaccine. So I decided to hold up a bit. I expected for there to be logical analytical reports and explanations about the reactions, and some reporting about who was most likely to have those reactions and why.

But there wasn’t as much information as you’d expect. Instead, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were pushed with a lot more force.

These vaccines, while apparently effective were made with new technology. This technology hadn’t been widely used in the past and since I know new medical techniques and vaccines are often tested for a decade or more before they’re approved for use in humans, I personally thought they exposed me to an unacceptable level of risk. I felt and still feel that neither of the vaccines or the way they work has been properly tested in humans.

At the same time, the media and even government agencies were only talking about the number of infections that had been detected. Number of infections is not the same as number of hospitalizations or number of deaths.

But in many of the media reports the three numbers were conflated and it truly sounded like COVID was akin to the Black Plague which had a death rate of between 30% – 50 %.

Yet, government agencies like the CDC were reporting less than 1% death rates for COVID.

So that started making me ask questions. I wasn’t alone in asking questions. Lots of people were asking questions and some of those asking questions were eminently qualified to do so.

Then censorship of COVID information and even reputable Doctors became rampant. You could find any number of articles speaking about doom and gloom, but Doctors and scientists presenting alternative research were silenced? Something was seriously askew, this is not the way information flows in this country.

I was willing to suspend my skepticism over the mask / no mask flip flopping from Anthony Fauci. I could chalk that up to new research results causing the change in direction. That’s what happens in science. What I couldn’t abide was that skeptics were shouted down in the public square and their valid research was painted as some kind of heresy.

We’ve seen similar behavior in the area of climate change and the theory of evolution. A theory accepted as truth, and woe be unto anyone skeptical of that theory.

(Full disclosure: I tend to think the theory of evolution is probably correct. However, it is still a theory, as yet unproven.)

That is not the way science is supposed to work. Scientists are supposed to read the research, poke holes in it, try to reproduce the results and either confirm or disprove the research.

Anyone remember Cold Fusion??? Some labs could reproduce the effect, and others could not. The general consensus was that there was some other reaction taking place that we didn’t understand, and couldn’t account for. Additional research was needed.

That’s how Science works. Science is not a religion, science is looking truth in the face and accepting what you see. Science is not faith based, we learned the folly of that path with the inquisition trial of Galileo Galilei. BTW Galileo was right, and the faith of the church was wrong.

Suddenly, it was as if facts and reason didn’t matter. We had scientists actually dismissing our evolutionary heritage that granted acquired immunity, in favor of induced immunity.

Honestly, I tend to trust 5 million years or so of biological adaptation a bit more than a vaccine in a bottle. That being said, I don’t have much of a problem giving my body a leg up on creating immunity by allowing it to sniff a germ in small quantities and saying “Hell No!” Then running off to build antibodies against it. Which led me back to the J&J vaccine.

But nagging in the back of my mind was how much about the virus was unknown. I’d read that the virus was unstable and mutating at a rather alarming rate. Viruses tend to do that, but they almost always mutate to more infectious, less lethal versions of themselves.

Viruses that kill the host organism are biological dead ends. Without a host, a virus has no choice but to be inert. So a fatal virus essentially kills itself off or mutates to something that serves the biological need to reproduce, leaving the host alive. Even Ebola, isn’t 100% fatal.

The problem with any biological system is that it’s always in a state of change. That’s the advantage too.

We’ve known for years that the over use of antibiotics can give rise to stronger more pernicious bacteria. Turns out that the same is true of vaccines that only address one particular aspect of a virus.

In both cases, there will be bugs that somehow survive. When those bugs reproduce, their children carry resistance to the antibiotic or vaccine. Continue that cycle enough times and you end up with so called “Superbugs”. These bugs may mutate to inhabit another biome or they may simply get tougher to kill.

See, inadvertently humans have been doing gain of function research for decades.

We just didn’t realize until recently that it could be really dangerous. Penicillin, sure… Now we have Penicillin resistant bacteria. Ampicillin gives rise to Ampicillin resistant bacteria, and so on & so on because we’re actively engaging in a biological war that’s been going on for millions of years. Get the picture?

Apparently, the same process is true of viruses.

With the rise of the COVID variants, I decided once again to hold off getting a vaccine.

My hope was that more research would lead to a better vaccine that stopped COVID cold, and prevented the escalation of variants. I’d prefer a one shot and done approach, instead of endless boosters every six months.

Think about Tetanus. It can be deadly and there is a vaccine. Generally speaking, you get a booster every ten years. But there are people who, because of their work, are exposed to Tetanus all the time. In their case, a booster isn’t technically required because their bodies see Tetanus so regularly their immune system has the antibodies on hot standby forever.

This speaks to the one size doesn’t fit all theory.

If your body has a continuously replenished supply of antibodies to something due to repeated exposure why do you need a vaccine? Your body sees each variation of the invader and creates a counter to it automatically. Therefore, anyone whose had COVID probably will be able to fend off all but the most radically changed variants. That’s the logic of the situation.

But try to find a discussion that addresses why or why not that logic works and you run into nothing but, “Get the damn vaccine, you fucking idiot!”

That worried me because it ignores the issue of acquired immunity altogether. That answer is not an answer. It’s akin to your mother telling you, “because I said so.”

So I held off a while longer. I was still hoping for enough research to be completed so that I could make an informed choice. I was hoping that there’d be an investigation into the Wuhan lab and that we’d know what exactly happened.

Was the virus naturally occurring or was the virus a chimera. I still believe that if the virus was created in a lab using gain of function technology then if we see the constituent parts we can build a vaccine that shuts it down.

If the virus is something totally natural, then at least we know and can concentrate on dealing with all the mutations. Either way, more knowledge is power. Except, every time someone asked that question… It was shot down as if asking the question was a conspiracy theory. Don’t we want to know?

At least we still had / have freedom of choice about getting the vaccine even if we’re not able to make a fully informed decision about getting it.

Then President Biden tried to mandate vaccines. But he didn’t do it above board. Oh no, he tried to do it in a fucking underhanded way that made me suspicious all over again.

Why is it so important to get a vaccine that The President would try to mandate it? Our government (Democrat & Republican) has shown over decades a rather pointed disregard for the people, except as chattel who provide fabulous sums of tax money that can be spent frivolously. Why the sudden about face? What is it that makes this vaccine so fucking important?

Could it be that the pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune? Could those fortunes result in kickbacks to certain politicians? Could it be that because the pharmaceutical companies bear no liability for harm caused by their vaccine, the payout is better than usual? I know this sounds like conspiracy stuff but “come on man…”

So I wait a bit longer. I watch friend after friend go get vaccinated even though they don’t want to. Why? Because their companies are anticipating Biden’s mandate will be upheld in the courts, and therefore are being good little sheep, obeying The President, forcing their employees to get the vaccine and then provide that medical information to their HR dept.

Several of these friends have had the light go out in their eyes a bit. They have now had their noses rubbed in the undeniable fact that they are slaves.

I’m hoping they get over it. Most of them state without question that they hate their companies, their executive officers, their management, and don’t give the least shit about doing their best work anymore. Their employers told them, “You’re easily replaced so you better obey us.”

It’s technically not about the fucking vaccine, it’s about the realization that they felt they had to choose to violate their caution and/or their beliefs in order to have a paycheck.

This broke their spirit. Time will tell if they’ll heal, or if as one friend said, “I don’t care about anything anymore. I don’t want to live like this, or ever have to compromise like this again. I felt I had no choice given that the holidays were upon us and the kids needed to have something normal.” He added, “I will never vote for a Democrat again, and I may just not vote again, because it’s pointless.”

He’s talking about putting his house on the market in June. He said that even if they don’t move out of state, they’re going to just rent. His plan is to get a small as possible, pay off debt, and not buy anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. No new phones, new cars, new TVs, washers or dryers, nothing in the durable goods category at all. He’s dropping cable after the first of the year and says everyone will just have to get used to watching what stations they can get with an antenna or what can be streamed over the internet. He’s not angry per se. He’s just wounded in spirit and has no knowledge or support to help him treat those wounds.

Thankfully none of my friends have reported ill effects from the vaccine itself. But it raised the question. If they had, would they have been able to sue their employers for enforcing a mandate that is not law, has been suspended, and may be rescinded by court action? I’m guessing not. I’d bet that the company would say, “We were only following The President’s order,” and the Government would say, “It wasn’t law so we have no responsibility.”

How many other workers have been so wounded? Could this be a part of why US productivity has taken a hit?

On the other side of the coin, there are friends who have drunken deep from the draught of fear porn. Their lives too have been irrevocably changed. Their Christmas cards or letters denote what they’ve not done, the trips or visits they cancelled. They speak with almost loving tones of their masking and not allowing people into their homes. They talk of their vaccinations, boosters, and socially distancing, as virtuous.

These are people who were active, and vibrant. They were healthy with so little risk as to be considered zero. Yet they are talking in their holiday letters are if they’re in their homes making signs to ward off evil.

None of this makes me want run out and get the vaccine. I don’t go to LA or Portland, or San Francisco, or New York, so I don’t want or need to comply with their NAZI vaccine papers or proof of negative infection.

To my friends in LA County, you’ll not have to worry about me darkening your doorsteps. I have no desire to deal with not being able to go into a bar or restaurant with you.

All I want is the facts. Give me hard data from which to make a decision!

Fortunately, someone has provided that very information.

The article is here and it’s interesting.

The person producing the article went at it from a partisan position. While I wouldn’t think this is partisan, this view provides some interesting data. It turns out that heavily Republican districts have a higher incidence of deaths from COVID. Not just cases.

The raw data further down in the article shows a higher death rate among unvaccinated people as well. The correlation tends to suggest that Republicans are more vaccine resistant than Democrats. That might make a lot of sense, given that most Republicans I’ve known over the years really hate the government telling them what to do.

In the highest Republican counties or states the COVID death rate is as high as 100 persons per 100000 versus 18 persons per 100000 dying in the bluest of the blue counties or states.

Okay, I can get my teeth into that data. The numbers still support that less than 1% of folks die from COVID. But it speaks to the efficacy of the vaccines themselves. When you pull the partisan evaluation out of the equation, and look only at deaths Unvaccinated versus vaccinated you get a little over a 4X decrease in death for those folks that are vaccinated.

That makes sense. It is data that allows an honest evaluation of COVID risk to Vaccine risk. Someone like me can look at this and say, “The odds of my dying from COVID are less than 1% and with the vaccine I can reduce those odds by approximately 75% which makes the vaccine worthwhile.

Then I can look at the odds of an adverse reaction to the vaccine based on the number of persons who have taken the same vaccine I’m considering, and determine if I’m comfortable with the odds.

From there I can weigh out both scenarios and make an informed risk assessment. That’s an assessment where my decision is mine and come hell or high water, I can defend my decision sleeping secure in the knowledge that I did the best research I could. I can own it and be proud that I did what I thought was in my best interest.

That’s all I’m asking for, and I’d bet that’s all the other vaccine hesitant are asking for as well.

This is why censorship is evil. If there had been open honest debate instead of censorship I’d bet that a lot of the vaccine hesitancy wouldn’t have been an issue.

Of course looking at one set of data doesn’t mean I’m running right out to get a vaccine. I’ll still go find additional confirming sources.

But it’s a welcome start.