Covid Purge

I'm not rushing out to get the covid19 vaccine because I don't trust Big Pharma (or any other large corporation that profits off of suffering), the Corporate Media lies without blinking and I don't do mass panics.  That's it.  

When I was in a crowd panic at the 2001 Quebec city protest I realized it could turn into a trampling situation. The police had launched tear grenades into a massive crowd on a flat plain and the crowd was panicking. The air began to smell of the apple vinegar - many people thought a rag soaked in it was protection against the tear-gas, it felt like the crowd pissing itself. I'd been in two other crowd surges where I'd experience the terror of trampling - once at the Sudbury Arena where the crowd was kept in the winter cold for a Bon Jovi concert; the other at Lollapallza where I realized the strange ocean/fluid dynamics of crowds.  At the Bon Jovi concert I had been frighteningly pinned against a pillar until some teenage couple yanked me to safety. As the massive crowd began to panic in Quebec City I could feel my brain making decisions.

I turned around and put my arms out to either side, becoming a human speed-bump or turn-stile. The crowd plowed into me. As I stood there are took the buffeting I scanned across the sea of heads. And there was one other guy 30m away doing the same thing. Facing the crowd, arms out. And I realized a particular ratio within the human race. Decision within 'combat' carry a weight in the memory.

I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of people vulnerable to respiratory disease. It seems to me that the traditional vulnerable populations are again the worst hit - the homeless, jail population, the impoverished, exploited factory workers - and not enough is been done to help them. Countries like Iran and India have been severely hit. Like most moral panics there is an very real threat at it's core, but moral panics show us that the corporate-state reaction can be even more dangerous. As a sociologist cultural over-reactions are common objects of study.

So my psychology bias toward skepticism, my leftist anti-corporate politics, combined with teaching to 'media ethics' and 'criminology' at LU (where I developed a hatred for corporate media's criminal role in starting war and a working knowledge of how statistics are abused) meant I wasn't going to rush to get any vaccine. I live in a rural area, work by internet and have never been hospitalized. I work with no vulnerable populations and am reclusive by nature.

Injecting myself with a Big Pharma product that has been rushed to market does not feel rational to me. I'd be more likely to take a global "UN vaccine" than these one that are delivered in the context of imperial rivalries and corporate profiteering. The secretive Moderna's 44% profit margin has Barclays forecasting sales of $19.6bn, $12.2bn in 2022, and $11.4bn in 2023 "assuming recurring vaccinations." So let us drop any pretense of piety or community love.

And do not mistake this for a 'moral defense' that can be defeat with some internet-based argument.....this is more personally than that.

I spent 7 years in Sudbury Regional palliative care, I slept in cars in cancer ward beside 80-year old 'wards of the state' who had no family - and sat with them as they died. I spent grim nights at grimmer Extendicare York with old dying men. I watched NHL games with tem in their apartment so a thankful mother could do a grocery run. All of them who could speak asked me to kill them.  Each and every one.  No dignity, daily humiliation and deep pain. What could a 22 year old say to a 70-old miner?

When a nurse called 'pneumonia' the 'friend of the elderly' I didn't get it. Now I can see the 'heroic' model of medicine can become monstrous.  

The baby boomers were a massive population bulge in profit-seeking Long Term Care homes - they were a pile of dry kindling for an aggressive respiratory disease. If we want to discuss making the institutions into more ethical places, I'm listening.  The idea that the individual needs to help take "stress" off the health-care system is a joke - Canadian healthcare was been systematically starved and run "lean" by managers and politicians who are closer to neo-liberal barbarians than rational humans.

Hidden in all the covid stats is the massacres that took place in some LTCs - bureaucratic deaths.  Covid patients moved in, ventilators improperly used, and the old 'over-mediated' trick that was the staple of the pre-euthanasia Canadian medical establishment. The CMA were a pack of cowards on legalizing  euthanasia and marijuana - but I don even have to look at their statement to know they will now lack all caution with this experimental vaccine. I don't have any particular trust in doctors, and demanding people take a rushed-to-market vaccine at any cost is surely not science.

My mother died a month after her diagnosis with cancer, she was killed by the chemotherapy. I know because the doctor told me. He was our next door neighbour and a honourable man.  She was a nurse, part of Laurentian's first gradation class.

12 hour after his second dose of the covid19 vaccine my brother had a serious cardiac episode and was rushed to the hospital. He was eventually diagnosed with pericardia. When he called Sudbury Public Health to report this, they said it was this was no reason to take a 3rd dose if required! They seemed to have backed down from this criminal advice. He is a Respiratory Technician who has spent many years in ER rooms. He is still in recovery.

I have a friend who did Nobel prizing winning work on neutrinos, my brother's partner has a PhD in Genetics, my father is a lawyer, I have friends in OPSEU and the NDP, friends in the working-class, friends in the middle.
None of them have questioned my decision not to get the vaccine, just as I have respected there own risk assessments. I feel slightly blessed by this.

But for all you frothing "liberals" and "leftist" (the Liberal Party has tons of doctors) who try to terrorize me and my partner with threat and bullying, I return the lack of empathy.  I don't remember seeing your faces on the street or in the community centers when we were fighting against the wars of terror, homelessness, earth-shattering capitalism and union-busters..... but tell me again how you "care about the community"

I will treat the epidemiologist who said "humans will never hug again" as psychotic and delusional as the national security type after 9/11.  Those who shill for Big Pharma should ask a cut of the billions in profits.  Those who think everyone who is skeptical about the vaccine as "TRUMP ANTI_VAX", I encourage you to end this lazy confusion. Rich people don't want us in the restaurants we'd never go to anyways.

I'm a leftist who values reason and mercy. I try to practice empathy with all living creature I met. I love science. My skepticism is hard won and a valued trait. I knowing how elderly Canadians die and having had palliative friends (I still miss you Ivan and Roy) has deeply effected my life.

I'm a 'dirty' hippie and the spotless 'liberals' are now talking about letting me die. We just endured 4 year of insane conservatives threatening to shoot ever 'dirty leftists'.  

And I am 'dirty' - at least I'm not physically disgusted much - how else can you help people?  Traumatized kids smear feces over their toys, getting upset will not help them. Bodies rot, the impoverished get infected, wilderness has no flush toilets. Beloved animals need euthanasia (as do unfortunate wild ones), kids smell bad, old people fart. People get cancer. A germ-phobic generation will be a sterile nightmare of fear, sneers and spitting. I've accepted my 'dirtiness' so it doesn't sting - and every bullying attempt to "jab my arm" simply makes me more resistant.

When my brother tweeted about his reaction to the vaccine, the comments ranged from screams of 'lies!' to 'you're weak, so its better if you did die'. Every day my partner reads aggressive headlines that openly terrorize her.

Please stop scaring and injuring my family!

I ask the vaccine-at-any-cost folks to honestly consider what they are doing. Do you really understand the situation enough to demand 100% compliance with Big Pharma? What was your view on 9/11 or the 2008 stock-market crash, or the rise of Trump - have you completely understood those events? Do you really believe that the medical establishment is free from the perversions of profit and power that have so corrupted every other institution?

Is the idea that you can take respiratory illness seriously and still have a right to your skepticism and control over your own body so irrational it must we must be purged?

Spring: The Vaccines are profitable and safe and effective
Early Summer: The Vaccines are profitable and safe and effective (except AstraZenca for women)
Late Summer: The Vaccines are profitable and safe and effective (except AstraZenca for women and Moderna for men)
Fall: The Vaccines are profitable and safe and effective (except for the variants)
Now: The Vaccines are profitable and safe and effective

Inject your magic juice all you want! I let other adults make their choices.
But the second you call your decision 'science', 'rational' or 'ethical', then we have to go to war. Your abuse of their terms does long-term damage to them for Moderna's momentary profit. Ironically those who have most sold out liberalism and the enlightenment are modern "liberals".

Being a Big Pharma 'fanboi' is not the same as keeping faith with the humanists of the 1500s-1900s. Please read some history so you can maintain perspective. I did a project on rabies where I literally wept as I read about Pasture creating the vaccine to help stop its instant death sentence. Modern/Pfizer and Covid are barely footnotes in this larger struggle to rationalize medicine.

You want to watch corporate TV, moralize (like the worst priests!) and harass non-conformists. That is the opposite of the larger 'natural science'/philosophy mission. I'm sorry the general public was so 'media-hypnotized' that they RUSHED to get neo-liberal public/private vaccines. [Look at Cuba for another way to create vaccines - state-owned, state-created!] but picking a fight with the working class and PhDs who are are not corporate fanbois will result in the destruction of this culture.

How did the purges against gays and leftists go in the 1950s-60s go? Still proud of that liberal arrogance and scapegoating now? It's been barely half a decade and you are full of apologies for those you harassed out of government jobs and purged! What will 2070 look like? Get you heads out out of you TV-asses and look to the horizon.....

All you can do is make us submit - we will never accept that you were 'science', 'rational' or 'ethical'. You have to prove those in the hard test of the real world...........

Finland has joined other Nordic countries in suspending or discouraging the use of Moderna‘s COVID-19 vaccine in certain age groups because of an increased risk of heart inflammation. The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare said Thursday that authorities won’t give the shot to males under age 30. The move by Finland followed similar decisions by three neighbouring countries on Wednesday. Sweden suspended the use of Moderna for people under 30, Denmark said those under 18 won’t be offered the Swiss-made vaccine, and Norway urged those under 30 to get the Pfizer vaccine instead.

You bray your corporate media 'talking points', I have to deal with my brother and students who have suffered myocardia and pericardia.

You can have your 'social media' - all I have is empirical data, training in critical thinking and a lifetime of failed neo-liberal products.

You can have for media-inflated arrogance. I have my humble reality.

You can have your snide morality, all I have is an urge to do the least harm.

I have told no other adult what decisions to make for themselves and their kids. You won't stop screaming through the media megaphone. I have no blood on my hands - no "100% pro-vaxxer" can make the same claim. Talk to my brother for the details....

You think "covid anti-vax" = "pro-Trump"? I fought right-wingers in the street for a decade and studied/taught them in university for another 10 years while you were watching the fucking Apprentice. You've now 'purged' me and my kind. This arrogance will now run dead-on to the reality test of fighting the US fundamentalist Right without any sane allies ...,,,,, The slightest rationality or empathy could have avoided this. Humanity hopes that North American liberals are up to that fight, but this recent mania and purging does not bode well.




You don't want me and rest of these people on your side? OK -Let history judge this authoritarianism, emotionalism and arrogance.

If you cannot see what is right in front of you - no amount of discourse will help you. Your minor role in this "moral panic" serves covid billionaires not humans. I hoped you enjoyed your moment in the 'social media' spotlight - because reality with all its complexities and complications will always re-assert itself.........................