Enough of the Vaccine Wars!

Another contentious issue, another monkey fight. More and more, on every public issue, reasoned discussion goes out the window while everyone hunkers down in the trees, throws poo at each other and tries to shout the loudest. It’s never about the issue, always about the “side”. If “they” say one thing, then “we” automatically gainsay it, no matter what. And vice-versa.

It’s only got worse during Covid. We’ve become warring tribes of screeching, howling, hooting, brain-damaged monkeys. And nowhere are we any more stupid or tribal than on the issue of vaccines.

Depending on your “side”, Covid vaccines are either the scientific miracle of the age with absolutely no side effects, not a single one, and you can never have enough boosters, and anyone who says otherwise is a science-denying white supremacist… Or, they are a weapon of mass genocide engineered by baby-raping Satanic communist Lizard People, knocking down the world’s athletes like ninepins and filling your blood with 5G microchips. If you don’t believe that, you’re either a “sheeple” or one of Klaus Schwab’s wicked stooges.

To say that this is not a healthy state of affairs for public policymaking is an understatement. We have one tribe howling that “the jab” will kill you as soon as you look at it, while the other tribe bellows that with enough boosters you’ll become practically immortal.

Lost in all this is clamour and poo-flinging is any dispassioned analysis of what, if anything, is really going on.

Ambulance ‘ramping’ has been at crisis point in every state in Australia over the summer. In Western Australia, just 70 per cent of priority one emergency call outs in March were responded to within 15 minutes. March was also the busiest month ever for paramedics in Tasmania with a 15 per cent increase in callouts.

Ambulance Victoria experienced its busiest quarter on record, a 16 per cent increase on the same period last year. In South Australia, ramping was so bad that it became an election issue. Paramedics in New South Wales were so angry about staff shortages that they went on strike this week.

One obvious cause of this is the stupidity of the Covidians, who sacked paramedics who elected not to have the Covid vaccine. Compounding that were other mandates, such as forcing into quarantine anyone who had had even the most fleeting contact with a “case” (that is, someone who had returned a positive test, regardless of whether they were actually sick — as more often than not they were not).

But what explains the increase in demand which has occurred in summer, not during the winter flu season? It’s not the pandemic. NSW, for example, has a combined private and government hospital capacity of 12,500 beds including 1,000 in intensive care units, but there are only 1,583 people admitted to hospitals ‘with’ Covid, and only 71 in intensive care.

In Queensland, Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said that, “We had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and breathing/respiratory issues. Sometimes you can’t explain why those things happen”. Well, don’t turn to the media, mainstream or otherwise, for answers. Depending on which you ask, you’ll get either a solid wall of denial or a solid wall of conspiracy theory.

To get some clues out, you needed to turn on the Footy Show. Discussing Brownlow medallist Ollie Wines, who was taken to hospital at half time where he was diagnosed with a ‘heart irregularity’, former Richmond forward Nathan Brown asked, ‘Is there a lot of this going on in world sport?’, clarifying that he was referring to the side effects of Covid vaccine booster shots.

Journalist Damian Barrett said the question was being asked, ‘by a lot of people’ and that it wasn’t just the heart issues’. Essendon star Matthew Lloyd, another panellist on the show that night confirmed that he had Bell’s palsy – and that both heart issues and Bell’s palsy had ‘gone through the roof since the boosters and Covid issues’.

He added that 3AW sports journalist Michelangelo Rucci had said that there’s a ward in Adelaide filled with people with similar symptoms to Ollie Wines – nausea, heart issues – ‘so there has to be something more to it’.

Maybe, maybe not. If you believe the non-mainstream media, there’s a been a sudden tsunami of deaths and heart issues among the world’s athletes. Is that true? Who knows? Did anyone keep track of such incidences among athletes before the Covid vaccines? Is this just a case of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon? (Also known as “the Frequency Illusion”: that is, a cognitive bias that occurs when, after noticing something for the first time, you begin to see it everywhere. For instance, a friend purchases a blue Mazda 3 — and suddenly, it seems as if there are blue Mazda 3s everywhere.)

We just don’t know — and nobody’s putting the shouting on hold in order to find out.

That Covid vaccines can cause myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and pericarditis (inflammation of the sac around the heart) as well as other severe reactions, including death, is a taboo topic in mainstream media. The Daily Mail accused the Footy Show hosts of making a ‘shocking claim’ for suggesting Wine’s heart issues could be linked to the Covid vaccines.

Spectator Australia

We know that the Covid vaccines can cause these problems because they’re officially listed side effects. But are they causing it? Let alone in sufficient numbers to be concerned about? Are the reported cases which correlate with vaccination, caused by it? Humans are, after all, cognitively predisposed to link correlation with causation, whether or not it’s the case.

Activists trying to demonise a medicine, a food, or any other substance, will point out that it “increases the risk of X by 25%”. But, on its own — so what? If your normal risk of X is, say, 1 in 100,000, then increasing it to 1 in 75,000 isn’t that big a deal. But if your normal risk is 1 in 100, then a 25% increase is a very big deal.

Vaccine hysterics also love to reel out numbers of adverse reactions and deaths, but on their own, these tell us little. “Adverse reaction” covers a hell of a lot of ground, from a bit of swelling at the injection site, to actually dying. Leaving aside the warning against linking correlation with causation, are people just reporting more milder adverse reactions simply because of the hyper-awareness around Covid vaccines?

On the other hand, the sheer out-scaled number of events reported absolutely warrants proper investigation. But nobody is interested in that. The “anti-vaxxers” have long ago made up their minds beyond any possibility of changing — and so have the pro-vaxxers. After a year of touting Covid vaccines as the Great Panacea and coercing everyone to get vaccinated or else be relegated to second-tier non-existence, governments, media, health bureaucrats and employers steadfastly refuse to concede that, whoops, maybe they were wrong.

I guess it’s too much to ask that we could all give up being yowling cretins for just five minutes and actually have an adult conversation about all this.