Death…Believe and Question NOT
It is on my most recent travels that I was reminded just how underrated, and underestimated, are individual freedoms. A QR code has become the new pass or badge of our times. It doesn’t matter if you are feeling healthy, if you have no fever or if the activity is outdoors: you need to prove you’ve been inoculated in order to have access to public services and goods. The principle behind it is paved with good intentions for the benefit of the masses, yet the implications are the road to hell for the individual.
Breaking down the three most prevalent arguments to this new norm:
1 — Previous, serious illnesses have been eradicated by making vaccination obligatory. YES. This is true, however, the current trend doesn’t match historical policy on obligatory vaccination. Never before have adults with and without co-morbidity been passively-aggressively forced to comply with a fast-tracked vaccination policy.
2 — We already have compulsory vaccinations to be able to travel to certain holiday or business destinations. YES. This is true as well. However, those destinations are a matter of choice outside of one’s home territory. They are not the museum around the corner; the aquarium across the street; the boat ride in the nearby town or the breakfast area of the hotel that already accepted one’s booking and payment. There is a not-so-subtle difference between grand scale destinations and small scale amenities.
3 — The current propaganda towards vaccination is meant to save lives and to create herd immunity in order for people to return to some kind of normality. YES. As a mass-based strategy for achieving quick results, this is the way to go. However, in order to truly achieve herd immunity we cannot only focus on the adults. Currently the vaccination policy has been extended to teenagers but the side-effects are not negligible and to be able to go further down the age ladder safely means a lot more money, time and research else we risk to solve one mass problem by creating another (and there is historical precedent for that). We are quickly heading towards a breaking a few eggs to make an omelette philosophy. Justifiable? Perhaps. Yet who, among us is prepared to be one of the broken eggs? Further still, who among us parents are prepared to use our children as currency? My argument recently against anti-vaccination was simply as follows: I chose to do it because according to my own life philosophy, I’m already past my prime and whatever side-effects come later on in life, is less and less relevant to me as I head towards my own hopefully natural death of old age. The response was: “Sure thing. But are you willing to take the same chance regarding your four-year-old child who’s just beginning to live?” NO. I’m not.
And now for the grand finale of an opinion that sits easily on both sides of the fence:
From a personal perspective, I tend to trust science, but very seldom the people involved in manipulating it towards tangible results. Why? Because it has been proven personally as well as publicly time and time again, that a title such as “Doctor”, “Researcher”, “Priest” and so forth, is no guarantee of competence or benevolence. I won’t go into the public examples because that is what Google is for (and those cases can easily be cross-referenced using public records). Medically speaking, the incompetence of one such doctor almost cost me my own own life a few years back. No, it wasn’t an indigestion! It was an organ failure! It is a lucky thing to have second and third opinions in life and from diverse sources of expertise. Diverse opinions are the protagonists of our pandemic story. Conspiracy theories often have some threads of truth to them…they are not to be discounted without investigation. Science has saved humanity many times over and it is not to be buried under red tape and military propaganda either. An informed mind is one that takes all the variables and facts into account and attempts to disseminate the false or nebulous information.
Lastly, where to from here?
The death of personal freedom for the sake of a safe and predictable outcome to life. It seems that we as the human race, struggle a lot with maintaining the balance between survival as a group and living as individuals. In time, we have minimized the risks of driving, flying, riding, eating, drinking and many more things in order to push back the sell-by date of life. We have attempted to grant more freedom to individuals by allowing different kinds of marriages, decriminalizing sexual practices, eliminating discrimination based on physical and/or faith attributes…and yet…the mass approaches prevail.
There are middle grounds to seek in all these things but middle grounds require time and effort…as well as greater intelligence. We have no patience and such intelligence as I envision, requires more decades of evolution.
As far as the pandemic case study goes, I’d say focusing on preventing the inevitable (aka compulsory vaccination) is a narrow-minded approach. Viruses never quite go away, with and without herd immunity. The potential for revival is always there once the ball gets rolling. A multi-disciplinary approach that also involves treatment, is a more efficient way to go. Why not approach it like the flu? Vaccines for the vulnerable and effective treatments for the casual outbreaks.
Wearing a mask in public spaces is a great way to avoid everything!
Vaccination against every possible disease will eliminate everything!
Taking medication for every symptom will alleviate everything!
Not smoking, drinking, or eating badly, and exercising will treat everything!
Follow those four laws and you could cheat death.
Skirt loosely around them and you might live.
