Love thy neighbor
I wrote in a notebook a few months ago a basic human principle that should be self evident, but that felt revelatory and difficult to excavate from the current socio-political context of vaccine/disease science. I wrote, “Healthy relationships are mutually benefitting and reciprocal.” I felt the need to write it down because this has never been the case for the vaccine-injured or their advocates in terms of how they are treated by the collective. The relationship and social contract of mutual and reciprocal responsibility, care and respect has not been upheld. Instead, the opposite has been the case — denial, denigration, gaslighting, malignment, slander, vitriol, abandonment, lack of compensation and care, job loss, and denial of basic human rights. The same could be said to be true of the treatment of Covid survivors with infection-based immunity if they refuse vaccination post recovery — economic deprivation, non-proportionate coercion, abandonment, slander, vitriol, social malignment, general misinformation, and communication by propaganda. As a collective, we ought to be ashamed. The social contract was broken and has not been restored. Even as the world tries to move on from Covid, there has never been an apology or acknowledgement from the institutions that colluded to bury harms, exclude and malign people. Nor have there been apologies from the masses who piled on with their own unique brand of vitriol, exclusion and hate, or from the bystanders who looked on, said and did nothing as if this was all acceptable behavior for the sake of public health. The reciprocity principle has been broken and abused. Unacknowledged harms remain and continue to compound.
Recently, I was encouraged to see that a team of public health, legal and scientific experts from Oxford, Harvard, John Hopkins and other academic institutions wrote a scientific review summarizing a risk-benefit assessment for Covid-19 boosters in young adults and five ethical arguments against mandates at universities. Besides an expected net negative harm from boosters in young adults which they quantify from the available data, I felt a sense of relief to see acknowledgement from top scientists of what has long been a concern on my heart and mind. “US mandates violate the reciprocity principle,” they write “because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes…Our estimate suggests an expected net harm from boosters in this young adult age group, whereby the negative outcomes of all severe adverse events and hospitalizations may on average outweigh the expected benefits in terms of Covid-19 hospitalizations averted…Our analysis is conservative given the fact that we did not account for the protective effects of prior infection, which is estimated to be substantive…We suggest that general mandates for young people ignore key data, entail wider social harms and/or abuses of power, and are arguably undermining rather than contributing to social trust and solidarity.”
This particular team of scientists are not the only ones with concerns about the ongoing booster and vaccination recommendations to young people. Danish health authorities will not be offering booster vaccinations this fall to anyone under the age of 50, nor the primary series for those under 18 unless they have underlying conditions that put them at risk. Likewise, the UK has discontinued the primary series for children ages 5–11 and will not be offering boosters, writing in a document published to their official website that vaccinating children was a “one-off pandemic response programme.” In June 2022, the Director of the Danish Health Authority, Søren Brostrøm, admitted that in retrospect, vaccinating children was a mistake. Nonetheless, many college campuses in the U.S. are still mandating boosters and the D.C. official school immunization requirements now includes the full Covid-19 vaccination series for 6th-12th graders, raising concerns about educational equity. One action step readers can take if they have similar concerns after reading the 30-page scientific and ethical review is to send it to colleges and universities and other institutions where mandates still apply.
It is difficult to explain the sense of grief and loss that comes from the lack of acknowledgement of the concerns, perceptions, experiences and realities of people like me from institutions of power that much of the public, my community, has placed their trust in as ultimate scientific authorities. Trust in the authorities, especially when tied to moral righteousness means the loss of the physical protections and the societal rights of the vaccine-vulnerable, and life-long gaslighting and misunderstanding over a core wound, whether silent or overt from family and friends. This is larger than just one vaccine-disease pairing or a particular booster mandate. This is also about an entire program that desperately needs to be re-worked for the health and benefit of all, especially children. The reciprocity principle has been broken by nearly everyone I know and love. Where am I supposed to go with that? Inward. Go inward, is what I keep telling myself. Find the Love that brought you here. Find your humanity even if they cannot find it in you.
I want to provide some links to 5–10 minute interviews with clinical trial participants and other injured parties whose stories have been buried from public view and whose data they have found missing from the peer reviewed journals their trial data were submitted to. Most testimonies have been removed from the internet for obvious censorship reasons, but some still remain. They are important to hear, not to dissuade people from a potentially life-saving intervention, but rather to provide a form of healing to the injured in the simple acknowledgement of allowing their stories to be heard. They and their advocates don’t owe the public their silence, not even to save a life. People are fully capable of making up their own minds. We can handle nuance, truth and multi-faceted realities. Silencing harms out of a projection of fear, no matter how valid, is not the solution, and those who have engaged in it at every level need to hold themselves accountable. This approach, myopic and un-nuanced, infantilizes people’s decision-making process, denies the informed consent process and disintegrates the social fabric of community. Preventing people from telling their ongoing trauma only compounds the harms. To not be believed is an almost unbearable grief. As you will see in the interviews below, lack of acknowledgement and support for the injured is literally killing people. Anyone who has contributed to this needs to own their share of responsibility. It doesn’t matter if you think the harms are greater for Covid for all age groups and comorbidity/health/immune/prior infection status no matter how many doses of vaccine given from now until eternity. The way the collective has treated the injured is inhumane. Bring them back into the circle where they belong to all of us. Acknowledge. Apologize. Make it right. It has long been time for their stories to come to light.
I hope you can hear past the politics of the conveners of the meetings and interviewers who represent both the left and the right, and any relevant media propaganda, to hear the statements of the clinical trial participants (and others) themselves. I was personally enrolled in an alternative vaccine trial that I was dropped from when pre-screening lab work determined that I was too high risk to participate, so I know at least in part, in addition to other participant experiences across trial brands and sites, how trial results were skewed in a particular direction. I hope you will listen to all of them, just a small sprinkling of many thousands. I especially hope you will hear the testimony of Kellai Rodriguez who sums up all of it so succinctly and compassionately. Love thy neighbor, she says. She is me. She is you. She is all of us.
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U.S. AstraZeneca clinical trial participant and NIH injury trial participant — Part 1, Part 2 short.
U.S. AstraZeneca clinical trial participant and NIH injury trial participant — long form interview/podcast with RFK Jr.
U.S. Pfizer children’s 12–15 clinical trial participants — short.
Kellai Rodriguez, U.S. post-marketing injury, mother with infection-based immunity prior to vaccination— short.
MIT professor Dr. Retsef Levi one year ago on his now published research— short.
Erenesto Ramirez, father of son who died post vaccination — short.
Pfizer vaccine trial whistleblower article and short video interview published in the British Medical Journal.
