On the nature of Cartesian doubt

This article was written on 23rd January 2021 with one pull-quote added and minor editing on April 7th 2021

Everything is the way it is because it got that way

Here I table a motion that any form of communication that purports to argue that the new coronavirus vaccines are either safe or unsafe beyond their test terms is disinformation.?

I’m going the long way round. Through numbers and the nature of chance.?

Two points to kick off with:?

1: Mathematical probability, – the calculation thereof – this may sound a little obvious, is time sensitive. It is contextual.?

It took twenty-four years to collect all the human strains of flu – from its arrival in 1918 to the first?successful?vaccine in 1942. Haven’t you noticed that weeks, days, hours after taking the new coronavirus vaccine – even before most of us have had it – the manufacturers are already saying it will not work? You know, the?new strain?line. Why is that??

2: Even a very low probability of a bad outcome – translated as an actual bad outcome to a very low percentage of players – when scaled across a global population – leaves a significant number of people in the firing line.?

I grew up playing out with a child my age who had no arms. The morning sickness drug his mum had taken (untested on pregnant women for the full term) only caused 0.0000001% of women to give birth to deformed children. It was hailed a success by pharma and governments. Afterall, across the globe, that’s only ten thousand kids. But I bet you wouldn’t have wanted to be one of them.?

Heads or tails ??

My point about available information needs making because often the nature of an educated guess tends to make us focus on the outcome. An educated what? Yeah. It’s a guess. When we are asked to make predictions it is so tempting to play the game and take a guess and see whether the guess comes true (future bias) that we forget about the quality of the prediction at the time it was propagated (presence). Such quality borrows from valid information available at the time.?To succeed, one must be present. Yet we very often unwittingly discount temporal context, allowing it to fall from our grasp like confetti at a wedding reception. Turns out, this is not so smart.?

Unlike the contraceptive pill and cigerettes and other recreational drugs, the AZ vaccine sits alongside a range of alternative vaccines that, unlike it and, to date, seem to deliver cover without the mortality incidence. To carry on using AZ without caveats may amount to a form of criminal negligence as defined in the statute books of many participating nation states. Marketing AZ as “safe” to start with simply has to be investigated, not forgotten. Hundreds of young people are dead, having consumed it with unfounded assurances, with the objective of achieving the opposite outcome.?

Should I hold a British fifty pence piece on the top of my thumb and make to flip it in the air – a coin toss – and should I look at you and raise an eyebrow – inviting you to call – it may sound pretty obvious that there are two outcomes. The trouble is, there are not two answers to the question. There are three.?

Like I say, context is so crucial that it cannot be left uninvestigated. Well, it can. It often is. To my mind, some things are binary. You are either doing them or you are not. Or, in terms of knowledge, you either have it or you are without it and you are guessing. So what is a plausible context differential for tossing a coin??

Here’s an example; if I am about to engage in the playing of a game for fun with one or more other contestants – say a game of darts with a friend or a game of football with me as the captain of one team stood with the referee and my opposing counterpart on the centre circle right before kick-off – it is reasonable and logical and in fact necessary, actually, to “play” along and treat the forthcoming coin flip to decide who goes first or who plays to which end in the first half – as only having two outcomes – and to call either Heads or Tails. Afterall, I am playing a game for fun and the coin toss is a custom-embedded mechanism to enable the fun to begin. The worst that can happen is that I and my team could lose the match – and it doesn’t take a mathematician to recognise that winning or losing the coin toss is not correlated, even vaguely, to my chances of winning or losing the game (match) that is about to be played. It is but a process to put the game in motion. An initiation to put the competition to proof.?

Regression to the mean

The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

M Luther King Jr.

Mr King was referring to the moral universe. You can take the essence of his point and change it to read:?the arc of nature (mathematics) is long, but it bends toward one single integer. One number. One value: the average.?

What are the nine month, two year and five year side effects of the new coronavirus vaccines? On average, what is the story with vaccines, anyway, in terms of a timeline??

We tend to not know that we do not know. We tend to think we do. Deciding where you sit in the cinema is much less correlated to whether or not you enjoy the movie than you think. You think it is causal and correlational. It is not. This is not an opinion. Masses of time-honoured data merely express a seemingly implausible yet non-Chaotic truth. Chaos is a pattern that seems random. But most things are random, disguised as patterns. We create the patterns in our heads. The fundamental confusion between correlation and causation is as old as graveyards.?This does not mean choosing where you sit for the movie is not important. Nor does it mean that you thinking that where you sit matters does not matter. Choice and our perception of the benefits of personal choice are vital ingredients in the modern day provision of private sector services. It’s just that it doesn’t matter in the context of the actual outcome. We may reasonably conclude that the giant in the ten-gallon cowboy hat in the row of seats directly up ahead proves that our choice of seat is correlated (in this case, negatively) to enjoyment (performance). Yet Game Theory says something stronger than?it is not correlated. It says it?cannot?be.?

I flip a coin a hundred times. I’m weird. I did this over and over as a kid. You get fifty-fifty or forty-nine fifty-one all the time. Occasionally forty-eight fifty-two. But that’s rare. There are times when Heads goes eight-nil up. Even sixteen-nil, I’ve had. On these occasions I am tempted to believe that the odds have changed on the outcome of the very next coin toss. Surely it’s Tail’s turn ? Law of averages, right ? Common sense ? No. It’s still fifty-fifty and after one hundred flips it’s levelling out. The arc of nature bends toward the arithmetic mean.?

Maths is not distilled opinion. It is natural law. Science is chronically proven (tried and tested repetitively) experience. Both stand beyond or at least seriously qualify the very worth of our personal opinion in the colloquial sense of that term. Maths leaves the jury out on any one event yet goes on to describe a poetic regularity that I like to visualise as a snowflake, transcending anything reasonable or instinctual to humans, playing out on the time curve and known as?regression to the mean.?All you gotta do is know when the jury is out. And when it isn’t. Oh – and it would help to know what the mean (average) is. There is a law higher than that of man. So get used to that, for starters.?

Game theory

OK. I was playing darts and football earlier. Now let’s change the context. I am unlucky enough to be shopping in my local store when I happen upon a psychotic individual who is holding a gun to the head of the shelf-stacker girl and as I come into view he instructs me to call the coin-flip for her life.?

All I have done here is take the “recreation” element out of the game that is about to be played. Yet we remain firmly within probability.?

By changing the context I have changed the consequences of losing the game. The stakes are too high and at this point mathematical probability, if I am smart, should be flooding my cognition engine and informing me that a coin toss never had two options on the call, anyway. And it’s time to bring the third call into play. The only truly authentically intelligent call, let’s be having it straight, is truth-based not guess-based.?

I don’t know

Let’s de-couple the coin flip from the games mentioned above; darts, football, life and death. Dealing with it in isolation, it is important to understand – only because we seem to fail to understand – that at the time of the call, “Heads” is a guess, “Tails” is a guess and “I don’t know” is a fact. The guesses bisect the outcome probability. Clean and rounded. Fifty fifty. The fact is a fact. It respects probability so much that it endeavours to answer the question properly. The question being put as I raise my eyebrow with the fifty pence piece on my upper-thumb is Which side up will the coin land?

Socially and culturally, as humans, we seem to think the question is instructing us to guess. But it is not. It is asking something so simple we overlook it. It is very simple because the answer is universal (there is only one) and obvious. Too obvious. The question is being asked now and demands an answer now. The fact that we always tend to fail this “now” element and answer the question with an eye on the future is but the human condition. Afterall, in leisure games, it’s good and essential really to play along. But with life and death I would contend that playing along is irresponsible. Which side up will the coin land? It has not been flipped yet. It is too early to say. I cannot know. I do not know. I am not avoiding the question. I am the only person in town actually answering it properly.?

How?"I don’t know"?saved lives in this pandemic

Last spring, when large numbers of people were dying in Italian ICU’s and last summer when the same was occuring in UK ICU’s, patients with low and falling oxygen levels were given oxygen by force. This was the equivalent of calling Tails as the coin flips through the air but before it has landed. It was the call I would have made and the call you would have made. The reasonable call. It was also the qualified practitioner call. And it was the wrong call. Too many of those patients died. It took the astute observations of an Australasian ICU worker, months later, to get to the realisation that, for the first time in medical history, when a (COVID_19) patient’s oxygen levels are falling to what would otherwise be disastrous levels – giving them oxygen often makes them worse, not better. Of course, they may die for lack of oxygen. But they seem to die quicker and in higher numbers when you assist and complement their oxygen supply in the proforma fashion. The courageous recognition of this mystery by the medical profession is the equivalent of calling?I don’t know?as the coin tosses and turns in the air and makes toward its landing.

ICU’s the world over, by recognising that they have no clue whatsoever what the hell is going on with SARS COV2, started to respond to the new data by altering the way they went about providing oxygen as a default treatment to people starving of oxygen – and this is why the death rates from the disease have fallen so dramatically, thank God, as a ratio of those admitted to hospital with severe cases. We still do not know why giving oxygen to those starved of it makes matters worse. Yet look at the sea-change in mortality rates (not nominally, of course, but as a proportion of those admitted to ICU or deemed by doctors to be ICU admission-worthy even when they can’t get in for lack of beds or a right-wing admissions algorithm) when we switch from making a smart educated guess to having the courage to say?I do not know.

The story above appeared in quality news aggregators which, if I recall correctly, was sourced originally from a piece in Robert Horton's The Lancet medical publication and BMJ papers. It then ran as a lifestyle feature in high-brow publications. I believe I first picked it up in Vanity Fair.

COVID_19 and the vaccines

Remember, I am writing this on January 23rd 2021 so the context from reading it in April 2021 may create a reality-crease. Bear with me;

My neighbour Steve got the first-phase of one of the COVID_19 vaccines last week. My other neighbour Baz is due it next week. This morning, on walking to Costa I bumped into my friend Jackie. She happily reported that she is getting the vaccine jab tomorrow. I spoke to Mum right before writing this article. Her bloke, Richard, is having the vaccine tomorrow morning. Everyone mentioned is reporting their news to me with one common emotion in their eyes and in their voices: hope. Jeez! How wonderful. Who would want to remove hope at a time like this??

Hegelian

I am aware that when I put forward an argument – be it verbally in person or in the written form – such as right here – it is my nature to give it my all. I endeavour to give it my all in terms of logic, reasoning, context and empirical reference – and I tend to deliver my point of view with, I am told, some force. This can lead people receiving me to believe that I am trying to persuade them over to my way of thinking. That I believe that I am right, objectively. This is simply not the case. I am genuinely only tabling a motion in favour of one side of an argument, which often and indeed in this case, presently coincides with my opinion. I do not want anyone to be won over and I certainly respect the opposite argument. I am human. I may even change my mind as time passes and take up the opposite position. I see flaws in my argument and irrefutable insights in the contrary contention. We live in an age where the craft and function of argument is worse than obsolete. It is very widely actively misunderstood to be synonymous with the obtuse, the unruly, the rebellious, the uncivilised, the ill-mannered. And it is seen as a dumbed-down game. Throwing custard pies into each others faces. A bun fight in which those participating in an argument come to the thing with an already ring-fenced position and the winner is the one who shouts loudest. Yet resilient obstinate stances and fisticuffs have no place in the thought leadership intellectual nature of true classic argument. Arguing is a game, for sure; but an intellectual one wherein concession allows for growth. And it is from here – the intellectual corner – and with humility and effort – that I attempt to propagate my contention.?

This article is my thesis within the dialectic argument framework. Thesis – antithesis – synthesis. If I wholly reject the opposing line (antithesis) and it wholly rejects my idea – in a childish kind of idealistic stand-off – there can be no growth (synthesis) and not only do we all lose, but something much worse will have occured: we will have failed to even learn how to argue. Now that’s just criminal. Lower than criminal. It’s boring.?

Flu: a known contagious respiratory illness

In 1918 the flu virus hit the human species. It killed many people (fifty million) and caused a global recession that lasted for over fifteen years. I won't send you on a downer by citing the reports of what happened when society started to un-lock down within the first years of break-out.

After one year we didn’t know it tended to arrive in winter – because we could not know. Winters only come along once a year and once is not a pattern. After five years we had – you’ve guessed it – five years worth of data. The winter (in the northern hemisphere) pattern was now a pattern in earnest. But the underlying explanation (the why?) was still missing. A good range of its many symptoms had been identified. Vaccine testing was already underway. Ten years after influenza came along, we now had so much data of what it does to humans in the long run – ten years to be precise – that we could see the grand design of the thing. Twenty years later we were able to observe the start, middle and end. How it all played out. Vaccines were years into testing such that we knew for a fact which vaccines worked (got rid of or lessened the effects of flu) and what their long-term side effects were. By the early nineteen-forties – more than two decades after influenza had laid waste to millions of humans – we had so much raw data on the timeline that we could get smart. Afterall, we are quite smart in any case.?Alas, your annual variation of the flu jab is a derivative of over twenty-two years of data. Core knowledge takes time.?

1940s: Thomas Francis, Jr., MD and Jonas Salk, MD serve as lead researchers at the University of Michigan to develop the first inactivated flu vaccine with support from the U.S. Army. Their vaccine uses fertilized chicken eggs in a method that is still used to produce most flu vaccines today.

For instance, we eventually came to know that although flu is endemic in the cold climates, the bacteria actually spreads through warm air. It can not exist in the cold. This truth is time-honoured since it runs contrary to the basic observation that we all catch the flu when it’s cold out.?In time, we began to understand why flu travels only in warm air and why you catch it when it is very cold out. But it took a while to get here. It is counter-intuitive. So the understanding required is gonna be nuanced. Vintage. Evolved.?Notions such as gut reaction and perceptions of common sense were just white noise disrupting the science.

Everything is the way it is because it got that way.?

D’Arcy Thompson

“Put a coat on before you head out or you’ll catch a cold” we used to say – and still do. It’s not true, by the way. That’s a red herring. Like “sunrise”. You know the sun is not rising but you still say it. You cannot catch the flu in the cold night air. And we can say that we catch flu in cold weather and with some conviction ‘til the cows come home – but it’s no truer than it would be if we did not say it. You cannot get to know some things without knowing them. Time. Spending time.?

And all the modern super fast technology on earth cannot gather ten years of data on a purely novel phenomenon, quicker than the passing of ten years. Even mathematical extrapolation and computer processing power are struck down by novelty. Ask any married couple if they know more about marriage, their partner and themselves as time passes and the answer is always the same. Find me a stable and credible individual who genuinely believes that dating websites, with their awesome algorithms and server processing power, have ever got near matching couples like good old analogue time spent together, and I’ll show you a scientist working in Antarctica and residing in sub-40 degrees celsius conditions who caught the flu.?

There are no time machines. Time-honoured data takes time. Period.?

No country for old men

In Britain right now over two million people have tested positive for coronavirus and almost squarely one hundred thousand people died from the related disease known as COVID_19 already. I am editing this part of the article on Saturday 23rd January and it is expected that deaths in the UK will surpass this number this weekend. There are many long-covid cases. I am one of them. I caught the disease on February 29th last year and I am still with the immuno-compromised aftermath of COVID as I write. Known as dysautonomia. I won’t say I am suffering. That word is too strong. But I was. I thought that I was going to die, but I didn’t and that "the game's up" conviction and critical status only lasted about forty-eight hours. My health is very slowly getting better as my body learns how to fight it. I am not whining.

Three weeks after writing the original version of this article my dad, who shared many of my underlyting health conditions, died and I have his death certificate. The only thing under the Cause of Death section on the document is Covid19. The new C word. Dad fought for twelve days in hospital - going onto and then back off End-of-Life status, seeming to recover before regressing in crazy waves. For five days I was speaking with the Doctor and team of nurses assigned to dad. I had a sense of what he was going through because I went through something similar twice last year. Symptoms included partial sight loss, rashes, dead legs and thrombosis in the feet. The nervous system that does stuff you don't have to think about such as breathing in your sleep, blinking, turning your kidneys on and off, (the autonomic nervous system) fails to receive instruction from the vagus nerve. It turns on and off and at random. This is because, to work properly, the vagus nerve needs oxygen passing it when you breathe in. Alot of us, unbeknown to us, have been breathing ever so slightly lighter - through the mouth into the upper chest - and not through the nose into the whole diaphragm. This is no good for vagus. In contrast to Wave 1 when we were literally suffocating, the Wave 2 version of inhalation irregularity, turns out, is just as lethal for different reasons. Suffocation was obvious. Dysautonomia is insidious. For people like me and dad, when COVID_19 cleared off, the biggest enemy became our very own defence or immunity systems, which by over-reacting, had unwittingly turned against us.

It may be genetic. Who knows? But I know this: COVID_19 is no country for old men. Yet plenty of us long-covid, for some reason, are still standing. And I feel very grateful for that. To those who believe the virus and it’s disease are made up, I say come and speak to me. Either I am a very good liar, a serial delusionalist or you are lucky enough to be asymptomatic or to not have known anyone in your family-and-friends circle that went down with it in serious symptomatic style.?I hope you never do.

There are sixty-seven million of us on the island and the thing has, to date, only reached two million of us. One in thirty-four. Some places less urban than my world have relatively low infection rates and contain people living in houses and villages and towns that are remote, require car journeys to even reach shops and where people generally do not interact – even before national lockdown guidelines were initiated. If I were them, I’d probably believe that the whole thing is a conspiracy too.?

It isn’t.

I am hopeful that something other than these non-vaccination vaccines will come to our rescue in the mid-term. The collective endeavour of our species is disarmingly clever. It was ever thus.?

The causation decoy

Do you think the virus is spreading exponentially because we are not wearing masks enough or properly? Or do you think masks and the spread of the virus are uncorrelated ? Mindful to me of overweight gym members running on the treadmills every day and concluding that their failure to lose weight is that they are not running far enough. It never occurs to them that running and losing weight do not correlate, simply because the media machine tells them otherwise.?

Is it that we know how the virus spreads and it is our fault, collectively, for not conforming to known mitigation and counteractive behavioural patterns, or is it that we do not know how it is spreading? Data, maths: a bit of both but largely the latter. Our need for control and the all-too easy narrative of discipline, shame and blameshipping: the former. I like wearing the mask and steering clear. It caters to my incessant need for control. Like I can pretend I am in charge of things.?

The untidyness of loose correlations

A point worth noting is that washing our hands, wearing masks and socially distancing is not working, per se. This means the following: these practices are well worth doing and are helpful beyond a negligible factor but to a significance that is out-weighed by the unknown mitigation behaviours that we are not collectively doing and the unknown aggrevating behaviours that we are doing. We do not know what will work but through trial along a timeline, we know for a fact this tidy triumvirate does not work in accordance with our expectations. Since we started these practices the disease has run rampant. You don’t need to be Einstein to arrive at my deduction. And an inconvenient truth is still a truth.?

Doing something that does not work, better, does not work.

The problem with loose correlation is that the answer is not tidy and we like tidy answers. Just as when a gym member wishing to lose body fat asks me if regular cardio (running) exercise would be good for them, the answer is yes and no. Yes, for a myriad of proven powerful reasons. No, for losing weight. But still do it. Just stop expecting it to do what it cannot.?

Likewise, masks and distance and cleanliness are definitely important and we should definitely act this way. But stop treating this as a cure and as infection rates rise, seemingly in defiance of our efforts, blameshipping on the non-conformists is to very much miss the point. When we point the finger we are rearranging the furniture while the house burns down.?

The end justifies the means. Or does it??

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it turns out. Sugar is not sugar. It is not harvested from sugarcane or sugarbeet. You can call it sugar ‘til the cows come home. It is not.

The coronavirus vaccine (I know there are lots of different ones now) is not a vaccine. You can call it a vaccine until the cows come home. It is not. A vaccine delivers unto the recipient a small harmless (broken down) dose of the disease it is fighting. The coronavirus vaccine does not vaccinate, thank goodness. How could it? We do not fully understand the disease yet. The jabs attempt to achieve the results of vaccines but they are not vaccinating you. If you think this is a small point or tangential or irrelevant than you will go through this pandemic in a confused state.?

Microwave ovens compete with traditional ovens by mimmicking their output. They leave formerly cold food in a hot state. But they do not add heat. The new vaccines and HFCS (industrial corn syrup) do the same. The trouble with microwaves and pseudo-sugar is that, it turns out, the journey is more important than the destination. Adding heat to food is just as important as leaving it hot. The nature of wholefoods (that it grew, ran, swam or flew) is more important than the taste. Queueing up and having a jab and getting the placebo rush and watching Hugh Bonneville get the jab on the news and feeling relieved to have had the jab and calling the jab a vaccine – may or may not – the jury is still out – be less important than waiting until we know what the disease is about and developing a real vaccine for it. You know – one that vaccinates.?

I am you. I am human. I want things to work out. I want a cure. I want normal. My words are not motivated hyperbole or personal opinion based on some perversion. Facts are not opinions. Math is still math.?

Heathen chemistry

Proven in the short term to be effective, the new coronavirus vaccines are not placebo. Well, they may have been – until you read this. So I guess placebo is a moot point. Notwithstanding, they change the human brain chemistry. They cleverly fool the brain into believing that it has the virus. No other mass distributed drug attempting to solve a problem formerly solved by vaccination has ever gone about solving it’s problem in this way. This is a pretty cool – and potent – slice of chemistry – compared to, say, drugs that we interpret as dangerous and worthy of education in everyday life: valium, cannabis and alcohol – all hypnotic sedatives. Downers. Weed. Booze. Hypnotic sedatives simply slow the mind and body down. They all address the same part of the brain. They are far from innocuous. Their long term side effects are documented and many of them are problematic. The new vaccine changes your brain chemistry; MDMA (ecstasy, formerly sold as Empathy until banned) and amphetamines (street name “speed”. Sold as an anti-ADHD drug under brand names including Ritalin and Adderall) are examples of modern drugs that transform brain chemistry. Speed not only inhibits the re-uptake (wear-off) function of the brain receptors pertinent to courage, strength and energy chemicals (fight or flight) including what we used to call adrenaline (norepinephrine) and feel good transmitters: dopamine and serotonin, but also reverses the re-uptake transporter. In other words, it promotes a state that is very strong and very long lasting. We altered the deep reward centre of the brain. Amphetamines are probably how we won so convincingly the aeronautical Battle of Britain dog fights against the axis air force in the second World War.?So do not for one minute think I am saying that the new vaccine(s) will not address the COVID_19 question in a successful manner. They might. MDMA was ( and still is, in places) a successful reconciliation drug – RELATE and its predecessor The Marriage Guidance Council – testify to that. I guess I’m looking at hangovers.?

This is a?morning after?article. Because you’re all still at the vaccine party. Nobody is looking ahead.?

Did we know the five and ten year side effects of 2-3-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (relational counselling medication or “ecstasy”) and amphetamines (anti-ADHD medication) six months after first producing and consuming the drugs back in the early-to-middle years of the Twentieth century? Or to put it another way, do you believe the TV programme Dr Who is real or fictional??Is you down wit’ da time travel, man??

Thalidomide

I was born in 1971. Women in 1970 in Britain (and years earlier in the US) took a pill to fight off the worst symptoms of morning sickness. I played football against a chap my age called Darren who lived on my street growing up but went to another school. I played on the wing, he was the defender that I could never get round. He was a brilliant football defender. Darren had no arms. His mum had taken Thalidomide to beat morning sickness in 1970. He still has no arms today. They did not know the full-term side effects of a drug that had been tested on pregnant women for less than full-term because….? Anyone? My favourite Doctor was Tom Baker. That scarf. That classic RADA voice.?

Ten thousand kids like Darren. Two thousand less fortunate (dead). But you know what? Morning sickness was cured. A lack of long-term testing for even seemingly mild drugs is potentially quite dangerous, let’s say.?

The coin toss is just beginning

All drugs forever have always carried side effects. Even anadin. Read the annoying small print tucked inside the container packaging. Most mind-altering drugs bar one are proven to have side effects that only come into play after six months and often only after years. The very concept of latent defects is …erm….latency.?

On a coin toss, when I call “I don’t know” at the outset and my friend shouts “Heads” and the coin is flipped and returns a Heads, whose call was smarter? Mine or his?

You are likely to get the answer wrong or to not know why you got it right, if you did. And that’s OK. Mathematical probability is not a song on Spotify or a hot dancer on Strictly.?That’s a swipe at media, not you personally. I can sound patronising. I know. I’m sorry about that. It’s a problem I have to live with.?

Brain messenger RNA sequencing

If the new mRNA vaccine tricks my brain into believing it has a disease that my species has never even heard of, what is to stop the function of the vaccine overreaching (to flip this, that is to say, what are the chances of it having NO side effects?) and for instance, also fooling my brain into believing that my eyes do not work, my skin is irritable, that I have increased sexual potency, that my wife is cheating on me, that food tastes better or that I also have malaria or a banging headache or a fantastic family that I should be more grateful for? What if it not only cures Coronavirus but reduces my risk of getting cancer, lowers my heart rate, makes me happier and removes wrinkles from my face??

Remember the coin toss is not complete. The correct answer is I DO NOT KNOW.

I know mRNA sequencing cannot make my football team win, given that I do not play in it.?

Should patients develop positive side effects, expect this news to hit your TV screen. And should the patients develop negative side effects in the untested long term, expect these developments to?not?hit your TV screen. Like, did they ever? Think about it. How many SSRI (antidepressent) users that have committed suicide (suicide is a major side effect listed in Citalopram’s manual) ever get the courtesy of a news report that even floats the causal question? And why not? All people always die, somehow. Sure. But media and pharma have created a world where massive percentages of people – even famous people – taking say, Citalopram, die from one of the very same conditions mentioned in the side–effects leaflet yet not one inch of any column in any press release exposes the all-too-real connection. One big question and a silent media. So who’s in bed with who? You can shake your head and raise an eyebrow but the affected behaviour don’t cut it. If I put your back to the wall, you know. You damn well know and you always did. Quit the wide-eyed innocence, reader. Nobody just landed.

I respect and applaud those taking the vaccine. I respect the opposing logic to that laid out here upon which their decisive actions are based. I fully respect the argument which opposes the motion I table. All of my friends, neighbours and relatives mentioned above. I see the narrative of optimism in your eyes. I really hope it works out. I am bamboozled by your casual attitude to very high-stakes risk. I mean, Wow! It’s some game you are playing. Personally, I tend to call Heads or Tails when I’m playing darts. Not Russian Roulette. You’ve gone all casual about your causal. Are you serious, bro?

Gary, why you be trippin’ ?

Nah, Reader. Why?you?be trippin’.

Epilogue

All the thoughts above are my own. I developed them in silence and was aided by contemplation and reflection. Everybody I speak to, not least Steve this morning, tends to put “their view” forward by either word-for-word parroting the television news or referencing “what they said” whilst pointing in the direction of the TV screen.

If you too would like to know what you think, try this: get silence and let the thoughts come. These are your thoughts. Not someone else’s. When you worship the TV news you are getting somebody else’s thoughts at the cost of your own. Even subsequent bouts of silent reflection are now echoing with the TV news. And when you think you are giving your opinion you are most likely citing verbatim or near enough the TV news. Outsourcing is cool. I tend to watch Netflix rather than produce my own American Screen Drama series. I buy milk because, you know, the cow in the flat would just annoy the neighbours and most probably walk all over my jigsaw board. Play to your strengths, innit.?

But your thoughts? Your very own marvellous mind? You are actually outsourcing thoughts and opinions to your TV every time you switch it on. Do yourself a favour. Wake up.?

A conspiracy of questions?

I’ll sign off with a conspiracy of lingering contemplations and questions:

If the vaccine is felt to be safe in the long-term, how come they changed the law just for this drug such that should you come to develop side effects or die, you cannot sue??

If vaccines do not function unless a very high percentage of people engage, why is the UK government not?ensuring?that a very high number of people engage? Why has it “spent” so much of your tax purse yet not bothered to guarantee the minimum threshold of participation required for success?

Perhaps the government has not spent billions on the vaccine project. Perhaps it has earned billions and perhaps you are the spenders.

The insistence of Occam’s Razor

The term “conspiracy theorist” is the leading modern derogation. Designed to silence and shame opposition. Yet often the mainstream line we are urged to accept involves comedy levels of conspiracy. The government, pharma and media (Media Inc) have found a vaccine that does not need its mid and long term side effects exploring. But many parties coming together for the fairytale ending contravenes the simplicity insistent in Occam’s Razor. It is my contention that conspiracy is the establishment line. The news. The media norm. Yet the necessary complicated sophistry of many variables interacting defies the mathematical probability of Occam. How funny that intellectual defectors are tarred with the same brush, as if to deflect the very charge. You’re surely one of those nutty conspiracy theorists! Nice try. But no. Just maths.?

The flu jab I take each October took twenty-two years of knowledge of the new disease to develop. Why are we not taking the early trial versions that were developed in 1919 – four months into human testing??

Like scientists cloning sheep – the charge being – why are you cloning a species whose members already look and act identical ? – you cannot start dishing out a “vaccine” with no long-term data to eighty year olds and tell me this is proof that there will be no long-term side effects. We are not all Kirk Douglas. Exactly how will long-term (even mid-term) side effects become apparent? Even if the recipient is still alive in ten years time, in our senior years we are replete with a myriad of age-related conditions as standard. Or to put it another way, do I look like I was born yesterday, mate? (see my age-related rebuke? What can I tell you? It’s straight from the hip.)

Orwellian?

Billions of pounds out of the tax purse and into the pocket of the pharmaceutical corporations and the government in significant measure (Corporation tax) is just the price. It is not the cost. We do not know the cost yet.?

War and ill health: big business?

Given that we still do not have within our possession the big pieces of the jigsaw called?How the Virus Spreads, and given that there are large gaps in our knowledge as to it’s latency period, how and when it gives birth to the COVID_19 disease, the full range of its symptomatic portfolio, what organs it is attempting to shut down (a year ago it was going for my lungs: now it’s after my stomach) and why, where it came from, when it arrived, how it will behave in the long term and basically what the thing is, how do we expect to cure our species of it? Whoever solved a problem that they could not even wholly identify??

Somebody near you is marketing a vaccine as a cure for a disease that they freely admit to not even understanding. Ask any doctor if science has ever found a genuine cure to a disease without knowing the disease in earnest.?

If you don’t know what I look like, how can you assassinate me??

This new claimant is getting super-rich from patient take-up. Meanwhile all the science that ever existed says the claims simply have to be not so much false as absolutely unproven. Science devoid of data. How could that possibly go wrong? When did science devoid of data ever go right? The answer is?never?– for the simple reason that that’s not science. No data an’ all. Why are you not concerned??

The trouble with outsourcing

What’s up? Are my Thalidomide and weed comparisons not close enough for you? OK. Let’s talk specifically about vaccinations. How about vaccinations for diseases caused by contageous respiratory viruses??Close enough? In all medical history, in time, let’s round it off to years, how fast has a vaccine that has generally been considered successful, taken to produce from the novel incidence of said virus on the species to delivery into the arms of the population en masse? And for one bonus point, why is that??

Say again? Can’t hear you? Cat got your tongue, sweetie??

Consuming TV and thinking that you are thinking for yourself is not thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself is.?

A game game or a real game?

The media presentation is external. But your interpretation of it is on you, Much like Heads or Tails. It’s your call. The coin is two-sided. For recreation players, there can only be two answers. For everyone else, there are three. This pandemic is not a game. But for argument’s sake let’s say that it is a game. But not a game game. A real game.?

What is the probability that the current and any forthcoming vaccines (launched with less than five years data) carry no long-term side effects of a nature that would at least make you think twice before consuming them, or decide to hold off ? In the history of all medicine, when did that ever happen? What, you mean little side effects like Migraine or big ones like epigenetic deformity, congenital illness and death? Here’s the qualitative answer:?no one knows.

This is not possibility. It is probability. And it’s not rocket science. It’s basic maths.?

All the scare stories and social media memes about the vaccines being?unsafe?beyond their test terms are known to you. Such disinformation is therefore superfluous to consideration here. And it is disinformation in deed.?

But broadcast communications about the vaccines being?safe?to a term beyond that in which they were tested? This too being disinformation? I’m gonna hazard a guess that I’m the first out of the traps.?

I table the motion laid out at the start of this article. Now hit me with the antithesis and let’s roll. I’m all ears. Anyone??

Thanks for reading.

We are one        

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This article was inspired by silence.