I know Daniel Pinchbeck, we’ve corresponded on and off for many years and in 2009 he interviewed me and recorded my views on the end of money and the future of civilization. Daniel is a brilliant thinker and prolific writer whose knowledge covers a broad scope, and he digs deep when researching topics of fundamental and universal concern. For those reasons, I tend to pay attention to what he says.

I was surprised by his latest newsletter, From Vacillation to Vaccination: Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson shot. This essay is long and comprehensive in outlining the many diverse sources of information that Daniel has consulted in weighing the pros and cons of the various experimental Covid injections and his somewhat contorted process of reaching his decision. He raises all of the pertinent questions about the pandemic, its cause(s) and official reactions to it, the motivations of the various actors, and the eventual outcomes and long term consequences. He provides numerous links for any who wish to become more fully informed.

Reading through it from start to finish, it occurs to me that one’s decision to take the injection or not is less a matter of the “science,” and more a question of one’s particular values, attitudes and beliefs, which are, for better or for worse, heavily influenced by each person’s cultural conditioning and the information sources they are aware of and choose to follow. That is something I know from my own experience, having had my own mind-changing “wake up call” that pulled me out of the “matrix” more than 45 years ago. I wonder, am I on the right track now? Maybe; I try to keep tabs on my internal compass of conscience and compassion by daily meditation, and I remain open to hearing different points of view. I think my conclusions are correct, but I acknowledge that I may be wrong, and that is why I refrain from telling others what to do. I can share information that I think important, and may advise when asked, but I will never coerce anyone to take off their mask, nor will I do anything to prevent them from being injected if that is their choice. Uncertainty is a constant in life and everyone has a right to decide what the right choice is for them. It is my responsibility to take care of myself as best I can, based on what I know. It is your responsibility, likewise, to take care of yourself. I will never knowingly put others in jeopardy, but I cannot allow your fear or mine to damage my personal integrity.

Despite the many alarm bells about the various Covid injections that Daniel acknowledges and references in his essay, he went ahead and took one anyway. There are three things that appear to have ultimately tipped the balance for him.

First, I detect a sense of helplessness and resignation in his statement that, “Perhaps one reason I finally acquiesced, sadly enough, is my sense that we have gone too far down this road at this point to be able to pull the brakes.” Second is his need to be perceived as a responsible member of mainstream society, which he reveals in saying, “Even though the vaccines are leaky and imperfect and I don’t trust the entire apparatus that creates them, I also desired to participate in society and do my little part.” Third is his fear (of fear) regarding the possible impact of Covid on himself and others. He says, “I didn’t want to be afraid that my failure to get a vaccine would cause my mother, or other elderly people, to get sick, or that I would get a more severe case of the Delta variant in the next months — considering its hyper-infectiousness, nearly everyone is going to get it at some point.”

That final point indicates that he believes that asymptomatic people can spread the illness and that nearly everyone is going to get it anyway, So what that boils down to is a “cover my ass” move, as if to say: “I did what I was asked to do so when you catch the illness and die it will not be my fault.”

At the same time, Daniel tried to hedge his bets by seeking out the particular variety of injection that he thinks may be less dangerous because it is more conventional and not an mRNA like the others: “I find it a bit ironic that I finally got vaccinated just as we discover that the vaccines may be more dangerous and of much less value than was originally touted. In fact, one of my main reasons to avoid the shot was concern over ADE[i], particularly when it comes to the experimental mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. That is why I chose the less popular Johnson & Johnson one, which relies on more traditional mechanisms, even though I had to spend a day asking in pharmacies around Manhattan to find it.”

Many people, examining the same information as Daniel, have made different choices. One need not be totally against vaccinations to reject a specific injection or treatment. When it comes to bodily sovereignty, everyone’s personal choice needs to be respected. In the wake of the Nuremburg Nazi war crime trials, as well as some notorious medical experiments and studies that were conducted by American scientists,[ii] the principle of “informed consent[iii]” became established as the rule for any medical study or procedure. In considering the questions of personal choice, vaccine mandates and medical passports, the question before us is this: Shall we allow our present fear to drive us backward into that dark realm of inhumane coercion?

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[i] Antibody-dependent Enhancement is a phenomenon where the presence of antibodies makes a disease worse.

[ii] One example is the U.S.-sponsored experiment, conducted Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 in which “nearly 700 men and women—prisoners, soldiers, mental patients—were intentionally infected with syphilis (hundreds more people were exposed to other sexually transmitted diseases as part of the study) without their knowledge or consent.” https://www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study

[iii] “Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient’s right to direct what happens to their body.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430827/