I published this article yesterday on Medium. Today I’ve been notified that Medium has suspended it because it was “found in violation of the Medium Rules,” nothing specific, just the usual boilerplate. I have no idea what the find objectionable about it. Everything in the article is factual and correct.
Regular followers of my site may find in it echoes of previous posts, but this article is mostly new, an expanded and much improved version of what you may have seen here before. I hope you will take the time to read it.
— thg

Daniel Pinchbeck is an author, journalist, publisher and self-described “bohemian outsider.” I’ve known Daniel for several years, we’ve corresponded on and off, and in 2009 he interviewed me and recorded my views on “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization,” views that I expressed in my newly published book by that same name. 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 to read in his recent newsletter that he had chosen to take one of the experimental Covid injections. His rather lengthy essay, From Vacillation to Vaccination: Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson shot, cites many diverse sources of information that he has consulted in weighing the pros and cons of the various options, and then describes 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 likely motivations of the various actors, and their eventual outcomes and long term consequences. He provides numerous useful links for any who wish to become more fully informed.

As I read through his essay from start to finish, it occurred 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. Am I on the right track now? I think so but I’m no longer so adamant in my beliefs and I have a greater tolerance for ambiguity. 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 may be important, and I may give advice when asked, but I will not presume to decide the proper course of action for someone else.

In regard to the subject at hand, 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, and it is your responsibility, likewise, to take care of yourself. I will never knowingly put others in jeopardy, but I cannot allow your fears 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.” That is difficult for me to fathom, coming from someone I’ve long considered to be a free thinker who has for a long time demonstrated courage in swimming against the current.

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.” His part in what, what does it mean to participate in society, to go along to get along? Many scientific studies of human behavior have revealed that people will, more often than not, disregard the evident facts and choose to do what everyone else is doing, especially when the group behavior is prescribed by some authority figure.

Third is his fear (of fear) regarding the possible impact of Covid on himself or 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 treatment like the others. He says: “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, 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.” ADE stands for Antibody-dependent Enhancement, a phenomenon where the presence of antibodies makes a disease worse.

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, the principle of “informed consent” became established as the rule for any medical study or procedure. In one such case, prisoners, soldiers, and mental patients were intentionally infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “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.” 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? Who, after all, owns your body?

As I approach my 85th birthday, I know that statistically I am in the high risk group, but I’m also aware that the human immune system, having evolved over thousands of generations and tens of thousands of years, is the most powerful defense we have against disease. My own personal immune system has been informed and trained by a severe case of the Hong Kong flu in 1968, a disease that reportedly caused over one million deaths worldwide, and by a bad case of typhoid while I was in India in 2007, and by numerous colds and sinus infections over the years, not to mention all of the usual childhood diseases that we all experienced when I was in my early formative years in the 1930s and 40s. So I’m inclined to trust my immune system now. I will take reasonable precautions to keep it strong and to avoid pathogens that might cause serious disease. I believe that if I do fall ill to this infectious disease I will survive it, as the vast majority have, especially if I can get access to proven treatments that if administered early can help me to recover. And if I don’t survive it, so be it, I’m ready to accept my mortality and embrace my fate.

I trust my natural immunity more than I trust experimental inoculations that were rushed through the development process that usually requires much more extensive testing and takes from 5 to 10 years to complete, and I trust it more than I trust the present global power elite that seem intent on getting every person on the planet to accept inoculation and to conform to whatever further dictates they care to impose in advancing their plan for a “Great Reset,” a plan that sounds benign until you look deeper into it. Is all this really about protecting public health? Do huge pharmaceutical companies that are given immunity from liability put my health and yours ahead of their profits? Their past record of frequent malfeasance causes me to greatly doubt that they put anything ahead of profit maximization. I also have serious doubts about the safety of these inoculations. The numbers of adverse effects and deaths from the various “vaccines” that are being reported is extremely troubling. In a recent presentation at the America’s Frontline Doctors summit, Dr. Lee Merritt, reported the numbers that have been compiled by the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and they are staggering. One must wonder why the vaccination program has not been halted in the face of such a miserable record, and why any informed person would agree to be a “guinea pig” in such an experiment.

As far as spreading the virus to others, The World Health Organization itself has now concluded that asymptomatic spread of the disease is “very rare.” That being the case, why have we not been advised to isolate the ill and let the healthy go about their business? If and when I do manifest symptoms, I will then act according to common sense and self-isolate to avoid spreading disease to others.

But most importantly for me it comes down to this: Life is more than breath and pulse, flesh and blood, muscle and bone. The fear of death inhibits true life which goes beyond the physical aspect; it is spiritual — free, adventuresome and spontaneous, and open to unknown possibilities. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). And this same essential truth, from the more secular point of view has been stated by W.H. Auden: Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die. I pray that whenever fear arises, I might find the courage to push through it, embrace my destiny, and choose to truly live.

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