Letter to the Editor
Vaccine protesters have often said that the current vaccines are ‘experimental’. They rarely, if ever, explain what they mean and this leads a commentator like myself to ask a few questions. When does ‘experimental’ become accepted for them? Or rejected? How long do they think the ‘experimental’ phase lasts? Does the ‘experimental’ phase end when authorities pronounce the vaccine safe? As vaccines are often developed after the onset of the disease they attempt to prevent, aren’t such vaccines always ‘experimental’? Was the polio vaccine I scarfed down in early 1960’s ‘experimental’?
Another area vaccine protesters completely ignore is the methodology behind the authorization of any vaccine. As there is no such thing as a perfect vaccine—one with no side effects at all—authorization is granted on the basis of a risk assessment. All vaccines exhibit some harmful effects. So in order to assess the usefulness of any vaccine we have to look beyond individual ‘rights’ to communal ones. And the only method we have to do so is ‘risk assessment’ based on the ratio of beneficial to harmful effects determined by a communal count of events. Let me repeat: we cannot escape this common form of assessing danger. Indeed we all do it when we jaywalk. Arguing from individual rights alone asks us to never authorize a vaccine if a single person is harmed. This is not tenable for communal protection. But vaccine protesters deliberately say nothing about the validity of communal ‘rights’ even though they are reserved in Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which protesters so loudly proclaim as definitive. They attempt to divert our attention by quoting spurious figures for deaths from the vaccine itself. We are asked to take as our authority Drs. Bhakdi and Burckhardt. I read their non-peer reviewed preprint—which gave results from 15 autopsies, selected by relatives, not researchers, as to the cause of the deaths. It was stated that the only common factor was the vaccine shot given anywhere from 7 to 180 days before death occurred. There was no indication that the researchers gave any thought to other possible factors in the 15 deaths.
Then there is the infamous Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) which is a self reporting system for the U.S. only (Canada has its own) to which health providers are legally required to report. ANYONE can fill out the VAERS reporting form (I have read it); it does not ask directly for a cause of death but does ask if death occurred. The only way to determine cause of death would be to select reported incidents claiming a link to a vaccine and subject them individually to a rigorous analysis including autopsy. In reporting 150,000 Americans dead from vaccines Jessica Rose and Matthew Crawford did not do this—I have read their report as well. They attempted through statistical means alone to estimate the rate of under reporting anaphylaxis events on VAERS on the premise that anaphylaxis strikes within minutes of a vaccine shot and thus is unequivocally caused by the jab. They did NOT examine in any way causes of actual deaths reported. Having worked out that under reporting was 41X for anaphylaxis (for every reported anaphylaxis case there were 41 unreported), which they admit is a ‘ballpark’ figure, they apply this figure to VAERS reporting of claimed vaccine deaths to get their 150,000 largely unreported ones. Remember at no time did these researchers look at the actual cause of death, if reported, and VAERS does not ask directly for the cause of death.
We have the demand for complete and systematic testing implied by the word ‘experimental’. And we have a research ‘study’ put forward by Bhakdi and Burckhardt which meets no experimental standards whatsoever. Far too small a sample; no control group; no indication of compounding factors; no description of methodology—in short, no science; and a ‘study’ from Rose and Crawford purportedly linking deaths to vaccine but created entirely by statistical manipulation. And when presenting us with the ‘evidence’ for a massive number of deaths due to the vaccines, they do not present us with related figures for the incredibly high number of vaccinated persons who have suffered no side effects; both are necessary for risk assessment. If 15 deaths is enough to prove to vaccine protesters that vaccines caused them, can I put forward my dozen or so friends who have suffered no ill effects from three shots to prove vaccines don’t cause deaths? If you think both claims are ridiculous by any scientific or logical standards you are right.
And then we have the Freedom Truckers. A large number of reasonable Canadians who feel they have some grievances which are being ignored. Among them swim a very small group claiming they will hold Ottawa to ransom until the unelected Senate dissolves our elected national government and puts the country under the direction of the last symbol of real autocratic government in Canada—our Governor-General along with a council of true believers. As they agitate to actually remove much of the political freedom for millions of Canadians they prate about their rights to do so. Like ‘Trumpeters’ and Republicans in Congress they wish to do away with both democracy and freedom, and do it in the name of democracy and freedom.
We live in a cultural age where opinion is sacrosanct; I am entitled to it and you can’t question it. This leaves us with the elephant in the room: what if your opinion is based upon demonstrable lies which you try hard to get others to believe are true. How are we to respond when you hide behind the bulwark of sincerity, individual ‘rights’, and opinion ‘sanctity’? Perception becomes all and those of us who actually believe that there are some provable truths are just whistling in the wind. The truth is what an individual says it is. Evidence is unnecessary. Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism rides again.
Oakley Rankin
