Not a gambler

I thank John Duck for his sarcastic "Well done" accolade but I defend myself against his accusation of my being a "two bob each way" gambler.

My decisions and actions throughout the COVID pandemic have been largely driven by fear. Firstly, I wore a mask outdoors during my daily walks because I feared Victoria Police. Secondly, I was 'vaccine hesitant' (having been previously vaccinated with all the usual things since childhood right up to the latest pneumonia vaccine) because of Donald Trump's declaration of "Operation Warp Speed", which seemed to overturn completely the normal rules of caution that should be observed to the highest degree when contemplating mass-vaccination of all humanity.

Although my hesitancy hardened into resistance as our Premier's aggression toward 'disobedient' unvaccinated Victorians became increasingly manifest, I eventually succumbed through a combination of social/peer pressure, combined medical/state 'bullying', my personal co-morbidities (resulting in two major operations last year) and the fact that my unvaccinated status forced the cancellation of a three-night 'escape' last October and carried the threat of ongoing exclusion from all hospitality venues.

So my wife and I both 'gave in' and received the AZ jabs last October and November. In short, multifactorial 'fear' was the driver of both our initial hesitancy and our eventual capitulation.

Being late starters, our 'opportunity' to get boosted also came late, by which time rumours of vaccine ineffectiveness and adverse reactions had begun circulating (as they increasingly continue to do so) and our Premier's obsession to continue punishing the un-boosted came completely unstuck through the arrival of un-boosted overseas visitors.

So now, ongoing fear causes us to be 'booster hesitant' but, to understand such fears, you have to be open to intellectual diversity beyond the mainstream narrative. This brings me to address Mr Duck's question, "And as for the medical 'establishment', what would they know anyway?"

I'll be kind and not dwell on the fact that many of them seem unable to tell us what a woman is but, rather, focus on one thing they do know very well, and that is that viral vaccine resistance, while being rare relative to bacterial antibiotic resistance, is not unknown and is now commonplace for the influenza virus.

For now, annual 'flu shots seem to be keeping up with the micro-evolution of influenza, but the COVID virus seems to be evolving at a pace impossible to match with prophylactic vaccines – a pace which might well be described as "Warp Speed" This should ring alarm bells everywhere as rumours of adverse reactions to COVID vaccines grow, some of them involving abnormal blood clotting.

The immune system and the blood clotting system are both enormously complicated and it would be a brave scientist who claimed that both systems were fully understood in their mechanisms, pathologies and interactions.

I conclude my tale of doubt and fear by observing that the sorts of people currently messing around with spike proteins and mRNA are not very different from the medico-scientific experts who not so long ago thought that their knowledge of the human genome was sufficiently complete to allow them to describe it as well over 90 per cent "Junk DNA".

This figure continues to be revised downward and currently hovers at around 75 per cent. Truly, a little knowledge can be dangerous, especially if it is acted upon by powerful elites in thrall to vested interests.

Brian Chapman, Drouin