No More COVID Boosters for Me. Here’s Why.

I have now seen enough to regret that that I had two COVID vaccines and a booster. I accepted these jabs because I trusted the public health authorities. I will not accept any more boosters. I am not alone. In the past six months, I have spoken to at least six friends who vote Democrat--all but one of them told me that they will not accept any more boosters and that they are concerned about risks associated with the vaccines.

I follow about ten well credentialed doctors online, including Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCoullough, who raise these concerns and many others. I've seen highly disturbing evidence that many smart doctors have been shut out of the conversation for three years (and they continue to be kept out of the conversation on legacy news outlets). We did not have a real or meaningful national conversation on the risks of these vaccines compared to the risks of COVID regarding many age groups. I saw the Great Barrington Declaration disparaged for mere political reasons, not medical. Our public health authorities told us that the vaccines were extremely safe, but now I'm not convinced of that.

Our public health authorities told us many things with the utmost confidence that have now been proven untrue. And although this is anecdotal, I've seen far too many videos of young healthy people collapsing, many of them dying. Over the past several years, I saw many numbers regarding the COVID risk of death that failed to break out the numbers of those who were obese, elderly and with comorbidities, failing to separate those from those of us who are healthy or young. I found out that many hospitals were conflating death with COVID with death from COVID, thereby inflating COVID death numbers.

Prior to vaccination, I was in very good health prior to getting vaccinated, very unlikely to die of COVID, even unvaccinated. I had an adverse reaction after my 2nd vaccination and it continues to affect me (inflamed toes). I know that I was also at some risk of harm from COVID, but as I write this, I believe we have been manipulated and lied to in many ways and that I have no meaningful way to be assured whether I was at more risk of harm from the vaccine than from the disease. Maybe someday we will know for sure.

The historically wretched track record of Big Pharma for lying to us in order to make $ multiplies my concern and frustration. Everyone will have their own opinion on this topic. I'm not suggesting to anyone else what they should do, but no more boosters for me.

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Bonus Concerns: See Steve Kirsch' "Pfizer's secret guide for how to make a vaccine "safe and effective," including these three tips:

Here’s Pfizer’s secret playbook for how to make a “safe and effective” vaccine:

Require full liability protection

Contracts require that the government isn’t allowed to reveal any adverse safety information without Pfizer’s express consent

Get the US government to agree that there will not be any ICD10 codes for:

Death of a fully vaxxed person from COVID Death from the COVID vaccine Injury from the COVID vaccine
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See also, this brand new article in the Australian Spectator: "Breaking the silence: do mRNA vaccine harms outweigh benefits?". An excerpt:

The evidence comes from the original double-blind, randomised control trials, that led to the approval of both Pfizer and Moderna by regulators worldwide. Malhotra explains, ‘In a reanalysis of the original trials with the Wuhan strain, eminent scientists essentially found you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event – for example hospitalisation, disability, or a life-changing event – than you were to be hospitalised with Covid. That means, in essence, the mRNA vaccine should likely never, ever have been approved for anybody in the first place.’

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Prevalence of Gender Ideology and the Placebo Effect

Is the nearly vertical upward spike in reported cases of gender transition due, in part, to the placebo effect? Leor Sapir Reports at City Journal,  "The Placebo Is the Point: A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research."

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.

Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”

It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide. Meantime, alternatives to drugs and surgeries (e.g., psychotherapy) are denigrated as harmful “conversion therapy,” setting the stage for a nocebo (harmful) effect on those who receive psychotherapy but not drugs.

From the viewpoint of those who have become intensely interested in treating dysphoria medically (rather than the "watch and see" method), many have uttered the phrase "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," which is "a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick."

 Biologist Colin Wright has been observing various parent groups. His observations give credence to that concern.

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Colin Wright: Sex is Binary

I've often referred to the work of Biologist Colin Wright. In this 5 minute video, Colin explains why biological sex is real, immutable, and binary.  To his explanation, I would add this: There is no third sex that has a third type of gamete.  To the extent that anyone claims there is a third sex that has a third type of gamete, please explain how that third type of gamete leads to the creation of offspring.

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The Affect of Overall Wealth and Egalitarianism on Sex Based Differences

Where would you expect to find sex based differences in career choice most diminished? If you guessed in countries with more wealth and egalitarian culture, you would be wrong. David Geary discusses and interprets the data in his article, "The Nurture of Evolved Sex Differences: Why favorable conditions produce larger sex differences." In wealthy countries like Norway, increased numbers of women pour into fields that are "people oriented" rather than "thing oriented." Consider, first, this data:

As reviewed by Schmitt and colleagues [33], sex differences in many aspects of personality, self-esteem, and cognitive and psychological functioning are larger in WEIRD, gender equal countries. For instance, women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men and men are more Machiavellian than women, on average. These differences are larger in more egalitarian countries. One potential reason is that religious prohibitions and proscriptions increase social cooperation and decrease self-serving behaviors in men and this in turn reduces the sex differences in these areas. The release of these prohibitions enables fuller expression of underlying differences; in this case, a decrease in men’s agreeableness and an increase in their use of Machiavellian social strategies [34].

Occupational segregation also increases in WEIRD, gender equal countries, presumably due to underlying differences in preferences for working with and helping people as contrasted with working with things [35]. Girls’ and women’s greater interest in other people and relationships follows from their greater investment in children and their need to develop BFF (best friends forever) relationships that serve as a source of social and emotional support. Boys’ and men’s greater interest in things likely follows from an evolutionary history of tool making, most of which is done by men.

[More . . . ]

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The Return of Transexual

Billboard Chris recommends that we give up on the word "gender." I agree. At its worst, it is an invitation to engage in old and reprehensible stereotypes (because girls who like to play with trucks are 100% girls). At its best, it is a meaningless word. At one point it was a polite way to avoid saying "sex."

By returning to "transexual," we recognize that there are only two sexes and that a person of one sex is presenting as the other. It is not a pejorative. It is recognizing some basic fact. Everyone out there, including people with sexual dysphoria who present themselves as the opposite sex, deserve kindness, respect and full legal rights as a person. Therefore, using "transexual" is truly not an insult. The benefit of using "transexual" is that we are recognizing basic biology and avoiding massive confusion associated with gender ideology. What confusion, you might ask?  How about this chart published by (believe it or not) Scientific American.

Two years ago I was scolded and told it was impolite, but I now disagree. I'm imagining the conversation when I start using transexual again. It will probably come down to a discussion (probably an argument) about who has the final say over how we use words. I'll see how it goes.

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