Why I won’t have a Covid booster

In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s not-really-vaccines. But anecdotes lack statistical heft. Sceptical viewers might too easily dismiss individual stories of the harms caused by the biggest inoculation rollout in history as freakish aberrations, mere coincidence (could relatives who happened to have been recently vaccinated really have died from something else?) or put it down to the cost of doing business at scale.

An official UK government report recently said that more than 2,200 Britons may have been killed by vaccine-induced injuries, but there’s plenty more hard evidence in governmentally collected databases that these fatalities are the tip of an iceberg’s worth of serious side-effects from Covid jabs. We don’t have space to do the subject justice here, either. But broadly, the frequency of dire side-effects from these vaccines, whose approval was rushed through on an emergency basis, are many times higher than those of traditional tried-and-tested vaccines (polio, MMR). Owing to troublesome, ad hoc reporting, the official stats may show just a fraction of the real numbers of Covid vaccine casualties.

I’m triple vaccinated – a status entailing three inoculations with an experimental medicine across only nine months; extrapolated, that’s four jabs per year. Many a well-adjusted, sensible member of the public (a description that may not capture me) must have made this same resolution: I do not want a second booster. Much less do I want a tenth booster or a 37th booster. As a grown-up, I’d also like to be given credit for being capable of doing my own research and weighing the odds on my own behalf. That means I don’t wish to be blackmailed, again, by being told that if I don’t let the state inject into my bloodstream whatever concoction Big Pharma has cooked up this week, I won’t be allowed to board a flight, cross international borders or eat in a restaurant.

From the first bells-and-whistles announcement of this miracle cure for what ails us, we’ve seemed caught up in sci-fi flick whose premise is outlandish. ‘Scientists’ toil-and-trouble, boil-and-bubble up a nostrum to protect against a novel virus. With the help of national leaders and public health authorities, and armed with the catchy slogan that ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’, they set about to inoculate the entire population of the human race with a hastily formulated drug whose trials cut more than a few corners and whose long-term effects are unknown.

Early in the film, the audience is already dubious. The entire species? Really? As our plot proceeds, these good Samaritans pump this same sacred elixir into all the children, down to babies only six months old – when children aren’t even at any real risk of harm from the evil virus. ‘Oh, no!’ women gasp, cowering in the theatre’s front row. ‘Not the babies! They’re the future!’ Impatient viewers grumble to their mates: ‘Give me a break. That would never happen in real life.’

These films are predictable, so you know what comes next. Whoops! The ‘vaccine’ doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Depending on who’s writing the script, either the consequences are unintended, set in train by genuinely virtuous worthies with a tad too much faith in their own competence, or the outcome flows from the deliberate scheming of devious technocrats who plan to cull or pacify the species, the better to rule the world. Either way, our elixir goes horribly wrong. Everyone starts dropping dead in the streets, just as they did in that Chinese video of February 2020 that turned out to be just funnin’.

Have we destroyed humanity at a stroke? No, anyone familiar with the genre could anticipate the emergence of a feisty, outnumbered, independently minded but ostracised band of heroic hold-outs – you know, including a nerdy twenty-something guy who’s in love with a sexy lady scientist, who alone has tried to warn the world that this magic prophylactic is dodgy, but no one will listen. Before the credits, it’s clear that the nerd, the forward-thinking but widely ignored epidemiologist and the rest of their kooky friends who knew better than to accept this untested ‘vaccine’ will begin, baby by baby, to repopulate the globe.

Outside the theatre, the plot is lower-key but follows the same arc. Covid vaccines don’t kill people – or not that many people. They just don’t work as envisaged. They don’t stop transmission. They don’t protect against Omicron and its sub-variants, as many a formerly self-righteous triple vaccinee has discovered on waking with a sore throat. Whatever the initial protective capacity, it doesn’t last: even the vaunted protection against hospitalisation and death wanes.

Meanwhile, the vaccine trials on young children were a scandal – their participants so few, their demonstration of efficacy so piddly, that demoralised medical personnel at the CDC and FDA, which waved through vaccine approval for under-fives, are deserting these agencies. Please don’t jab your baby.

For pharma, and for governments whose political wagons are hitched to pharma, the answer is more and more vaccines – one specific to Omicron! To BA.5! One that works against all coronaviruses! (Were the latter possible, we’d have had the common cold sorted long ago.) Over time, we turn whole populations into human pin-cushions. But I’ve a better idea. The widely disseminated fourth dose in Israel had a negligible effect on Covid. The prospect of downing dozens of mRNA smoothies gives me indigestion. I’d rather take my chances.

That isn’t prescriptive; others are welcome to roll up their sleeves. But people should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to keep offering themselves up as guinea pigs, while folks who decline to do so still get to board a plane. Deal? That’s a dumpy cinematic denouement, but reality is at its best when underwhelming.