“
Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
”
”
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
“
Fear is a virus. Music is a virus and a vaccine and a cure.
”
”
Sarah Pinsker (A Song for a New Day)
“
the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of the New York Times? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me.
”
”
Ann Patchett (Commonwealth)
“
used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.
”
”
Zadie Smith (Intimations)
“
We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine added. “We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day.” Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. “Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.
”
”
Hugh Howey (Second Shift: Order (Shift, #2))
“
This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.
”
”
Matt Parker (Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors)
“
Some people say love is contagious. You might start writing verses of your own next.”
“I believe my constitution can handle it. But what about yours?”
“Fortunately, I have been vaccinated against love by a mixture of intelligence and good common sense.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories)
“
One more day, man. I’ll spend one more day with her. If there is a chance of getting a vaccination or a cure, I owe it to Mike and his family to find it. One more day. If it doesn’t pan out, I’m leaving her.” He thought about going back into the truck,
”
”
Mark Tufo (For the Fallen (Zombie Fallout, #7))
“
There had been a lot of improvements in medicine since the days of Original Bob, but some things hadn’t changed all that much. Cancer could be nipped in the bud if caught early, but there was no vaccination yet. And the knife was still often the only effective treatment.
”
”
Dennis E. Taylor (For We Are Many (Bobiverse, #2))
“
Twenty orphans, one of whom was vaccinated, were put on board a ship. On the eighth day, when a pustule had developed, a second orphan was vaccinated, and so on. When the ship reached its destination, the transfer of vaccinia was made to local residents and the vaccination chain continued.
”
”
D.A. Henderson (Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer)
“
There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous.
”
”
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
“
My identity may have been stolen in Vaccine Court, but the corruption in that court has robbed children and families in America of so much more. Justice must come for all. I pray the day of reckoning is close.
”
”
Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
“
What I really don't understand is why many doctors kick patients our of their practice over this issue. What's wrong with simply disagreeing with parents but still providing medical care to their child? That's what the American Academy of Pediatrics tells us we should do. Read them the riot act once then move on and be their doctor. A family that chooses not to vaccinate still needs medical care. Sure, their child may catch a vaccine-preventable disease, and yes, their unvaccinated child decreases the local herd immunity and puts other kids at risk, but that is still their choice. Parents of patients refuse to follow my medical advice every day.
”
”
Robert W. Sears (The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child (Sears Parenting Library))
“
Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
”
”
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
“
Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries.
”
”
Deborah Blum (A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers)
“
The Coronavirus quarantine may make many want to scream. Let's hope soon they'll develop a milestone vaccine. Sure, the unknown can be daunting and scary. So, for now, just continue to say those Hail Marys. Take it day by day, and it shall all be okay!...
”
”
Denise LaRossa
“
Polio was effectively eliminated throughout the world. And then people just … kind of forgot all about polio. This seems to be the human response to any disease. People forget diseases ever existed the minute they are no longer being affected by them. Maybe that’s understandable. Maybe if we all thought about all the potential diseases the world is teeming with, and the extent to which we are, every day, dancing on the edge of a volcano, the world would seem too terrifying to walk around in at all. Or we’d just vaccinate our kids.
”
”
Jennifer Wright (Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them)
“
We are at the tail end of a decline in infant mortality that began just over a century ago. Babies no longer wander into open hearths or are mauled by marauding pigs. We have vaccines, lead-free educational toys, diapers that can sop up a typhoon. But we have never been more worried.
”
”
Nicholas Day (Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle: A Journey Through Infancy)
“
in a letter to the New York Times, Dr. Hans Neumann from the New Haven Department of Health noted that based on the projected scale of the immunizations, within two days of getting a flu shot, about 2,300 people would have a stroke and 7,000 would have a heart attack. “Why?” he asked. “Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots.” Likewise, in the week following a flu vaccine, another 9,000 people would contract pneumonia, of whom 900 would die. These would certainly occur after a flu shot, but not as a consequence of it. “Yet,” wrote Neumann, “can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind?” Grandma got the flu vaccine in the morning, and she was dead in the afternoon. Although association does not equal causation, this thinking could lead to a public backlash against vaccinations that would threaten future programs.
”
”
Jeremy Brown (Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic)
“
The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that, at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in women. A vaccine is now available—these days, vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed—not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it. We
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
“
In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties or invite a bunch of people over,” reported Reiber.
”
”
Kathleen McAuliffe (This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society)
“
A vaccine is now available - these days, vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed - not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
“
I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.
”
”
Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)
“
For Redfield it was one of the most difficult times of his four-decade professional life. “15 Days to Slow the Spread” was important, but not enough. In private he told others of his deepest fears. “It’s not to stop the spread,” Redfield said. “We were now in a race. I think we all understood now we were in a race. We’re in a marathon. We’re in a two-year, three-year race. Not a one-year, not a six-month race. The race is to slow and contain this virus as much as humanly possible, with all our efforts, till we can get a highly efficacious vaccine deployed for all the American people and then beyond that to the rest of the world.
”
”
Bob Woodward (Rage)
“
Countries measured their success by the size of their territory, the increase in their population and the growth of their GDP – not by the happiness of their citizens. Industrialised nations such as Germany, France and Japan established gigantic systems of education, health and welfare, yet these systems were aimed to strengthen the nation rather than ensure individual well-being. Schools were founded to produce skilful and obedient citizens who would serve the nation loyally. At eighteen, youths needed to be not only patriotic but also literate, so that they could read the brigadier’s order of the day and draw up tomorrow’s battle plans. They had to know mathematics in order to calculate the shell’s trajectory or crack the enemy’s secret code. They needed a reasonable command of electrics, mechanics and medicine in order to operate wireless sets, drive tanks and take care of wounded comrades. When they left the army they were expected to serve the nation as clerks, teachers and engineers, building a modern economy and paying lots of taxes. The same went for the health system. At the end of the nineteenth century countries such as France, Germany and Japan began providing free health care for the masses. They financed vaccinations for infants, balanced diets for children and physical education for teenagers. They drained festering swamps, exterminated mosquitoes and built centralised sewage systems. The aim wasn’t to make people happy, but to make the nation stronger. The country needed sturdy soldiers and workers, healthy women who would give birth to more soldiers and workers, and bureaucrats who came to the office punctually at 8 a.m. instead of lying sick at home. Even the welfare system was originally planned in the interest of the nation rather than of needy individuals. When Otto von Bismarck pioneered state pensions and social security in late nineteenth-century Germany, his chief aim was to ensure the loyalty of the citizens rather than to increase their well-being. You fought for your country when you were eighteen, and paid your taxes when you were forty, because you counted on the state to take care of you when you were seventy.30 In 1776 the Founding Fathers of the United States established the right to the pursuit of happiness as one of three unalienable human rights, alongside the right to life and the right to liberty. It’s important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself. Crucially, Thomas Jefferson did not make the state responsible for its citizens’ happiness. Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe. According to Richard Carter’s history of the discovery, on that day “people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, . . . took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, and forgave enemies.”4 The city of New York offered to honor Salk with a ticker-tape parade, which he politely declined.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Most people think they work; they can kill themselves with their diligence. They think they’re building Atenas, but they’re only shining their own shoes. When I was young I used to be astonished at how little progress was made in the world—all those fine words, all those noble talkative men and women, those plans, those cornerstones, those constitutions drawn up for ideal republics. They don’t make a dent on the average man or woman. The wife, like Delilah, crops her husband’s hair; the father stifles his children. From time to time everyone goes into an ecstasy about the glorious advance of civilization—the miracle of vaccination, the wonders of the railroad. But the excitement dies down and there we are again—wolves and hyenas, wolves and peacocks.
”
”
Thornton Wilder (The Eighth Day: A Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics))
“
In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
”
”
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
“
In 1931, at the age of four, my father was diagnosed with polio. He was
immediately put into an isolation room at the local hospital in Brooklyn,
New York. There was no cure and no vaccine for polio at that time, and city
dwellers lived in fear of its spread. For several weeks my father had no human
contact, save for an occasional visit by a masked nurse. His mother
came to see him every day, but that’s all she could do—wave to him and try
to talk to him through the glass pane on the door. My father remembers
calling out to her, begging her to come in. It must have broken her heart,
and one day she ignored the rules and went in. She was caught and sternly
reprimanded. My father recovered with no paralysis, but this image has always
stayed with me: a small boy alone in a room, gazing at his mother
through a pane of glass.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
“
All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wild-maned winter's chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophmores in their new junior blazers, like Saturday's magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straight-razor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetra-packs of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer's yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg's Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Birds Eye frozen peas, shredded spinach, French-fried onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more wholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.
”
”
Richard Fariña (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me)
“
Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance)
“
When I was in the seventh grade, in a health class, the teacher read an article. A mother learned that the neighbor children had chicken pox. She faced the probability that her children would have it as well, perhaps one at a time. She determined to get it all over with at once.
So she sent her children to the neighbor’s to play with their children to let them be exposed, and then she would be done with it. Imagine her horror when the doctor finally came and announced that it was not chicken pox the children had; it was smallpox.
The best thing to do then and what we must do now is to avoid places where there is danger of physical or spiritual contagion.
We have little concern that our grandchildren will get the measles. They have been immunized and can move freely without fear of that.
While in much of the world measles has virtually been eradicated, it is still the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children.
From money generously donated by Latter-day Saints, the Church recently donated a million dollars to a cooperative effort to immunize the children of Africa against measles. For one dollar, one child can be protected.
”
”
Boyd K. Packer
“
By March, front-line doctors around the world were spontaneously reporting miraculous results following early treatment with HCQ, and this prompted growing anxiety for Pharma. On March 13, a Michigan doctor and trader, Dr. James Todaro, M.D., tweeted his review of HCQ as an effective COVID treatment, including a link to a public Google doc.48,49 Google quietly scrubbed Dr. Todaro’s memo. This was six days before the President endorsed HCQ. Google apparently didn’t want users to think Todaro’s message was missing; rather, the Big Tech platform wanted the public to believe that Todaro’s memo never even existed. Google has a long history of suppressing information that challenges vaccine industry profits. Google’s parent company Alphabet owns several vaccine companies, including Verily, as well as Vaccitech, a company banking on flu, prostate cancer, and COVID vaccines.50,51 Google has lucrative partnerships with all the large vaccine manufacturers, including a $715 million partnership with GlaxoSmithKline.52 Verily also owns a business that tests for COVID infection.53 Google was not the only social media platform to ban content that contradicts the official HCQ narrative. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, MailChimp, and virtually every other Big Tech platform began scrubbing information demonstrating HCQ’s efficacy, replacing it with industry propaganda generated by one of the Dr. Fauci/Gates-controlled public health agencies: HHS, NIH and WHO. When President Trump later suggested that Dr. Fauci was not being truthful about hydroxychloroquine, social media responded by removing his posts.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap. Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap. A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap. “Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him. “It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
“
The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that, at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in women. A vaccine is now available—these days, vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed—not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Unfortunately, many of us begin life on this planet with toxins in our cells. Some we inherited from our parents and grandparents, and even more toxins entered our cells at birth. In fact, in those days general anesthesia for women in the delivery room was standard practice! As infants, we received vaccinations, many of which contained mercury. Later, we probably took antibiotics that destroyed the beneficial bacteria we needed for healthy digestion. And as the years passed, we Boomers continued to be assaulted by a “chemical soup” of pollutants—from processed foods in aluminum foil (TV dinners) to household pesticides. I actually remember one summer my brother and I entertained ourselves by taking the mercury from a thermometer, rolling it into a ball, and playing with it—our own version of toxic Play-Doh. No one knew… .
”
”
Donna Gates (The Baby Boomer Diet: Body Ecology's Guide to Growing Younger: Anti-Aging Wisdom for Every Generation)
“
The problem, and I am making this percentage up, is that like 80% of the country did receive their vaccination, were infected, and now spent their days trying to eat non-infected people. Unless it was raining. They hated rain, which would make Seattle residents generally safe in a holy fuck it finally pays off for all of the terrible weather kind of way.
”
”
Phillip Tomasso III (Evacuation (Vaccination Trilogy, #2))
“
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.
”
”
Nina Shapiro (Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice—How to Tell What's Real and What's Not)
“
..."You're getting a sort of vaccination this year. If you don't know it now, you'll find it out some day. But it's going to keep you from dying of a terrible disease."
Lucinda was filled with amazement… "What is the disease, Uncle Earle?" she asked solemnly.
"Snobbishness-priggishness-the Social Register. I don't care a damn what you call it, Snoodie, as long as you get your antitoxin before the disease gets you.
”
”
Ruth Sawyer
“
Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .
”
”
Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
“
The teacher picks a science issue that has political traction at the time, such as climate disruption, vaccines and autism, GM food or the like, and phrases it as an antiscience proposition that students will argue for, using rhetorical arguments, or argue against, using scientific arguments. The trick is that the teacher does not determine who will argue for or against the motion until the day of the debate, by a coin toss. This way, all students have to research both sides of the debate. In so doing, they quickly learn the difference between the knowledge-based scientific arguments against the antiscience proposition, and the non-scientific, emotionally persuasive rhetorical arguments in favor.
”
”
Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
“
The term 'intellectual ghetto' was coined by David Bauder in his 2016 Associated Press series "Divided America" and was meant to encapsulate the communities users had segregated themselves into by curating dissenting opinions out of their lives. Because we now have a seemingly infinite number of news outlets to choose from, whether they be historically reputable publications like The New York Times or an anti-vaccine blog that only came online the day before yesterday, Americans can now choose the news they consumer a la carte and filter out anything that overtly challenges their beliefs, even if those challenges are competent and necessary.
”
”
Jared Yates Sexton (The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage)
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James Young Simpson studied medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, graduating in 1832. By the mid-1840s, Simpson had climbed the ranks to become a professor of midwifery in Edinburgh, relieving the pain of childbirth with ether, like his American colleagues. But Simpson wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a more potent agent, one that was pleasant to inhale, worked quicker, and didn’t cause vomiting upon awakening. He settled on chloroform, a combination of hydrogen, carbon, and chlorine. On November 4, 1847, Simpson invited two of his assistants, James Duncan and George Keith, and some of his friends, including a Ms. Petrie, to a dinner party. When the dinner was over, he asked his guests to sniff a variety of volatile gases, including chloroform. Duncan and Keith immediately lost consciousness, falling under the table. Ms. Petrie also lost consciousness, but not before declaring, “I’m an angel! I’m an angel! Oh, I’m an angel!” The next day, without animal studies, clinical trials, or federal approval, Simpson administered chloroform to a woman during a particularly painful delivery. “I placed her under the influence of chloroform,” recalled Simpson, “by moistening half a teaspoon of the liquid onto a pocket handkerchief [and placing it] over her mouth and nostrils. The child was expelled in about twenty minutes. When she awoke, [the mother] observed to me that she had enjoyed a very comfortable sleep.” The parents were so elated that they named their daughter Anesthesia. On November 10, 1847, Simpson told a group of colleagues what he had done. Ten days later, he described his experience in a medical journal, claiming that chloroform was more potent and easier to administer than nitrous oxide, and quicker to induce unconsciousness and less flammable than ether. Now the entire medical world knew about it.
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Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
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The covid regimes were popularized in present day democracies and were most dystopian and oppressive in places that once believed themselves "free and democratic." If there is indeed a reckoning to be had, democracy must not be spared from the conversation.
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Aviel Oppenheim (Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain)
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The coronavirus finally began to enter the consciousness of Trump’s reelection campaign. On the morning of February 28, Jared Kushner spoke by phone with Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager. “We need more visuals,” Parscale told Kushner. Trump should be “standing in front of amazing things. Put the white coat on. Look at the vaccine being made. Show America we’re doing stuff.” That day the stock market fell for the seventh day in a row, reaching its worst week since 2008. Later that day at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it.” He called Democrats’ criticism of his handling of the virus “their new hoax,” after the Russian investigation and impeachment, and their “single talking point.
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Bob Woodward (Rage)
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Recently, scientists in the Netherlands unearthed an X-ray machine similar to those used in the early 1900s. They found that the amount of radiation emitted was 1,500 times greater than that to which patients are exposed today. Also, where exposure times in the early 1900s ranged from ten minutes to several hours, exposure times today are about twenty milliseconds (thousandths of a second). And, unlike the early days of X-ray technology, medical technicians now leave the room before turning on the machine. Between 1896 and 1930, tens of thousands of radiologists, technicians, and patients suffered burns, hair loss, and bone pain; thousands lost fingers, hands, and arms; and hundreds died from cancer.
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Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
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In fact, Moderna never had the actual coronavirus on its premises. It never needed a sample, just the computational sequence of the virus’s RNA. Once Moderna got the sequence, the entire process to construct a candidate vaccine took just two days.
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Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
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Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within twenty-eight days of receiving the vaccine. In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within twenty-eight days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.80
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Leigh Anne Tuohy was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another. Jump-start him. She had already satisfied his most basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and health care. He had pouted for three days after she had taken him to get the vaccines he should have had as a child. It was amazing he hadn’t already died some nineteenth-century death from, say, the mumps. (When she tried to get him a flu shot the second year in a row, he said, “You white people are obsessed with that flu shot. You don’t need one every year.”) Now she was moving on to what she interpreted as his cultural deficiencies.
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Michael Lewis (The Blind Side)
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The raw data from CDC’s 1999 Verstraeten study showed that children who took thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccines in their first thirty days suffered an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism than children who did not.30 Verstraeten
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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train me, nice as could be other than acting like she’s my mom, all honey-this and honey-that and “You think you can remember all that, sweetie?” Just three or four years out of high school herself. But she did have three kids, so probably she’d wiped so many asses she got stuck that way. I didn’t hold it against her. Coach Briggs’s brother stayed upstairs in the office. Heart attack guy was a mystery. First they said he might come back by the end of summer. Then they all stopped talking about him. As far as customers, every kind of person came in. Older guys would want to chew the fat outside in the dock after I loaded their grain bags or headgates or what have you. I handled all the larger items. They complained about the weather or tobacco prices, but oftentimes somebody would recognize me and want to talk football. What was my opinion on our being a passing versus running team, etc. So that was amazing. Being known. It was the voice that hit my ear like a bell, the day he came in. I knew it instantly. And that laugh. It always made you wish that whoever made him laugh like that, it had been you. I was stocking inventory in the home goods aisle, and moved around the end to where I could see across the store. Over by the medications and vaccines that were kept in a refrigerator case, he was standing with his back to me, but that wild head of hair was the giveaway. And the lit-up face of Donnamarie, flirting so hard her bangs were standing on end. She was opening a case for him. Some of the pricier items were kept under lock and key. I debated whether to go over, but heard him say he needed fifty pounds of Hi-Mag mineral and a hundred pounds of pelleted beef feed, so I knew I would see him outside. I signaled to Donnamarie that I’d heard, and threw it all on the dolly to wheel out to the loading dock. He pulled his truck around but didn’t really see me. Just leaned his elbow out the open window and handed me the register ticket. He’d kept the Lariat of course, because who wouldn’t. “You’ve still got the Fastmobile, I see,” I said. He froze in the middle of lighting a smoke, shifted his eyes at me, and shook his head fast, like a splash of cold water had hit him. “I’ll be goddamned. Diamond?” “The one,” I said. “How you been hanging, Fast Man?” “Cannot complain,” he said. But it seemed like he wasn’t a hundred percent on it really being me loading his pickup. He watched me in the side mirror. The truck bounced a little each time I hefted a mineral block or bag into the bed. Awesome leaf springs on that beauty. I came around to give him back his ticket, and he seemed more sure.
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Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead)
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The explanation didn’t seem quite so simple to Tom, but he let it suffice. “And what happened to ancient Earth?” he asked. “Oh dear, now you ask too much,” Michal said, turning. “That story is not so simple. We would have to start with the great virus at the beginning of the twenty-first century—” “The French,” Gabil cut in. “The Raison Strain.” “Not really the French,” Michal said. “A Frenchman, yes, but you can’t say it was . . . never mind. They thought it was a good thing, a vaccine, but it mutated under intense heat and became a virus. The whole business ravaged the entire population of Earth in a matter of three short weeks—” “Less than three,” Gabil inserted. “Less than three weeks.” “—and opened the door to the Deception.” “The Great Deception,” Gabil said. “Yes, the Great Deception.” Michal gave his friend a let-me-tell-the-story look. “From there we would have to move on to the time of the tribulations and wars. It would take a full day to tell you how other Earth—ancient Earth—saw the end. Clearly you don’t know all of the histories, do you?” “Obviously not.
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Ted Dekker (Black (The Circle #1))
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Children’s bodies and brains are still in an early developmental stage of growth until at least the age of three. To inject infants with a variety of vaccines, which contain toxins and materials the body will recognize as foreign contaminants seems an ill-conceived “health” policy. Before the age of one, it is not recommended by our healthcare organizations to allow a child to eat honey, because a child’s system is not developed enough to handle “natures perfect food.” Currently, we are not only injecting infants with a plethora of vaccines in their first year but are starting them out with a vaccine on their first day on the planet. Is it any wonder why we have such rampant illness in the infant and adolescent population today? A little common sense appears to be needed here.
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Stephen Heartland (Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States)
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those first days, they’d thrown everything but the kitchen sink at those infected. Vaccination didn’t work to protect people, and antivirals proved useless, as usual. The CDC had ordered him to abandon the willy-nilly disbursement of the drugs for fear of wasting stores when the nation was on the verge of a pandemic. Somehow the senator had finagled a few crates for them, but Steve hadn’t bothered prescribing them. Why throw good medicine after bad? He
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Dayna Lorentz (No Easy Way Out (No Safety In Numbers, #2))
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In those first days, they’d thrown everything but the kitchen sink at those infected. Vaccination didn’t work to protect people, and antivirals proved useless, as usual. The CDC had ordered him to abandon the willy-nilly disbursement of the drugs for fear of wasting stores when the nation was on the verge of a pandemic. Somehow the senator had finagled a few crates for them, but Steve hadn’t bothered prescribing them. Why throw good medicine after bad? He
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Dayna Lorentz (No Easy Way Out (No Safety In Numbers, #2))
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January 28: Marilyn arrives in San Francisco the day before embarking for Japan, where DiMaggio has been invited to make appearances. She breaks her thumb, although a DiMaggio relative said Joe was responsible for her injury. He seems to have been taken by surprise when she came up behind him, and he instinctively grabbed her hand and bent back her thumb. Dr. Clifton Bennett vaccinates Marilyn for her trip.
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Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
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Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My
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Noelle Hancock (My Year with Eleanor: A Memoir)
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DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.
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Lonely Planet (Discover Costa Rica (Lonely Planet Discover))
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The pediatrician Paul Offit mentioned to me, during an interview about his work, that he had recently seen two children hospitalized with influenza. Both had been immunized against everything on the childhood schedule except the flu, and both ended up on heart and lung machines. One lived, and the other died. “And then the next day, when someone comes into your office and says, ‘I don’t want to get that vaccine,’ you’re supposed to respect that decision?” Offit asked me. “You can respect the fear. The fear of vaccines is understandable. But you can’t respect the decision—it’s an unnecessary risk.
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Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
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We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and contaminated it with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS,” the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria maintained, urging parents to refuse vaccination.
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Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
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In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated.
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Kathleen McAuliffe (This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society)
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Putting this all together, Moore and Reiber predicted that the germ would prod people to seek out the company of others early in the infection, before it had blown its cover and triggered a counterattack by defense cells. Once they’d formulated a hypothesis, they decided it would be wise to conduct a pilot trial to see if the idea had any merit. The researchers tracked the social interactions of thirty-six people—none of whom knew the purpose of the study—before and after they got flu shots at a health clinic on the Binghamton campus. The change in the subjects’ behavior was huge, so notable that its magnitude surprised even Reiber and Moore. In the first three days after vaccination, coinciding with the time when the virus was most contagious, subjects interacted with twice as many people as they had before being inoculated. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties or invite a bunch of people over,” reported Reiber. “This happened with lots of our subjects. It wasn’t just one or two oddities.
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Kathleen McAuliffe (This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society)
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It was there. In my mind. After the call I’d just taken, after talking with LaForce. But I wouldn’t say it out loud. Wouldn’t even let myself form the complete thought in my head. Wasn’t believing it. No fucking way zombies were real. Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead – Fuck no. Fuck Milla Jovovich and all of that shit.
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Phillip Tomasso III (Vaccination (Vaccination Trilogy, #1))
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Similarly, a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent.17 Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public. As the McKinlays and Kass18 had predicted, vaccinologists successfully hijacked the astonishing success story—the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortalities of the first half of the twentieth century—and deployed it to claim for themselves, and particularly for vaccines, a revered and sanctified—and scientifically undeserving—prestige beyond criticism, questioning, or debate.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence.[11] Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine-learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it, and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine.[12] On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced. After preliminary testing, it was sent to the National Institutes of Health on February 24. And on March 16—just sixty-three days after sequence selection—the first dose went into a trial participant’s arm.
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Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
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Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, Italy. In this study, males receiving the first or second dose of mRNA-1273 had approximately a twelve times greater risk of myocarditis (95% CI of 4.09 to 36.83) or pericarditis (95% CI of 3.88 to 36.53) within seven days of vaccination
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Robert F. Kennedy (Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (Children’s Health Defense))
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People may ask, since Marxism is accepted as the guiding ideology by the majority of the people in our country, can it be criticized? Certainly it can. Marxism is scientific truth and fears no criticism. If it did, and if it could be overthrown by criticism, it would be worthless. In fact, aren't the idealists criticizing Marxism every day and in every way? And those who harbour bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas and do not wish to change -- aren't they also criticizing Marxism in every way? Marxists should not be afraid of criticism from any quarter. Quite the contrary, they need to temper and develop themselves and win new positions in the teeth of criticism and in the storm and stress of struggle. Fighting against wrong ideas is like being vaccinated -- a man develops greater immunity from disease as a result of vaccination. Plants raised in hothouses are unlikely to be hardy. Carrying out the policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend will not weaken, but strengthen, the leading position of Marxism in the ideological field.
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Mao Zedong (On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People)
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This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.
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Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)
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A 2017 CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within twenty-eight days of receiving the vaccine. In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within twenty-eight days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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In his early AIDS days, Dr. Fauci had thrashed FDA as inhumane for demanding randomized double-blind placebo studies at the height of the pandemic. Now, here he was doing what he had condemned by blocking an effective treatment simply because it would compete with his expensive patent-protected pharmaceutical, remdesivir, and vaccines.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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there have been 48,465 deaths among Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries within fourteen days of a first or second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.72,73 There are about 59.4 million Americans covered by Medicare, representing only 18.1 percent of the population, so these staggering numbers are roughly comparable to Steve Kirsch’s population-wide estimate of 150,000.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The raw data from CDC’s 1999 Verstraeten study showed that children who took thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccines in their first thirty days suffered an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism than children who did not.30 Verstraeten also documented a grim inventory of other neurological injuries including ADD/ADHD, speech and language delays, tics, and sleep disorders in children exposed to thimerosal. Verstraeten reported that these shocking signals prompted him to review, for the first time, the published medical literature, where he confirmed the alarming toxicity of mercury (thimerosal) to cause these injuries was biologically plausible.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The absurdity of expensive shots as a remedy for indigence, a salve for malnutrition, or the dearth of potable water is obvious when one considers that three billion people live on less than two dollars per day. Eight hundred and forty million people don’t have enough to eat. One billion lack clean water, or access to sanitation. One billion are illiterate. About a quarter of children in poor countries do not finish primary school.122 Poverty is a target-rich environment, but the data suggest that Gates’s vaccines miss the target altogether.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence.[11] Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine-learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it, and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine.[12] On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced.
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Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
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it would take almost two centuries to eradicate smallpox due in part to people being resistant to getting vaccinated. Smallpox still managed to kill 300 million people in the twentieth century. Almost a third of a billion, dead. In the twentieth century. And the last case was in 1977. Fucking hell. Vaccinate your goddamn crotch goblins.
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James Fell (On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down)
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In the ten days after getting a flu shot, the blood levels of antibodies against the flu virus can increase fifty-fold. But to get the optimal benefit from the vaccination, its recipient must get enough sleep. In one study, participants were allowed only 4 hours of sleep a night for six nights, starting four nights before the vaccination. A week later, their antibody levels were only half those of participants who had slept normally.5 In another study, participants deprived of just a single night of sleep after receiving a hepatitis vaccination similarly produced only half the antibody levels of controls.
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Antonio Zadra (When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep)
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Following its pioneering world-record vaccine rollout, Gibraltar saw an immediate spike in deaths, suffering 2,853 fatalities per million inhabitants, a European per capita mortality record. During the first days of the rollout—which began with senior citizens—some 84 elderly died immediately after vaccination. Gibraltar’s shell-shocked Governor General said it was the largest mortalities ever suffered in the nation, exceeding even those endured during World War II.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Similarly, a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent.17 Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90% effective, Jonas Salk refused to commercialize it or obtain a patent
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Marty Makary (The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It)
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... so, for those keeping score at home, he wants a guerrilla war where Americans shoot and hang other Americans. It will be very easy to tell who they need to kill because they will be the ones telling you to wear a medical mask and get a vaccine. Even after I gave him the first food he had eaten in two days, he still was not willing to listen to me for just a few seconds and explain that “socialism” actually means using taxes to pay for hospital visits, instead of running up huge medical debts. Rather than letting me talk, he threatened to hang me, all while still eating my food. On most days, I might dismiss a conversation like this as nothing but the rantings of a homeless guy whose mind has been pushed too far. But today he’s just come from the Sea of People who stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to flee for their lives. On a day like today, I think this interview merits more consideration, especially when so many others I interviewed concurred with parts of what he said. I believe
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Ben Hamilton (Sorry Guys, We Stormed the Capitol: The Preposterous, True Story of January 6th and the Mob That Chased Congress From the Capitol. Told in Their Own Words. (The Chasing History Project #1))
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... so, for those keeping score at home, he wants a guerrilla war where Americans shoot and hang other Americans. It will be very easy to tell who they need to kill because they will be the ones telling you to wear a medical mask and get a vaccine. Even after I gave him the first food he had eaten in two days, he still was not willing to listen to me for just a few seconds and explain that “socialism” actually means using taxes to pay for hospital visits, instead of running up huge medical debts. Rather than letting me talk, he threatened to hang me, all while still eating my food. On most days, I might dismiss a conversation like this as nothing but the rantings of a homeless guy whose mind has been pushed too far. But today he’s just come from the Sea of People who stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to flee for their lives. On a day like today, I think this interview merits more consideration, especially when so many others I interviewed concurred with parts of what he said. I believe men like him represent a much larger segment of the population than those mesmerized by The Media want to accept. Based on the miles I’ve driven and the conversations I’ve had while Chasing History, I’d say men (and women!) like him are a large minority of the population and they ain’t going away. And unless some modern-day messiah manages to re-open political dialogue in this country, I see more trouble in the years ahead.
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Ben Hamilton (Sorry Guys, We Stormed the Capitol: The Preposterous, True Story of January 6th and the Mob That Chased Congress From the Capitol. Told in Their Own Words. (The Chasing History Project #1))
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Newer antivirals, termed neuraminidase inhibitors (NAIs), include zanamivir (Relenza) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu). These drugs impair the release of newly formed viral particles from infected cells. When first introduced, the NAIs were trumpeted as the treatment of choice for the flu. Experience suggests this was an overstatement. Studies show that NAIs shorten the duration of flu by about one day only. Alongside vaccination, they do appear to help prevent complications in those at risk, but they also have drawbacks. Zanamivir is associated with bronchospasm (wheezing) in individuals with chronic lung problems, while oseltamivir is known to cause dizziness, nausea, and vomiting.
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Andrew Weil (Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own)
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JD was born in Poland in 1894. When he was eighteen years old, he immigrated to the United States, where he worked in a ball-bearing factory. In August 1940, a severe form of lymphoma invaded the entire right side of his neck. He could barely open his mouth, turn his head, swallow, or sleep. In February 1941, he was referred to the Yale Medical Center for radiation therapy. After two weeks of daily radiation, he improved. But the improvement was short-lived. By August 1942, he had trouble breathing, couldn’t eat, and had lost a substantial amount of weight. On August 27 at 10 a.m., JD became the first person in history to receive a medicine to treat cancer. Every day, for ten consecutive days, he received an injection of nitrogen mustard. After the fifth dose, his tumor regressed; finally, he was able to move his head and eat. One month later, however, his tumor came back, necessitating another three-day course of nitrogen mustard; again, the response was short-lived. So, he received a six-day course, without effect. On December 1, 1942, ninety-six days after he had received his first dose of nitrogen mustard, JD died. Because this was a covert operation run by the OSRD, the phrase “nitrogen mustard” never appeared in his medical chart. Instead, doctors referred to it as “substance X.” The first paper describing nitrogen mustard’s effects on cancer wasn’t published until 1946, four years after JD was treated. On October 6, 1946, the New York Times, under the headline “War Gases Tried in Cancer Therapy,” wrote, “The possibility that deadly blister gases prepared for wartime use may aid victims of cancer will be investigated by the Army Chemical Corps’ Medical Division.” Nitrogen mustard had provided the first ray of hope in the fight against cancer. The modern age of chemotherapy had begun.
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Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
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Zoonotics seem to be in the hews for one or another reason of late.
From coronavirus (covid-19), bird flu (H5N1) and now monkeypox.
Scientists say that there are no connections between them, yet bird flu turned up in coronavirus hotspots around the globe.
Monkeypox attacks the same areas as covid.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
It's time that we looked more closely at how these zoonotics work and why they share a penchant for the same human body areas.
There may be no connection, but what if there is.
It's like yesterday and tomorrow. They are both separate, but they are connected by a thing called, today.
We should look at what is their food source. That is, the proteins in our bodies that they feed off. We should also map out the areas to see where they overlap.
With monkeypox we should also look at what vaccines were administered just in case there is a connection there as well.
I know that there is a connection there somewhere. All we have to do is look at what may be possible.
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Anthony T. Hincks
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Dr. Tess Lawrie: “Fifteen thousand people a day times six weeks . . . Because at this rate, all other countries are getting ivermectin except the UK and the USA, because the UK and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Rushing to bring a vaccine to market could also cause other sorts of safety problems in its manufacturing. Infamously, this happened in the Cutter Incident during the early launch of the polio vaccine, in 1955. When the polio vaccine was made available, mass vaccination days were organized by local communities. More than 120,000 children received a batch of the vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus was incomplete. Within days, there were reports of children developing paralysis, and the mass immunization program was abandoned within a month. Investigation showed that two batches of the vaccine, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, had the live virus, resulting in symptoms in forty thousand people, permanent paralysis in fifty-one, and death in five; and this does not include cases of the virus spreading to other children.
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Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
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In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.
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David Isaacs (Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling story of vaccination, one of medicine's greatest triumphs)
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The story, of course, was fraud. Days later, Oklahoma’s Sequoyah Northeastern Health System posted a categorical denial on its website, dismissing the entire story as mere fabrication. That Rolling Stone picture of the long lines was an Associated Press stock photo from the previous January, a photo of people waiting in line to get vaccines. As it turns out, not a single patient has been treated in Oklahoma for ivermectin overdose.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Dr. Awolesi will be proven correct in her epidemic forecast: the exponentially increased speed with which this rabies virus infects and progresses will aid in its own containment and control. Nine days after Josh and Luis meet Ramola and Natalie a massive pre-exposure vaccination campaign will finally begin in New England for both humans and animals. In concurrence with the quarantine, the vaccination program will be wildly successful and will return the region from the brink of collapse. In the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic (but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind], where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem), almost ten thousand people will have died.
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Paul Tremblay (Survivor Song)
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Pfizer filed with the FDA on Friday, November 20, seeking authorization for emergency use of the vaccine.35 It was the first company to seek permission to offer a COVID vaccine to US patients. It was just 248 days since the company had first set out with BioNTech to develop the vaccine. No vaccine had ever been developed that fast. The process involved 150 different clinical trial sites, 43,661 patient volunteers, the work of thousands of Pfizer colleagues, and the hopes of a weary nation: it was one of the largest, fastest, and most important scientific endeavors of its kind in modern history.
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Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
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But maybe his father was right. Maybe what had happened in 1918 could never happen again.
"U.S. Reveals Detailed Flu Disaster Plans."
Cole decided to make this the topic for his research report. Plans for manufacturing and distributing vaccines and other medications. Plans to quarantine the sick and to call up extra doctors and nurses and to replace absent workers with retired workers so that businesses wouldn't have to shut down. Plans to keep public transportation and electricity and telecommunications and other vital services operating and food and water and other necessities from running out. Plans to mobilize troops (for Cole this was the only exciting part) in the event of mass panic or violence.
One day he would ask Pastor Wyatt why, despite all these plans, everything had gone so wrong.
"Son, that is just the thing. That is what people did not--and still do not--get. There is no way you can count on the government, even if it's a very good government. The government isn't going to save you, it isn't going to save anyone. There's no way you can count on other people in a situation like we had. People afraid of losing their lives--or, Lord knows, even just their toys--they'll panic. Even fine, decent Christian folk--you can never know for sure what they'll do next. So I say, love your neighbor, help your fellow man all you can, but don't ever count on any other human being. Count on God."
What Cole didn't know was that most of the plans he read about that night would have been sufficient only for an emergency lasting a few weeks.
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Sigrid Nunez (Salvation City)
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The next day, Trump toured Fauci’s lab, the NIH Vaccine Research Center, as part of the White House effort to showcase the president’s determination to speed up the creation of a vaccine. Fauci again reminded Trump that getting a vaccine in a year was wildly optimistic. At the end of the tour, Fauci and Azar drove with the president across Wisconsin Avenue from the NIH campus to the helipad at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Marine One awaited to fly Trump back to the White House. “So how’s Francis Collins doing?” the president asked Azar, referring to the NIH director they had just said goodbye to. “He’s really helped us on the fetal tissue ban,” Azar said. He referred to Trump’s 2019 decision to dramatically cut government funding at NIH and elsewhere for medical research that relied on tissues of aborted fetuses. This was a move to please antiabortion conservatives, a key part of the president’s political base. Collins didn’t agree with the policy, Azar told Trump, but was “being very professional in implementing it.” Azar was surprised when Trump asked, “Is that fetal tissue issue going to slow down the vaccine and therapies?” When he learned the answer was yes, the president said he wanted them to reverse the ban, but that never happened.
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Carol Leonnig (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year)
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Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the United States Government, and perhaps any government. And it is based upon a lie. The Director of the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the WHO have all had to reluctantly acknowledge that the vaccines cannot stop transmission. When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness, or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of September 17th, 2021, she said: Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated. Even so, three weeks later, on October 7th—just days before this book went to press—the President of the United States announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.” The President just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.” Not one question was posed to the President about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth—and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on. A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population—that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, 1984. It
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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After spending the day in a school vaccination clinic, a colleague of mine quipped: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”6 Applications for government benefits might be completed under similarly chaotic circumstances. Users who have a lot else going on in their lives need to be able to apply for the service without an undue burden of time, technology, and cognitive overhead. If they’re asked for documentation, the documents need to be ones they have access to. If they need to correspond with the program, there has to be a way for them to do so even if they lack a stable mailing address. If they have family who are undocumented immigrants, they may need reassurance that applying for a program won’t get them or their relatives in trouble.
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Jennifer Pahlka (Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better)
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In the photo, I’m living in the moment. My smile is a thousand-watt beauty, all that orthodontia finally paying off, all those chewy vitamins and two vegetables at dinner and access to vaccinations and fluoride in the water radiating from me. I looked like a corn-fed State Fair dairy princess reigning over my subjects.
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Lori Rader-Day (Little Pretty Things)
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Her response was of a day when true humans may unknowingly receive transhuman instructions via an implant or injection. A seemingly innocuous vaccine or identification “chip” can initiate intracellular changes, not only in somatic or “body
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Thomas Horn (Pandemonium's Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the bermensch (Overman) Herald Satans Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God)
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On April 13, 1955, Mayor Robert F. Wagner of New York City had wired President Eisenhower to URGENTLY REQUEST ESTABLISHMENT OF FEDERAL SUPERVISORY ALLOCATIONS OF SALK VACCINE SIMILAR TO THOSE SET UP IN THE EARLY DAYS OF PENICILLIN. The mayor wasn’t alone. Even those who opposed a large government role in this matter were shocked to learn that the Eisenhower administration had made no plans for the distribution of polio vaccine, believing that the drug companies could best handle it on their own. When asked by a Senate committee whether this inaction had led directly to the current shortage, Mrs. Hobby gave a candid, if suicidal, response. “I would assume that this is an incident unique in medical history,” she mused. “I think no one could have foreseen the public demand.”15
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David M. Oshinsky (Polio: An American Story)
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vaccinators—recruited by the committees and trained for just half an hour—administered candies or sugar cubes permeated with live attenuated poliovirus. The goal was to immunize every susceptible child in Cuba. Castro’s invention of vaccination days, coupled with the use of Sabin’s doses, achieved rapid success in interrupting transmission and making Cuba the first country to eliminate polio.
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Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
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On April 30 Lucy cheerfully reported that, after three days' illness, she was on the mend. Although she had no mirror, she could feel twenty pockmarks on her face. 'I am almost glad you do not see it.," she wrote, "I don't believe I should get one kiss and yet the doctor tells me it is very becoming.
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Nancy Rubin Stuart (Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married)
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The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. It effectively “killed” the poliovirus. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible. Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The first big batch of vaccine wasn’t properly made. Cutter Laboratories in California, one of the main producers of the vaccine, inoculated more than 200,000 children in 1955, and within days there were reports of paralysis. Within a month, the program was discontinued, and investigations revealed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.
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Matt Richtel (An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives)