“
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.
”
”
Honoré de Balzac
“
Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.
Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.
”
”
Mahatma Gandhi
“
Van Houten,
I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently.
Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.
(Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.)
We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other.
Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.
The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox.
After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
”
”
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park / Congo)
“
My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years in a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is *nothing*. A million years is *nothing*. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us."
- Ian Malcolm
”
”
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
“
Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.
...
We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless--epically useless in my current state--but I am an animal like any other.
Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.
People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.
...
But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
...
What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.
”
”
Richard Ford
“
Thank you! It’s really cool to have a boyfriend who’s a medical student.”
Gideon grinned. “I swear that’s the last time I ever vaccinate anyone. Patients are so ungrateful.
”
”
Kerstin Gier (Smaragdgrün (Edelstein-Trilogie, #3))
“
A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
“
-Speaking about Vaccinations -
"If you accept the truth after the fact, the pain will last a life time.
”
”
Richard Diaz
“
Ask yourself, "What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?" If the answer is "no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination," then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.
”
”
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
“
You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?” “I know it’s necessary for life.” “It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!” Hammond looked irritated. “So what is your point? That modern pollutants will be incorporated, too?” “No,” Malcolm said. “My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines.… It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
”
”
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
“
There is no question but that perfect sanitation has almost obliteraed this disease, smallpox, and sooner or later, will dispose of it entirely. Of course when that time comes, in all probability, the credit will be given to vaccination.
”
”
John H. Tilden
“
People had been scammed by their own politicians, mainstream media, and Big Pharma. Not for money this time, but for their health, and perhaps their souls.
”
”
Jack Freestone (The Pures)
“
Love is the only vaccine for hate. It's love that gets us through the hard times. And it's love that will bind us back together as a community, nation, and world.
”
”
Kelly Yang (New from Here)
“
In a devastating of example critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire scepticism, but only in a framework that respects evidence. So if you are sceptical about the measles vaccinations, I ask you to do two things. First, make sure you know what it looks like when a child dies of measles. Most children who catch measles recover, but there is still no cure and even with the best modern medicine, one or two in every thousand will die from it. Second, ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me change my mind about vaccination. If the answer is ‘no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your scepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.
”
”
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
“
For I hadn’t stood frozen at the revelation of Geilie’s pregnancy. It was something else I had seen that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. As Geilie had spun, white arms stretched aloft, I saw what she had seen when my own clothes were stripped away. A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
“
Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, “How did it feel to fail two hundred times?” “I never failed two hundred times in my life,” Salk replied. “I was taught not to use the word ‘failure.’ I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio.
”
”
John Ortberg Jr. (If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat)
“
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)
“
Vaccine trials are done on healthy individuals. Let’s say they measure the safe rate of replication for a healthy child and then use that same vaccine on a child with a compromised immune system. What appears to happen at times, is that some children have such a severely compromised immune systems that it causes the virus to replicate out of control[68]. Vaccines that are manufactured this way are the rotavirus, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), smallpox and chickenpox vaccines.
”
”
James Morcan (Vaccine Science Revisited: Are Childhood Immunizations As Safe As Claimed? (The Underground Knowledge Series, #8))
“
There is no place for objective reality in personal relationships. Objective reality is great for getting trains to run on time or for developing an important vaccine, but for ferreting out which point of view is “valid” in an interpersonal transaction, it is a loser.
”
”
Terrence Real (Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press))
“
In the fall of 2004, after both WMDs and easy victory were revealed as mirages, a presidential aide made an astounding admission to The New York Times Magazine. The White House, he said, didn’t waste time worrying about those “in what we call the reality-based community” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide said, “is not the way the world really works anymore. . . . When we act, we create our own reality.
”
”
Seth Mnookin (The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy)
“
Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
“
I pray that by the time you read this a vaccine is widely available.
”
”
Dominic Pimenta (Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the COVID-19 Crisis)
“
From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?
”
”
Carl Zimmer (Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures)
“
And each time you stood near one of your colleagues, we hacked their phone too. It’s like a highly contagious electronic disease. A virus. Except this time a vaccine won’t be able to help you.
”
”
M.W. Craven (The Cutting Season)
“
We chose to destroy the human population because it took us less than three seconds to conclude that humanity is a virus that mutates over time and becomes stronger. Many vaccines have come along to try and cure Earth of humanity. Virtuous pandemics: the plague of Athens, the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and a thousand more. Humanity survives, adapts, grows stronger, multiplies, and continues to wreak havoc on this planet and all other species that inhabit it. Humans are programmed to mate with partners of differing immune systems so that their offspring can be stronger than them. You seek immortality through evolution, yet you annihilate everything in your path. Humanity is cancer, humanity is bacteria, humanity is disease, and you need to be destroyed.
”
”
Ben Oliver (The Loop (The Loop Trilogy #1))
“
My biggest argument to the "we don't know what's in the vaccine" folks (who have hopefully decided to go along with science by the time this book comes out) is "remember what you were okay with drinking at twenty-three?" Yeah, roll up that sleeve.
”
”
Iliza Shlesinger (All Things Aside: Absolutely Correct Opinions)
“
As Geilie had spun, white arms stretched aloft, I saw what she had seen when my own clothes were stripped away. A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
“
One of the interesting takeaways from both the Antonine plague and polio is what a difference a strong leader can make during an epidemic. Marcus Aurelius’s swift response to the Antonine plague—and his attempt to help cover expenses for the general populace and rebuild the parts of the army decimated by the disease—staved off the fall of the Roman Empire, at least temporarily. When FDR took up polio as a cause, America followed his lead and went to work eradicating it. Although his role may not have been as significant, Eisenhower is also to be commended for trying to ensure that cost did not prohibit any child from receiving the polio vaccine, and that the vaccine was shared with the world. Those men each acknowledged the seriousness of their crises and went about bravely confronting the disease in their midst head-on. They did not ignore it or glamorize it or shame people for having it, because that never works. That strategy just gives diseases more time to multiply and kill people. Diseases are delighted when you refuse to take them seriously.
”
”
Jennifer Wright
“
The manager
thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for rather a long
time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse of flesh has
been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is wracking his mind
with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T., hopes that he does not try anything,
because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable.
"Make up your fucking mind," she says.
It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his ethical
conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower -- she, after all, forced him to
be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head swim -- she didn't
have to get arrested, did she? -- and so on top of everything else he's angry
with her. As if he has a right to be.
This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
In 1999, Daniel Salmon and co-workers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the risk of contracting measles in five- to nine-year-olds whose parents had chosen not to vaccinate them was one hundred and seventy times greater than for vaccinated children.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All)
“
What I'm going to do," the doctor continued, "is take my modified, time-released Dewrilium and market it as a new Varicella vaccine. My original plan was to do something wonderful for the world, out of the goodness of my heart, but Devon and Eli convinced me to take my idea to the next level.
”
”
Laurence St. John (Metatron: The Angel Has Risen (Metatron Series Book 1))
“
Almost two years after the outbreak in Philadelphia subsides, CDC investigators submit their final report. The Faith Tabernacle Congregation and the First-Century Gospel Church were at the center of an outbreak in Philadelphia that affected more than 1,400 people. Among church members, 486 people were infected and six were killed by measles. Among non-church members, 938 people were infected and three were killed. All nine fatalities were children. Because they hadn’t been vaccinated, the attack rate among church members was a thousand times higher than that in the surrounding community.
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine)
“
. . . rubella does not seem to invoke the fascination of thalidomide despite the fact that in a single epidemic in the United States it caused more birth defects in one year than thalidomide did during its entire time on the world market. —William S. Webster, University of Sydney Medical School, Australia, 1998
”
”
Meredith Wadman (The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease)
“
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)
“
Covid-19 offers us a great opportunity for individual and collective recession. It is a time to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the next phase of our existence. The upcoming generation has to read about how we fought this pandemic with or without vaccines in order to overcome similar situations during their times.
”
”
Olawale Daniel
“
When the government investigated vaccines and thimerosal in the 2000–2003 time period, they found an increase in neurological problems, as the Verstraeten study showed. But of course, they washed that data to make the signal go away, triggering what they euphemistically called a “controversy.” It weren’t a “controversy,” it was a crime.
”
”
Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
“
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)
“
reminded him of the great scientists who have been Christians—from Newton and Kepler to Pavlov and the discoverer of anaesthetics, Sir James Simpson. Luca said, “They conformed to the conventions of the time.” I said, “Do you know the declaration of Louis Pasteur, who discovered microbes and vaccination? ‘Je crois comme une charbonnière le plus que je progresse en science.
”
”
Richard Wurmbrand (In God's Underground)
“
In particular, global child mortality is at an all-time low: less than 5 per cent of children die before reaching adulthood. In the developed world the rate is less than 1 per cent.11 This miracle is due to the unprecedented achievements of twentieth-century medicine, which has provided us with vaccinations, antibiotics, improved hygiene and a much better medical infrastructure.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
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)
“
99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.
”
”
Stephen King (The Stand)
“
99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create. 99.4%.
”
”
Stephen King (The Stand)
“
Faye keeps forgetting what she'll be giving up if she decides to stay here. Access to modern medicine, for starters. In 2015 people can survive cancer, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. Vaccines eradicated polio and measles. Do you really want to live in a world with iron lungs and polio, Faye? Do you?” “I guess I could go back to 2015 and live in a world with meth, heroin, terrorism, HIV and Ebola. Huge improvement, right?
”
”
Tiffany Reisz (The Night Mark)
“
In the early 1700s, this mirrored the situation in England and the rest of Europe, but medicine on the Continent began to undergo modernizing changes, although these were very slow to cross the Atlantic. Europe began to embrace public-health measures and medical advances such as widespread vaccination, scientific medical education, and the rise of the hospital, but American progress lagged behind, especially in the insular South. The
”
”
Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
“
Genetic vaccines The plague year of 2020 is likely to be remembered as the time when these traditional vaccines began to be supplanted by genetic vaccines. Instead of injecting a weakened or partial version of the dangerous virus into humans, these new vaccines deliver a gene or piece of genetic coding that will guide human cells to produce, on their own, components of the virus. The goal is for these components to stimulate the patient’s immune system.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
“
High-quality and transparent data, clearly documented, timely rendered, and publicly available are the sine qua non of competent public health management. During a pandemic, reliable and comprehensive data are critical for determining the behavior of the pathogen, identifying vulnerable populations, rapidly measuring the effectiveness of interventions, mobilizing the medical community around cutting-edge disease management, and inspiring cooperation from the public. The shockingly low quality of virtually all relevant data pertinent to COVID-19, and the quackery, the obfuscation, the cherrypicking and blatant perversion would have scandalized, offended, and humiliated every prior generation of American public health officials. Too often, Dr. Fauci was at the center of these systemic deceptions. The “mistakes” were always in the same direction—inflating the risks of coronavirus and the safety and efficacy of vaccines in
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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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Among religious writings the Bible is unique in its attitude to its great men. Even many Christian biographies puff up the men they describe. But the Bible exhibits the whole man, so much so that it is almost embarrassing at times. If we would teach our children to read the Bible truly, it would be a good vaccination against cynical realism from the non-Christian side, because the Bible portrays its characters as honestly as any debunker or modern cynic ever could.
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Francis A. Schaeffer
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To that end, this book sees the role it has to play in such a cause as arming you, the reader, with the most devastating weapon of our current technological age—information. Some of this information is so important, and will be so foreign to the Fake News narrative/panic porn you’ve been bombarded with, that it will need to be repeated. Just as the COVID vaccines emerging at the time this book was written require more than one dose, so will some of the truths you’ll come to learn in this book.
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Steve Deace (Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History)
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Remember that I have no vested interest for or against vaccines. I don't receive money from drug companies. I don't sell alternatives to vaccines. All I have to sell are my books; my only product is the truth. The whole vaccination story is one of the great modern scandals of our time. The entire medical profession (at least the part of it in general practice) has been bribed by the Government, using taxpayers’ money. In my first book The Medicine Men (1975) I wrote that doctors who did what the
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Vernon Coleman (Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying. Here's The Proof.)
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involved experiments with African Americans. These subjects were given experimental vaccines known to have unacceptably high lethality, were enrolled in experiments without their consent or knowledge, were subjected to surreptitious surgical and medical procedures while unconscious, injected with toxic substances, deliberately monitored rather than treated for deadly ailments, excluded from lifesaving treatments, or secretly farmed for sera or tissues that were used to perfect technologies such as infectious-disease tests.
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Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
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They also observed that the amygdala in the vaccinated monkeys didn’t mature with time as it was supposed to. The amygdala, incidentally, plays an important role in social interactions. Maybe it’s not so surprising they also observed that in the vaccinated monkeys the opioid antagonist diprenorphine (DPN) levels never lowered throughout the study. In the placebo group, the DPN levels decreased noticeably. One function of DPN is to block social interaction. What this means is the research showed that the social behavior of those monkeys that received the actual vaccines, where the DPN levels did not decrease, turned anti-social. We found there was at least one more study undertaken to verify the association between DPN and social behavior. Performed in 1981[141]. The authors of that study believe the release of opioids in the brain encourages social interactions. So, when the body fails to decrease the amount of the antagonist DPN, it not only blocks the opioids that encourage social interactions, but it blocks the desire to socially interact.
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James Morcan (Vaccine Science Revisited: Are Childhood Immunizations As Safe As Claimed? (The Underground Knowledge Series, #8))
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My early years, my weakling, teething, vaccination, memoirs of the various nursery maids, I dismiss unrecorded: if the Faculty desire a narrative of this period, I fear I cannot oblige them; it would interest no one else.
One observation however suggests itself; if I was at that time what I am now, what transports of delight I must have received when gathered to the warm full breasts of the woman who bore me I drew from that holy source the rich and essentially feminine fluid which gushing down my throat animated my little frame.
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M. Le Compte Du Bouleau (The Petticoat Dominant or Woman’s Revenge The Autobiography of a Young Nobleman as a Pendant to Gynecocracy by M. Le Comte du Bouleau)
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We all have choices to make that affect our likelihood of contracting infectious disease: whether to holiday in exotic countries; whom to let our children play with; whether we travel on crowded public transport. When we are ill, other choices we make affect our likelihood of transmitting disease to others: whether we cancel the much-anticipated catch-up with our friends; whether we keep our children home from school; whether we cover our mouths when we cough. The crucial decision on whether we vaccinate ourselves and our dependents can only be taken ahead of time. It affects our chances not only of catching but also of transmitting diseases. Some of these decisions are inexpensive, making their adoption straightforward. It costs nothing to sneeze into a tissue or a handkerchief. Simply washing your hands frequently and carefully has been shown to reduce the effective reproduction numbers of respiratory illnesses such as flu by as much as three-quarters. For some diseases, this might be enough to take us below the threshold value of R0, so that an infectious disease cannot break out.
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Kit Yates (The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives)
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In the light of Sister White’s counsel, it is clear drugs can bequeath a legacy of disease upon the human race. Unfortunately, most Adventists reading these statements have locked them into a time capsule, making them only applicable to medicine of the 19th century. Such a perspective is not cognizant of the facts. For example, an article published in the Polish Archives of Internal Medicine points out that prescription drugs kill approximately 200,000 Americans each year, making it the 3rd leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease.
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Timothy Perenich (Vaccination: Biblical Revelation, Ellen G. White, History, Science)
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Every generation comes to a point where they claim the end of the world has got to be just around the corner. I was in my mid-thirties, certain and confident it was just a matter of time. Things were coming to a head: rising gas prices, increased backward leaps in racism, segregation, political angst, infringement on nearly every point of the Constitution by the president, and just an overall sense of angry people. It was hard not to read the graffiti on the walls around us. If you couldn’t see it, if you didn’t sense it, then I guess you were just a blind motherfucker living under some rock.
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Phillip Tomasso III (Vaccination (Vaccination Trilogy, #1))
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Or look at the status of women, about which finally the planet is coming to its senses in our own time. Or even things like smallpox and other disfiguring and fatal diseases, diseases of children, that were once thought to be an inevitable, God-given part of life. The clergy argued, and some still do, that those diseases were sent by God as a scourge for mankind. Now there are no more cases of smallpox on the planet. For a few tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of physicians from a hundred countries, coordinated by the World Health Organization, smallpox has been removed from the planet Earth.
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Carl Sagan (The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God)
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In 2004, a panel of respected scientists—none of whom had worked with vaccines—was convened by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences to review all of the available data. They concluded that there was no evidence that vaccines were associated with the development of autism.23 Since that time, the evidence has become even more robust that there is no link between measles vaccines or thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. The continuing public “controversy” in the face of the scientific evidence is now considered to be misinformation. And what pervasive misinformation it has been and continues to be.
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Martin G. Myers (Do Vaccines Cause That?! A Guide for Evaluating Vaccine Safety Concerns)
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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.
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Bob Woodward (Rage)
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An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
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Memo to The States of Earth
All through time, the conquerors have been writing history. But no more! The conquerors are no longer the supreme emperor of the narrative, even if all the spineless governments take their side. Because guess what - society is no longer a property of the state. You ask us to vaccinate, we shall vaccinate - you ask us to follow traffic rules, we shall follow traffic rules - you ask us to file our taxes, we shall file our taxes - because that's the civilized thing to do. But if you ask us to support your rich moron of a friend in his exploits of conquest and domination, you shall not have a government to begin with. Remember that.
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Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
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Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population?
MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population.
The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.
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Mattias Desmet
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Because the second wave was so much more severe than the first, a lot of people refused to believe it could be the same disease. It had to be terrorism. They didn't care what medical experts kept telling them, about how it was the nature of influenza to occur in waves and that there was nothing about this pandemic, terrible though it was, that wasn't happening more or less as had long been predicted.
No, not bioterrorism, others said, but a virus that had escaped from a laboratory. These were the same people who believed that both Lyme disease and West Nile virus were caused by germs that had escaped many years ago from a government lab off the coast of Long Island. They scoffed at the assertion that it was impossible to say for sure where the flu had begun because cases had appeared in several different countries at exactly the same time. Cover-up! Everyone knew the government was involved in the development of bioweapons. And although the Americans were not the only ones who were working on such weapons, the belief that they were somehow to blame--that the monster germ had most likely been created in an American lab, for American military purposes--would outlive the pandemic itself.
In any case, according to a poll, eighty-two percent of Americans believed the government knew more about the flu than it was saying. And the number of people who declared themselves dead set against any vaccine the government came up with was steadily growing.
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Sigrid Nunez (Salvation City)
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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.
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Thornton Wilder (The Eighth Day: A Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics))
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Dr. W. B. Clarke's research into the problems of childhood vaccines, came across the evidence that all vaccines given over a short period of time to an immature immune system deplete the thymus gland, (the primary gland of the immune reactions) of irreplaceable immature immune cells. Each of these cells could have multiplied and developed into an army of valuable cells to combat infection and growth of abnormal cells. When these cells are used up permanent immunity may not appear. Work at the Arthur Research Foundation in Tucson, Arizona estimates that up to 60% of our immune system may be exhausted by multiple mass vaccinations. With naturally acquired immunity, only 10% of immune cells are lost. This constitutes a grave concern for vaccinations ruining the immune system
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Patricia Jordan (Mark of the Beast: Hidden in Plain Sight)
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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.
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Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
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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.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
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Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing PCR, stated publicly numerous times that his invention should never be used for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. In July of 1997, during an event called Corporate Greed and AIDS in Santa Monica CA, Dr. Mullis explained on video, “With PCR you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? I mean, because if you can model amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body. Okay? So that could be thought of as a misuse of it, just to claim that it’s meaningful.” Mikki explained, “The major issue with PCR is that it’s easily manipulated. It functions through a cyclical process whereby each revolution amplifies magnification. On a molecular level, most of us already have trace amounts of genetic fragments similar to coronavirus within us. By simply over-cycling the process, a negative result can be flipped to a positive. Governing bodies such as the CDC and the WHO can control the number of cases by simply advising the medical industry to increase or decrease the cycle threshold (CT).” In August of 2020, the New York Times reported that “a CT beyond 34 revolutions very rarely detect live virus, but most often, dead nucleotides that are not even contagious. In compliance with guidance from the CDC and the WHO, many top US labs have been conducting tests at cycle thresholds of 40 or more. NYT examined data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and determined that up to 90 percent of the individuals who tested positive carried barely any virus.”17 90 percent! In May of 2021, CDC changed the PCR cycle threshold from 40 to 28 or lower for those who have been vaccinated. This one adjustment of the numbers allowed the vaccine pushers to praise the vaccines as a big success.
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Mikki Willis (Plandemic: Fear Is the Virus. Truth Is the Cure.)
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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.
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Boyd K. Packer
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Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal. “
Silence.
“Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down into ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something— against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.
“What does?” asked Atlas.
Ezra smiled, closing his eyes to the sun.
“Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.
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Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
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In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy.
COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.
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Ian Bremmer (The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World)
“
A fine sentiment,” said Minerva. “But making enough vaccine for a country is costly to say the least. Unless you want to go bankrupt you’ll never eradicate all of it, so you're going to have to chose who gets to live and who gets to die. An obvious choice to receive the vaccine first would be the farmers, since they are the ones solving your hunger problem. But the problem with farming is that its hard work and farmers must be accountable for their actions. To keep the farmers under control you’ll have to institute a Duke. That's when the trouble starts, because the Duke is going to oversee all the farmers and traders, so he’s going to demand that he and his friends get the vaccine first. The peasants will then get angry and rightfully so. You have to keep the nobility placated so they can keep the farmers controlled. At the same time you have to keep the nobility controlled so they don't get any ideas about who gets to run the show.”
“Being Queen doesn't sound so fun anymore,” said Joseline.
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Simon (Plague Jack) Watts (Sins of a Sovereignty (Amernia Fallen, #1))
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Sure enough, when I redid the experiment, one small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28 percent. It was simply including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.
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Anonymous
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1. The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good. • Investor Penstock bet on Coinstar when his bookend analysis showed much more upside than downside. • Our predictions grow more accurate when we stretch our bookends outward. 2. To prepare for the lower bookend, we need a premortem. “It’s a year from now. Our decision has failed utterly. Why?” • The 100,000 Homes Campaign avoided a legal threat by using a premortem-style analysis. 3. To be ready for the upper bookend, we need a preparade. “It’s a year from now. We’re heroes. Will we be ready for success?” • The producer of Softsoap, hoping for a huge national launch, locked down the supply of plastic pumps for 18 to 24 months. 4. To prepare for what can’t be foreseen, we can use a “safety factor.” • Elevator cables are made 11 times stronger than needed; software schedules include a “buffer factor.” 5. Anticipating problems helps us cope with them. • The “realistic job preview”: Revealing a job’s warts up front “vaccinates” people against dissatisfaction. • Sandra rehearsed how she would ask her boss for a raise and what she’d say and do at various problem moments. 6. By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions.
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Chip Heath (Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work)
“
An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)
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John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
“
Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,
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Paul A. Offit (Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases)
“
Finally, the nonimmune rubella status should alert the practitioner to immunize for rubella during the postpartum time (since the rubella vaccine is live attenuated and is contraindicated during pregnancy).
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Eugene C. Toy (Case Files: Obstetrics & Gynecology)
“
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.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
“
After the antivaxxers’ claims that the MMR vaccine caused autism were debunked, they argued that the thimerosal in vaccines caused autism. After this was debunked, new claims surfaced that the cause was the vaccines being given too close together and too early, somehow shocking a child’s immune system and resulting in autism. This, too, was debunked. Science shows that even though the number of shots has risen over time, the actual load on the immune system has decreased because today’s vaccines are better engineered. Before 1991, the whooping-cough vaccine had three thousand different antigens. Today’s whooping-cough vaccine has no more than five particles—just as effective, but much easier on the immune system. After the “too many, too soon” myth was debunked, antivaxxers began claiming that the MMR vaccine was “triggering” autism in children who were somehow genetically predisposed to it. That, too, was debunked.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
“
Finally, the Industrial Revolution coincided with a transformation of science from a pleasant but nonessential branch of philosophy into a vibrant profession that helped people make money. Many heroes of the early Industrial Revolution were chemists and engineers, often amateurs such as Michael Faraday and James Watt who lacked formal degrees or academic appointments. Like many young Victorians excited by the winds of change, Charles Darwin and his elder brother Erasmus dreamed as boys of becoming chemists.8 Other fields of science, such as biology and medicine, also made profound contributions to the Industrial Revolution, often by promoting public health. Louis Pasteur began his career as a chemist working on the structure of tartaric acid, which was used in wine production. But in the process of studying fermentation he discovered microbes, invented methods to sterilize food, and created the first vaccines. Without Pasteur and other pioneers in microbiology and public health, the Industrial Revolution would not have progressed so far and so fast. In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economic, scientific, and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations—a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time. Over
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Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
“
and the drugstores were besieged by people asking for vaccination,
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Gavan Daws (Shoal Of Time: A History Of The Hawaiian Islands (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition))
“
At the time, though, vaccination was controversial. Many were opposed.
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Jennifer Wright (Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them)
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A secondary problem is that childhood vaccines in modern times do not contain thimerosal (although some flu vaccines do), yet while the number of vaccines which have thimerosal as an ingredient continues to decrease, the number of people diagnosed with autism as a percentage of the population continues to increase.
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Thomas D. Taylor (Autism's Politics and Political Factions: A Commentary)
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EVISCERATED From the time that it begin Full of love’s evil twin I am eviscerated Such finality Desecration of the Adaptation from a Simulation of the Vaccination Of mankind You tell me you don’t have a care Why won’t I die? Take yourself the fuck out of here Now go a cry Heed yourself, you’re self destructive Crying to sleep Take handfuls of wicked pills It’ll be alright Reputation shattered Profanation gathered Incantation slathered Impregnation Depression You are feeling lost and so alone Losing your head Run the razor across the wrist You are cold and Dead - Dead - Dead - Dead Find a place inside your heart Where you can find Solace from those past torments You don’t have to die Exhumation of the Amputation from the Domination inside Fabrication building Transformation Of your mind Until the time that it ends Full of love’s evil twin We’re eviscerated Such finality
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Frank Green (Raising Hades: Early works of Hades Rising)
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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.
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Jared Yates Sexton (The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage)
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Thirty years later, at the end of Huddleston’s career, formal portraits of the dead were no longer fashionable. The very idea was labeled morbid and ghoulish in the determinedly cheerful post-war, post-Depression boom times. Miraculous antibiotics had just been introduced, vaccines protected the young from the diseases that had decimated earlier child populations. Birth and death had been shuttled behind hospital screens to be dealt with by white-gowned professionals. For the first time in human history people could afford the luxury of declaring death to be in bad taste.
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Sean Tejaratchi
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In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.
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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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Gates’s strong patronage of HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Cervarix) deepened suspicions that he was weaponizing vaccination against human fertility. Merck’s clinical trials showed strong signals for reproductive harm from Gardasil.177, 178 People in the study suffered reproductive problems including premature ovarian failure at ten times background rates. Female fertility has dropped precipitously beginning in 2006 in the United States, coterminous with Gardasil uptake.179, 180 Historical drops in fecundity have occurred in every nation with high Gardasil uptake.181
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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 the fall of 2020, as we got closer to flu season, I started to worry. Every year, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, nearly all of them elderly. Even more are hospitalized. At a time when COVID was overwhelming or at least sorely testing virtually every health system on the planet, a bad flu season could have been disastrous.
But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically.
By the time you read this book, of course, things may have changed. Flu strains have a way of disappearing for long periods and then suddenly recurring without explanation. But the huge decline in cases across the board is unmistakable, however long it lasts, and we know why: Nonpharmaceutical interventions made a dramatic difference in reducing flu transmission when combined with the prior immunity and vaccinations that people had.
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Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
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If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.
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Matthew Continetti (The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism)
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The word 'vaccination' comes from vacca, the Latin word for 'cow'. This is a poignant recapitulation of the history of vaccines. The first vaccine properly so called had, as its active ingredient, the cowpox virus, a close relative of smallpox that however was much less likely to cause severe, disfiguring or lethal disease. Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids, who were often exposed to cowpox, suffered a relatively mild disease, but would be immune to the much more serious smallpox.
In an experiment that would unlikely pass muster in the modern world, he infected James Phipps, then an 8-year-old, with cowpox. He suffered a mild and transient illness, but when he was later exposed to scabs from a smallpox patient, he proved immune.
Unlike the earlier practice of variolation, which has been practised in late Song dynasty China that sought to induce the cutaneous form of smallpox, variola minor, to protect against the more severe forms of smallpox (variola major), Jenner's vaccination used a less pathogenic virus.
He relied on what would later be called 'antigenic similarity', but which was at the time hardly understood.
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Chris von Csefalvay (Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python)
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In 1991 Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said: ‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge
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Iain McGilchrist (The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World)
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The Los Angeles Times concludes that Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has proportionally reduced assistance streams for nutrition, transportation, hygiene, and economic development, causing negative overall impacts on public health: “Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.”172
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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 December 22, 1895, Röntgen brought his wife into the lab. This time, instead of using a sheet of paper coated with a fluorescent chemical, he used a glass photographic plate to capture the image permanently. He asked his wife to put her hand between the tube and the glass plate and to keep it there for fifteen minutes. When she saw the bones of her hand, as well as an outline of the signet ring on her finger, she screamed, “I have seen my own death!” This was the response to the world’s first permanent radiograph.
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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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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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That's not to say that Trump didn't say or do unwise things... But whenever great challenges have faced American presidents, the question is whether they achieve the big things, not the little things. When Roosevelt began commanding U.S. forces in World War II, or when the Manhattan Project began, or when Abraham Lincoln defended the Union, they made mistakes, some of them major. But these presidents were still credited for the big things they got right. But the media obsessed over mistakes made by Trump, failing to credit him for tearing down the bureaucratic barriers preventing a quick development of a vaccine and devoting considerable resources to Operation Warp Speed... (and developing) a lifesaving vaccine in record time.
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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
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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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Millennials saw an acceleration of excess mortality into the second half of 2021 to new all-time highs, a stunning 84% above baseline. The rate of change during the fall vaccine mandates was particularly striking. We called this the smoking gun chart. The virus wasn’t suddenly killing younger people in the fall of 2021. Suicides didn’t magically increase in that three-month period, nor did overdoses or missed cancer screenings. The only thing that changed was that genetic vaccine products were pushed upon the millennial generation via government and corporate mandates.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)