What Plague Should we Really be Fighting?

The only way to fight a plague is honesty – Albert Camus 1947

A couple of months ago I had woken up at around 3:00am and was finding it difficult to fall back to sleep.  When this happens I normally search around You Tube for a nice sleep meditation but this particular night I sort of accidentally ended up listening to a Russell Brand video which certainly didn’t put me back to sleep. 

I wrote a post back in October (Unwashed and Unvaccinated) after listening to radio news reports that were being repeated every half an hour and sounded to me more like a plug for Pfizer than a genuine news story.  I think these news stories were supposed to instill fear but instead I became suspicious and was taken back to Russell Brand’s video clip which was what prompted me to write that post.

I would like to share this video here but I literally cannot find the video clip that I watched that night.  I doubt that I dreamt it because I don’t think I would have thought of that all by myself.  Russell was neither supporting nor opposing the Covid vaccine but he pointed out that when you drill down on these mainstream media companies that you will find a link to the big Pharma companies.  My first (somewhat sleep deprived) thought was: “he’s talking about America or the UK but this wouldn’t happen in New Zealand surely?”

In an effort to find that video I’ve listened to a lot of Russell Brand recently.  Have You Been Lied to by the Media? is the closest video I can find to the one I listened to that evening.

I posted some of the things on Facebook that I’d discovered during my Google search and was surprised to find that one of the most left-wing people I know who vehemently rails against corporate greed with monotonous regularity was the person championing these practices the loudest.  To be fair, I don’t think this person actually read what I written or watched the video as his arguments had no relevance to the point I was attempting to make.

Fast forward about six weeks and New Zealand is set to move into the childishly simple-to-understand Traffic Light System due to come into effect on 06 December 2021.  I still haven’t had my first vaccination because of the issues I explained in my previous post.  After attempting to phone the Ministry of Health Covid Healthline and speaking to a person who I’m pretty sure was based offshore and was no help whatsoever, I sent the following email to the published Ministry of Health Covid email address and copied in my own GP.

Good afternoon,

I am enquiring as to whether there is any chance of me obtaining a temporary exemption from the vaccine pass on medical grounds.

I have been taking a disease modifying therapy for multiple sclerosis called Fingolimod.  I have attached a copy of the New Zealand Datasheet for this drug with the relevant points highlighted.  Please note that I am aware that the Covid vaccine is not a live attenuated vaccine but studies have shown that as Fingolimod treated MS patients have a very low lymphocyte count, they fail to develop SARS-COV-2 antibodies.  Below is a link to an Israeli study with these points highlighted and I believe studies have also been conducted in Norway and Sweden with similar conclusions.

Immune Response to COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

As blood that I had taken on 14 October 2021 showed a very low lymphocyte count (refer attached results), I was instructed by my Neurologist xxxx to discontinue the drug which I did on 22 October 2021.

I discussed this with xxxx nurse at an appointment on 10 November 2021 and she confirmed the advice shown on the NZ Datasheet for the drug and advised me to wait for a full six weeks before getting my second vaccination.

This means that I will not be considered to be fully vaccinated until 16 February 2021.

My understanding is that exemptions are only available to a very small handful of people in the entire country and I don’t want to waste everyone’s time applying for this if it is considered out of the question.  Can you please advise if there any possibility that I might qualify for a temporary exemption on these grounds?

Regards,

I haven’t heard back from my GP and the Ministry of Health replied with barrage of automated responses that weren’t much help at all. 

At the same time as all this was going on, I did my own bit of fact-checking, got fact-checked and ended up checking out of Facebook forever.  I think it’s probably the best thing that could’ve happened given these “troubled times”.  This is how it came about …

It would be fair to say that I have become quite anti these traffic light mandated vaccination shenanigans because of the situation I’ve found myself in and this led me to surf around like-minded Facebook pages etc.  I came across a post referencing statistics around UK covid deaths which to me sounded like it might be a bit far-fetched and since I’m a bit of a stickler for calling out online scams (even to the point of discrediting hoaxes like commenting and sharing motor home posts), I needed to check it out for myself. 

I went to the Office for National Statistics UK website, downloaded the relevant data and since I’m a self-confessed Excel geek (this is what I have done for a living for quite some years), I put it onto an Excel spreadsheet.  I found that what was being claimed on the Facebook post was actually 100% accurate. Then, after giving my vocal friend a serve for calling me an antivax conspiracy theorist over, I had a brain explosion and made the fatal mistake of posting the data that I’d got from the Statistics UK website on Facebook. Links to my two spreadsheets are below:

Mortality Rates by Vaccination Status

Deaths by Age Group*

*There are two tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet.  The 2020 figures are shown in a slightly different format to the current 2021 figures which start at the time the vaccine was made available to 16 and 17 year olds.

Although I had posted only my own figures and findings rather than sharing a Facebook post breathlessly spouting about conspiracy etc, someone commented that Facebook factcheckers had debunked the UK stats, saying it was “misinformation”. I responded by saying that the Facebook factcheckers are actually funded by Johnson & Johnson showing a screen grab giving the source of this info

and a video from my new best friend Russell Brand called Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers.

What I didn’t say, but probably should have done is that unless Statistics UK has been hacked and the data tampered with, how can the data that I myself accessed and downloaded possibly be “misinformation”? (OK, I have added some lines to show subtotals but none of the data has been altered.)

Shortly after my reply about the factcheckers, my original post seemed to disappear. Facebook’s way of controlling the narrative has the potential to annoy me even more than the bloody mandate so I deactivated my Facebook account. 

I don’t think I can cope with Facebook and all that bullshit right now … I’ve got traffic lights to contend with!