Justin. Honest question. How can we ever come together as a society and humanity when the rift is so deep? Personally I will never take this vax. I basically agree with just about everything christine says. I cannot imagine how people like yourself and others who think what happened the last three years is a reasonable way to live and be…
Justin. Honest question. How can we ever come together as a society and humanity when the rift is so deep? Personally I will never take this vax. I basically agree with just about everything christine says. I cannot imagine how people like yourself and others who think what happened the last three years is a reasonable way to live and behave. The fact that I was prohibited from any kind of normal life unless I took an injection,(experimental or not) and almost everyone just went along with it is staggering to me. And yet you write with the absolute identical conviction of the rightness of your views as we do of ours. Fascinating conundrum for these ‘interesting times’.
I really appreciate the question, and appreciate you reading. Sorry for the delay in replying — I'm actually on deadline right now, penning a report that's trying to answer that very question. But let me try and offer a few disjointed thoughts:
With the benefit of hindsight, we imposed too many restrictions on unvaccinated people. The science, as of early 2021, told us that unvaccinated people were not just risking their own health, but increasingly the likelihood of transmission to others. The, frankly, coercive nature of the policies the state enacted and we (the media and the public) broadly supported were justified by the science. It's the same principle as to why many places either require, or *very* stringently encourage, vaccines for students. That science changed when the Omicron variant came around. The case for mandatory vaccination remained strong for individuals' personal health but got substantially weaker in a broader community sense. We (the state, the media) should have been more direct about that. But sometimes you only really know what you knew after the fact, y'know?
All that being said, I know you disagree with the premises underlying all of that. You don't trust the science that says vaccines are safe. You don't trust the results of the investigations that have found that zero (or very, very, very close to zero) people died from the mRNA vaccines. On that front, I suspect we'll be at an impasse. I'll send you meta-analysises and thr results of major population-wide studies that back up what I'm saying, and you'll send me selective reviews and studies that, you'll argue, refute them.
I don't take these points on matters of faith, I believe them because I've seen the evidence, and people much smarter than me have backed up those points.
But, I suspect you feel the exact same way. And maybe that's fine. I suspect if we talked about anything else, we'd find ourselves agreeing on plenty of points. Whereas questions around the vaccine have become calcified, I think most of us remain open and curious about many, many other topics.
So how do we move past this? I think we have to put the pandemic behind us and focus on what's happening now. There will be a time to litigate the successes and mistakes of the pandemic, and hopefully we can all have confidence in wherever that lands. Otherwise, I think we need to find some places for humility and agreement on other files.
Justin. Honest question. How can we ever come together as a society and humanity when the rift is so deep? Personally I will never take this vax. I basically agree with just about everything christine says. I cannot imagine how people like yourself and others who think what happened the last three years is a reasonable way to live and behave. The fact that I was prohibited from any kind of normal life unless I took an injection,(experimental or not) and almost everyone just went along with it is staggering to me. And yet you write with the absolute identical conviction of the rightness of your views as we do of ours. Fascinating conundrum for these ‘interesting times’.
I really appreciate the question, and appreciate you reading. Sorry for the delay in replying — I'm actually on deadline right now, penning a report that's trying to answer that very question. But let me try and offer a few disjointed thoughts:
With the benefit of hindsight, we imposed too many restrictions on unvaccinated people. The science, as of early 2021, told us that unvaccinated people were not just risking their own health, but increasingly the likelihood of transmission to others. The, frankly, coercive nature of the policies the state enacted and we (the media and the public) broadly supported were justified by the science. It's the same principle as to why many places either require, or *very* stringently encourage, vaccines for students. That science changed when the Omicron variant came around. The case for mandatory vaccination remained strong for individuals' personal health but got substantially weaker in a broader community sense. We (the state, the media) should have been more direct about that. But sometimes you only really know what you knew after the fact, y'know?
All that being said, I know you disagree with the premises underlying all of that. You don't trust the science that says vaccines are safe. You don't trust the results of the investigations that have found that zero (or very, very, very close to zero) people died from the mRNA vaccines. On that front, I suspect we'll be at an impasse. I'll send you meta-analysises and thr results of major population-wide studies that back up what I'm saying, and you'll send me selective reviews and studies that, you'll argue, refute them.
I don't take these points on matters of faith, I believe them because I've seen the evidence, and people much smarter than me have backed up those points.
But, I suspect you feel the exact same way. And maybe that's fine. I suspect if we talked about anything else, we'd find ourselves agreeing on plenty of points. Whereas questions around the vaccine have become calcified, I think most of us remain open and curious about many, many other topics.
So how do we move past this? I think we have to put the pandemic behind us and focus on what's happening now. There will be a time to litigate the successes and mistakes of the pandemic, and hopefully we can all have confidence in wherever that lands. Otherwise, I think we need to find some places for humility and agreement on other files.
But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.