Why I’m Not Taking The Vaccine

From the perspective of a pro-life Catholic with little science knowledge, but who isn't completely blind.

The title says it all, so how about we get right into it? The reasons start with a strong ethical objection, which lead into three problems on the medical and science front.

ONE BIG ETHICAL PROBLEM

The use of tissue from aborted children was a part of the research process in the Moderna & Pfizer products. The parts of these children were involved in the actual production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I don’t want to be a part of this.

Yes, I know the Catholic Church has said, with the full authority of the papal teaching office, that the Moderna & Pfizer vaxes can be used in good conscience and I truly don’t question the Catholicity or pro-life credentials of those who do choose to be vaccinated. You can’t be more Catholic than the pope and I’m not trying to. But there are four important points that have to be made…

*The first is this—simply because the Church gives the nod to using the vaccine, doesn’t mean I have to be vaccinated. In fact, the very document linked to above makes it clear that no one should be forced to take this if they object. Even if Pope Francis or other bishops say—as they often have—that we should all rush to take it, they are bound by the complete teachings of Holy Mother Church the same as we all are. It’s admittedly bizarre to see prelates actively undermining their own teaching, but that’s the world we live in.

*The second point builds off the first and it’s that a Catholic can still choose to boycott any number of things they find objectionable without it being the official teaching of the Church.

There is a no papal document that mandates people boycott Netflix because of its association with child porn. There is no formal papal call to boycott goods made in China because Muslim slave labor is used to create those low prices at Walmart. And if we want to turn the clock back, there was never an official magisterial document (at least that I’m aware of) that demanded Catholics in the South boycott segregated businesses.

Yet in all of these cases, laity and clergy, not just Catholic, but from the Protestant denominations and elsewhere, chose to boycott. It was not because they considered themselves morally superior to those that didn’t boycott (at least I hope they didn’t). It was because they had a reached a personal tipping point where they couldn’t take anymore. When it comes to the abortion industry and its ties to Big Pharma—a couple of multi-billion dollar global businesses—I am at just such a tipping point.

*The third point is one where I must unfortunately be more critical of Catholic clergy. It has to be emphasized that the Church has never, at least in her official capacity, said that vaccines made with aborted babies involved at any step in the process is anything less than sinful. She has simply said, in this current public health moment, that the sinful act is far enough removed from the actual vaccine as to make the vax permissible. A moral theologian would call this “remote cooperation with evil”, the emphasis being on remote.

But for remote cooperation to be valid, there must be voices raised against the conditions that made such a choice necessary to begin with. The incomparable Catholic writer Phil Lawler makes this point, drawing on Church teaching that goes back to 2005 regarding abortion-tainted vaccines.  

Most of us don’t have the platforms to raise any kind of meaningful protest. But bishops do. Catholics in medicine and pharmaceuticals do. The most the rest of us can do is take to social media, to personal conversation or a small blog like this to raise our protests. Where are the leaders? Even if bishops want, as most do, for us to take the vaccine, where is their strong voice of protest against the faithful being stuck in this position to begin with? Where are the Christians in Big Pharma, working to develop the vaccine that would have no ethical issues at all? The necessary precondition to “remote cooperation”, that of a principled protest, is sorely lacking.

*The fourth point is this—Holy Mother Church, as the infallible guardian of faith and morals, even in historical periods where its hierarchy is spectacularly corrupt, is protected by the Holy Spirit in making the moral assessment that in a case of grave necessity, the use of an effective vaccine with ethically problematic origins is permissible. Of that, I have no doubt. But…and it’s a pretty big but….there are a few other decisions that have to be made along with that.

In order to reach the “remote cooperation” conclusion, one must have also concluded that the virus is grave in all circumstances and that the vaccine is effective in all circumstances. Those are two judgements that are not of faith and morals, but of medicine and science, two arenas where Christ did *not* give His Church any guarantees.  

So did the leadership of the Church judge correctly in effectively agreeing with the narrative pushed by corporate media, political leaders and Big Pharma, that the Vaccine-vs-Virus equation clearly comes down on the side of the vaccine in all cases? Maybe. But I have significant doubts. Which is a good segue way to move to the next segment of this discussion.

THREE BIG MEDICAL PROBLEMS

I’m far from a medical or science expert, as even a perfunctory glance at my high school and college transcripts will confirm. But I also have eyes and all the media gaslighting in the world has not prevented me from seeing the following…

CENSORSHIP & MASS HYSTERIA

If you live in the United States, you’ve never seen a period like this, where debate was blatantly censored. Sure, you’ve seen plenty of cases where public bullying and PR manipulation was used to push a particular agenda. But you’ve never seen the heads of major social media companies—the gatekeepers of information in our modern communications landscape—collude to openly censor and ban any ideas that contradict their preferred narrative.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happened in regards to any discussion of the relative risks between the vax and the virus. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERs) used by the Center For Disease Control (CDC) to monitor feedback on any bad effects from a vaccine was always regarded as legitimate by Big Pharma and by governments.

Of course it wasn’t perfect—it was voluntary feedback, so any sample would not be an automatic reflection of what reality was. But it was still considered an important tool in measuring how vaccines in their early stages were performing. And if anything, the imperfect nature of VAERs meant that conventional wisdom assumed that adverse effects were underreported, and by a factor of five.

Now that VAERs feedback is not fitting the narrative approved by Big Pharma, the government and corporate media, it’s suddenly unreliable. People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long raised concerns over the practices of Big Pharma—concerns that used to be shared by his fellow Democrats—is suddenly being censored.

What’s more, real study and dialogue has been replaced with marketing buzzwords. The biggest is “misinformation.” Here’s a hint—when you suddenly see every media talking head, every Big Pharma executive and every politician in their back pocket using the same buzzword, it means there was some type of coordination. When that buzzword gets down to becoming a cute little frame that everyone can use on their social media profile photos, that’s an even bigger tell.

It’s a tell that there is absolutely nothing scientific about this public narrative. Which is why I won’t feel guilty over contradicting the narrative in spite of my lack of scientific and medical knowledge. The people given the public trust in this arena  abandoned integrity when they chose buzzwords over science. I can handle a discussion over buzzwords.  

And there are a lot of people with plenty of scientific and medicinal street cred raising concerns. Which leads us to the next problem.

PROFESSIONAL BULLYING IN MEDICINE

Let's start by pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in how data is being tracked. When a person died with both COVID and other co-morbidities, it was classified as a COVID death. When a person dies soon after taking the vaccine, there is no consideration given that the vax might have been the cause.

So when supposedly authoritative data is cited to pressure me into taking the vaccine, I'm not going to trust it because I know the results are being manipulated. Not that they are blatantly false. Not that anyone in the medical field is directly lying about anything. But they are de facto lying through a subtle manipulation of the playing field.

Now let's move on to the cases of two people—Dr. Robert Malone, who went to  Harvard Medical School, and Michael Yeadon, who used to work high up in the ranks at Pfizer. Both have raised objections to the effectiveness of this vaccine and how it’s being used.

Why do these two individuals in particular matter? Because they’ve devoted their lives to vaccines. Dr. Malone invented the mRNA vaccines used in the production of these COVID-19 vaxes. Dr. Malone firmly hopes the vaccine will ultimately succeed. But right now, he’s honest enough to say that it’s “leaky” and that widespread vaccination in the face of all these variants can actually make the pandemic worse. Yes, the vaccinated might actually inflict this pandemic on the unvaccinated, in the inverse of the current narrative.

Yeadon is another one whose career has been about developing vaccines and making them widely available. He too, has spoken out about using this particular vaccine, at least right now.

Both men’s’ careers have suffered because of their principled position. They are censored, considered persona non grata in circles they used to be held in high regard in, and branded “purveyors of misinformation”—those handy little buzzwords at work again.

Conversely, the medical professionals who dutifully send out newsletters and lecture patients with the preferred corporate narrative will be rewarded.

So who’s right? What’s someone like me, who needed a kind and generous science teacher to push me through my high school class with a gift D- to think? Who do we believe?

I might not know science, but if I have to bet my life (and I do), I’ll take my chances with the people who are risking everything over those who are comfortably taking no chances whatsoever. And I’ll certainly take those who are risking their careers over those who are actively lying. Which brings us to our final medical point…

THE PIED PIPER

How much longer are we going to pretend that Dr. Anthony Fauci, our corporate media’s patron saint of the virus and vaccine, is anything other than a liar and a criminal?

Fauci went on record under oath in front of the U.S. Senate, that his office had nothing to do with funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab in China. Then documents were obtained showing that Fauci’s office had done just that and it would have been almost impossible for him not to know about it.

The man virtually created the virus!!! And I’m supposed to take him seriously when he talks about how to treat it?!?!. As Frasier Crane said to Sam Malone in the series finale of Cheers upon hearing that Sam was going to marry Diane—“I say this as a caring and supportive friend—HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FREAKING MIND?!!”

The fact that Fauci lied is not my opinion. It is a matter of public record. That doesn’t mean everyone who shares Dr. Fauci’s assessment of the virus-vaccine landscape is a liar. It doesn’t even mean that they’re wrong. It does mean that the honest amongst their number might want to take a deep breath, decide how much of their analysis has been impacted by what this liar and con artist has been saying for the last year and a half and then start calmly working through the objections raised by Dr. Malone & Co., free of all buzzwords. Until then, I’m out.

In sum, we have three reasons that anyone, regardless of their medical knowledge can see—we are in a climate of censorship and mass hysteria, driven by professional bullying and orchestrated by a proven liar. I trust you’ll understand if I’m skeptical of the narrative under these conditions.

HOW CAN YOU BE SO SELFISH?

It’s the question that’s aggressively asked of those of us are vaccine skeptics. The people asking (and by “asking” I really mean “accusing”) include government leaders, religious leaders, media pundits and their followers at the grass roots. The very Church document I referenced at the top calls on Catholics to “consider the needs of the community”,  and in a context that make it clear that such consideration would naturally lead one to choose the vaccine.

Let’s first address the argument that unvaccinated people are causing vaccinated people to get the virus, I’ll simply ask you if you have ever heard that argument made on behalf of any other vaccine. Ever. As noted above, our side can just easily argue the reverse, and with credential experts who were never previously considered unreliable sources. So this is not an argument that I have patience for.

To return to more reasonable concerns about the needs of the community, I’ll answer by pointing to everything said above. If we are living a time of censorship, mass hysteria, professional bullying and taking “leadership” from a proven liar, then maybe the real needs of the community require some pushback.

But what if I’m wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time. What if, ten years from now, the dust settles and we realize that this vaccine was in fact perfectly safe, that the 99-plus percent survival rate of the virus didn’t tell the whole story and that, unfortunate as the ethical sources of the vaccine may have been, it was the only way to stop a deadly pandemic?

But what if I’m right? That wouldn’t be the first time either. What if, ten years from now, the mass hysteria, bullying and all the other well-established negatives of this current historical moment are stronger and engulfing more people and professions? Pushing back against these forces doesn’t get easier over time, it gets harder.

Ultimately, in a time of great uncertainty, everyone—whether they are pro-vax, anti-vax, vax-skeptical or somewhere in between, simply has to find their ground and be willing to live with the consequences. The hard reality that no wants to face is that only future generations, with the cooler eye that history provides, will really have a good handle on the debates we’re living through. We have to decide what hill we’re ready to die on.

As for myself, refusing to cooperate in the sacrifice of babies to the needs of Big Pharma, while pushing back against mass hysteria, professional bullying and the leadership of a sociopathic liar, strikes me as a worthy way to go if I end up with a fatal virus. I don’t think it will come to that, but I’m prepared to live with it. I hope those of you who opt for the vaccine can say the same if the cure proves more dangerous than we’re told it is.

I mean that sincerely—I do hope that. Because it would be a damn shame if history records that we tore apart our civilization over a disagreement over the comparative risks of a virus and a vaccine. And that is exactly what’s at stake in this historical moment.

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