Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
When I look around at the people I know in my community, very few other than my wife and I have not had covid-19 yet. I don’t attribute it to anything more than luck. I know people that have been equally as cautious and more cautious than us that have had it. We both work in schools and have greater exposure than an office worker who spent most of the last couple years working from home. We’ve been lucky.
Yesterday I got the Moderna Omicron-Containing Bivalent Booster shot. It was an easy decision for me. The variant most prevalent right now is Omicron, and I’m happy to increase the odds that I don’t catch this virus. A number of people I know have felt the lingering effects of covid for several months, and having been someone who has previously dealt with 6+ months of chronic fatigue (a vitamin D deficiency about 4-5 years ago) I’d rather not deal with something like that again if it can be avoided.
This is why I decided to to get a 4th shot:
I work in a school and if I can avoid getting and/or spreading a virus, then that’s good for my whole community. I take the flu shot each year for the same reason. Does that stop me from getting the occasional flu? No. But it probably stops me from getting sick more often than I do. Viruses are tricky things and flu shots are not a perfect science. The purpose of a flu shot is to prevent some of the more likely flus that are going around, not all flus. I see this Omicron-Containing Bivalent Booster in the same way I do a flu shot… it’s a vaccine focusing on preventing contraction of the more likely variants. I’m not 100% preventing covid, I’m reducing the likelihood of contracting common variants that are currently circulating.
We might be in endemic rather than pandemic times, but there are still people catching covid variants in our community… and unless I had a non-symptomatic case, I’m still one of those people with no natural immunity. I like the idea of decreasing my odds of catching covid. Just like I decrease the odds of getting a flu with my yearly flu vaccine.
I said this in a post, ‘If or When?‘ six weeks and 2 days ago, with respect to Omicron and coronavirus:
I’m afraid my crystal ball gazing conjures no clear images of what’s to come in the short term. What’s my best guess? Businesses and maybe even schools closing from staffing shortages; Tougher restrictions in public (indoor) spaces; and a lot of people self-or-family isolating.
What’s my hope? Less and less hospitalization with more and more mild cases that look like a ‘regular’ flu.
We didn’t have any full school closures in our district but 2 weeks after this post we had a 3-day period where many schools were short staffed and support teachers, and vice principals, were reallocated to help fill the needs. Tighter restrictions didn’t happen. And many people did get mild versions of Omicron although so few of them were tested, because of shortages of tests and long lineups, that I think the number of cases reported was probably underreported by a factor greater than 10.
Now, there are no issues with staffing, and there is an abundance of rapid tests available, and I think things are much better. The only big news here in Canada is a protest against mandates and vaccines that is being held in Ottawa, with smaller versions showing up in other major cities. I’m not going to link to any of the reports because I don’t believe they deserve the attention.
I find it sad how many people are misguided by these protests, and think they are somehow fighting for freedom by blockading people and making others less free? It’s sad how messages of hate and ignorance are part of this convoy. It’s ironic that when we are on the brink of restrictions being lifted, thanks to a vast majority of Canadians doing their part in slowing the pandemic by following the mandates and getting vaccinated, these unvaccinated, anti-mask protesters feel like they are somehow doing something to better the world they live in.
6 weeks after my original post I still haven’t had covid, but I’d say this has been as much about luck as any other reason. Many people around me have been equally as cautious as me and have contracted it. All these people have had versions that are mild, or at least not bad enough to go to the hospital. And I still wonder if for me it’s a question of if or when? But in this 6 weeks I’ve seen things getting much better. I wonder if mask restrictions will continue in schools after March Break? I wonder if there will be crowd restrictions at theatres and sports events, or if restaurants will still require vaccine passports?
Unless another contagious and more deadly strain start spreading, I think we might see a lot less restrictions in the coming months… But it won’t be because of this ‘freedom rally’ that’s happening. On the contrary, it will literally be despite them and their anti-community stance, not doing their part to help reduce the concerns and spread of coronavirus.
There is a truck convoy in Ottawa and thousands of people are protesting vaccine and mask mandates. I’ll be generous and say there are 10,000 people there protesting. That’s 0.026% of the population not 2.6%, not .26%, 0.026%. Double that if you consider people who wanted to join them, you are still just over 0.05% of the population.
This small but loud group has a right to peacefully protest, they don’t deserve so much attention. I have been bypassing the news about them in my feed, but I did see one thing that was really pathetic. One of the things some protesters did was to put signs on a Terry Fox statue. Terry Fox, a Canadian hero who:
A) Was immunocompromised and might have been an example of the kind of person who we are trying to protect with these restrictions, because he might have had a vaccine exemption.
B) Raised millions of dollars for medical research.
Wow. Talk about missing the point.
I hope the small unvaccinated population in Ottawa end their peaceful protest without harming anyone or damaging any property, and they don’t end up taking too much more of our attention.
And while I’m at it, thank you to everyone who understands that these (temporary) mandates and restrictions are to help protect our community, and for doing your part. You have my appreciation, and my attention.
I finally got my notification and am booked for my 3rd, booster, Covid-19 shot. I still have to wait a couple weeks to get it, but at least I have a date on the calendar.
Our bodies are amazing things, and the idea that we can train our blood cells to fight off a virus before it can affect us adversely is incredible. That we now have the science to do so without even giving us a less harmful version of the virus is even more astonishing.
I’ve been big on pushing Vitamin D as a great way to boost our immune systems. It’s a cheap, easy to access, almost impossible to overdose, vitamin that is also a hormone which helps our immune system. It can’t and won’t prevent covid, but it can drastically reduce how covid and other ailments affect you, if you get sick. And, about 70-85% of people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in Vitamin D, due to a lack of sunlight, (especially in the winter).
I’m also a huge advocate for the vaccine. I had measles, mumps, and chicken pox in the same school year as a kid. I missed 40+ days of school that year. My kids didn’t have to go through that. My mother-in-law had polio, my wife and I didn’t have to go through that.
MNRA vaccines, and the science behind them, could potentially prevent a far worse (more fatal) virus in the future from ravaging the human race. And how could it do this? By giving our immune system a timely and needed boost.
Politics aside, profits to big pharma aside, possible covid treatments, after getting sick, aside. What we have here is a chance to reduce the likelihood of having a bad covid experience. Go to any social media site you like and search the hashtag #longcovid, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… regular people of all ages and many in good health pre-covid.
Will a booster guarantee anything? No. But I am happy to give my immune system a boost, and hopefully you will too.
One of my favourite responses when someone asks me how I’m doing is “Living the dream!”
Yesterday I wrote about how there seems to be many people who think they ‘took the red pill‘ – revealing an unpleasant truth, but they have actually taken the blue pill – remaining in blissful ignorance.
Then this morning I was listening to a podcast and musician Baba Brinkman was quoted as saying, “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
This made me realize how much reality right now (for many if not all of us) is literally like being in a dream. Let me explain… In a dream, when something doesn’t fit with reality, it doesn’t always trigger a response.
Examples:
You are in a dream talking to someone and turn away, you turn back and now it’s a different person, but having the same conversation.
You are in a dream and in it you are in your own house, you change rooms and now you are in a room you’ve never seen before, or even outside.
You are in a dream and cars can fly, or you can fly.
In each of these cases, had it been reality, the experience would be jarring, but in a dream it just makes sense.
Well in today’s reality, I think many people are living in a dream. So, you give an anti-vaxer, or a flat earther some profound point that undermines their belief, and what happens? Nothing. It doesn’t interrupt the dream. It isn’t jarring, it doesn’t ‘wake them up’. Their reality includes points and counterpoints that do not trigger a wakeful response. So, the dream can keep going… uninterrupted.
“What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
The problem today is that too many people are agreeing on hallucinations that just don’t fit our reality; hallucinations that undermine our future reality… and I’m not sure how we can wake them up?
This is an interesting time that we live in. I find myself in a position where I need to question my own values. I don’t do this lightly. I don’t pretend that my values have suddenly changed. It’s just that present circumstances put me at odds with my own beliefs around freedom of speech.
I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I think that when a society sensors speech, they are on a dangerous path. I take this to an extreme. Except for slander, threats, and inciting violence, I think people have a right to say and believe what they want. I believe that taking away such freedom puts us on a perilous path where a select few get too much control, and can undermine our freedoms.
An example where I take this to the extreme would be agreeing with Noam Chomsky.
So now, even as an ardent defender of free speech, I find myself agreeing with YouTube’s decision to ban vaccine misinformation:
YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.
Two, four, eight, or sixteen years ago when YouTube began, I would have screamed ‘Censorship!’ at the idea of a platform banning free speech. Even now it bothers me. But I think it is necessary. The first problem is that lies and misinformation are too easily shared, and spread too easily. The second problem is that the subject area is one where too many people do not have enough information to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience. The third problem is that any authentic discussion about these topics is unevenly biased towards misinformation. This last point needs explanation.
If I wanted to argue with you that Zeus the Greek God produces lightning and thunder when he is angry, I think everyone today would say that I was stupid to think such a thing. However, if I was given an opportunity to debate a scientist on this in a public forum, what inadvertently happens is that my crazy idea now gets to have an equal amount of airtime with legitimate science. These two sides do not deserve equal airtime in a public, linkable, shareable format that appears to give my opinion an equal footing against scientific evidence.
Now when dealing with something as silly as believing in a thunder god is the topic, this isn’t a huge issue. But when it’s scientific sounding, persuading and fear mongering misinformation that can cause harm, that’s a totally different situation. When a single counter example, say for example a person having adverse effects from a vaccine, becomes a talking point, it’s hard to balance that in an argument with millions of people not having adverse effects and also drastically reducing their risk of a death the vaccine prevented. The one example, one data point, ends up being a scare tactic that works to convince some people hearing the argument that the millions of counter examples don’t matter. And when social media platforms feed similar, unbalanced but misleading information to people over and over again, and the social media algorithms share ‘similar’ next videos, or targeted misinformation, this actually gets dangerous. It threatens our ability to weigh fact from fiction, news from fake news, science from pseudoscience. It feeds and fosters ignorance.
I don’t know how else to fight this than to stop bad ideas from spreading by banning them?
This flies in the face of my beliefs about free speech, but I don’t know any alternative to prevent bad ideas from spreading faster than good ones. And so while I see censorship as inherently evil, it is a lesser evil to allowing ignorance to spread and go viral. And while it potentially opens a door to less freedom, and I have concerns about who makes the decision of what information should be banned, I’d rather see a ban like this attempted, than for us to continue to let really bad ideas spread.
I thought in this day and age common sense would prevail and there would be no need to censor most if not all free speech. However it seems that as a society, we just aren’t smart enough to discern truth from cleverly said fiction. So we need to stop the spread of bad ideas, even if that means less freedom to say anything we want.
It is an insightful, graphic way to look at what has happened to death rates of covid patients since the vaccine was introduced. It helps you understand the scale of this compared to things like yearly deaths by lightning, drowning, and traffic accidents. But these two images really put things into perspective:
Have a look at Covid deaths in the US, especially after vaccine introduction (the box on the right):
And how things would look if vaccines didn’t work, versus the actual statistics:
I am dumbfounded by the news that people are self-medicating using a drug to treat livestock for parasites in order to ‘prevent’ or ‘cure’ themselves from covid-19… despite this being dangerous.
This is just batshit crazy. There is a large population of people that won’t take the vaccine because they don’t know what’s in it. Vaccines have been around since 1796, and have saved countless lives. Vaccines are proving that they are working, with drastic differences in Covid-19 hospitalization and deaths between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The stats are so easy to see…
But these people will follow the advice of crackpots on Facebook and take a medicine designed for large livestock animals in unknown doses. These people are the same people that call anyone who gets the vaccine a sheep. Let that thought sink in.
These are people who get their information from that one crackpot doctor who knows more than every conventional doctor. They know someone, who knows someone, that this worked for. They know the government is out to get them, to strip them of their rights and freedoms and control them. And they skip by the articles on their crackpot pseudoscience news websites about chemtrails and alien created crop circles to get to the anti-vaccine ‘science’… not realizing that most people don’t get their facts from places where they have to choose their own conspiracy adventure.
We live in a world of easy access to too much information and miss-information, which feeds anyone’s beliefs. Information isn’t neutral… facts aren’t evenly distributed. I think that critical thinking might just be the most important skill of this century. Our biggest job in schools these days might just be developing kid’s bullshit detectors… before they start taking medication designed for bulls.
