Back in the Day

This morning I watched a clip of Dr Jane Harvey on BBC News encouraging people to get their 5 year olds vaccinated against covid. For some reason it put me in mind of the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch.

In the sketch there are 4, now wealthy, Yorkshiremen trying to outdo one another about how hard they had it when they were growing up. The sketch is decades old now but it was a somewhat prescient dig at people whom we might today accuse of revelling in their victim status.

Today we have a certain section of society who seem to be in some kind of mad rush to claim special, minority, status. You’re gay? Paah, you had it easy. You should try being a furry queer non-binary trans unicorn.

The problem is is that there are people who have suffered as a result of being in a minority class. My own view is that some of the modern nonsense actually diminishes their legitimate grievances.

Perceptions and societal attitudes do change over time. This can be a very good thing indeed. I’m very glad that the casual racism that was commonplace in my childhood days is now overwhelmingly utterly rejected as the nasty, offensive idiocy that it is. Although it does seem that, in terms of casually offensive racist remarks, white has become the new black, these days. But that’s just my white fragility talking. Obviously.

So why did this clip of Dr Jane Harvey get me so nostalgic for the Pythons?

I suppose I can sum it up with the statement “back in my day, we had real nutters”

You can watch the clip yourselves - although I do recommend some meditation beforehand to prevent possible loss of IQ, or explosive decompression of your head. What struck me wasn’t so much the nonsense she spouts in such calm, measured tones, but what it represents.

Back in my day, vaccines were supposed to prevent one from becoming infected. This may have been a necessary simplification of the “science”, but I think most of us would have done a bit of a double-take if we were told the vaccines we were injected with wouldn’t actually prevent infection, or transmission, but would give us a bit of a better chance of not ending up seriously unwell.

I have to admit, back in the day, I thought those folk arguing about a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, for example, were just nutters. Real nutters. The sort of nutter we had back then; anti-vaxx loons we could safely ignore. These idiots couldn’t tell the difference between a spline and a standard deviation.

Or so I thought. Back in the day.

Now, I’m not at all as sure as I once was. I’ve seen the report and data from the covid Goo trials. I’ve seen a government body try to protect a commercial entity by requesting that data be withheld for up to 75 years. I’m well aware that not all is as it seems to be and the various obvious manipulations and obfuscations do not give me the confidence I once had in these products.

Back in the day, I just accepted the word of the official experts. This vaccine stuff is jolly good, a medical miracle, without it we’d all be dead, or worse.

But things have changed. Sure, there were “anti-vaxxers” back then and their claims were countered. What strikes me as different these days is the sheer amount of effort that is being expended trying to convince us all that these “anti-vaxxers” are, as before, just a fringe, loony minority.

Things have gotten so bad that official agencies are going to stop publishing the relevant data because “anti-vaxxers” might use it to paint these new covid ‘vaccines’ in a negative light. That’s really quite extraordinary when you think about it. There was no such pressure when it appeared the vaccines were working quite well. When the data was (apparently) showing Goo goodness the reports were written without the various qualifications about potential biases. There was no special pleading about how ‘effectiveness’ was a difficult, and complex, thing to determine and could only be trusted to ‘experts’.

Now that the data (as limited as it was) is showing Goo ghastliness things are different - now we can’t even be trusted with the data because it might show the ‘wrong’ thing. In our naïve and non-expert hands, the data is too dangerous - and we might come to a non-approved opinion about it.

Back in the day, we were at least able to assess things for ourselves.

Back in the day, there didn’t need to be any special pleading for the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Nobody was popping up telling us that really things like VAERS and the Yellow Card Scheme were basically a load of untrustworthy shite. Nobody wittered on about coincidences.

Indeed, back in the day, the vaccine side effect monitoring systems did, at least occasionally, work as intended. New vaccines were pulled when it became apparent there was a signal indicating a problem.

Back in the day, we had teensy-weensy, iddle-biddle safety signals and people freaked out. But these days, the friggin ginormous spike in reported adverse events we’re seeing with the Goo, we’re told it’s all just coincidence.

Rightly or wrongly, throughout my scientific career (such as it was) I’ve always held the view that if something is significant you don’t need to indulge in a whole raft of fancy-schmancy technical wizardry to demonstrate it. That’s not always true, strictly speaking, but it’s not a bad rule-of-thumb.

When a medical product is touted as being hugely safe and hugely effective then, not to put too fine a point on it, it should be fucking obvious.

But not as far as the Goo is concerned. It’s so fucking good, so fucking safe, so fucking effective, that the only people who can see this are the experts. Anyone else looking at the data will not be able to see this wondrous medical miracle for what it truly is. It’s so fucking obvious it needs all sorts of fancy models and adjustment for confounders in order to be able to see it. Thank God we have experts to properly analyse the data.

These experts must be turd polishers extraordinaire, because the data really doesn’t smell too good at all.

Dr Harvey tells us that in order to protect kids against some future, unspecified, threat the best course of action is to make sure they are vaccinated. What she fails to mention, of course, is that she’s recommending they be ‘vaccinated’ with some Goo that is at least 2 years, and several variants, out of date. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be recommending everyone get vaccinated with the 2020 version of the flu vaccine to protect themselves against flu.

Back in the day, I thought the flu vaccine was probably a good thing for those of us who wake up with more wrinkles on our faces than our scrotums. I was even wondering about whether I should get one - at least back in the day. Nowadays I’m really not at all sure about that and the recent Stack from Alex Berenson really does make you wonder.

Things have definitely changed. They (whoever ‘they’ are) really do seem to be trying too hard to promote these vaccines - they’re telling us what we should think instead of letting the data speak for itself. The urgency and desperation that is evident really does set those alarm bells ringing. It’s too much, for too little. The lady doth protest too much, as the saying goes.

Back in the day, when someone was overstating their case, when things seemed too good to be true, we became suspicious. These days suspicion is not allowed and now we need to be protected from anything that would make us suspicious - things like official health data on the covid Goo. And things like vaccine trial data would make us so suspicious we need to be protected from it for 75 years.

The more they try to tell me how wonderful and brilliant this covid Goo is, the more I distrust them and their message. And doubly so when they try to hide the data that would allow us to see this miraculous benefit for ourselves.

Back in the day wasn’t always good - but I wish for many things covid-related we could wind back the clock.

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