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chaotic-twin · 3 years

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Hi Simon,

I'd like to ask advice for something I didn't really talk about with anyone (apart my therapist), mostly because I respect my father and I don't want to spread bad talk about him but I still need advice, so here I am in anon mode.

Premise:

- I live in Italy

- I've always considered my father to be a smart person with a good heart, empathy and which had a huge positive personal development during the years.

Unfortunately my dad decided to not get vaccinated even if I tried with all my might to give him good reliable info and to debunk all the fake news from the very start of the pandemic with scientific papers, easy explanation, etc.

And yet he has the most weird/twisted ideas on the vaccine and the Covid19 that I haven't even read anywhere (so he must have reached those conclusion by himself and that's even more worrying for me-), which are:

1) "I don't think this virus is as problematic as they say, if it was, a lot more people would have died in percentage". I then asked him if he looked for data on what he was saying and he replied "no, I ask myself those things but I don't care about looking for data, they're not accurate anyway since they didn't test the entire population so you don't know the true percentage". He didn't want to reason on this after saying that, even if I looked for the data.

2) "My body is healthy and already did a good job protecting me from the virus up until now, why should I inject him with the virus? My body has been good up until now and then as a reward I inject him the virus? He doesn't deserve it!". I then explained to him how the vaccine effectively works and he looked me with a puzzled look that very obviously said "that's not how I thought it works".. but then proceeded to say he won't do it anyway because:

3) "I think half the doses of vaccine are a placebo and don't work anyway". I asked him why he thought so and he replied he doesn't believe in politics and in the government; I then tried to explain to him that the politics have nothing to do with science (at least here in Italy) but he was immovable and started talking how there were so many wars based on lies and so he doesn't trust what the institutions tells him to do

4) the only "positive" thing from all his conviction is that he wants to wait September, look how things go and MAYBE he'll get vaccinated...but my hopes are very low, he should also repeat the anti-tetanus shot and already said "I'm not gonna do it" and I'm.. exhausted? I don't know what else I can do to make him reason...

I even explained him that the vaccine is not only useful/made for him but society as a whole, with so so so many people immunocompromised which can't vaccine themselves and he replied "look at you, what society made you with all this sense of guilt towards others" and I was speechless, it's not guilt, it's common sense!! But he didn't listen at all..

But let's get to the other amazing thing that happened! The day before my aunt (my father's sister) was going to get her vaccine shot, they talked to each other and obviously my dad shared with her his amazing ideas! And guess what??? My aunt got even more scared and run away from her vaccine, yeeeey!

Also, it seems that even his dearest friends won't get vaccinated... *sigh*

So I ask: what can I do? Can I even do something?? Even if I tried to give them all the right info, can I do something more??

Dulcis in fundo: I'll have to be with both my dad and my aunt these next three days (from Monday to Wednesday) and I already don't have the energy to argue with them for three days straight, I just hope none brings this up..even though it's the topic of the moment so I won't be able to avoid it I guess T_T

Well, thanks for listening and sorry for the wall of text, have a nice day then.

Alright…this is a complicated one, but I’ll try to make this easy to get through and as brief as is possible to do, which means it will be long, but there’s no helping that. This will be for anyone who questions getting vaccinated, or is trying to convince someone to get vaccinated:

Change your thoughts about this person. Your father isn’t exactly the man you thought he was and this event, which has acted like a catalyst for many, has allowed him to evince all the things he already thought. Also the incredible bungling of this event, the world over, has created an environment of suspicion and fear which feeds into prior prejudices and skepticism. Some of the things he said to you indicate distrust of government, science, and a lack of concern for others. “Guilt for others”? I’m sorry, it’s called compassion, and I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about others. Cope with that realization and move on. You can’t fight ignorance if you’re willing to subvert truth to it. Your dad (or other family member) is just a person, and so you’re better off facing down their issues as a peer, not a respectful child their ego can ignore. Tell them you understand their fears and have information that might help. If they choose to ignore you, then it’s time to get serious.

There are ways to convince a stranger, usually with a sort of “we don’t know each other but I completely comprehend your feelings. Let me answer your questions “ sort of way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with alder family, especially a father, in a patriarchy. So wording is important. Stick to the facts and repeat them often so that his brain incorporates them and it ends up being his idea. Repeat it as often as his fact-free news does. The more often a human hears something, the more neural connections are made and memories formed, so if you want this person to live, or stop being a plague vector, repeat the words over and over, until they’re sick of it. Better than being sick with covid.

I’m afraid that this is one of those arguments you should not avoid or put down. This is life or death for everyone. It’s not a joke. So let’s address his concerns one at a time.

Here’s a comprehensive list of facts that attack all the salient points.

This disease isn’t new and wasn’t a surprise. Communicable disease experts have been tracking coronaviruses in humans since the late 1960’s, when the viral strain first made the zoonotic leap to humans. There are labs all over the world who have been studying them and building vaccines for them for decades. All of the current vaccines: Pfeizer, Moderna, Astrozenica, Johnson & Johnson all are built on that data, which is why they could be made so quickly—they had 60 years of data on which to build. In fact, our government was warned of Covid-19’s possible advent back during Obama’s presidency, which is why he built a Pandemic Response Team (which the last president of the USA, Trump, disassembled). In fact, the effort to study coronaviruses has been an international effort, because scientists don’t actually give a damn about country lines, and only care about their field and competition within it. So don’t be surprised that you haven’t heard of them, but scientists “been knew” as the internet says. The FDA here in the USA has a ten year long study program for all new vaccines. Why was covid fast tracked? Because it was an old method and this is a crisis. Does it mean “no one knows what will happen”? No. There were still test groups. I know some who participated. They’re all fine. And also, the format of the vaccines are old. Old. Around for a while. Old method, new virus.

No. It didn’t come from a lab in China. I repeat. It wasn’t lab grown. We now know its genome and it bears absolutely no traces of having been spliced or any of humanity’s ham-fisted tinkering. It evolved.

Reactions to the vaccine are not inherently bad or of concern. They don’t mean the vaccine is bad. Covid kills people because the virus doesn’t yet know how to exist in human bodies. Meaning not only are you dealing with a virus that doesn’t know how to not kill you, you’re also dealing with the body’s overreaction The human immune system essentially goes berserk. Treatment of the virus is not just control of viral spread and damage, but also immune system control and suppression (this is why the lupus medication of hydroxychloroquine was considered as a possible treatment). What this means is, if you already had a strain of Covid-19 in the last year, and the immune system still has a vivid memory of it. When you get the first vaccine shot your body says “oh not that again” and responds, sometimes ferociously. It’s your body arming itself against what is essentially a neutered virus—used as a trigger to get your body making antibodies to protect you. If you haven’t had a strain of Covid in the last year, you won’t have as strong a reaction to the first shot. But you might have a reaction to the second one, because the first was so effective your immune system “got the email” and now knows its enemy, and so it arms itself. The reaction actually proves the vaccine is effective.

Don’t just get vaccinated to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, because there’s a lot more going on, and not enough people are addressing this. Viruses mutate. That’s why HIV was so difficult to build vaccines for. The common cold isn’t one virus, but a group of them that constantly change because we can’t build effective vaccines for all of them and give them to the world all at once, and influenza mutates constantly. Meaning that every time a person gets the virus, they are now a Petri dish for possible new strains, some of which may not be controlled by the current vaccine. Vaccinating yourself creates a barrier and prevents the virus from having access to yet another Petri dish it would use to evolve. We have the covid-19 delta variant now, because people didn’t get vaccinated, and thankfully the vaccine appears to work on it, but the next variant may not respond so well. We have to shut off every possible way this thing can evolve, to effectively kill the virus and shove it out of existence, as we did small pox. This means a worldwide effort to stop it in its tracks. Everyone vaccinated at once against Covid-19.

No one uses vaccines to control, in fact they often use the deprivation of vaccines to control. This is a completely understandable conspiracy. I don’t trust any government on this earth but this is not the way they control you. (They use money and fear to do that.) But here, let me give you some points on that account.

Vaccines carry dead or weakened forms of the virus, ones that can’t breed or spread in your body, just a sort of blue print for your body to use. Immunosuppressed or compromised people cannot get them because their immune systems are not going to respond to that blue print in the same way.

We have annihilated several illnesses from this earth through effective vaccination.

The vaccines aren’t controlled by governments. They’re owned by corporations which are just as bad, but multinational. Each proprietary vaccine is based on multinational data and collaboration, and it is data anyone can get hold of if they know how. You know how you can tell the data is available? Competing companies all have it. At the same time.

Vaccines don’t contain harmful chemicals. If they did, the virus in them would be killed. The things they do contain are either preservatives, stabilizers, or viral uptake boosters designed to help your body use the vaccine better. If you’re really worried about the components in them, perhaps stop eating basically any food on earth, because you get more mercury from a piece of tuna than you do a flu vaccine, and more aluminum from eating salad than you do from a Covid vaccine.

The US military has been given all manner of vaccines and shots for a century, from which they cannot abstain. They don’t get to know what they’re being given. They just get a shot. Look how many of them are still alive. Leading cause of death for veterans is actually heart disease (20.2%), suicide (13.1%), and unintentional injury (12.7%). Not “death by vaccines”.

Your immune system cannot effectively defend itself from something the entire human genome hasn’t encountered. I don’t care if you’re an Avenger, and in the best shape of your life, your body can always use a leg-up. A vaccine is made from the strains that exist in human bodies, which means it gives you effective instruction on how to build your own defenses. Your immune system only works if it can get hold of safe blue prints it can use to build immunity. It can’t do that if you get killed first. Getting vaccinated is how your body can mount an effective defense against something it’s literally not seen.

Do I really need to give a lecture on how governments have used disease to control, colonize, and destroy groups of people, or are we good on that? No? Let’s just say a lot of people think disease is a natural population control for an “overpopulated” world. Allow me to introduce you to the 8 stages of genocide.

The community of people who have researched this virus and pioneered the vaccine don’t have an agenda. They’re virologists. Their entire interest and obsession and expertise is in understanding viruses and preventing loss of human life. I work with some of these people, and just because you don’t understand what they’re doing, doesn’t mean you ought to attach your pessimism to what they do. Is your father an expert in something? How would he feel if someone without that expertise tried to have an opinion? What if it was life or death? That’s how scientists feel right now.

The virus is that bad. It is. There have been 4.09 million deaths world wide, so far, which may not sound like a lot, but really is. Now epidemiologists have a method for calculating what they call “excess death” or the death count above normal, caused by an epidemic. It’s complicated but, we can do some very rough math to get a general idea. In 2018, there were only 57 million deaths worldwide. That’s from ALL causes of death—chronic illness, age, war, famine, and! Communicable diseases like this one. If this one virus accounts for a 7% rise in total deaths? That’s a HUGE increase. And that’s just so far. Let’s be fair and divide it up between 2019 ans 2020. That’s still a 4%increase. (The other deaths may drop a bit, because quarantine kept other diseases down and also kept people home, but it caused a rise in violent death [because abusive people being locked in a home with their victims, is obviously bad.]) And again, it evolves and mutates and will kill more. So saying “They can’t know how many cases we have actually had” is god damn irrelevant, because it continues to evolve. Then there’s the other problem, that many of the people who get it and recover (higher in poorer areas with less health care and certain age groups) end up with debilitating long-term side effects. Meaning covid just became what we call a “comorbidity” or worsening effect, for any other illness they may have had later in life. (Invest in ventilator development if you want to make some money in the coming decades). “Long covid” causes all sorts of problems, like clots, organ failure, and long term respiratory illness. You aren’t dead, but you might end up dead from something that otherwise wouldn’t have hurt you. Not to mention that you’re still susceptible to another strain of covid-19, which might actually kill you. But I can already hear your father saying “yes but they said it would be much worse and it hasn’t been” to that I say, yes, because we all quarantined. “Duh”. We reacted, which controlled it, but some countries in Africa are only just now getting a peak in cases. Meaning the death toll will keep rising. Meaning this is still going on, and if it is, the virus is getting access to more laboratories it can use to evolve out of our vaccination control. Meaning the quarantine will never end.

You want to go back to normal, trust the combined expertise of generations of scientists. Get vaccinated. The vaccines we have not only prevent illness, they lower spread, they lower risks for “long covid” or hospitalization in cases of breakthrough infection or “getting infected even though vaccinated”, they prevent avenues of mutation. This isn’t about politics, or your generation, or the egotistical nuances of the cause célèbre of the decade or whatever party leanings you may have. Right now, in the USA, we have a huge set of outbreaks. Where are they? In states with low vaccination rates. Meaning they’re working on getting rid of their own ideology. However, they’re also taking out people who cannot get vaccinated, people who don’t have access to good information, people who can’t read, and…they’re a perfect place for a virus to evolve and grow new strains that cannot be stopped by our current vaccines.

And if you’re just afraid of needles…say so. Stop being a nitwit and constructing a huge framework of garbage that misinforms just so you don’t have to get stabbed with a needle for .5 seconds. Walk it off. Go to therapy for phobias and then protect everyone around you.

I’m tired of this debate. When the Spanish Flu epidemic happened 100 years ago, the world was desperate for an answer. Desperate. They would have done anything to get a vaccine. In some parts of the world, they are right now. Developed nations, your privilege is showing.

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