This isn't working.

 "That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason; there is nothing more excellent than the universe, therefore the universe exercises reason." - Zeno of Citium

 It's time to very briefly return to a theme I broached in another post.  It's about the stages of grief, and how people process their feelings and move past grief.  This is a well-understood and widely accepted process within the field of psychology.

This post isn't about grief over the loss of our daily routines - the "before" time.  We seem to be slowly adjusting to whatever "normal" is these days.  However, some people appear to be experiencing denial and anger over a certain pharmaceutical product that we were all told would fix the world's problems and "get us back to normal" from before the pandemic.  In other words, emotions over being lied to, and grief that "normal" probably isn't going to return.  I'm not a mind-reader, but I'd go out on a limb and say that people haven't yet acknowledged and accepted that we are never going back to "like it was before".

And that's because the pharmaceutical product that everyone eagerly lined up to have injected doesn't seem to be working all that well.  

That product, authorities now admit, doesn't keep you from getting sick.  Nor does it keep you from making others sick - from being a "Typhoid Mary" so to speak.  Preventing "severe illness" is what they now claim that it does - when that's not at all what they said in the beginning.  Can they even prove or quantify this "preventing severe illness"?  Has an honest study been done on this new goalpost?  Preferably a study *not* by one of the big pharma companies, or their ex-employees who now run things at the CDC...

In spite of the above points, I'll give them this much - the pharma companies are amazing at making drug trials look successful.  It's helpful to then get rid of the control group before any long-term effects could become evident.  They have also been very, very good at getting the media and government to look the other way regarding adverse reactions.

Watch this for a better understanding of what we are currently enduring...

Back to the cycle of grief though.  People don't respond well to being duped, snookered, hood-winked, lied to, or flim-flammed.  A lot of people who have been duped become extremely angry when it is pointed out that they've been conned.  They often turn their anger on the truth-teller, rather than the con artist.  

After all, who wants to believe that they've been manipulated and taken advantage of?  People have continued to place their trust the authorities... why is that?  These same authorities lied us into wars, bailed out criminal banks, and have toppled democratically elected governments - they are a disturbing kind of people.  The CDC oversaw the final 35 years of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study!  Why would you trust them to suddenly do the right thing?

And so people are very angry right now, but they are angry at the unvaccinated, and this is encouraged by the media.  People should really be angry with pharma, the government, and the media - those are the ones who misled them into believing the vaccine would "get us back to normal".  There is no "going back to normal".  "Normal" is whatever our daily lives will become after we adjust to this new situation: Living with endemic bat disease.  Until you can vaccinate every deer and other Covid-carrying animal in the world, we are going to have to learn to deal with this.

Israel is in the process of launching a campaign of boosting - a third dose of the same vaccine that's failing to help them right now.  There is also now discussion of a fourth dose.  At what point does this end?  And more importantly, is it even working?  If you have soaring illness in spite of a high vaccination rate and boosting, is the vaccine really helping you?  

Back again to grief.  So what grief processing am I actually talking about?  Let's take a dose of reality, instead of a dose of medicine.

Within a few months, I anticipate that some of these manipulated people are going to have a light-bulb "aha!" moment, and realize that the vaccines aren't doing much lifting.  I don't know if this light-bulb moment will be an instant thing or not.  

Remember when, after months of ridicule, it was suddenly credible and OK to discuss the possibility that this virus might have leaked from the Wuhan Lab?  Remember that shit???  That was a massive media turn-around from fantasy-land over to logic, in like three days time - after months of ridiculing the idea, and calling anyone who suggested it a "racist" (WTF?).  This turn-around happened so suddenly that it made my head spin.  

Maybe the vaccine inefficacy debate will end in the same sudden way.  Maybe it will require a longer period to process, acknowledge and become common wisdom.  Orwell would love watching the media these days.  He could write another book. 

While the vaccines don't - in my opinion - seem very beneficial, they are occasionally giving kids myocarditis, and thereby gifting hospitals with enormous medical bills.  Ka-ching!  These are hospital bills that nobody can be held legally liable for - and yet employers are mandating people get these shots!!!  That is insane, given the poor performance of these vaccines at stopping the spread of Covid.  Maybe those hospital bills will get some coverage and trigger that light-bulb moment.  The light-bulb moment has been a long time coming, but it should come eventually.

After their last legal settlement, Pfizer seems to have learned that best practice for a pharma corp is not to invent a great product, but to avoid legal liability.  Everyone who got the shot might soon recognize that most of this hysteria is about funneling tax money to pharma, and not about public health.  There is also the government's desired side-effect of tighter social control, monitoring, and surveillance. 

We are currently being "nudged" to inject a vaccine that was developed to fight a variant of Covid that was making the rounds in late 2019 and early 2020.  That old variant has all but disappeared - displaced by the more virulent Delta variant.  Other variants are lurking about which seem to dodge antibodies created by the vaccine.  Those variants would clearly make the vaccine pointless, if they were to become the dominant strain.  When you find yourself in a hole, it's usually best to stop digging.  More of this older vaccine will probably only be useful to Pfizer shareholders.

This other news from England is not welcome at all.  England is a reasonably well-vaccinated country. And yet the most recent pandemic wave has more infected people than ever - even more than when people weren't vaccinated at all!!  At some point, you have to acknowledge that what you are doing is not working and try something different - stop digging.  I do this in my life on a daily basis. I can't understand why organizations fail so badly at trying another path after observing that the first doesn't work.  However if the motive is financial, and then the refusal to change becomes more clear.

A lot of people will hopefully soon realize that they were nudged into doing something that maybe wasn't in the best interest of their personal health.  It's at that point that we need to be the better person, and to show them our compassion.  

Showing compassion to the injured is the moral, ethical, and the human thing to do.  It's imperative to not ridicule, shame, or belittle them - even though so much hatred was directed at us skeptics.  We need to help the misled to get through their disillusionment, and past the bargaining and depression stages of their grief.  The anger stage is going on right now, and yes, it's very real.  

Deep in their hearts though, they probably already know.  

Be kind, be forgiving, and most of all, be empathetic.  We have all been harmed by this - in different ways and in differing degrees.  Be humble, helpful, and encouraging.  

Update November 11, 2021:

It seems that The Atlantic agrees with me.  I only found this article this morning, although it was published a couple of days before this post.  It looks like their thought processes echo my own.  Rational people seem to arrive at similar conclusions.