On my way back to the car from attending the rally at Mount Maunganui on Saturday 16 October, I had the misfortune to be walking in front of a group of older kiwis who clearly disapproved of the shenanigans of our crowd. As they clucked their tongues in displeasure one old man decided to speak indirectly to me in his most passive-aggressive voice. His wife spit out in lemon tones "Look, there's one of them there!", and he proclaimed "Oh, for goodness sake, they are putting us all at risk!" in a much louder than necessary voice just to be sure that I knew he was talking to me.
The urge to turn and ask him how my vaccination status could possible affect him faded pretty fast. I took the higher road. I just don't care to bother with you, sir. You are your own worst enemy.
I was only for a fleeting moment tempted to ask my cowardly accuser exactly how my vaccination status had any effect on him. After all, there have been no attempts to actually measure transmission rates by Pfizer, from whom he received his protective shot. And his shot isn't going to kill Covid by magic when he meets it next. That just isn't how this works. I suspect he wouldn't have been able to give me a good answer. And that's half the problem - these twits just don't have any real information about either the disease or the vaccine they've taken on a promise that it will make the world a better place.
The most glaring omission from our collective discussions about vaccination for Sars-Cov-2 has surely got to be sensible and factual discussions about health outcomes. Health outcomes from Covid-19 and health outcomes from vaccination seem to be the one topic, apart from generic venting about freedom and control, that is almost studiously being avoided by everyone who could helpfully contribute to it. Why is that?
Look, I confess, I'm a chicken. I'm not proud of it, but I have a plethora of fears in varying degrees about a number of things that a rational person might find somewhat stupid. For example, and probably the daftest of them all is my fear of needles. I hate them with a passion. I was 8 months pregnant before I pulled up my socks and plucked up courage enough to go and get a blood test to confirm my condition. The phlebotomist was greatly amused, and could hardly restrain herself from laughing out loud. I would have forgiven her if she had, I know how funny it must have seemed as I waddled in for the test. Funnier still of course is that the hospital required it even at that late stage of pregnancy before they would agree to tend to my delivery needs. Anyhoo, suffice to say I don't do needles well.
As an RA sufferer, I also have an extremely heightened aversion to the pain that comes with being under nuclear-level attack by my own body. Talk about friendly fire! I vividly recall the days, in the not to distant past, when I borrowed a walking stick left behind by my mother on one of her visits just so that I could get to the bottom of the garden and back. I had for a couple of years struggled with joint pain which my doctor had advised was the result of joining the ranks of 'older New Zealand'. Thanks, pal, for the reminder! It was just arthritis, he said. Turns out it wasn't just arthritis, it was RA. And it was bad RA.
According to my GP, normal people have an RF (Rheumatoid Factor) of less than 25. When it was finally checked, mine was 283. That might give you an indication of the state of this poor old body, and the intense inflammation pain I was in. By the time I was diagnosed I was wearing knee braces with springs under baggy jeans so I could get out of my chair after I sat down. I slept with braces on my hands and wrists to limit their movement at night. I would wake through the night in such pain that I would be crying before I was even awake. I would whimper quietly so as not to wake my partner, and hobble out of the bedroom in desperate search of painkillers. I raided old medications out of the back of drawers that hadn't been opened for years - diclofenac that was probably well and truly out of date, but I hoped it would numb the pain for me, combined with 10-12 paracetamol and ibuprofen tablets a day and the odd tramadol whenever I could get my hands on it. I hate the effects and the horrifying addictive qualities of tramadol, but the ethics of scrounging drugs from the Bay's black market went right out the window. I couldn't walk very far, I couldn't lift anything over a few kilos, and using my computer and mouse were strictly limited to just the essential duties of my work. Suicide was at one time a serious contemplation, just to make it stop.
I've been medicated for over a year now, and I'm almost living pain-free. But the memory of that time spent being victimised by my own body lingers, never far from the forefront of my mind. It was a living hell that I never want to go back to, and a constant source of extreme fear. It makes sense then, that I don't take chances when it comes to anything that might cause me to revert to the crippled old woman I felt like I had become.
Then, God save us, Delta came calling at the door. At first, I had been afraid of the 'flu itself. Covid, my GP told me, was likely to hit me much harder because I am already immuno-compromised. I was terrified at what this outbreak could mean for me. I listened carefully to every word of every news broadcast to find out how close this new enemy was.
What I didn't know back then is that the theory that I would be more susceptible than everyone else was just that - it was, and still is, just a theory. You would think, wouldn't you, that with so many people in the world suffering from AI diseases the medical fraternity could do more than just theorise about what might happen if we get the China 'Flu! You'd think someone would push the research, right. Well someone did - the Covid-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance. Thank the heavens!
What I now know, after waiting and 'doing my own research', is this:
- I am most likely at no greater risk than anyone else at being infected with Covid-19;
- I may be at 'slightly' greater risk of severe outcome (such as a ventilator being needed) but that has yet to be fully studied;
- I am likely to obtain only 33% of the antibody value of a 'normal' person after vaccination, due to the methotrexate I take.
Moreover, there is a possibility for disease flares or other adverse effects for rheumatology patients following vaccination. These adverse events were minimally evaluated in the vaccine clinical trials, which excluded AAIRD patients receiving systemic therapies. The rapid presentation of side effects for some patients receiving COVID-19 vaccinations suggest there is something proinflammatory in the nucleoside-modified RNA vaccines. ~ Joel Ernst, MD, chief of Experimental Medicine at UCSFSo, no additional risk of infection and much less benefit from a vaccine than everyone else, with only a minor increase in risk of complications, but a possibility of flare or other adverse effect. Quite why my doctor at my last visit thought it would be helpful to encourage me with: "There's a reason why 99% of the doctors in New Zealand are vaccinated, you know", is anyone's guess. For crying out loud, man! I'm not a doctor, and I don't give a damn what they have done. I care about my health, not theirs! Give me real information! I left, after telling him he'd done his job but I wasn't going to play the fear-porn game.
Were my fears without foundation back when I believed Covid was going to be the death of me? No. No one's fear is completely without foundation. We're all entitled to be scared. But sometimes, we have to admit that the reason for our fear is that we've been told to be afraid needlessly. So it was with me for such a long time. The initial jolt of fear that ran up my spine when I first heard about Covid-19 in early 2020 became a writhing beast over a very short period of time. It wrapped itself around my spine, unleashing tentacles to latch their suckers onto my spinal cord and intrude upwards into my mind. I became all but paralysed by the fear produced by the media daily and encouraged by Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield from their regular dissertations at the Lectern of Lies. It took months to extricate that little blighter and free myself enough to realise I was being conned.
We've developed a huge body of New Zealanders (about 500,000 apparently) who are not only refusing to be vaccinated, they are also refusing to accept the extraordinary lack of information about Covid-19 being dished up by our health professionals and Ministry of Health. And not just a lack of information either. Sometimes what we are being told is deliberate misinformation, designed to frighten us as though Covid-19 were a boogeyman in the closet ready to come out and bite us while we sleep.
In a sea of horror, so many kiwis are searching frantically for a lifeboat, only to find that it hasn't been deployed for them. No one is coming to save them - they must save themselves. They flounder and are tossed on wave after wave of speculation and disinformation until they either succumb and drown or manage to find their own means of survival. That's not good enough, my friend. It's not good enough at all.
Only 10-15% of us will survive, if current vaccination statistics are anything to go by. The rest will drown before they can ever be certain of the facts - and before they can be sure they've heard the truth. Those brave souls who have thrown themselves into that sea are surviving, if not intact, then at least content. One by one, they reach the shore still clutching treasure chests of information to share with the rest of us.
They are not cowards, afraid of a little needle as they are being portrayed. They are not conspiracy theorists, crazy enough that they should be considered less than human. They are not uneducated plebs who don't understand how vaccines work and what they are supposed to do. That is not who they are.
They are our heroes, and we will sing their praises for generations to come.
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