Beware what you catch!

I can hear her words still reverberating in my ears like she said it yesterday. To catch a  big fish, always put a small fry on the hook. All through my childhood, this is the mantra that Amma preached upon us. She was unapologetic about her views about the nuns in the convent school that my sisters went to. Even though she was the one who insisted that my sisters should go to a missionary school, she was always sceptical about their true intentions. She told my sisters to learn what the teachers taught but not what the nuns preached. She was clear about that. In her mind, the school gave good education, for the other stuff, thank you very much.

Whenever someone offers you a handout, be wary. Amma would always remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything carries a piece of baggage. In simple terms, we grew up distrusting altruistic intention, minding only for ourselves. Maybe, these teachings helped us to pull ourselves by our bootstraps to greater heights.

As we matured and our inner eyes opened, we thought maybe the human race survive all this while because of our altruistic acts, not just each individual's zest to survive. The strong had to hold out a helping hand to guide the weak. For that, we have charity bodies, NGOs and religious institutions.  

All that Amma had said came echoing back to me after so many decades when Bill Gates, the once-richest man in the world, announced that he was donating half of his property to charity and was sacrificing his life and soul in solving Africa's food and health problems once and all.  

Soon enough, the truth was revealed. At the heights of the Wuhan virus pandemic and the desperate dearth of vaccines in everybody mind, someone suggested that the patency for vaccines should be lifted. It was thought more vaccine makers can increase production to make it available to the masses, the rich and poor alike. But, much to everybody's surprise, Mr Gates opposed the idea citing fear of a drop in the quality of vaccines produced. In my eyes, it sounds like a drop in income rather than quality control.

Even closer to home, our leaders are not at all interested in getting all its citizens vaccinated. The tussle is not in procuring vaccines, but which brand to use, whose proxy companies would get the lion's share of the bargain and what is it for them. Nobody is bothered about the lay people's welfare. Even individual states which procure vaccines via donations are restricted from using, citing licencing and legal mumbo jumbo as the issue. Again, the bottom line is ringgits and sens. If their intentions are so clear, are they worried? No, they are so thick-skinned that nothing can hurt them. Come next election, they would create another ruckus to garner sympathy votes.

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Are you vexed?

Vaxxed - From Cover-up to Catastrophe (2016)
Vaxxed II - The People's Truth (2019)

It must be difficult being educated in the 21st century. With the plethora of information at our fingertips, we are left not more well versed but on the contrary, more confused and unsure about almost everything. The more knowledge we seem to acquire, the more we seem to be wanting. The influence of visual media and the persuasive power of raw human emotions make us buy any story and rethink that perhaps conventional wisdom perhaps needs reassessment.

For aeons, people succumbed to communicable diseases. Entire civilisations have disappeared in our not so distant past. The advanced Aztec and Mayan cultures were probably wiped out by the smallpox viruses brought in by looting Spanish sailors. Barring some viruses kept in laboratories for bio-weapons, we have managed to eradicate smallpox from our list of the leading causes of mortality. Vaccination used to be hailed as one of the fifty of mankind's most significant discoveries. Now, people stand proud thumping their chests boasting of their statuses of not being inoculated against communicable diseases. In fact, it appears as if they have lost all confidence in the medical profession.

No, it is not true that medical professionals are not trained in administering vaccinations. Contrary to what is wrongly alleged in this documentaries, medical students spend many hours studying immunology and rationale of immunisation. True, adverse reactions to vaccines are known, but it is a numbers' game. We are talking about extremely rare serious debilitating long-term neurological side effects, in the range of 1 in 100,000 for triple antigens. The disgraced British Gastroenterologist, Dr Andrew Wakefield, in his seminal 1998 BMJ paper suggested that the combination Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine probably carried many contaminants that could be linked to autism. He suggested MMR administration be reassessed and be given as separate preparations. 

Japan, after its 1960s experience with unexplained subacute myelo-optic neuropathy (SMON) which was linked to polio vaccine and threatened to put a stop to the 1960s Tokyo Olympics, is very wary of introducing vaccines to the country. For the record, many years later, a popular dysentery medication Clioquinol (CQL), was singled out as the probable culprit. The manufacturers of the anti-HPV vaccine against cervical cancer, Gardasil, have been trying very hard to penetrate into the Japanese market with no success.

The documentaries managed to pluck the melancholic strings of many of its sentimental viewers. The pictures and video clippings of before and after images of patients with vaccine-injury can move mountains. Imagine a bubbly and smiling infant learning to walk before the MMR vaccination turning into a fretful, floppy child with no eye contact. And yet in another instance, a dirt-bike racing teenager boy becomes quadriplegic with spinal meningitis after Gardasil. An active cheerleader with a bright future has her personality all altered after the anti-HPV jab. 

Statistics do not matter to the victims of vaccine-injury. The question is whether the subsequent morbidity experienced by the patient was indeed caused by the act of vaccination. Was it a mere coincidence or a manifestation of an unrelated disease that was deemed to surface anyway? Are the symptoms related to the contaminants in the preparation of vaccines? It is known that aluminium, nickel and mercury which carry the antigen are linked to ill effects. Does the multiplication of deactivated viruses or antigens in animal cultures bring with it zoonotic diseases related to attached retroviruses? Perhaps the human body has not been given time to adapt to the high load of animal inoculations.

The democratisation of information does not liberate its consumers. It merely pushes all the information to the end-users, to empower them to make choices. The product insert lists all the known and obscure adverse complications related to the vaccines, hence, absolving the manufacturers of possible litigations.

The presence of a special vaccine court in the US where vaccines cannot be sued but the possible victims of vaccine-injury may be compensated by a professional body raises suspicion whether Big Pharmas have some kind of a stronghold to reap benefit from an unsuspecting society. Is there more than meets the eye in the story of immunisation?

From a movement that demanded a reassessment of combination vaccines, it has now morphed into one that opposed all kind of vaccinations. In my opinion, it is a kind of overkill. Some of the later scenes in the second documentary borders on ludicrousness, though. Clips of proud parents from the Bible Belt region flaunting their seemingly healthy and smart children is no testimony of perfect health.

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Corona the vaccine, we the virus.

Swans in Venetian Canal
 Credit @filterjm

Probably for the first time since Man started giving salutations to the feared forces around him, he has been asked to stop all kinds of religious congregations in big groups. For aeons, Man believed that maladies take place because the Divine forces have been angered. In their simple understanding, the only avenue left for them to correct the tragedy is to appease the Divinity by glorifying it to high heavens; hoping that He would throw us His Grace.

Hence, despite appeals by the authorities, practitioners of various faiths continue to put their trusts in the forces above, not in rational thinking and the sciences. They feel that people have been misled for far too long. The way the human race appears to be heading does not assure them of a happy ending. Too many have placed self-interest above salvation to expect altruism to prevail.

There are groups of people who are hellbent in finding scapegoats. In their minds, many if not most germs came from the East. In recent memory, we have heard of SARS, H1N1 and Nipah Virus and their fixation with exotic animals like civet cats and bats. In the 14th century, Bubonic Plague and Black Death arose from the Far East via the Silk Road.

Scrolling through the annals of history, one discovers that pretty much every human pathogen originated from our exploitation of animals. Humanity's dominion over animals has unleashed a veritable Pandora's ark of infectious diseases. Most modern human infectious diseases were unknown before domestication led to a mass spillover of animal disease into human populations. For example, tuberculosis appears to have been acquired initially through the domestications of goats but now infects one-third of humanity. Meanwhile, measles and smallpox may have arisen from mutant cattle viruses. We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, chickens and typhoid fever, ducks and influenza, water buffalos and leprosy as well as horses and cold virus (Michael Greger, How Not to Die).


Or is our decision to self-isolate against each other is Nature's conniving power play to avenge decades of rape of its sovereignty? Look at the countries which were teeming with excessive human activities and see what lockdown has achieved? China's citizens can finally get fresh air and see the blue sky without being enveloped with smog. One week of an absence of gondolas and visitors, dolphins and swans come out to play. It looks like Corona is the vaccine, and we are the virus of Nature.

Since prayers in large enough groups will not see any daylight in the near future, cries for help from the divine forces cannot happen. I guess we have to depend on our God-given intellects to save us from extinction.

Dolphins have appeared at the Italian coastline after the
shipping lines were locked down due to coronavirus (REUTERS)

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