Footnote 28: A Reply to Igor Chudov's Question

Igor asked: 'Why did you NOT get the shot?' Well, here goes…

Editorial preface: I first thought that I’d post a brief reply, but my determination processes were quite…more nuanced (elaborated), so, instead of my planned post, here goes.

Before we start, here’s why:

When Sars-Cov-2 first made waves, we—a family of four (our children were born in 2014 and 2017, respectively)—lived in a non-EU country in Central Europe.

Spring/summer 2020: Consent without Thought

The first ‘lockdown’ was quite something: never saw anyone who came down ‘with’ Sars-Cov-2 or the like, but we (family of 4, kids born in 2014 and 2017) kept mostly home. I recall our dinner conversations getting somewhat more anxious just before the government declared containment to the way forward in mid-March.

Little did I know, or care, about anything related to Covid-19 at that time. Working ‘in academia’, everything was moved online on a whim at around the same time, although, with the benefit of hindsight, pre-March 2020 features included a number of ‘helpful’ campus-licensed products (MS Teams, Zoom, to name but the two most obvious ones) were already available, hence ‘disruption’ occurred mainly because these programs are so crappy that it took people some time to actually learn-by-using how to, kind of, sort-of ‘properly’ use them. True, there were some bumps and so, but with the learning curve pointing upwards and a lot of goodwill from all sides, we struggled on.

Sidenote: remote instruction is very bad, and the only thing that’s actually worse, I think (without having evidence) is no instruction at-all. If asked, I’d go on a rant, but it boils down to basically two issues: first, not all teaching is the same, and I found one-directional lectures work o.k.-ish, as opposed to, say, small-group, engagement-heavy discussion seminars or the like. Here, too, a one-size-fits-all approach is clearly useless, if not an outright stupidity. Second, back in the middle ages when ‘the university’ as an institution came into being, interested people paid a scholar to teach, and, if transformed to an argument, goes a bit like this: the primary education/learning effect of higher education is students learning from each other; sure, they also learn from their instructors, but the students are constantly observing each other in a social setting that encourages self-discipline (learning), reflection, and, above all, dissent. Moving ‘the university’ online was a blunder of gigantic proportions.

Fortunately, spring 2020 was awesome, weather-wise (25° C, or shorts and t-shirt around Easter), and we didn’t live in the city (but the suburbs), meaning: our backyard vegetable plot as well as a playground that wasn’t off limits were what kept us going—and outside in the warm sun a lot.

As spring turned to summer, we moved from one (non-EU) country to another, which may have taken some immediacy from following the news too directly, for obvious reasons. Back then—glory days—there were no test requirements upon entry into our current country of residence here in Scandinavia; yes, mask mandates at the airports and aboard the planes, but all things considered, it was o.k. (Also, our kids had stayed with my in-laws in Austria, and my parents brought them to Scandinavia a few days after my wife and I arrived, which took some pressure off everyone involved.)

One last thing I recall: neither of us had come down with ‘the virus’ by then; I vaguely remember my wife being in bed for 1-2 days in mid-March 2020 with something like a quite common cold. The kids and I were fine, only I lost part of my sense of taste (on the tip of the tongue) a few days later, but more in the manner of tasting food that’s too hot, i.e., as far as I can remember, nothing like the symptoms described. We didn’t even think about, and even less about getting tested: tests were in short supply back then, and after 1-2 days, all was well.

Summer/autumn 2020: Relocation and Reflections

Once up North, things were very different. Norway had been an early ‘success’ story with respect to Covid management. There were not even quarantine obligations when we entered the country in late July 2020. So, my wife and I picked up our luggage, got the rental car, and travelled downtown to our hotel. Once there, we went out and had a nice, if quite expensive and late, dinner in a packed restaurant. No masks, no inconveniences, no nothing, with the absence of ‘normal’ tourists perhaps the one definitive thing that was, well, very different.

The Nordic countries were highly digital by the time we got here: virtually no-one uses cash (there are no transaction fees, too, and even buying real estate means that online money transfers are immediate) and public administration is very much digitised as well. Once you are in the population registry, you can open a bank account—and get yourself a BankID, a digital identifier that allows you access to virtually all services, public and private, ranging from remote signing of contracts, filing tax reports, and talking to kindergarten officials.

Sidenote: I remain extra-wary of these things, esp. the payment by swiping and tapping, as well as that digital ID. While both were extra-handy in the context of most magistrates being, well, ‘in home office mode’ in summer 2020, the delimitations on human freedom are too severe. To illustrate this briefly: when Russia’s military operation in Ukraine commenced, I took out a sizable amount of cash, which prompted my bank to write me a formal letter discouraging me from doing so; here in Norway, one has eight (!) cash withdrawals without fees per year…the other day, local media reported that someone took out 9,990 Norwegian Crowns (max. amount per individual withdrawal being 10,000, or about US$ 1,000), showing a surveillance still and the headline alleged ‘money laundering’.

Still, like everyone else saturated with gov’t propaganda, Norwegians were eagerly awaiting ‘the vaccine’ to safely return to their lives in autumn 2020. Over time, as I met more of my departmental colleagues, most lunch talk, such as it was, revolved around all matters Covid-19.

Given the generally less hand-handed approach—which mirrored, to no small degree, neighbouring Sweden’s efforts, albeit without officials rubbing it into everyone’s faces and with much lower mortality figures—to this day I commend the Norwegian government for leaving esp. young children in peace: there never were mandates of any kind in kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools after spring 2020. Once, in January 2022, some states tried mass-testing—and in my province, they tested some 1.2m children (rapid AG tests), which resulted in 19 or 20 ‘positive’ tests, to the tune of some US$ 750,000. *This* prompted local papers to run headlines, such as ‘we could have spent that money more wisely, e.g., on school lunches’, and that was that. (The situation in upper middle and senior high schools is not so different: mostly remote instruction, with all the expectable fall-out, incl. overflowing teen psychiatry wards, massive psycho-emotional problems, and the like, but since there were way fewer restrictions, perhaps the severity of these policies isn’t as big as elsewhere.)

In terms of university life, well, we switched between in-person (‘normal’) instruction, ‘hybrid’ teaching (a certain fraction of students per week was allowed into the classroom, rotating with other groups over the subsequent weeks), to full remote instruction depending on class sizes. This was done on an individual choice basis, partially restricted by mandatory limits on the number of people allowed into any one room. I should also mention that we switched three or four times between these varieties of instruction, all of which ‘worked’ more or less (badly), depending on who you ask. Personally, I prefer in-person instruction and accessibility in my office, but the students’ eagerness (sic) to actually come to campus was—and in my many ways still is—quite limited.

Given the overall very low teaching load in Norwegian academia, I had quite a lot of time to think and read-up on all matters Covid-19. Being here helped a lot, as it demonstrated that a hands-off approach (comparatively speaking) worked no worse and, in many cases, much better, than the heavy-handed intrusions meted out by governments in esp. Central Europe.

Spring 2021: Decision Time

It was around that time that I ‘discovered’ Alex Berenson’ Twitter feed (those were the days…) and began to read medical papers and studies. I learned a lot, in particular noticing that ‘writing’ isn’t exactly the strong suit of our colleagues in the life sciences (or what passes for ‘journalism’ these days). Learning a new language and leaving behind the countries and language-area I lived in previously helped a lot to cut back on legacy media consumption.

Yet, my main ‘motivations’ to become ‘sceptical’ boil down to the following two core issues:

• While I had been reading ‘dissenting’ voices, such as Paul Craig Roberts (shout-out) and Chris Martenson (ditto) for almost two decades, more doubts crept into my mind. I am in the very fortunate position to be able to share my thoughts with my wife, and around the time the injections were rolled out, we saw that any complications whatsoever were immediately dismissed by anyone—before vanishing into the ‘memory hole’, as was the case with the two Austrian nurses who died shortly after receiving the AstraZeneca injection in spring 2021. To this day, these two tragic deaths are the only such events that were ‘associated’ with any of these injectable products, as the Austrian authorities admit (see here for details, incl. links). Doing so didn’t exactly increase my confidence in these products and having available information ‘other’ than government propaganda and MSM bullshit also helped, in addition to the experiences in Norway outlined above.

• On the other hand, the Norwegian healthcare system is virtually all public (socialised), which means that there’s virtually no chance that you could somehow skip the queue and get an injection before your government-allocated appointment to ‘receive’ any of these injections. Being in the middle of the age distribution and life expectancy (I’m in my early 40s), meant that both my wife and I would have been virtually among the last people in Norway to be ‘offered’ these products, sometime in summer 2021. This afforded us the time to think this through and observe what happened to the people around us.

By then, too much questionable information had become available, and over the course of a two-minute exchange, both my wife and I agreed not to take these injections. We were also helped by a long-planned and, in retrospect, timely visit to Austria from mid-June to mid-July 2021. It was precisely in this time-window that the (online) invitation to ‘get vaccinated’ arrived, and since we were out of the country, we passed on this ‘opportunity’.

Summer/autumn 2021: Confirmation Biases

Most people we knew around us in both Austria and Norway had taken the injections by then. Sure, there was intense social pressure to ‘get vaccinated’ as well, mainly applied by virtually everyone telling you, of course without being asked, that they ‘had just gotten the shot’. Since I don’t share such information with everyone (except in medically indicated situation), I just let these people talk and kept quiet about my injection status.

Sidenote: the truly most moronic pro-jab statement I heard came from a colleague at work who constantly talked about nothing else other than getting ‘vaccinated’ in spring 2021. It would, of course, allow us to ‘put the pandemic behind us’ etc., and once he (who’s a bit older than me) received the Moderna product, he ‘complained’ to me informing me (of course unasked) that he’s ‘almost unhappy not to have had any side-effects at-all’ from both injections. He since received a ‘booster’, but at least he stopped talking about that, with the exception that he (still) hadn’t had Covid, but he clearly wished so.

As there’s no legal pressure here in Norway, consequences were minimal. I recall I only had to lie to a colleague (my next-door neighbour at work) once when asked. My mitigation tactics included steering the conversation away to some other topic over lunch or, if that didn’t work, apply something that work(ed) wonders with my own kids: simply reply ‘what do you think?’, combined with an eyeroll, which usually stopped these kinds of things in the tracks. My colleague, by the way, since came out informing me that he won’t get a ‘booster’ jab, so, I suppose my constant dissent, however carefully worded, was working.

In autumn 2021 I also started putting out pieces on Substack, so, if you wish to read up on these Norwegian experiences, all my bespoke articles are entitled ‘Covid in Norway’ and they will take you by the hand from around October of last year onwards.

As the section header indicates, more and more confirmation emerged over the second half of 2021 that underwrote our joint decision not to take these products. Neither of us got Covid-19 (until mid-January 2022, it was nothing much to worry about), by which the Norwegian public health authorities had come out with clear statements about risk stratification by age and, consequently, determined to abrogate virtually all mandates in late February/early March 2022.

A Brief Summary (of sorts)

By now it is evident that taking these genetic injections—in particular after going through an infection without having taken them—isn’t going to make me reconsider my choice. I’m awfully glad I did, and I’m even happier that there was no discussion about this with my wife.

Having the most accurate information about such a life-altering decision at-hand is helpful, but not having to discuss (argue) the wisdom of doing so was perhaps the key ingredient. (I don’t want to imagine—and I don’t have to, for I know one such person—what it must be like if one’s partner is all-in on these injections and wishes to also get the kids ‘vaccinated’…).

If being distrustful of the government’s deliberations, proclamations, and intentions is the foundation, another bedrock is my deep scepticism legacy media, thus if both are singing the same tune, one should immediately become extra wary of anything and everything that is said.

As a professional historian, I’d also add the following (from my series on the German Revolution of 1918/19, see here and here; emphasis added):

A long time ago, I resolved that, professionally speaking, I won’t touch contemporary history as my main field of research. The pitfalls of trying to avoid ‘the conventional wisdom’—one may study the period from around 1900 to the present, alright, but the outcome of one’s research is, of course, predetermined by politico-ideological concerns for one’s career, private fortunes, and family.

All told: get informed about any issue from as many angles as possible; don’t trust the government or the legacy media; discuss your thoughts with your partner (in my case, my wife’s BS radar is awesome); and don’t act in the heat of the moment.

Finally—a shout-out to Igor Chudov whose writings are a wellspring of sanity and humanity in this ever-worsening mess.