Now Wash Your Hands

It is April 8th. I’ve been feeling slightly rough for about a week now – slightly sore throat, the impression that there is phlegm about to burgeon on my epiglottis, tired and, frankly, about to have a breakdown . But this is also quite possibly due to where I am in my menstrual cycle. I felt yesterday like curling up and crying, but I couldn’t afford to risk a prolonged spell incapacitated by this … shit.

I’m a single parent, and the Easter Holidays are happening despite the past year being spent largely in Lockdown thanks to dear old COVID-19, which is exterminating some people, leaving others unscathed and dishing out its “long” form to others, irrespective of their general premorbid state of health. That worries me. The numbers are confused by media reports, whose accuracy is questionable, and the acceptance of general terms on death certificates. I feel that this is sloppy; how can you measure something if the data aren’t accurate to begin with? I’m leery of the Office for National Statistics for this reason. Reports of the COVID-19 death toll by the BBC have all contained the caveat “death for any reason within 28 days of a positive Covid test”. Asymptomatic person surprised by the positive result, and wondering whether it is a false positive produced by the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) methodology, walks under a bus – and the death is logged as Covid-19.

The problem with feeling slightly under the weather during a pandemic is that, given the conflicting information, it could be anything or nothing to worry about. I had the first vaccine thirteen days ago, and now I wonder whether this is the belated arrival of symptoms to show that my immune system is cutting its teeth on defending against the new protein, in which case I am not actually ill. When you throw in hormones in a menstrual cycle and the fact that physical malady, albeit slight, can provoke a dip in my mood, you may have some idea of my present confusion. Or you may not.

Next Monday, non-“essential” retail outlets can begin to open, and so can gyms. I wonder whether we can therefore resume a more stimulating Easter holiday agenda and visit farms and National Trust beauty spots.

There is a requirement, despite vaccination of enough people to encourage the “herd immunity” so sought-after by Boris Johnson at the beginning of the pandemic, to continue to wear a face covering indoors where there are other people, to maintain the social distance of two feet at all times when outside the home, and there is already media-transmission of squawking, by the government and its scientific advice panel, about a ‘Third Wave’ coming soon. This seems to me to be fear-mongering: relax the lockdown requirements, but keep us all in fear about getting ill and dying, or making someone else ill enough to die.

Ever since the beginning of this pandemic, I have been struck by the patronising nature of the guidelines to wash our hands, cover our faces when we cough or sneeze, and refrain from invading other people’s personal space. I learned to wash my hands when I was a child, when parents and education providers reminded us, before meals and after using the toilet, to do the hygienic thing. We were also taught to cough or sneeze into a tissue, or to cover our mouth and nose when, as we do occasionally, we cough or sneeze. This is common sense.

I can only deduce from the guidelines, therefore, that, for years, no one has used any common sense or consideration towards other people. Being made to wear a face covering in retail outlets might seem like a preventative measure in a plague, but it is, equally, tantamount to the whole class being punished for the behaviour of one or two rowdy pupils. We are all urged to “take one for the team” by wearing a mask, but is there any real sense that we, as human beings, are actually connected? The message of toxicity is generating fear – of people, by people, because we are apparently toxic. This is not a frame of mind at all conducive to mental health or a sense of community.

This country’s government has been whipping up hysteria, with the help of a long-respected broadcasting corporation, by giving imprecise and overblown figures for the death toll, and by repeating the message that we, the population, have to “protect the NHS”. Hang on; the purpose of the NHS, when it was set up, has been to protect us, and it does this to an increasingly mediocre standard, as it has long been divided up in such a way as to waste money, be unable to communicate, and to result in too much collateral damage – people who are dead unnecessarily, either through neglect or case mismanagement, and who are, frankly, good for the statistics.

The proliferation of rainbows and rainbow-adorned merchandise like stickers on petrol pumps and on mugs proclaiming that the NHS equals our heroes amounts to so much party-political propaganda. I am alive in spite of the NHS, and so is my son; not to mention the Local Government-level cock-ups that help to make this country a signpost to Beachy Head for too many people, if they survive to make that baleful journey.

I feel that I’ve been primed for this all along through circumstances such as drug addiction and recovery, brain injury exacerbating pre-existing depressive tendencies, single-motherhood of my special-needs son and the attendant isolation from and by other parents at playgroups and mainstream school, then the failure by the local authority case worker to do their job, resulting in a long school exclusion for my son and, by extension, great social exclusion for both of us, and now my living with the depression that the brain injury bequeathed me, with the help of medication for the rest of my life.

I don’t think I can adequately describe the torrent of difficulties that I experience between my ears. My Other Half and I are both brain-injury survivors, and ex-junkies, and we can both emphatically relate to the onslaught, post-injury, of patronising individuals who say you’ve met before, and a retinue of local-government and medical minions who, frankly, steal the oxygen from other more intelligent, efficient people by being so utterly ineffectual as to be an insult to anyone who learned to read and write, in however rudimentary a capacity.

The thing is, there is no common sense – the Coronavirus guidelines conjure up for me a sense that there has been a world of people pushing one another aside by rubbing up in close proximity, sneezing in each others’ faces and on the supermarket groceries and so forth; indeed, I remember turning round to stare fixedly with disgust as the person behind me in the cash machine queue spat on the pavement. This was before the injury, I recall with vagueness; I can only imagine that this condition worsened thereafter to this (pandemic-parading) degree.

It is now January 2022, two years into this remarkable blanket-pranking of democracy started by plucky Communist China. The world seemed to follow suit in a revoking of freedoms (lockdown), long queues of face-masked people outside supermarkets resembling stills from the Pink Floyd film, The Wall, and an ‘Immunocracy’ which stinks rather of some contemporary Nazi-armband equivalent practice.

This ties in with what I have regarded since the brain injury as a deficit of intelligence, perhaps in parallel with the left-wing woke phenomenon that has had people and even respected institutions getting their knickers in a twist over several things – by omitting to notice, for example, that statues of historical figures constitute historical documentation; not glorification. In an alarming turn of events, people’s speech mannerisms (“should of” rather than should have) as well as behaviours have attempted to fling many an important didactic event down the memory hole, and the Epsilon-B status of local authority figures as well as general retailers has become horribly apparent to me.

In this Zombie Apocalypse of an epoch, the tables turn in the style of what I imagine to be a Hitchcock film: there is a virus, an invisible enemy, among us; the risk to people over 80 is played down, except for everybody now being indoctrinated, by the media, into worrying about their chances, not of falling ill themselves, but of killing mum/dad/granny/random elderly passer-by. Now you are a time-bomb, so you must all have the vaccination, which isn’t so much about the genius of science and its capabilities today, but all about saving the NHS from collapse, whilst omitting to state the obvious fact, which is that its funding structure is top-heavy, its administrative and bureaucratic practices more models of obfuscation than of anything helpful, and its habit of saving lives in the acute stage, and leaving people to rot when conditions are chronic.

Rainbows appear on petrol pumps and on the backs of ambulances, proclaiming that the NHS is filled with ‘heroes’ and, at the beginning of the pandemic, we stand outside our houses and applaud and bang saucepans to boost morale and swear our allegiance to this rickety old dinosaur. I instantly spot some Pro-Party Political agenda, but I participate because it might just boost everyone’s morale and kids, including and especially my son, love banging pots and pans to make a noise.

After the clapping, we have to have The Jab. It’s experimental, but that part is played down; now you are doing your duty to keep the community healthy. I sense the death of the individual and recall dystopian novels written by Orwell, Huxley and the like, but the imperative to get the jab continues. Suddenly it’s community-minded to have the jab and, by extension, selfish to exercise physical autonomy and democratic choice. You must participate. I smell a rat, but wonder whether I am simply paranoid; after all, I am on medication for good reason and, as a child in the Eighties, have had self-doubt inculcated in me by parents, the establishment and so forth.

Confused and slightly worried, I do something which, at my age, is very silly: I telephone my Dad. He isn’t in the least bit worried and talks of clinical trials being run “in parallel rather than in series” enabling faster clearance for widespread public use. He is very clever and his wife worked in the pharmaceutical industry from the attainment of her Biochemistry degree until early retirement. She is very clever. I am invited to have the first of two injections because, as the parent of a child with special needs, I have been ‘prioritised’. I am slightly worried. My father says, “Think; think” in that tone of voice used by very clever people to reassure, shame and guarantee compliance in morons. I have my misgivings, but I accept the invitation and have the first jab.

As time passes, I am more sceptical; I look on the internet and find data published by the Office for National Statistics and the NHS. It does indeed look as though people over 70 and with underlying conditions are at risk; it also appears that the greatest portion of the population to go missing is NHS staff – isolating because they have been in contact with seriously ill patients. I suspect that they are taking a sickie because doctors aren’t offering any face-to-face appointments. They must be scared, I think. Well, perhaps they know something I don’t. I have the second jab, and try to ignore the nagging sense inside me that I’ve been disingenuous.

“Maim: 2 harm, impair” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, Eighth Edition, 1990)
It is now February 2022. Data is emerging that the SARS2-Covid19 vaccinations stand more chance of delivering irreparable damage to the immune system than of protecting anyone. Over the coming years, we will see an increase in mortality of which we had never hitherto dreamed – a genocide delivered in the name of public health. There is information on social media about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Athletes collapse on pitches worldwide and news agencies like Reuters can’t seem to find evidence of these events; one wonders who is a trustee of some large pharmaceutical company and whereabouts these people are lodged; ditto government officials. It becomes a game of hide-and-seek but it looks more like a Murder Mystery from my viewpoint.

My complaint about the broadcasting companies’ data inaccuracy is for good reason: you can’t drill down to determine the specifics of the narrative: age groups, geographic areas, co-morbidities etc. in order to get an accurate picture of events. I have come across a similar glitch in my own ‘data accuracy’. Initially, I thought I was furious with my father and his wife, who have had all the jabs, because they seem unconcerned. In actual fact, it is myself at whom I’m ablaze with rage: at the middle-aged age of 48, I rang my Dad about something about which I ought to have trusted my instinct. Instead of standing on my own two adult feet, on ground for which I have experiential good reason, I reverted to the teenage girl who wanted reassurance from the ‘clever’ parent.

Now, both of my parents are clever, in different ways. Something that they do is to occupy a scenario that suits the sense of who they are in the world, as it were. We all do. It’s easy to say that what we believe, we see – the world around is is a reflection of our inner psyche. But when the internet gives you access to a great deal of data, some of it conflicting and deeply unsettling, you really do need your objective stance.

I had initially wanted to wait until more data was available because the jabs are in their experimental phases; instead, I allowed the hysterical repetitions of the media to dislodge my sense, inside myself, that the data wasn’t accurate. I had printed off some data for myself, from the Office of National Statistics and the NHS (administratively sub-optimal to say the least), and had achieved a pretty decent map of the most likely victims of the virus, and the fact that staff shortages in the NHS were created by doctors and nurses “isolating”. You couldn’t get a face-to-face with a GP if you tried, and many did. My instinct told me that they had gone into hiding, perhaps because the virus was indeed a deadly one. But I also know that my own doctors have been ignoring me ever since, as a result of their incompetence, I went private. This was the move which saved my life, and I was obfuscated in even that, because the GP whom I had asked for the referral had dashed out a perfunctory note and put it behind the reception desk without telling anyone. I discovered this fact three weeks later, when the Psychiatrist’s secretary telephoned me to see how I was getting on.

I wasn’t dead. That wasn’t exactly ideal in the frame of mind in which I found myself trapped, but I knew that my exit strategy would leave my son heartbroken. So I held on. I’m glad I did.

In early January 2022 I went to collect my prescription at the pharmacy. The pharmacist, a neatly dressed, trimly proportioned man with oriental eyes, asked me politely how long I had been on my medication. When I told him, I thanked him for asking so politely and enquired, in my turn, about his curiosity. He told me that he has practiced for over ten years, but has never come across another person on the same combination of meds, at the same dosages. I was happy to tell him how it had come about, but I also wonder how many other people are not getting the help that they really deserve.

Later on the same day, whilst out with my dog at the usual place, a lady with whom I had recently started chatting expressed her surprise when I told her about the conversation with the pharmacist.

“You’re on medication? For what?” she asked.

“Depression, ever since a brain injury.” I told her. She looked at me askance, not with squeamishness but with incredulity. “I know!” I said, laughing. “It works!”

“But you’re flamboyant and outrageous and I would never have imagined that you, of all people, would be on medication. For depression. After a brain injury?” Her eyes were wide with surprise.

Since having the two Pfizer Covid jabs last year, data has proliferated on social media and some of it purports to have scientific basis and validity. Dr Fauci appears to be a demon of the piece, linked with HIV vaccine problems in the nineteen eighties, and popping up now to say a bit about the chance of the Covid jab having given people HIV. Early last year I did a bit of reading about mRNA vaccinations and what a marvellous ‘vehicle’ mRNA is for a vaccine, and so cost-effective. Crucially, said one web site, there would be no risk of “insertional mutagenesis” (the injected substance altering your DNA genome). Which is nice.

Unfortunately, it seems that, in an organism as complex as the human body, with its immune system, the introduction of a new spike protein is not necessarily a healthy move. Your antibodies can start blowing up your own cells, which might look like they are the spike protein. Don’t ask. I’m not a scientist. But the recent explosion of cases of cardiac arrest in teenagers, cardio myelitis in people of all ages, and a suspicious pre-diagnosis of “long Covid” by my partner’s doctor, after months of him trying to contact him for an appointment, with symptoms starting after the first jab in February 2021, for which he has been sent for blood tests and an X-Ray. For scarring on the lungs. I beg your pardon? I must say that I find all of this very concerning.

So now the gloves are off. If this injection has indeed damaged my immune system (and I hope I got a placebo), then I have nothing whatsoever to lose except my life. And that does not come without a tremendous fight. I owe it to my son to speak out, so that he isn’t persuaded into it – I already have a letter, on National Hell Service letterhead, saying that he might be at risk, and may be eligible for a vaccination. This is, I remind you, an experimental vaccine. Why would I risk compromising my son’s health by submitting him to the Russian Roulette that is the roll-out of the vaccine. There is no way that I would consent.