Swimming With Corpses

... and other unpleasant truths.

Nobody: Would you take a bath with a dead body?
Me: Of course not! That’s disgusting. You’re psychotic for even asking me that.

Seems like a reasonable exchange, right?

I saw a funny post/meme/tweet a while ago. I can’t find it now so I have to paraphrase and I can’t give proper credit (obviously I’ll update that if anyone can identify and share the source), but here’s the gist:

The belief: Most people wouldn’t take a bath with a dead body.
The reality: Most people will swim in the ocean, even though there are tens of thousands of dead bodies in there. 
The conclusion: There is such a thing as an acceptable water-to-dead-body ratio.

Clever observation is my jam, and this one had my mind spinning. Would I sit in a hot tub with a dead body? Hell no. How about a pool? Definite hard pass. What about a lake? How big is the lake? Like, can I swim to the other side? Can I see the bottom? Are there other not-dead people in there with me? Is the corpse clearly visible? Is it just the one?

Did you see how I just went from you-gotta-be-effing-kidding me to yeah-maybe-why-not in less time than it takes to flip someone off in traffic?

Enter a term you see being slung around on the Interweb like so much monkey dung these days: cognitive dissonance. It’s a phrase psychologists use to describe the discomfort we feel when we think or act in a way that’s in direct opposition to our belief systems. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable because our brains like balance. In order to restore restful mental equilibrium, something has to give: the belief or the behavior.

Example: Fast food is nutritional nicotine. We all know it. If you asked me if I value my health, I’d insist that I do. But also, sometimes I want a greasy drive-through burger. With fries and a Diet Coke. In order to indulge this craving, I have to resolve the inner conflict: “It’s just one meal. I eat great 95% of the time. Everyone eats crap every once in a while [except my sister who studied Culinary Medicine, whatever]. Everything in moderation. If this Happy Meal is going to take a few minutes off of my life, it’ll take them off the very end and by that point, death will probably be a welcome relief. (Yes, this is how far my mind goes.) Screw it, YOLO!”

Similarly, take swimming with corpses. Since I really love the lake (I live in Texas which is essentially Middle America’s own Death Valley and I just got into wake surfing and I’m not half bad for an old lady), it’s easier to bend the belief than the behavior. Thus: It’s not that bad to swim with corpses.

The question becomes, where’s the line?

Daily I debate people online about all sorts of things COVID related: case counts, deplorable media coverage, the coordinated attack on ivermectin and other repurposed drugs, and the brazen, blatant government corruption all around us come up often. But it seems no topic is more heated than vaccine adverse reactions.

“Vaccines are safe and effective,” my sparring partners continue to insist, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. “VAERS is unreliable. Anyone can report. Correlation does not equal causation. Science!”

I’ll remind them that VAERS was designed to be an early warning system; a way of identifying trends and picking up patterns. Considering it’s the singular database we’ve used to record and analyze adverse reactions to any vaccine, it’s fair to say that alarm bells are blaring. But openly acknowledging that there are clear and present dangers associated with COVID vaccines would necessitate shifting the behavior (championing mass, uncontested immunization).

A polio vaccine mishap in 1955 allowed 200,000 children to accidentally receive inoculations containing live virus strains; it paralyzed 164 of them and killed ten. The vaccination program was abandoned.

In 1976, the CDC acknowledged an unusually high number of cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome associated with swine flu vaccination; that program too was abandoned after forty million people were immunized. Reports of associated deaths range from 25 to 42.

As of September 2023, more than 1,595,000 reports of adverse reactions to COVID vaccines have been collected in VAERS. That is not a typo, and we’re not playing with Monopoly money here. These are human lives. That insanely astronomical number (which incidentally is believed to represent only a tiny fraction of actual injuries) includes 210,138 hospitalizations, 67,895 cases of permanent disability, and 36,286 deaths.

The belief: It’s not okay for vaccines to injure or kill people.
The reality: Exponentially more people have been injured or killed by COVID vaccines than by all other vaccines combined in recorded history.
The conclusion: There is an acceptable death rate for vaccines.

My question to the pro-poke crowd is, where’s your line? Is it okay to kill people as long as they realize that’s a risk? Is it more acceptable if they’re old and close to death anyway? How many deaths is “too many?” Is it a percentage of overall vaccines administered? Does that number change if it includes you or your child or someone else you personally know and love? What about kids (who, if you’ll recall, are at essentially ZERO risk of dying of COVID)? Even if Jack’s vaccine protected Jill—which it does not—is it ethical or appropriate to sacrifice one child to save another? What’s a reasonable number of young lives lost so that Pharma can get even richer and pro-vaxxers won’t have to go through the unpleasant process of choosing between belief and behavior?

Mine is zero.  

My belief: It’s not okay for vaccines to harm or kill people.
My reality: Vaccines are harming and killing people.
My conclusion: The. Madness. Must. End.

It’s really that simple.