Ok, I’ve been wanting to write about the C O v I d v a c c i n e and explain all the research I’ve done on it, but I was afraid it would take too long and be too long to read.

Then it became an issue in our family and I was so passionate about it, I wrote it. And it felt so good to get all of that out! So here it is! It’s long. I don’t have links but anyone can look any of this up. I’m not a doctor and am not giving medical advice. This is simply MY opinion.

You should know I’m not trying to sway anyone from getting it. Everyone should make an informed decision based on YOUR circumstances that are not going to be the same as mine.

When I heard they were working on a vaccine for Covid, I was relieved. I assumed it would help us put this behind us and be able to get back to normal life. I assumed we would all take it! I assumed it would be a typical vaccine made with inactive or killed Covid virus.

When I learned it was different, I sought to understand it better and make an informed decision. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Do you know the history of vaccines? Edward Jenner is credited with developing vaccines but the true history is that many people beat him to it. When smallpox was running rampant, farmers had noticed that when milkmaids who had contracted cow pox from contact with open blisters from milking the cows were exposed to much deadlier smallpox, they didn’t get sick! So farmers started opening these blisters on cows and infecting their families with cow pox and it was indeed protective against genetically similar smallpox. Jenner eventually injected pus from cow pox into a little boy. The boy was exposed to smallpox repeatedly and did not get sick! This was in 1796. Yet it wasn’t until 1840 that Jenner’s work was accepted and put into the Vaccination Act.

Since Jenner’s time, science and vaccines have gone through many changes. It was discovered by mistake on a poultry farm that leaving live virus out in the sun weakens it (called attenuated). This weakened virus was found to be protective at creating immunity to the full live strain upon exposure just a couple weeks later. This would lead to the development of weakened live virus vaccines.

Do you know the history of the polio vaccine? It’s an interesting story.
Polio had been around for hundreds if not thousands of years and 98% of cases resolved without issue, however the polio that made it into the bloodstream caused severe illness or even death.

In the 1900’s it reached epidemic levels in mostly developed countries. There’s a theory that prior to this time, infants were exposed early in life through contaminated water and were able to develop immunity to it. Once sanitation increased, infants were not exposed to it early and were instead exposed later, which made them more vulnerable to the severe form of the disease.

In 1954 a polio vaccine was developed that contained inactive polio virus. Parents couldn’t wait to get their children vaccinated. In 1955, in what’s known as the Cutter Incident, 200,000 children were given a vaccination of a live strain of the virus instead and acquired polio and several children died. Unfortunately, viruses can sometimes attenuate back to full viral mode when exposed to the wrong conditions. Additionally, people with weakened immune systems were not able to get many vaccines because of this risk and had to rely on herd immunity (or the vast majority of the population being immune for protection).

Besides the risk to those with weakened immune systems, live, attenuated virus vaccines carried a risk of a higher number of adverse events (AE’s). So scientists got to work trying to create something that would provide similar protection to viruses without the increased risks.

The solution was many of the vaccines we have now. Some of them use killed viruses, like these:
Hepatitis A
Flu
Polio
Rabies

Because immunity induced by a killed virus is not as long lasting as immunity from a live but weakened virus, typically more than one vaccination is needed to boost the immunity.

Another type of vaccine uses pieces of the virus or antigen instead of the entire virus to create immunity to that specific part. The great thing about these vaccines is that you cannot ever get infected from them and so even people with weakened immune systems can safely take them. Again on the downside though, induced immunity is not quite as strong as with the smallpox and polio vaccines that were able to protect the recipients from getting or spreading the disease for life. You can still get the disease, you’re just likely to have less severe disease since your immune system has a head start. These vaccines also come with the need for boosters. Because the immune reaction was sometimes not as strong, additives such as adenovirus are sometimes added to stimulate a more robust immune response. Examples of this vaccine are:
HIB
HEP B
HPV
Whooping cough
Pneumococcal
Meningococcal

These have been the standard vaccines we’ve grown up with. There are decades of research to show their effectiveness and risks. All vaccines come with risks. Even taking Tylenol or ibuprofen comes with risks. For the vast majority of people, the benefits to them far outweigh the risks. Nevertheless, there are small numbers of people that can’t and shouldn’t take these vaccines because of either allergies to the ingredients or previous vaccine adverse events.

I had assumed the Covid vaccines would be made using one of these methods, so even though the timeline was shortened, I felt confident enough in the decades of vaccine research that went into the vaccines I previously mentioned. However, scientists have been experimenting with a different kind of vaccine for decades and the Covid pandemic created an opportunity to get them widely available to the public quickly and at a low cost, without many of the risks of infecting anyone accidentally.

I had first learned about these mRNA and viral vector vaccines in cancer treatment. A young girl that I follow on social media that I’ve followed for years has been part of an ongoing clinical trial. She had cancer at the age of 2 or 3 and went through chemo which eradicated her cancer but nearly killed her. The chemo left her in acute liver failure and there were days I didn’t think she would make it. She miraculously pulled through, but her cancer has a high recurrence rate and the chemo was killing her. She has been receiving mRNA injections that teach her immune system to target her specific cancer, and thank God she has been disease free for the last few years. The injections she receives are not without side effects but she’s mostly living a normal life.
I have nothing against mRNA vaccines, as you can clearly see I believe they’ve been instrumental in helping this girl.

That said, I wanted to understand how they work.

I learned they are sent into our cells via a lipid (basically a fat) that allows them to enter into our cells much the same way the Covid virus and many other viruses that evade our immune system defenses do.

When a virus like Covid gets inside our cells, it uses its viral rna to hijack our cells and use them as little virus factories. Our own cells start pumping out baby viruses and eventually the cell swells with these virus particles and explodes, releasing all the baby virus into the surrounding tissues to sneak into and hijack more cells. But our immune system is smart, and the battle is just beginning. Our cells have a way to let the immune system know they’ve been hijacked.

On the outside of the cell, our cells can dangle particles of the virus, like a flashing billboard that shows the immune system what type of virus it’s infected with.

Then our immune system can create antibodies that will attach onto that part of the virus to mark it for destruction.
Similar to how the virus works, the mRNA vaccines are injected into muscle tissue where they sneak into muscle cells and use our cells to make a ton of little spike proteins (the same spike protein that Covid uses to sneak into cells). Like with the virus, once the cell swells enough with all these little spikes, it explodes, releasing the spikes into the blood stream to be found by the immune system. Just like with the actual Covid virus, our immune system sees the spikes and creates antibodies that can attach onto them and mark them for destruction.

Our immune system has memory. So once you’ve had Covid and gone through the process of creating antibodies, when you encounter it again, your antibodies recognize it right away and start pumping out the antibodies and you are able to defeat the virus before it’s really able to replicate and reproduce efficiently.

Our immune system works the same way with the vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system to produce antibodies to the spike protein, so if you encounter Covid, your antibodies are already primed to attach to the spike protein and mark it for destruction before it has ample time to replicate and an infection to take hold.

Obviously, one difference I want to point out is that the vaccine is only priming your antibodies to attach to the spike protein. When you have had an infection with Covid, your body has seen and reacted to the entire virus, not just a piece of it. So if the virus mutates, as they always do, you’re more vulnerable to the mutations if your immune system is only primed to fight certain pieces of it. Additionally, the virus enters our bodies in the wild via the respiratory tract, the nose and lungs and infects those tissues. It is a different mode of delivery than the vaccine being injected into muscle tissue and scientists are trying to find out currently how that is playing into things.

Obviously, the benefit of getting the vaccine instead of the live virus is that you don’t have to go through a full infection and all the risks that go along with it. Yet it doesn’t offer as complete protection as having recovered from the virus. But if Covid is going to kill you, obviously, having protection against severe disease is a great trade off.

There’s debate currently about how long natural immunity lasts to Covid and how long vaccine induced immunity lasts. There’s strong evidence that in people without compromised immune systems, immunity is very long lasting, possibly for life. They are able to speculate on this because they have found memory B and T cells that fight Covid in those with prior infections. Our antibody levels will continue to wane the longer out we are from encountering the virus, because we would swell into blimps if we continued to carry a high antibody load in our blood to every virus we’ve ever encountered our entire life! So our immune system makes some copies of antibodies that go into the blood to protect from an infection but it sets aside some “in the bank” if you will, (but really in the bone marrow and lymph) to keep in case it’s needed again.

You can boost your antibody levels by getting a vaccine booster, or by encountering the virus again. It’s important to note that even if you have no antibodies in your blood to Covid, as long as you have those memory B and T cells stored away, you still have a high level of immunity to reinfection.

Not everyone has a strong immune system. After age 65, it is well documented that the immune system starts to decline. Chicken pox is an excellent example of this. Most of us had chicken pox as young children, and it’s another virus that tends to be mild in the young and can cause serious complications the older you are. It’s why, before there was a vaccine, it was common for parents to purposely infect their young children so they had it when they were young and had lifelong immunity. My own parents did this and brought me to a friends house to play that had chicken pox! My daughter got chicken pox when she was 6 months old (too young for the vaccine) and nearly 3 decades after I had it, I still was immune and didn’t get it.

Your immune system never really “defeats” the chicken pox though. It pushes it to hide within your nerve cells and lies dormant there your entire life. However, after age 65, your immune system declines and that’s why they recommended the shingles vaccine for the older population. It’s essentially a booster for the immune system to prevent the virus from coming out of hiding and causing extreme symptoms. Bouts of intense stress can also dampen the immune system and so sometimes young people can get shingles infections too. The immune system is dampened enough to allow that virus to come out of hiding and wreak havoc.

So people with weakened immune systems may not have the ability to fight off Covid when they encounter it again and get reinfected. That’s why it’s important to get the data, on the 1% of Covid reinfections to see what the ages are of those becoming reinfected. It’s also important to genetically sequence the virus each time a person tests positive to make sure it’s a different virus and not just that the body hasn’t cleared the original infection or that the test is picking up dead viral load.

Remember, immunity doesn’t mean you won’t encounter the virus again, it just means that the virus will not have the ability to replicate and produce live virus that could then transmit to someone else. To date, the cdc has released a statement that they do not have a single documented case in the US of someone becoming reinfected with Covid and transmitting it to another person. And that’s in 2 years of this virus being here!

Ok, so maybe natural immunity IS long lasting but why not just get the shot? It’s shown it boosts antibody levels in those with prior infections so it can’t hurt right?

While it’s very true that getting the vaccine after a natural infection will cause a spike in antibody levels, that doesn’t mean it increases protection. Just like you can’t be a little bit pregnant, if you’re immune, you can’t be “more immune”. Ok, but what’s the harm?

Hopefully, there is no harm. What if there is? We’ve literally never done a vaccine that enters our cells in much the way a virus does and hijacks our own cells to get them to become little spike protein factories. It’s true that viruses have been doing this to us since our co-existence with them. And it’s caused a lot of issues. There’s still much we don’t understand about auto-immune diseases like my mom’s MS.

They know there’s a genetic component. They’ve found mutations on several different genes that people with autoimmune diseases seem to share but they don’t all share the same mutations or even the same set of gene mutations and people that have the mutations don’t always have autoimmune.

There’s a much higher incidence of autoimmune diseases in climates the furthest from the equator leading to the theory that low vitamin D levels are also a contributing factor.

The last piece of the puzzle seems to be some immune event in people with genetic components that also live further away from the equator. Frequently, among people with MS, many of them had a really bad bout of a virus, flu or mono before the age of 18. The theory is that whatever the virus did to the people predisposed, caused the immune system to overreact and attack healthy myelin (the fatty sheath that protects nerve cells). This is what MS is. Your own immune system attacks your nerve coatings as though they are a virus and it damages nerve and brain tissue. It’s a terrible disease. Watching what it’s done to my mom over the last 10 years specifically has been awful. There is no cure. All she can do is take medicine that weakens her immune system in the hopes it will then leave her nerve coverings alone.

With my mom, sister and my aunt all having autoimmune diseases, I have to assume that I’m genetically predisposed and that my children are too.

Could the fact that our own muscle tissue cells are used by the vaccine to become little spike protein factories turn our immune system against our muscle cells? Many neurologists are sounding the alarms but are sadly being censored because they don’t want people to question the vaccine. If this does happen, it’s not something we would see for likely 5-10 years as autoimmune diseases are slow progressing and notoriously hard to diagnose.

If someone has a high likelihood of dying or having severe disease from Covid, it makes sense that they would take this risk of unknown 10+ years down the road. And the less years of your expected life, the more it makes sense to not worry as much about unknown long term effects.

For our family, we have to hope (nothing is guaranteed) to have many decades of our lives yet to live, and I don’t want even the slightest risk to any of us of a terrible life long disease like MS because we took a vaccine that we likely didn’t even need.

Additionally, the spike protein in and of itself has been found to cause havoc throughout the body. They have found the spike, and not the virus in brain tissues of some of the people who died of Covid. Scientists theorize that in people who get a more severe infection, the spike protein and virus has infected many more parts of the body and created inflammation there. So should we be turning our muscle cells into little spike protein factories and causing inflammation throughout the body? Scientists have said our body does this “for a few weeks” after receiving the vaccine. What could happen during these few weeks of spike protein floating around our blood and going into our organs and tissues, including the brain? I don’t know, but I would rather wait and see.

Additionally, there are adverse events occurring as a result of the vaccines. This is the case with every single vaccine, as I’ve said. Even Tylenol and ibuprofen can cause issues and are generally regarded as safe. The most serious AE’s of course are blood clots and strokes, Bell’s palsy and GBS, and myocarditis. I’m aware that the chance of these AE’s occurring is incredibly small given such a large number of people who have received the vaccine. But they do occur. Why would we risk one of these AE’s for a virus we’ve already survived and possibly have robust immunity to?

Myocarditis is being classified as mild, though it does involve hospitalization for children. Are you aware the heart damage it causes is irreversible? Once the heart is damaged, it cannot repair itself, but it scars, which can cause lifelong complications and the 10 year survival rate is 50%. Now that’s probably lower than it would be in children because the age and health of those that get myocarditis is probably already compromised but my kids hopefully have a long life ahead of them and I’m not willing to take the risk of 161 kids out of one million vaccinated getting myocarditis when we just don’t know what those kids will have in 10 years.

Furthermore, there are less serious AE’s that have occurred in people we know for which science has not really explained. For example, many women have had heavy vaginal bleeding following vaccination, including some women that I know. So far, the explanation has been that it’s stress from vaccines causing menstrual irregularities, because it’s very easy to write off women’s issues as “stress” or not take them seriously. That doesn’t explain why women who are well past menopause suddenly having heavy bleeding. It doesn’t explain trans men who are taking hormones having bleeding.

I could continue to give perfectly rational and well thought out explanations for why we feel it’s best to wait, but I think I’ve explained that much enough. Another factor for me is that I don’t like how hard they are pushing the vaccines on everyone and I will not be a part of that. I hope you are all aware of what is happening in Australia with the vaccine mandates. I listened to an interview last week of a woman that lives in Australia that has well documented and severe allergies to Polyethylene glycol, which is in the mRNA vaccines in addition to a whole host of other medical complications she has that make her a perfect candidate for a vaccine exemption.

In Australia, the messaging has largely been that everyone must get vaccinated to protect those who can’t get the vaccine. Well, this woman has well documented anaphylaxis to these ingredients and has had to be hospitalized after multiple injections of epinephrine that nearly killed her and she has not been able to obtain an exemption. Her doctor has told her that she would not vaccinate her in her office because it’s too risky, but she also will not write her a medical exemption because it’s too risky to her practice! She then was told to try this hospital that specializes in allergies and was told it’s a 6-12 month wait and this woman will not be able to work or be in society without the vaccine or a medical exemption.

Once her story broke, a lot of people reached out to her to try to help and recommended a doctor that was writing medical exemptions. By the time she contacted his office, she was told his office was currently being investigated by the health and human services authorities. People have told her she should just go to a hospital and get the vaccine and get an epi pen and allow them to treat her. They are essentially asking her to risk her life, as there is no guarantee that an epi pen is going to be effective each successive time and that the epinephrine itself won’t kill her. It’s absolutely insane, and I highly recommend everyone listen to this interview. It’s by Brett Weinstein for free on Spotify.

It’s extremely concerning that in a country like Australia, they can push these mandates and say there will be medical exemptions granted, but then, when you see that doctors are too scared to write them, there really is not an allowance for medical exemptions and that should terrify everyone. So I am absolutely against being shamed and guilted to get the vaccine by any authority or non authority. It is very upsetting to me that it’s thought acceptable to discriminate in this way.

To close, we respect everyone’s choice on whether or not to get vaccinated or get your kids vaccinated. It is not an easy choice for anyone and none of the choices available are free from risk.

I want to show everyone just how much research I’ve put into this. I didn’t watch a bunch of YouTube videos or follow some conspiracy theorist online. I read medical textbooks that I had to read more than once to make sure I understood. I have read medical journals. I have talked to doctors including my own who was perfectly fine with my decision not to get vaccinated. I don’t expect everyone to reach the same conclusions I did, but I do want the amount of time and effort I have put into this to be respected.

As for the vaccines, we know that vaccinated or unvaccinated can contract Covid. If you have Covid virus replicating in your body, you can spread it. So I just hope everyone knows that having the vaccine will not prevent someone spreading it to you if they are sick.

Another lie that keeps repeating is that the unvaccinated are causing the variants. The truth is that any host that has a weakened immune system allows the possibility for a virus to mutate and for those mutations to take a foothold and then be passed on.

Please, fact check me on any and all of this. I really want people to have information and not just these politicized views of people who are not getting this vaccine. I want people to know why we feel this way!! I’ve done interviews with researchers in the area because I want people to know we are rational and sane.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.