Yesterday marked one year since I gave up my career in nursing after 14 years, due to the appallingly unethical public health response to the covid pandemic. After years working in intensive care, aeromedical retrievals, organ donation, and finally outpatient neurosurgery, I knew I could never continue to participate in a system which enthusiastically overrode the rights of patients to bodily autonomy and valid informed consent. It was a painful choice to make, but one which I have never regretted.
In the ensuing year, I have tried my best to raise the alarm about the harms the pandemic response has caused and continues to cause, with particular focus on covid vaccine mandates, mass childhood covid vaccination, and covid vaccine-induced adverse events. I have never denied the existence of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, nor have I ever denied the severity this virus presents to certain high-risk individuals. I have made every attempt to treat others with respect, while also speaking frankly in defence of my personal and professional values, and broader principles of medical ethics.
The other day I received a message from a former colleague admonishing me for making what they termed “deeply disturbing and misguided” posts on social media. To be clear up front, the message was not aggressive or rude, it simply stated the person’s position and made it clear it was at odds with my own. Despite the civil tone, this message really upset me.
The person began by announcing their critical care medical credentials, which was odd given we had worked together for several months and I was already reasonably aware of this information; it also showed a total disregard for my own professional experience, albeit as a lowly nurse. They continued in asserting that their experience working during the pandemic gave them the authority to so judge my comments. They also expressed issue with my choice of forum, claiming it was “unfortunate”. I’m not sure what that means; where else am I supposed to post things which I consider supremely important to the future of our society and the global population (including their children)?!
I have taken issue with essentially all of the government pandemic response policy since the outset, but in 2021 this culminated in a profound objection to covid vaccine mandates and the mass vaccination of children. Since this time I have posted many things on social media which have sought to question the decisions our governments have made/are making, and their underlying motives. Throughout this entire time, this person has not commented, private messaged or otherwise contacted me (or deleted/unfollowed me - until now) to express concern regarding these posts.
So what, you may ask, had I posted recently which may have caused such grave offence? In the week leading up to the message I had made four posts which covered topics including excess mortality, the clear under-reporting of covid vaccine-induced adverse events, and the grossly unethical practice of denying unvaccinated people organ transplants.
I had also posted a plea to my friends in healthcare to consider why our governments are signing contracts to build factories which will produce millions of failed and potentially dangerous MRNA ‘vaccines’.
Try as I might, I could not understand what about my posting about these issues could be considered “disturbing” or “misguided”. Of course, these matters themselves are indeed deeply disturbing, but to draw attention to them? Who could make such an argument, let alone a healthcare professional? And why can our recently-divergent health experience not co-exist?
How does calling for appropriately stratified risk/benefit analyses for covid and covid vaccination, fighting covid vaccine mandates, and advocating for people who have been injured by covid vaccines diminish the experience of covid patients in ICU? It absolutely doesn’t. One could even make an argument that a one-size-fits-all approach is what truly diminishes and further endangers those at high risk from the covid virus.
And this, I would argue, is the crux of my former colleague’s issue. They were silent for months and months as I posted other dissenting views, but once the messaging forced them to consider their own involvement, they were suddenly very uncomfortable.
Similarly, those who were previously supportive of the western establishment pandemic response, but who now find themselves joining us in calling for good-faith examination of the covid ‘vaccines’ and their potential adverse effects, are not immune from an inability to critically appraise their previously held views.
UK cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, initial public advocate of covid vaccination-turned vocal critic, has recently Tweeted some very back-handed assessments of the different reactions to the covid vaccine roll-out, referring to those who do not fulfil conventional standards of high education but whom declined covid vaccination, as “Bob the builder”.
To be clear, I commend Dr Malhotra for his stance and for his continued campaigning to bring the clear safety and efficacy issues pertaining to the covid ‘vaccines’ into the mainstream. I am not trying to dismiss him, nor his relevant knowledge and experience on these topics, simply highlighting the condescension in which some of his recent Tweets are bathed.
In one Tweet, Dr Malhotra suggests:
“Many didn’t take it [the covid vaccine] for irrational reasons, & sometimes irrationality can be proven (as in this case) to be correct. Many didn’t take it because of intuition which also has been proven to be correct. But the majority not taking any more jabs now [read: him] are doing it for rational reasons”.
The implication here being that those of us who declined from the outset must have been doing so based on something other than science (most I know weren’t - the data to support this decision were there even way back then), and therefore we were “correct” incidentally, or by accident.
Similarly, in another Tweet horribly lacking in self-awareness, Dr Malhotra responds to disagreement from UK pathologist Dr Clare Craig, by saying:
“I think you’ve read this wrong @ClareCraigPath - my life’s work has been about advocating shared decision making & informed consent. Lots of publications on that. The issue is was whether ‘Bob the builder’ was better informed in making that decision than [esteemed Standford Professor of medicine, epidemiology and public health, John Ioannidis] Ioanidis et al? Unlikely”.
As you can see from my Twitter response, I think it is painfully obvious that Dr Malhotra considers himself to be a peer of Professor Ioannidis (which I am not affirming nor denying) and to accept that many of us ‘regular joes’ did in fact apply critical reasoning in our rational decision to decline and didn’t simply get lucky based on our intuition or incidental irrationality, is proving rather difficult.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that there weren’t some irrational decision-makers out there, just that to dismiss as irrational anyone who is conventionally intellectually inferior to Prof Ioannidis, which in this particular area is pretty much all of us (the KEY word being conventionally), is incredibly offensive and just plain wrong.
Interestingly, around the same time as these Tweets, Dr Malhotra spoke at the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) 'It's time to review and reflect: Australia’s response to Covid-19’ event in Canberra, Australia. Within his presentation, Dr Malhotra spoke about the importance of understanding not only the ‘relative risk reduction’ (RRR) offered by a particular intervention (in this case, the covid vaccine), but also the ‘absolute risk reduction’ (ARR) and the ‘number needed to treat’ (NNT).
Similarly, he spoke about the findings of the original pharma-led clinical trials which lacked moderate and long-term safety data and failed to demonstrate any meaningful indication of a reduction in transmission, serious illness or death. Dr Malhotra also made mention of a lengthy “World Health Organisation-endorsed” list of potential adverse effects of the covid vaccines, lamenting that “…doctors should have been made aware of this list from the beginning…”.
While I don’t entirely disagree with him, the fact remains that virtually all of this information was available at the outset of the covid vaccine roll-out and was easily accessible to any doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers, or indeed any average person, who cared to look for it (and some very ‘rational’ people did). While it is clear that confirmed adverse event data has sadly grown considerably over the past two years, weighing the initial lack of moderate to long-term safety information in the decision of whether to accept or decline an newly released intervention with an infinitesimally small ARR for young (or even middle-aged), healthy people, was anything but irrational.
Of course I agree that there should have been a more comprehensive effort to communicate these things to those healthcare workers who were charged with gaining informed consent and administering the injections (I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate as to why this did not happen, other than to say it could not possibly have been an accidental oversight), but you cannot possibly argue that they were not known at the time the vaccine was rolled out, and indeed at the time many doctors, professors and others in medicine (many of whom should have known better) accepted covid vaccination.
As I said earlier, I do not seek to diminish the contribution Dr Malhotra is now making in the campaign for a serious, independent review of the western pandemic response. Nor do I seek to invalidate the previous good work my former colleague has done in the space of critical care medicine. However, we must all acknowledge when we have erred, especially on an issue as grave as the potential harms of covid vaccination. Projecting our own ‘disturbing’, ‘misguided’, and/or ‘irrational’ shortcomings onto others will not free us from their consequences.
(Addit: This essay is not intended to be a claim of my own perfection, far from it. I am no more immune to blind spots in self-awareness than anyone else, however I hope I will always try to reflect on my own views and positions and be honest about the times and instances where I too have erred).
Excellent! It's a puzzle, since as we all know there were so many red flags from the beginning.
How to explain the reactions of your former colleague, and that of Dr Aseem Malhotra? (Of course, I do thank God for Dr Malhotra and for the courage he is showing)
What I have noticed is that each of us who saw red flags came from a different perspective. For example, some perspectives grew from the experience of the conspiracy to invade Iraq on the excuse of WMDs. People like Dr Aseem Malhotra had seen the weird academic cruscade against dietary fats (I heard about this from Dr Ron Rosedale in 2007). Mine was a project management perspective: what endpoint did they have in mind when they locked down to 'eliminate' such a contagious virus, after it had already escaped from Wuhan, other than continual lockdown until the end of time? I found that bizarre and suspicious.
And we know our perspectives are built gradually, requiring a number of prompts (some say about 5) before each of us is ready to accept a new idea or see a red flag. So, another prompt for Dr Malhotra would have been the death of his father.
But inhibiting us from seeing red flags is our drive for trust and harmony. This holds us to trust authority. And many in the population have not yet reached our threshold number of prompts required to lose that trust.
Now, much of the authority that promoted the covid response was from the medical establishment. So, I suspect that people like Dr Malhotra and your ex colleague, schooled in medicine, will have had a bigger inhibition. They will in fact have started from well BEHIND the line. So, rather than the apparent advantage of being able to read the science, the medically trained may have been held more strongly to trust medical authority.
Malhotra is playing the Scott Adams card: all the smart people like me believed the 'experts' while everyone who decided against taking an experimental injection of a completely novel technology was just acting on some kind of gut feeling. Not only is this complete rubbish, it's utterly insulting to all those of use who were delving into the medical literature and poring through the regulatory submissions, and speaking up about all the red flags that we discovered in that process.