My Top Ten Arguments Against Getting a Covid-19 Vaccine
Aka, Why I have Trust Issues.
I have been asked to make a steel-manned argument on the topic of Covid-19 vaccines. This should be a layup, as I myself have yet to get one. I am considered part of the “vaccine hesitant” camp, partially because my daughter gave me Omicron in March 2022, and I had one day of chills, one day of being tired from the chills, and I went running on the third day. I am up to date on all my other shots.
(Update - Part Two is here, where I offer a rebuttal against the arguments offered below)
So, in a David Letterman-style Top Ten List, here are my ten arguments against taking the vaccine, from the least to most crazy.
I served on a medical Institutional Review Board for several years back when I taught Philosophy, and a lot of the protocols we reviewed included side effects of medications that didn’t manifest until after 10-15 years after FDA Approval.
According to this 2017 NBC News article, “almost one-third of new drugs approved by the FDA ended up years later with warnings about unexpected, sometimes life-threatening side effects.”
Are in the vaccines part of that ‘one-third’ group? It will be impossible to say until 2040 or so, and because of that everyone who got the shot is part of an experimental group, and everyone who did not is part of a control group, until enough time passes for long term data to be created. Until then we do not know, and cannot know, what the effects of the vaccines or non-vaccination are going to be.
(Update 10/16/2022) - There is a risk of myocarditis and pericarditis that was publicly announced by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even if the risk from the vaccine is 1/7th of the risk from Covid, that’s still information that wasn’t known when the vaccines were rolled out and oftentimes mandated).
I score low in Agreeableness when confronted and my universal response to anyone telling me to do anything or else, is to choose ‘else.’ I don’t like being bribed, coerced, bullied, or threatened.
Psychologically, it’s advantageous to not let others make decisions for you because once someone knows they can coerce you into behaving in ways that serve their interests, they’re going to continue to coerce you into continuing that behavior. Philosophically, this violates Kant’s second formulation of his Categorical Imperative to treat others as ends and not merely means. If you let people use you as a means, then unethical and self-interested people are going to do just that.
Government and large pharmaceutical corporations are self-interested actors, who gained huge amounts of power and produced so much profit that 40 new people became billionaires making products to fight covid, while the richest 10 men in the world doubled their wealth. I do not believe that they would behave ethically if it cost them the opportunity to acquire that much power and money.
Note - You can take the OCEAN Personality Test HERE if you like (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism)
Big tech, seemingly in collusion with big pharma, silenced criticism of the vaccines. To quote Tyrion Lannister, "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
Dr. Robert Malone holds ten patents and was one of the pioneers of the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. He said that the technology behind the vaccines wasn’t safe yet and was subsequently deplatformed by social media companies. In 2020 two Bakersfield doctors, Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, said they were concerned that the threat of the virus was being exaggerated, which could cause problems. They too were deplatformed. Then anyone who shared these views were silenced on social media or smeared as ‘anti-vaccine’ or ‘anti-science.’
It is extremely unlikely that any new medicine is going to be 100% safe, 100% effective, and 100% guaranteed not to have side-effects. Telling everyone that there were guaranteed zero “costs” in a cost-benefit analysis was dishonest, and silencing people who wanted to discuss costs was a great way to make it look like vaccine proponents were not willing to discuss the matter in good faith.
Further, people were also deplatformed early on for saying that covid possibly came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, instead of a wet market. Then suddenly it became acceptable to state one’s belief that it was a lab leak. Now it’s acceptable to discuss the harm of the lockdowns had on children, where before it wasn’t.
Banning dissent and censoring people with unpopular opinions is one thing, but then changing which thoughts are, and are not allowed, to be spoken publicly does not exactly instill confidence that everything is on the up and up.
I am a Political Theorist, trained in Marxist philosophy, and I absolutely believe that the logic of capitalism is such that if these huge pharmaceutical corporations discovered safety problems (side effects, manufacturing problems, tainted products, etc.), they would do everything in their power to keep that information under wraps for as long as possible, while pushing as many vaccine sales as possible in the meantime to maximize profits.
In 2009 Pfizer paid 2.3 billion, the then highest fine ever, for lying to consumers to increase profits in ways that caused them serious medical harm. In 2013 Johnson and Johnson was fined 2.2 billion and holds the record for most fined pharmaceutical company in American history, having been forced to pay $14,754,410,167 over 66 violations. Over the entire industry, since 2000, pharmaceutical corporations have been fined 1,015 times for a total of $87,016,147,991.
Seriously, check this data out. It’s incredible. And these are all large corporations with legions of highly paid lawyers protecting them.
(Update 10/16/2022) - Pfizer did not know whether Covid vaccine stopped transmission before rollout, executive admits. Again, this is why I have trust issues when it comes to large corporations.)
Related to 7, these corporations were shielded from all legal liabilities in case something went wrong.
“It’s completely safe, and you’re not allowed to say otherwise, but if anything goes wrong, you’re completely on your own! It’s for your own good! Trust us!”
A bunch of things have gone wrong since.
From Yale Medicine,
'Breakthrough infections' became a thing after politicians, including President Joe Biden, said that the people who got the vaccines wouldn’t get infected.
Dr. Pierre Kory has accused Pfizer of hiding data linking vaccines to miscarriage, although Newsweek and others dispute these claims.
From the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, “Rare heart-related side effects higher with Moderna COVID vaccine.” Here is more information on myocarditis and pericarditis from The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology:
(Image courtesy of DAIC)
Some of the things that they told me I was not allowed to take wound up having some benefit.
Arshad, et al. (2020) found some benefits to hydroxychloroquine, although Rosenberg, et al. (2020) disputed their findings and methodology. Henry Ford Health wrote a letter defending the research and explaining their design decisions, stating, “Unfortunately, the political climate that has persisted has made any objective discussion about this drug impossible, and we are deeply saddened by this turn of events. Our goal as scientists has solely been to report validated findings and allow the science to speak for itself, regardless of political considerations.”
Andrews, et al. (2021) found, “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin,” as did Kerr, et al. (2022) Recently NIH has approved ivermectin studies in clinical trials, although it still officially does not recommend its use.
This video of Stephen Colbert and a bunch of dancing needles didn’t help
I told my Chair that I would need to finish my Ph.D. program remotely if my college mandated the vaccine, and that I would have to leave early and finish my dissertation on my own if that wasn’t possible. I’ve turned down jobs because of mandates. I’ve been called all kinds of names for being skeptical of the official narrative for the reasons listed above.
Insulting me with people dancing around in syringe costumes after all the sacrifices I made to put off having to have a questionable substance forcibly injected into me means that I am now extremely motivated not to take it, no matter how unreasonable that is.
Partisanship has created a scenario where the logic of any decision is just to do the opposite of what the other side is doing. It seems like people on the left wanted people to take the jab because that was their cause, and people on the right refused because that was their cause. I am not convinced many people put more effort into it than just doing what their side was doing because of in-group psychology.
“the opinions of co-partisan peers are just as influential on citizens’ policy preferences as the opinions of party elites. Further, the mechanisms underlying elite and peer influence appear to differ, with conformity to peers—but not elites—driven almost exclusively by strength of social identification with the party.”
Sternisko, et al. (2020) link these processes to conspiracy theory acceptance.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, finally, I give you the most crazy reason I have for not having taken any of the covid vaccines:
I intentionally expose myself to a lot of conspiracy theory material, and the idea of a New World Order killing off and sterilizing as many people as possible does have a certain grip on the imagination.
Alex Jones is an absolute lunatic, and the last thing I ever, ever, ever want is for him to be right about anything. However, he was right about chemicals in the water turning the frickin’ frogs gay, he was right about government’s abusing Covid-19 to do some seriously authoritarian crap (concencentration camps in Australia, freezing the bank accounts of protesting truckers in Canada, digital medical information IDs being required around the world), and he was right about the elite power structures wanting to control the flow of information online to their benefit.
None of this should be even slightly real.
He’s crazy, and I’m crazy for listening to him, but these are some seriously crazy times that just keep on getting crazier. When I keep catching the wardens and nurses of the insane asylum that is contemporary society lying and hiding information from me, that is going to pull me to start taking the ravings of the other lunatics in here a little more seriously. Or, as Prooijen, et al. (2022) put it in the abstract for their article ‘Suspicion of institutions: How distrust and conspiracy theories deteriorate social relationships,’
“Many citizens distrust powerful societal institutions and hold conspiracy theories about them. What are the implications of this suspicion of institutions for people’s social relationships? The current paper proposes that institutions have at least two functions to regulate citizens’ social relationships: providing people with a sense of safety, and providing models for group norms and values. Suspicion of institutions undermines both of these functions, and therefore yields a range of negative societal outcomes by impacting people’s interpersonal, within-group, and between-group relationships. More specifically, suspicion of institutions reduces trust between strangers, within-group cooperation, commitment, and prosocial behavior, and increases prejudice, intergroup conflict, polarization, and extremism. We conclude that institutional distrust and conspiracy theories erode the fabric of society.”
So, just spit-balling here, maybe our public institutions should do what they can to increase institutional trust. That means allowing dissent, that means not shifting legal liability onto people who do not understand what they are being coerced into being injected with, and that means not changing the rules mid-game about which thoughts are forbidden or mandatory in the public sphere. It means treating people as rational individuals who are free to ask questions, express skepticism, and make their own decisions.
Thanks for reading, and as always, if you’d like to recommend changes, I am always willing to edit these articles in response to constructive criticism.
-Dr. Nathanial Bork