My experience with COVID recently may be a bit unusual, as a friend pointed out to me over the Christmas holiday.

Though COVID’s been everywhere for almost two years now, and I’ve been incessantly commenting about the global overreaction to it while also decrying vaccine mandates of any kind, luck would have it that I happened to both get the virus and experience its symptoms at precisely the same time that I got the jab. 

I won’t do that disingenuous and self-deprecating thing that so many people who’ve gotten the jab like to do and suggest that “I did my research on the vaccines and decided what was best for me” or tell you that “it was totally my choice.”  No, there was significant professional pressure for me to get it, and I ultimately concluded that the jab likely poses neither a significant risk nor a health benefit to me, and it was not a hill upon which I was prepared to die.  I am in the fortunate situation that I can, however, protect my wife and children from being forced to get this experimental drug which they absolutely do not need.

And so, I scheduled my jab for early December. 

“I think I may have COVID,” my wife said a day before my appointment.  I ventured to the local pharmacy and grabbed some at-home tests.  Within minutes, hers showed as positive. 

Well… shucks.  What was I to do?  Not get the jab that had taken so long for me to schedule, and do what all of the power-mad fearmongers in government and their neurotic cult followers demand by immediately quarantining myself and my healthy children in fear of exposing others to the virus?  

Though the COVID cultists would consider our decision to be the highest and most dangerous form of heresy, we simply watched for symptoms and decided to keep the kids home only if they exhibited them.  They never did.  I tested negative and got the jab.

To say that I’ve never experienced anything like that trip to the drugstore is an understatement.  I made an appointment at a local pharmacy that had my drug of “choice,” and the masked pharmacist walked in asking which of my jabs this one happened to be.

“Is this your first, second, or third?” he jovially said.

“It’s the only one I’m getting, doc,” I said. It didn’t hit me until later that I was getting an experimental cocktail injected into my arm which carries potential long-term risks, and the very least one might expect is that the guy injecting that drug would look at my file first, or maybe just that two-page questionnaire I’d filled out a few minutes before which would have easily answered his question or told him whether my medical or family history might present a concern.

But like most Americans being herded like cattle toward the jab, I had no such luck.  It was all business after that brief small talk was over.  The cap was off the needle, and he simply asked, “Which arm do you want it in?”

“I don’t care, this one’s fine,” I said, pointing to my right arm. 

“Great,” he said.  On the table behind me, he tossed a closed folder, slightly larger than an envelope, within which was a handwritten “vaccination card” and a list of side effects to the shot. 

“There’s some information in there if you’re interested in looking at it later,” he said.

Among that information was a litany of warnings that, I suppose, aren’t necessary for patients to read or understand or sign prior to providing “informed consent” to taking what is overtly described in the literature as an “unapproved vaccine” with a “duration of protection” that is “currently unknown,” or that myriad, though rare, and potentially deadly side effects could occur.

Afterward, my arm was sore at the injection site.  This was no big deal and expected.  The next night, I felt a bit sick.  Nothing terrible, though a bit achy with a cough and mild fever (never over 100.2), and a somewhat strange skin sensitivity which happens to be listed among the “risks” of the drug given to me, as it happens -- an “unusual feeling in the skin (such as tingling or “a crawling feeling”).” 

Which of these were symptoms of the virus or side effects of the jab, I couldn’t say.  Because after a couple of days, I lost my sense of smell.  I was infected with COVID, I presumed, and to satisfy my curiosity, I took a test.  Unsurprisingly, it read positive almost immediately.

Losing my sense of smell was by far the worst of it for me.  I have had fevers, aches, and coughs in the past, but I’ve never been able to put my face into a jar of coffee and have absolutely none of it register with my brain.  That was fairly alarming, I’ll admit, but I was fortunate to have it back in a few days. 

On the severity scale of all the illnesses I’ve experienced in my life, COVID registers somewhere a few inches north of a cold and a few miles south of strep throat or the flu.  And for the vast, vast majority of people, the experience is similar.  Unless you are very old and unhealthy with specific risk factors, COVID is simply just not very harmful. 

What’s really interesting about the COVID-cult’s preachers, though, is that even the remote possibility of extremely isolated examples of bad experiences among seemingly healthy people with the virus is cause for mass public paranoia.  

Take Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, frocked with all the fancy scientific credentials needed to signify his moral authority on this matter, who took to Twitter to share a TikTok video (because that’s where all doctors collect primary data supporting their conclusions these days, I guess) of a young woman who claims to be unable to taste the difference between various liquids.  “This woman had #COVID19 and now cannot taste the difference between whiskey hot sauce vinegar or Diet Coke,” he writes.  “But the “mild” minimizers would hand-wave that #LongCOVID doesn’t count right?”

As the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh points out, “[e]ven if you had no taste you’d still be able to distinguish between vinegar and Diet Coke by texture alone.”  In my own experience, taste was limited only by lack of olfactory function, and I could still distinguish between sweet, salty, bitter, etc. 

But let’s imagine that this is real, and consider the good doctor’s logic being applied here.  Because there are extremely rare, mostly anecdotal, and isolated examples of long-term negative effects from infection outside of the smaller, most-at-risk demographics, everyone must submit to periodic lockdowns, universal masking, and generally reorient their lives at the government’s command.  But when major scientific studies show serious side effects of the jab, such as findings that “teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from COVID-19 [sic],” for example, his response is that everyone on planet Earth absolutely must be compelled by their government to inject the potentially harmful concoction into their bodies.

That alone makes the doctor’s position a hypocritical and illogical one.  And when you consider that the experimental drug he’s pushing does not prevent infection or transmission of the virus and that the vast majority of people is at virtually no risk of severe health afflictions from COVID, it becomes an insane and tyrannical one.

But the insane and power-mad, however credentialed, are now running the asylum of neurotic inmates that America has become, unfortunately.

After I had recovered from COVID’s very typical effects, I told anyone willing to listen about the experience, and my wife asked me why I would talk about it so openly.  It’s because I want everyone to know that for me, probably like the fifty other people you know who’ve had COVID (and like the progressives you know who’ve had it but never told you about it because the infection was a sign of shame and punishment for “not following the [COVID] rules,” of which they were only recently absolved by the clergy at the Washington Post), it was just not really a big deal. 

The median age of COVID deaths is still higher than average life expectancy, and most people under 45 are at significantly greater risk of harm while riding in a car than they are from COVID infection.  Those are just simple, statistical facts that are often ignored.  And another fact that’s often ignored is those who have had COVID, like my wife and I, now have natural antibodies which our cells may remember and deploy for a lifetime against this and similar coronaviruses.  

But of my wife and me, which is now at greater risk?  The one who has injected new, unnatural, and unknown health risks into his body to mitigate a virtually nonexistent one or the one who has not? 

Fauci’s deceitful clergy likely know the answer to that question, even if their gullible flock does not.  And if they were honest or had an ounce of integrity, they would have never demanded universal vaccinations as the means of our salvation.  

Image: michael_swan, via Flickr // CC BY-ND 2.0