Prosecutor: So, you're saying that the supernatural is your exclusive province?

Peter Venkman: Kitten, I think what I'm saying, is that sometimes, s--- happens, someone has to deal with it, and who ya gonna call?

—Ghostbusters (1984)

There are many alarming news stories about the COVID jab and the current flavor du jour of COVID, the delta variant.  Some of what I've read predates delta.  Some information is from early in the release of the vaccines and, as I discussed in this February article, influenced me to avoid getting the jabs.  Nothing I've read since has changed my opinion in favor of getting myself vaccinated.  In fact, the public pressure has the opposite effect — the more they try to demonize those of us who take a thoughtful approach and wish to understand fully what the vaccine does (and doesn't do), the more resistant I become.

Once again, I am going to attempt to gather in one place some source material that might help you to make informed decisions about the future — whether to get the vaccine if you haven't yet, whether to get the upcoming "booster" shot, and how to negotiate life in these trying times.

Alex Berenson, an intrepid reporter on all things WuFlu, treads where most refuse to go and asks questions nobody in control wants to have asked.  His latest rational and compelling post, on his Substack site, explores the news from Israel, the land of 90% vaccination of the older set.  He points out that only 1 in 10 Israelis over 60 isn't vaccinated, and the reason those folks aren't is mostly because their health was already too fragile to tolerate the jab.  This leads him to say loud and clear that shouting about the unvaccinated getting sicker if infected from Delta is a red herring.  These people already were sicker.

The vast majority of the sick people in Israel, and by sick, he means with serious illness, are vaccinated.  He points out that the rate of cases has risen 12-fold in a month.

Reports are also in for the Massachusetts cluster.  About three-quarters of the infections in Provincetown, which has had 469 new delta cases since July 3, are in vaccinated individuals.  The viral load is equally high in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated.

There are other reports, which say that most cases of COVID are among the unvaccinated and are occurring primarily in areas with lower vaccination rates.  So, whom do we believe?  How do we know what's true?  Show me the actual statistics, because the statement contradicts what I've seen that was factual!

I've written about antibody-dependent enhancement — that the vaccine is causing the variants.  The virus wants to live, above all.  It's not a complex organism that reasons.  It just finds a pathway to life.  It's been shut down in its original form by the vaccine, so it evolved to become unaffected by the vaccine.  The NIH published an abstract in March about this based on a study looking for the best "informed consent" for people getting the vaccine.  Here's the study result:

COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

Huh.  How about that?  They've known for months and said nothing?  Oh!

Now I feel like one of those infomercials — "But wait!  There's more!"

This CNBC article has a handy map.  The map shows some funny things, to my way of thinking.  One, they conflate two different things on the map — low vaccination rate and high case count are orange; everything else is gray and signifies 40% or more vaccination.  Why would they do that?  Since most of the country is in gray, that seems a moot point.  But it also shows a lot of orange areas, meaning higher cases, are clustered near the southern border.  Oops!  Wonder how many of these cases just came across the Rio Grande?  They're not (per news reports on FOX) even testing the migrants before they put them on buses to wherever they want to go, and the "got-aways" are probably making their own way north.  Border agents are getting sick, too.  The government is doing nothing to protect them.

I'm longing for the Ghostbusters to show up about now.

Image: COVID virus.  Public domain.

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