MARCH 2022

This winter we lost our main income, and we were banned from society, our local café, the local cinema, the empty local library, the deserted and always quiet art gallery. My office, which is found two levels underground on the Mount Allison campus (and is so isolated I don’t like to send young women to work there at night) was off limits.

I am assuming that the idea behind the segregation is that the unvaccinated are carriers of disease, otherwise, how could they justify this exclusion? In a movement of mass hysteria, the society we live on turned on us. The prejudice and segregation continue now even as the mandates are lifting.

Our friends, our friends and family, stood by and accepted it. They were content, and some even seemingly gleeful, when my husband lost his job of twenty years with the Federal government. He was a year away from retirement and worked from home. We are still banned from planes and trains.  We are treated like criminals for choosing against an experimental injection that has not stopped transmission or illness, with the caveat that this new experimental injection ‘might’ save you from hospitalization and death.  

We were in shock and continue to be shocked by this development. But we stayed calm and kind and friendly. As the restrictions mounted, and the vaccination rates increased, the illnesses reportedly increased. As the winter progressed the popular media encouraged the madding crowd to point their fingers at us. If only they would have gotten vaccinated, screamed the newspaper headlines, we would be out of this pandemic by now. It seemed a ridiculous conclusion because the unvaccinated were isolated while the vaccinated were out traveling and eating out and passing illnesses to each other.  Editorials became more vicious, and so did our Prime Minister.  We read them with concern.

Life should be uncomfortable for unvaccinated, we read. We will force them to accept the vaccine; take away their jobs, take away unemployment insurance. We should fine them, ban them from health care, charge them. How long will we tolerate them? asked our Prime Minister. Block them from shopping for food, that should have an effect!  For the first time in my life, I realized I was not safe in my own country, and that concept is as alarming as you might imagine.

As the pressure continued the picture of the unvaccinated person painted by mainstream media was of a slow witted, stubborn, low class, uneducated person. Articles appeared suggesting the unvaccinated were unable to calculate long term benefits. Some of the far-left Liberal leaders made a point of recognizing that there were certain populations, people of colour and Indigenous people, that were traumatized by medical authorities. This would explain their reluctance, they said, but they looked no further into that subject (what medical practices had bred this mistrust)?  

The media puzzled on the subject. Who are these malcontents who will not comply?  “The vaccines are safe and effective. This is the only way to stop the pandemic.” The Prime Minister repeated this mantra over and over, hoping to make it true by repetition. The injection was pushed, offered in shopping malls, injected by volunteers, pushed into every arm they could get it into. The general population was so ground down by manufactured fear and abrupt changes to their society, that they were mostly acquiescent. Of course, many people would lose their jobs without the jab, or their children, or their home, so they had very little choice.

I believed in the existence of the virus in the first year of COVID. I was cautious. I washed the groceries! I washed my mask! I bought what they were telling us. But now I am skeptical. I don’t trust the medical authorities and the mainstream media. The more we learn, the more skeptical I become. When they say thirty people in the hospital with COVID, I say, let’s have a break down: who are they, what were they in hospital for? What is the average age of the fatalities? The annual flu is also fatal to elderly people. One mainstream news channel claimed that a young man who had died of cancer, died of COVID, and the misdirection was eventually admitted and corrected (after causing panic in parent’s hearts).

In that first year of COVID we actually enjoyed the feeling of the world being united and working together. Sadly, that has now been replaced with a divided world. Families divided, friends lost, businesses failed, depression and suicide. I have been a vaccine skeptic for many years. That does not mean that I never get a vaccine, but it does mean that I do not blindly accept what the doctor’s office promotes. I read, I think, I analyze, I compare. And yes, I can read and analyze. In that first year of COVID I did dread the coming of the vaccine, but I could not have imagined the horror show that we have experienced.

I was not entirely against a vaccine, considering that at the time I thought there was a virus worth avoiding. I would have preferred a Canadian made vaccine, and one that had proper long-term studies. In our heartfelt desire to leave behind the restrictions and mandates, let’s not forget that pharmaceutical companies are not our friends.

In the first year of COVID I decided that we would wait one whole year before trying the new vaccine, to see what the side effects would be, and the efficacy. The consequences of our delaying the shots were dramatic, but not from a position of health and illness. We lost our income, went through our retirement savings, saw our right to freedom of movement curtailed and were threatened with more severe punishments.

Keep in mind that people get vaccinated to help themselves, not to help others. The hysteria has built false narratives about vaccines. We know that the flu vaccine is only so effective (it is often based on a virus that is no longer in circulation) and we know that some people get sick from the flu vaccine, so we have never made it mandatory. Your doctor suggest you get it and when you say ‘no thank you’, they move on. They can’t make you get a flu vaccine, even if they think it will be good for you. But now, look at what has happened. We are in a new world. Will they make the ineffective flu vaccine mandatory now?

The theory of ‘social credit’ so popular in China, is already a working system in Canada. We have never had digital ID before, we have never had to tell anyone our medical status before, we have never before been cut off from social freedoms according to our medical status. This is all new and I am most shocked and disappointed by my friends and family for their compliance. If you believe that vaccine works, go ahead and get it. Have I seen one friend or family deny themselves the use of their medical passport though? Would they try, for even one week, to live as we do?

Keep in mind there are those who had one vaccine and had such a bad reaction that they don’t dare get the second. These people, once happy to comply, are painted with the same brush as me and my family, who are natural dissenters. We who are naturally skeptical and instinctively cautious when it comes to profit hungry pharmaceutical companies, we like to make up our own minds about the medicine we take. 

Friends and family considered us recalcitrant, stubborn. Some are pitying or make concerned faces when they ask us how we are: I wonder if they are worried about our health. I don’t think so.   

They seem sympathetic but distanced. I can’t help but wonder whether they would stand back quietly as we lost everything. Would they look away when we were forced on to trains to internment camps?  We wondered what would happen if the Federal government began to fine us over non-compliance. How long would we last? Would we lose our house? We made plans to avoid the hostile hospitals if we did get sick. We wondered if we had to move out of the country. We were terrorized.

We thought about how we could save our house. One afternoon I gave myself a sense of relief by planning to put our house in a friend’s name so we wouldn’t lose it while we were in Mexico, or wherever. Those friends that I trusted to look after our child and our house, soon rejected us. I had posted that I felt a sense of hope in the truckers’ convoy, and the friends that I had felt such warmth from made it very clear that we should not support that movement.

I was told that I should find some other movement to support. Though they had expressed some cynicism about the building hysteria and seemed content enough with our non-vaccinated company to hand us their treasured child and share food, it was clear that they were never going to support the anti-mandate movement.  

We were on our own there. Moreover, if we went there, if we supported a questionable movement that had been painted as anti-gay and anti-trans and white supremacist, they were going to have to reject our loving accepting home and company. In their compliance with the hysteria and the restrictions, they joined the forces of harassment. They become part of that section of society that has terrorized us for not taking part in a product testing project funded by the Federal government.

My body has been under extreme stress. I have been sending every last calming chemical to my nerves so that I can accept that I am banned from travel and crossing borders. I feel the loss of freedom deep in my bones. Wouldn’t you? I know that I cannot be with two of my children, even if they need me.

I bury my aching heart under layers of stoic resistance. I bury the thought, the horrific thought, that my children can still be harmed by this vaccine or the new ones that have suddenly come to market. What will happen to their immune systems? What sort of autoimmune diseases will they have to handle as they age?  God forbid other outcomes. Sudden Onset Death. I don’t even want to think about it.

The more the government pushes the vaccine, the more it reveals its motives. It is about control. Not health. If you are still feeling healthy after your three shots, thank the heavens. But in your relaxed state of joyful acceptance of the modern world of medicine, don’t forget that long term studies have not been done on humans, until now.