IF YOU thought covid was over, you might like to think again as it is certainly not over so far as the NHS is concerned. The spring covid vaccination campaign starts on Tuesday April 1 and ends on June 17. Cue more huge posters at bus shelters and similar places plus, I’m sure, plenty of text admonitions to go for your spring booster.
Those eligible for this particular booster are the over-75s, anybody aged between six months and 74 years who has a weakened immune system, and adults who live in care homes.
Although as an over-75 I am eligible, I will not be rolling up my sleeve for the latest jab any more than I have done for the earlier ones. But why do they want to keep jabbing us with ever more vaccines?
They say it is to protect us from all the viruses and diseases that might come our way, but I think there is more to it than that. After all, we are offered vaccines when we are not even ill and might never be at serious risk from any infection they are supposed to ward off.
No, I have come to the conclusion that they are not really medical treatments at all, but a kind of ritual, a secular version if you like, of Holy Communion. Whereas with Holy Communion you receive bread and wine as the symbolic, or perhaps actual, body and blood of Christ, with the vaccines you are jabbed with substances that are supposed to deliver, if not eternal life, the next best thing, which is freedom from all bodily ills.
In both cases, the substances enter the body and receiving the vaccines is closely akin to a religious rite. You are summoned, and you queue up until the priestly figure, the doctor or the nurse, dispenses the magic elixir. The doctors are in white coats, the nurses are in uniform, and vaccination centres have become our worldly places of worship.
Once the ceremony is over, you leave the room, absolved from covid, flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), pneumonia, shingles, tetanus and whatever new diseases or viruses can be developed or invented to justify yet another shot being injected into your arm.
And much as Christians believe they must attend Holy Communion regularly to top up their spiritual sustenance, so believers in the vaccines are convinced they must return again and again for boosters and follow-up jabs just to make sure all these nasty viruses stay well away.
Nowadays, I would hazard a guess, there are far more believers in the power of vaccines than in the power of Jesus Christ. Those who have cast off religion believe it is all superstition, incapable of proof, whereas those who swear by vaccines will tell you that they have been developed in modern laboratories by dedicated scientists. What about polio? they ask. What about smallpox? Weren’t these once-dread diseases wiped out by the miracle vaccines?
It doesn’t stop there. Once upon a time, all babies born to Christians were automatically baptised with holy water to cast out original sin and the priest or vicar made the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead. Today’s babies, by contrast, are more likely to be baptised with an onslaught of vaccines. From eight weeks old, they are injected with vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) , diphtheria, polio, flu, hepatitis B, covid and pertussis (whooping cough), to name but a few. In all, British children are baptised with a total of 17 vaccinations during their childhood and early teenage years. While an adult can give informed consent, this option is not open to a baby. You might say that a baby does not give consent to be baptised as a Christian either, and that is true. But whereas baptism and Holy Communion have been around for two thousand years and are harmless but enduring religious ceremonies, vaccines are relatively new and very often far from harmless.
Even now, in spite of much evidence and many studies showing that the covid vaccine, in particular, can cause serious illness and even death, all too many continue to believe in its efficacy. I am still hearing people say that, but for the wondrous vaccine, their bout of covid would have been so much worse. How can they tell? There is simply no way of knowing whether the attack of covid would have been more serious, less serious or completely non-existent with or without the vaccine. And I wouldn’t mind betting that thousands of ‘eligible’ people will, instead of going to church for Holy Communion, be queueing for its unholy equivalent, the vaccine.
It seems strange to me that many people who think they are rational, modern and enlightened because they no longer believe in God, religion or spirituality, will readily succumb to a laboratory-concocted witches’ brew without doing a trace of research into what it contains and how it might work in the body. Or, even, whether it works. They have merely transferred their faith from God to Big Pharma.
As for the widely-held belief that vaccines overcame feared diseases such as smallpox and polio, I have been reading a closely-researched book, Dissolving Illusions, by Dr Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, which shows that clean water, better nutrition, effective sewage disposal, slum clearance, warm homes and attention to hygiene did far more to combat previously lethal infections than all the inoculations ever invented. The vaccines just took the credit, as they still are doing, in many people’s minds, for saving millions of lives during covid.
Liz Hodgkinson’s My Covid Diary, based on her TCW articles over the years, is available to order from Amazon, Waterstones and most bookshops.
