PAPERS, PLEASE!
Papers, Please!
BINGHAMTONREVIEW.COM
By Patrick MacAuliffe
As the world begins to reopen from the pandemic and millions of COVID vaccines are being administered to more and more groups of people, a startling trend has started to emerge. Talking heads, people who haven’t left home in a year, and many others in between are calling for legislation to mandate proof of vaccination against COVID in order for a person to return to pre-pandemic participation in society. Restaurants, airports, concert venues, and more would require a “vaccine passport” just to get in. Proportionality bias - the human brain making the irrational deduction that big events must have big causes - may cause one to jump fully off the conspiracy theory deep end about the whole affair. In my view, whether the COVID vaccine is truly safe and effective, or it’s purely experimental gene therapy rotting the brain because of Bill Gates’ microchipping, is irrelevant. The safety of the vaccine, deduced from reputable sources, will be explored in this article. However, at the heart of the issue is the massive affront to liberty and legality that is a “vaccine passport” law. The COVID vaccines most common in the US market at the moment are mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. A typical vaccine uses a weakened or inactive version of the virus it is trying to prevent, allowing for the T-cells in our bodies to learn how to defeat it without the serious side effects of the real virus. mRNA vaccines, however, don’t imitate a virus itself so much as the “spike protein” used to deliver copies of the virus’ RNA into healthy cells (the messenger RNA, hence the name). If the structure of a given virus spike protein is known, replicas of this protein can be used in vaccines to teach white blood cells to attack these mRNA proteins, preventing the virus from replicating upon transmission. According to Harvard Medical School and the CDC, experimentation with mRNA vaccines has been conducted
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for decades, and the appearance of COVID-19 has provided an “exciting” opportunity, as Harvard puts it, to put these experiments to the test. Like many people, I was hesitant to immediately jump on board with a vaccine that was produced and tested in under a year. The FDA takes years to approve any sort of new medical technology, and no new vaccine has been approved in fewer than four years, according to Harvard Medical School. In the case of COVID-19, the reason that this vaccine took such a short amount of time to test, produce, and distribute is that Chinese scientists had a head start on studying and cataloging the structure of the virus. The Annual Review of Virology contains a study on the methods of coronavirus spike protein bonding from September 2016, and Science magazine has another study on the specific structure of COVID-19 from March 2020. This latest study is based on the data from China’s scientists, which may be part of the reason why some QAnon-types claim that COVID was grown in a
“...a vaccination card ...opens the door for other restrictions on the free choices of individuals.” Chinese lab as a biological weapon. For a virus with an approximately 1-2% mortality rate, COVID-19 is a rather poor biological weapon if this was the case. I encourage doing one’s own research from multiple reputable sources to understand how these mRNA vaccines work and why they could be produced so quickly. Growing large amounts of a virus and then working to weaken it enough for use in a traditional vaccine takes exponentially more time than merely replicating a harmless version of a virus’ delivery system. The overview I’ve provided is a very basic explanation of how
the COVID vaccine works, and the scientific intricacies are worth taking the time to fully understand. My skepticism about the process by which the vaccines were produced has been significantly abated through my research. I can say with confidence that the mRNA vaccines will not cause, for most people, adverse long-term side effects. What is not abated, however, is my skepticism about the motives of the large pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccines and the government policies surrounding the mass vaccinations. Pfizer, producer of the most effective COVID vaccine at 95% efficacy, has had a long history of settlement payments and lawsuits, some of which totaled in the billions of dollars. In 1996, Pfizer even conducted an unauthorized clinical trial for its antibiotic Trovan on children in Nigeria, 11 of whom died and dozens more of whom were left disabled, according to drugwatch.com. Both Pfizer and Moderna made millions from selling their companies’ shares in the stock market as news of their vaccines’ effectiveness was released to the public, raising questions from NPR and Forbes about insider trading. Johnson & Johnson, producer of a 65% effective COVID vaccine, had to dispose of 15 million incorrectly produced doses on April 5th. One day later, the New York Times reported that 62 million more doses of J&J’s vaccine would potentially need to be thrown out after checking them for contamination. My reservations about these companies are that they seem to either be purely motivated by crony profit or they are horrendously incompetent. The concern about crony acquisition of money comes to a head as the international debate about mandatory vaccine passports rages. Should proof of vaccination be required to return to a pre-COVID operation of society, this may provide a cover for large pharmaceutical companies to lower their quality control standards. If people have no
Vol. XXXIII, Issue X
