My sister in Florida called me recently in one of those “catch up” family calls that we like to do every so often.
This call, however, was different. She described to me how she and her husband made a decision to get the new shingles vaccine, Shingrix.
Now, my sister is a big vaccine booster. During COVID she was forever asking everyone in the family when they were going to get the vaccine. When the booster came out, she always inquired about that too.
“Don’t you think you should get the booster? Come on, you’re not a conspiracy theory person, are you?” she’d ask.
My sister is also a pretty committed Democrat. Rachel Maddow is one of her heroes, so you get the picture. For a couple of years it was hard to have a conversation with her without her mentioning Trump. Trump this and Trump that. These phone conversations were hard to navigate, but since I love my sister, I did the best I could.
It helps, of course, that my two other siblings are both politically conservative, especially my brother Paul, a Vietnam vet, who loves walking into Philadelphia restaurants in his MAGA hat.
So . . . my sister and her husband end up getting the vaccine called Shingrix. They return home afterwards. Her husband leaves to go to the store and she hops in the shower. Midway through the shampooing and sudsy scrubbing her body suddenly goes dead — as in paralyzed.
She could not move, although she managed to shut the water off and sit on the shower stall floor and wait until the paralysis ended.
She waited and waited until finally her husband returned home from the store.
He saw her sitting on the shower stall floor — she told him she could not move — and then he took a large terry cloth towel and helped her into bed.
Five hours passed and no change. She still couldn’t move her body. Finally, just as her husband was about to call an ambulance, she felt that she was able to move. She recovered.
When she told her doctor about the Shingrix reaction, the doctor was “shocked,” and had no explanation.
I checked out Shingrix on the CDC website. There was nothing about body paralysis under ‘adverse reactions.’
“Most people got a sore arm with mild or moderate pain after getting Shingrix, and some also had redness and swelling where they got the shot,” the CDC statement reads.
“Some people felt tired, had muscle pain, a headache, shivering fever, stomach pain, or nausea. Some people who got Shingrix experienced side effects that prevented them from doing regular activities. Symptoms went away on their own in about 2 to 3 days. Side effects were common in younger people.” (My sister is in her seventies.)
The CDC recommends two doses of the recombinant zoster vaccine (RZV, Shingrix) to prevent shingles and related complications in adults 50 years and older.
The CDC website also states that in clinical trials, Shingrix was not associated with serious adverse events.
“In fact, serious side effects from vaccines are extremely rare. For example, for every 1 million doses of a vaccine given, only one or two people might have a severe allergic reaction.”
Before we ended our call, I couldn’t resist asking her how it felt to be a real victim of what she would have otherwise termed “a conspiracy theory fantasy vaccine reaction” before her real time experience.
She paused, and said, “I know….”
This was also the week that Naomi Wolf published her extensive interview with Dr. James Thorp citing massive dangers to women and babies via the mRNA injection, frequently referred to as “the jab genocide of the unborn.’
This was also around the time when the quadruple-vaccinated Dr. Jill Biden announced that she had tested positive for COVID.
This earth-shattering news went viral on AOL, CNN, MSNBC. Dr. Jill testing positive meant that she might die, fall into a coma or spread COVID to her husband via a shared hankie or goodnight kiss.
Lucky for everyone involved, the frail president was out of the range of “contagion” because he was speaking to hardhat union members in Philadelphia, and about to embark on a trip to India.
The truth is, testing positive for COVID in most cases means next to nothing. You might get a little cold, a Victorian fainting couch headache, or a sniffle. Three days after testing positive, however, CNN reported that Jill the doctor had tested negative (again, in blaring headlines).
Whew!
About those headlines: what a wonderful advertisement for the COVID-testing industry — an industry that surely doesn’t want to go gentle into that good night.
Rest assured there’s not going to be a COVID testing kit “good night” anytime soon, primarily because there are still too many people, especially people in their twenties, who can’t conceive of life without COVID and the maskaholic theater trappings that go along with it.
A September issue of The Daily Pennsylvanian (DP) — a student publication at UPenn — brought this fact to light when it focused on student worries about an on-campus resurgence of COVID.
An image accompanying the piece showed perfectly healthy looking students walking on campus in face masks.
“…Upon the end of the public health emergency in the U.S.,” the article stated,
“The Penn Cares Testing Program was also suspended — eliminating Penn’s on-campus COVID-19 testing site, related contact tracing measures, and the COVID-19 resource call center.”
The article went on to describe the panicked reaction of first year student, Natasha Kobelsky, who told the DP that she was disappointed “with the apparent lack of a requirement for her to report her positive test results.”
Why don’t we file this complaint under, “Pining away for Authoritarianism,” a title that could easily be a Tom Jones song.
The fact is, the Penn freshman’s views aren’t all that shocking, especially when one considers that in 2022, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit aimed at protecting free speech on university campuses, released its free speech ranking, placing UPenn second to last out of 203 schools surveyed.
Our positive-status Penn heroine elaborated:
“The information was not readily available and [it] took a lot of jumping from site to site and calls and redirects to get to where I needed to be and figure out what protocol I was supposed to follow.”
Liberals love requirements, mandates, protocols and ultimatums. They need to be told what to do.
In 2020, Vox, a liberal publication much like Slate, critiqued the anti-lockdown protests as “business per usual in the land of right-wing Trumpism.”
“[This is] why it’s not surprising that in some areas, protesters waved Confederate flags or held signs that read, ‘Give me liberty or give me Covid-19.’ The protests are symptomatic of the profound presence of whiteness and white supremacy in America.”
During the 2020 lockdown, while I was walking through Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood, a young woman all masked up and in yoga pants and tattoos, screamed at me, “Put your mask on!”
It was, as they say, a directive from the Authoritarian State.
Now, I do not like losing my cool in public but her attitude was so nasty I wound up verbally scolding back that 24/7 outdoor mask-wearing was mostly about making some kind of lefty political statement.
The most avid mask-wearers were almost always the people who could not stop saying how much they hated Donald Trump. They were the leftists I was finding myself increasingly at odds with, the same people that supported the dismantling of statues like the Christopher Columbus statue in FDR Park or the Frank Rizzo statue across from Philadelphia City Hall; the same people who saw systemic racism in photos of Jordan Petersen or Aunt Jemima pancake mix; the same people who thought that illegal immigrants ought to be granted the right to vote, or get driver’s licenses.
The same people who objected to voter ID laws.
The same Philadelphia theater managers who, on opening night, made it a point to thank the original owners of the land where the theater was built, “before it was stolen” — never mind that Native Americans stole land from other Native Americans all the time.
Yes, these were the same people who cheered when Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Petersen, David Horowitz or Milo Yiannopoulos were banned from speaking at prominent universities.
Not long after my sister became paralyzed in the shower, Dr. Vin Gupta, the Harvard-trained lung specialist and poster boy for “sexy, with-it liberal doctors with an opinion about everything from climate change to gun control,” appeared on MSNBC recommending that everyone over six months of age get boosted against COVID.
He was so excited to be announcing this.
The reason everyone needs to get a booster, he said, is because the new variant is spreading throughout the country — like a Maui wildfire!
The use of fear to drive expanded government roles in society is really at the root of totalitarianism.
Sadly, a very large number of people in 2020 seemed to be quite happy living in a totalitarian society.
The girl who screamed at me in the street at that time about not wearing a mask was very good at spreading misery, something many woke leftists love to do.
That misery, of course, came in the form of pandemic lockdowns that resulted in the closure of 30 percent of Pennsylvania businesses, the second highest percentage in the nation.
The lockdown also brought in the travesty of mail-in voting, a system that France had for a while but abolished because there was too much fraud.
Let’s fast forward to August 2023. When I ride Philadelphia’s Market-Frankford El, take any bus or walk the streets, I still see a considerable number of people who wear masks outdoors. Most appear to be in their twenties or thirties, ostensibly healthy looking people who should not be thinking of masks.
This odd trend, no doubt, is being fueled by fears of the so-called XBB.1.5 variant that seems to be making a statistical dent in the Northeast US (to date, 75 percent of confirmed cases have been categorized as XBB.1.5)
Van Gupta, an actual doctor, is all about fueling those fears, and the news media is playing along: a new plague is coming, buckle up, be fearful, be safe and watch out.
Watch out for what? Getting paralyzed in the shower?
Funny thing about my Democrat sister: for the first time ever since the advent of COVID vaccines, she’s not saying anything about getting a shot to ward off the latest variant.