Born into the age of Covid

My 13 month old daughter stood up today, wobbled a little and then did something you and I take for granted. She walked. It’s been 24 years since I last had the privilege of watching a small human, my little human, take their first steps on that long and eventful journey toward adulthood. It was a surreal moment, filled with both elation and trepidation.

Lara was born in January of 2022, into a household infected with Covid. Both my wife and I had caught it only days before her birth and it was inevitable she would contract it. Omicron was circulating and I suspect that was what we had contracted. At a week old, I could see she was struggling and took her in to our A&E, suspecting the worst. A few hours later she was admitted to an isolation ward, where she would spend the next ten days.

I could see the doctors were at a loss in terms of treatment protocols for the young infants in the ward. The gold standard at that stage was to pump the infant full of antibiotics and hope for the best. I refused the treatment, arguing she was not febrile and that she should be monitored rather than medicated. Ignoring my request, they pressed ahead and she spent the next seven days on a drip.

She was discharged after a week, her little system somehow had managed to fend off the virus without any ill effects. My wife was overjoyed, but I harbored concerns and I still do. There is absolutely no research done on young infants and the long term impact of the virus on their systems. Babies are notoriously difficult to treat and even harder to enroll in any form of meaningful trial. This results is a wait and see scenario, which, if you’re the parent, is far from ideal.

She’s made it, almost uneventfully – aside from a few minor incidents, mostly involving the cat and her desire to separate it from it’s tail – to her first birthday and first steps and on the surface, all appears well. It’s the rest of her journey that concerns me, and it’s a concern all new parents should share, post Covid.

We cannot unsee the last three years

Particularly if you’ve been invested in the saga of Covid, and I have, writing copiously on the pandemic, the lockdowns, masks, mandates and then, the vaccines. We’ve seen both the best of healthcare (in terms of dedicated doctors and nurses tirelessly running the gauntlet) and the worst. We’ve been lied to, locked down, manipulated, terrified and then coerced, sometimes at gunpoint, into rushed vaccines and experimental medical technology.

Now, we have to witness the last act of the Covid saga, of a triumvirate not even Shakespeare could have envisaged. The lead players, science, politics and medicine, trying to extend their flawed narrative just that little bit longer, and to play out their final scene they’ve conscripted our children. We are living out the vaccines swan song and they’re singing it to our babies.

There is some benefit for some children, those for whom the risk of the vaccine is outweighed by their medical conditions or predisposition to developing serious Covid symptoms. For most other children, Covid is not life threatening. There is simply no logical reason to expose them to the risks of a growing number of serious adverse events linked to the mRNA vaccines, some of which prove fatal.

There is not one shred of serious, robust clinical evidence to support the CDC’s Covid vaccination campaign for children.

Given what I know and what I’ve witnessed over the last three years, I now face a conundrum as a parent. One that I am certain many other parents also face. How can we ever again trust public health, and the science that drives it. As the person responsible for ensuring my baby daughters wellbeing, I now have to weigh up the risks (often unquantifiable) of each medical intervention she is exposed to, before consenting to it. I know that in many instances I will now decline these interventions.

Is the reputation of the vaccine irreparably damaged?

It may very well be in the minds of many parents, as evidenced by diseases we had once eradicated, making a slow and determined return. Small outbreaks of measles, polio and other childhood ailments are telling signs of our distrust in a system that is supposed to protect us, and which, under ideal conditions, does.

mRNA has issues, perhaps not the actual idea, but the particles we use to deliver the enveloped instruction in, the production, which exposes the vaccines to impurities with E.coli present in a number of tested samples, and then of course, the fact that the products don’t perform as advertised. The body does not, in some individuals and for reasons unknown, stop producing the protein the vaccine instructs, as we’d been assured. There are numerous other issues, to complex for this article and therein lies the rub.

Much of what is currently under development in terms of cutting edge medicine blithely assumes we’ve got mRNA all figured out, when truth be told, we are still stumbling to understand all the subtle nuances of the technology. Vaccines, flu shots, cancer treatments and other rare diseases will, in the future, all be delivered with mRNA technology.

My young daughter now faces medical choices that didn’t exist, pre-Covid. Am I going to expose her to these new treatments. Absolutely not. I will wait, as should responsible science, to see what emerges from our global clinical trial involving nearly two thirds of the worlds population. I pray I am wrong, but emerging evidence suggests otherwise.

In the meanwhile, old fashioned polio drops and measles, mumps and rubella vaccines will have to suffice.