Still not having the vaccine...

Back in April-ish 2007 I attended a conference for senior managers in HBOS.  One of the presentations during the day proudly announced that the bank borrowed £280bn on the overnight and short-term money markets to fund its mortgage lending.  As chance had it I was sitting next to a dealer from the organisation's Treasury function.  I said to him that seemed an extraordinarily large amount to have to re-finance every day, and didn't it create some vulnerability were markets to ever not be accommodating?  "Oh no", he replied, a bit condescendingly, "it's all fine, we never have a problem".  I was semi-convinced, and did nothing further about it.

So when HBOS collapsed a few months later because, er, its short term lending facilities had been withdrawn as a result of what was known as the credit crunch, I was, to put it mildly, frustrated.  I'd taken the previous 5-6 years of bonuses in the form of share options. Had I acted on my gut, and cashed them in, as I would have been able to, I'd have avoided a loss that just tipped into six figures when the HBOS share price crashed.

If this been an isolated example, I might have put it down to bad luck.  But when I left Lloyds, which took over HBOS, I became a management consultant, and am approaching 10 years in the job.  On now countless occasions I've encountered situations or circumstances that seemed intuitively wrong or amiss, I've been met with official explanations and/or reassurances, and yet after digging and analysis my initial reaction has proved to be right.  And usually the more senior the source of the reassurance, the more likely there is to be a problem.

And this is what explains my stance with the vaccine - the conditions are the same.  On the one hand there's a set of facts that cause me to raise my eyebrow:

1. The vaccine is being pushed hard, not just for those who are vulnerable to Covid, i.e. the older, the fatter and the sicker, but to all healthy people (seemingly including children it seems, which is utter insanity), at enormous cost, for an illness with a 99.9%+ survival rate, depending on your exact demographic
2. There are cheap and easy ways of avoiding the worst effects of Covid (vitamin D, zinc supplements, lose weight) and treating it if you do get it (ivermectin, hydroxychoroquine) that not only haven't been pushed by governments and their medical advisers, but in the latter case have been actively discredited, not by proving they don't work, but by undermining and attacking the reputation of those who suggest them
3. Medical trials for the vaccines don't end till 2023, and their development lifecycle means we can't by definition yet know their long term effects
4. Pharma companies have been granted immunity from prosecution for any damage or death arising from the use of the vaccines they've manufactured

A combination of the above creates big doubt in my mind.  Note that I'm not making any judgement about the efficacy of the vaccines themselves; it just seems odd to me that they're being promoted so vigorously.  It encourages me to think there's more to this than meets the eye.

Worse, there now seems a concerted effort from not just government, but the media in its choice of language ("anti-vaxxers", "refuseniks") to demonise people who've chosen not to have the vaccine. This week particularly has seen a wave of broadcasters and writers - Shelagh Fogerty, Iain Dale, Sarah Vine among them - to brand people like me as 'selfish', and somehow responsible for potentially delaying the lifting of all Covid restrictions.  (It'll be interesting to see if the government adopts the same approach. "Look what you made me do" - the language of domestic abusers, control freaks, gaslighters, and coercion psychopaths the world over).  This is the equivalent of that condescending "oh no, it's all fine" I heard at the HBOS conference all those years ago, with the attendant implication that I'm too stupid to understand what's really going on.  Well, I'll make my own mind up thanks....

...and my mind has made an assessment of the risks.  I'm a very fit (in comparison to the average), slim 54 year old who mixes with relatively few people and lives in a low population density area.  In the unlikely event I get Covid, it's unlikely to be any worse that the pneumonia I had in 2019 and the (proper) flu I had in 2018.  

One last argument to knock down - that I risk creating what economists call "externalities" if I don't have the jab, in other words that I create a cost for society.  I've even seen people suggesting that the unvaccinated should either not receive or have to pay for hospital treatment in the event they're admitted with Covid.  I wonder if those people would argue the same if I fell off my bike and needed A&E treatment?  After all, I quite easily avoid the risk by not going for a bike ride.  So who gets to judge?  All sorts of injuries and ailments are treated by the NHS that are caused by recklessness or stupidity, so even if you put vaccine-avoidance in the same bracket, that's not an argument to treat it differently to, say, patching up a Saturday night drunk who's tripped over his kebab.

But back to the main premise - the whole set of circumstances surrounding the vaccine seem iffy to me (the arguments that it's a trojan horse for implementing population behavioural controls are looking increasingly convincing).  And I'm not going to be pressured, bribed, coerced, persuaded or insulted into having the damn thing until that changes.  I'm not holding my breath.