My wife (who is vaccinated) recently contracted Covid. Despite being in very close contact with her throughout and not being vaccinated, I never tested positive. Go figure.
She had moderate symptoms including a fever, coughing, headaches and exhaustion. But, thankfully, she's feeling much better now.
To be fair, she got the vaccine back in 2021 and had no additional vaccines or "boosters". But it led us both to wonder what good the vaccine actually does. Especially since I didn't get sick at all. All of this only serves to affirm, in my mind, the idea that the risk of adverse side-effects from the vaccine itself was not worth it
for someone who is relatively young and in good health.
For the past several years, people like me have been branded as "anti-vaxxers", conspiracy theorists, just plain idiots or worse. Nothing could be further from the truth*. But I don't want or expect an apology. I just want people to think for themselves. Do your own research. Look at history (this exact same scenario has
happened before - not too long ago - right here in the U.S.). Ask yourself if what you're being told makes sense - and think about who's saying it. Just because someone has the word "Doctor" before their name, that doesn't make them infallible. And if they're a politician, well ... how many politicians do you actually trust to tell the truth about anything? (Maybe take a closer look at which companies politicians were investing in at the time.)
That's what really surprised me the most about this "pandemic": how quickly so many people fell right in line and unquestioningly lapped up what the media and politicians were dishing out. And how big pharmaceutical companies suddenly went from being some of the most greedy and evil entities on the planet to supposedly being our only benevolent hope. From my point of view, it was as if almost the entire world had their memory 'zapped' like we were in a Men in Black movie. It was surreal, and if I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it was possible. But here we are ... still.
* N.B.: To be clear, there are indeed some people who actually believe that the vaccines are part of some conspiracy to reduce or somehow control the population. I am not one of them. Although, I do believe that the way the government and media handled the situation only encouraged such paranoia.