I found it hard to know what to do about showing up to my vaccination last month.

Locking down with my parents on a far more apocalypse-friendly bush retreat in the backroads of Makarau, our bubble has become an absolute wheelhouse of objections to the approach of the outside world spearheaded by Jacinda, Biden and the World Health Organization.

My mum, for instance:

“feels in her spirit and discerns for herself it is not okay to take a vaccine that has used the luciferase process (sic) and has been tested on aborted fetal cells“

It is a matter of personal conscience for her.

My father, a medical professional, was – at the time – on the fence between a conviction the new mRNA technology is best approached with caution and a desire to protect those he works with. After a discussion between them, he cancelled his first vaccine appointment and decided to do some more research on its effectiveness in preventing transmissibility, as he was fully prepared to have COVID himself as long as he were no likelier to give it to his patients unvaccinated.

This is a compromise which as a healthy 30 year old, I couldn’t help but be curious about.

How do I remain true to my immense cynicism about the motives of a wildly profitable pharmaceutical industry and compliant governments, while still doing everything in my power not to infect even one other person?

Over the first month of lockdown and with feverish curiosity I overheard my dad speak to two doctors – one tentatively pro-vax, the other vehemently against – as well as some family friends of the faith who advised caution and preached the importance of marital unity on the subject.

Pausing at the top of the stairs one Sunday to listen to their call, I overheard the doctor against the vaccine decrying the sanctioning and removal of important immunity boosters and treatments like Ivermectin that the government had allegedly made illegal to funnel people into taking the vaccine as the sole treatment plan. He spoke also of Israel’s woeful infection rates since the bulk of their population received two Pfizer doses and the importance of a natural immunity through diet and exercise, strengthened of course by the booster blood of Jesus.

He mentioned that in his current role at a South Island ANE he had looked after patients with vaccine side effects and made reference to the many nationwide with blood clots, fainting and being violently ill. He went on to say that the authorities were playing down the role of the vaccine in the 49 deaths that have occurred following vaccination with the Pfizer jab in New Zealand in order not to freak people out and continue with the goal of getting enough of the population over the line.

“As a doctor” he told my dad, “my advice is to hold off to see if these other live virus vaccinations (i.e. Novavax) become available to us, and see how the lay of the land is but I tell you, you will eventually have to make a stand. This whole thing is really about control and separating out those who are prepared to stand up to the New World Order and stand firm in their faith.”

Running down the stairs to heave firewood into stacks and get COVID off my brain, Dad soon joined me and relayed some more of what the doctor had shared.

“I mean, what possible reason do the media have to underreport the deaths and the side effects and what possible bad motive would all these down-to-earth Christians have to resist it?” he asked me.

“Because they belong to a religion with a sense of being persecuted, that is increasingly at odds with a liberal, secular global politics and who see the modern world as going to hell in hand basket?”

“I take your point” he replied, before we changed the subject, much to my relief.

A few nights later I found myself speaking to a friend who has a Master’s in Biology, has written best-selling books about the natural world and has a doctor for a wife.

He rung me while I pored over articles in advance of my impending appointment, struggling to find convincing proof that the vaccine would prevent transmission of Delta or continue to effectively protect us from mutations, and my initial distress at having been interrupted turned into relief as I found a very worthy and humble sounding board in my good friend.

Along with his wife, we have all adventured together in the outdoors for years and I know that they – like me – are both very much for a return to being more in touch with nature, for boosting our natural defenses (psychological or physical) through a life of balance and natural means, but I also know he has a pragmatic view of the utility of science which I in my more hippy leanings can sometimes neglect!

While he gently and diplomatically pushed me in the direction of getting my jab, we got onto the psychology of the decision and how the vax issue – like it seems everything else these days – seemed to fall neatly along a left/right political divide. My mate felt deeply that it was a shame that this issue, like Trump, Climate Change, and Identity Politics had become a matter of identity itself with marriages, families and friend groups clambering to react to the deep chasm the choice to get vaccinated was opening up between them. We shared how despite our awareness of the polarity, we were both helpless not to give into the temptation of writing people off who disagreed with us too.

For me, it is a passing comment about ‘natural cycles’ when the climate emergency is mentioned, when certain walks of life are judged to be more or less spiritually sound or that Trump was given such a hard time in the media because he was sent to defend the dying principles of a more righteous America.

I see red.

Inexplicable, overwhelming disdain.

At times I pull out of my emotional nose dive and stalk away. Other times I shout and assert my view in a way that does nothing but entrench people in theirs. Facebook Comments sections aren’t the problem. It’s the principle that in the 21st century with the power to transcend the hapless left/right divide and gather in the name of truth and service we are instead descending further and further into a cesspit of tribalism where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The internet, as most of us have realized, is largely to blame.

But as much as I believe this is fundamentally a political divide we are seeing, I also think it runs deeper and offered my mate – with his acquiescence – an adaptation of his political theory.

Because it can’t be as simple as conservatives/libertarians casting off Big Science and Government while liberals amble blindly along to whatever tune their beloved institutions press play on. As just one example, there are a huge amount of what you might describe as ‘hippies’, who would almost certainly identify as socially progressive and yet are vehemently opposed to the jab, committed as they are to naturopathic remedies and holistic models of being that scorn the profit-driven likes of big Pharma.

I’ve seen many an article the last couple of months that seek to caricature the other side as selfish, as sheeple, as malevolently motivated when I just don’t think it’s ever been the case for either. As with all else under the sun, be it the pro-life/choice debate, private enterprise vs. governmental regulation or PC/cancel culture, you have two camps ultimately driven by justice, the greatest good, and by truth but with very different ways of arriving at the destination.

The counsellor in me bucks at the thought that getting anything less than a consensus of 90% agreement on the vaccine is somehow damning evidence that we’ve lost our way as a species. Since when have we known anything to be agreed upon 100% by humans? We literally evolved and came out on top of other hominids because of our capacity to see things from multiple points of view. The liberals among us push forward, innovate, and scrap oppressive ideas while conservatives hold to traditions that have kept us prospering for millennia and as such are loathe to move too quickly, too soon.

On the one hand with COVID you have very often religious or ‘spiritual’ groups, substantial amounts of Black Americans, NZ Māori and Pasifika Peoples, business owners and white, rural libertarians some of whom truly believe that the UN has collaborated with Anthony Fauci, the Wuhan lab and Bill Gates to evade the climate disaster by decimating the world’s population with a man-made virus and subsequent vaccination plan that among other things, serves to control large swathes of the population through microchip vaccine passports. For the more religious types there may be behind this loose collective of liberal billionaires and governmental cronies a demonic and sinister spiritual plot that must needs be carried out before a worldwide ‘illumination of conscience‘. Akin to the Life Review concept reported during Near Death Experiences, everyone in the world during this time will be subject to a half-time match analysis of their actions with the Almighty before being given a chance to turn their life around and help redeem the planet for the coming Kingdom on Earth.

Wild? You betchya!

At their roots though, these groups represent a force fundamentally opposed to or at least weary of the direction the globalized, materialist and secular culture is headed. For the hippies, it is a revolution of natural law they desire. For indigenous groups like Tangata Whenua and Pasifika peoples, I wonder if there isn’t just a teeeny bit of mistrust for a western health system and culture that has ultimately pathologized and brought about worse physical and psychological outcomes for them than Europeans for centuries.

Love ’em or hate ’em, you have to admit, it’s a little more complex than just ‘selfish’.

Then on the other hand you have a majority group of what feels like a generally educated hodgepodge of left-leaning, science-believing folk and swathes of people who are too busy surviving to have the luxury of over-analyzing their decision. As a whole, I’ve noticed a ‘hold-my-nose’ kind of reluctant trust of the authorities and a submission to the news narrative that mainstream institutions and most peer-reviewed articles are relaying. For this group, knowing they are protecting vulnerable family and friends is often enough. Does it matter if Anthony Fauci, the face of American public health told the truth about the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (whom he heads) not funding alleged gain of function research on novel respiratory bat coronaviruses in Wuhan where this all started? ‘Probably not, anymore’ they say. It’s already happened and this is the most direct path to getting back to normal life with their loved ones.

Fair enough.

Except it’s increasingly looking like we won’t get back to normal right?

Would Jacinda have signed off on a return to level 3 with 20-30 new daily cases in last year’s lockdown? No chance. The announcement was a a pivotal swing in the direction this government is taking to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate so we can slow down, rather than eliminate the virus in our communities. This plan is a more realistic one it seems but begs the question: How long do we play with lockdown settings, public hygiene measures and tailored booster shots to confront the next mutations generated in the parts of the world slower on the vaccine uptake due to lack of funds or otherwise? Till everyone’s had it?

It would be nice to have a timeline laid out, although I don’t envy the government’s task of providing one!

The Pfizer vaccine, while not a failure in preventing Delta by any stretch, does seem to be more of a preemptive tonic than a terminator of viral load. Given that a leading British immunologist and director of the Oxford Vaccine Group told UK lawmakers last month that the herd immunity goal with Delta is ‘mythical’, will this mean a yearly booster in perpetuity? One with slightly higher stakes than it’s influenza equivalent?

Quite hard to say but it’s looking that way.

Which I’m okay with. I got my jab, in the end, to protect the people I love and the people I am delivering workshops to on mental health (for which lockdown, as we know, has been a bit of a nightmare for).

But having known what we do now, if it had come down to a referendum, would I have voted for the full lockdown, wait-for-90% vaccination-before-we-move approach?

I have done some serious wrestling with this question. And while I have my doubts around the absolute bloodbath Shaun Hendy for example predicted through modelling, I still tend to believe the more we can vaccinate, the slower the rate of devastation will be. At the same time, I think talking about the fact that a country’s health system capacity, population age or level of co-morbidities such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity come to bear on an inordinate amount of COVID-19 related deaths is worthwhile. God knows that if we put the same trillions of dollars and mobilized public response into regulating polluting, sugar-filled, processed foods and alcohol industries, we would almost certainly be reducing the devastation COVID has wrought on a significant level.

I also believe we will not forevermore have it in our power to hold back the rising tide of nature to regulate our numbers. While I am obviously opposed to any “Bill Gates-sponsored” mass-annihilation solution to overpopulation and climate change which will wreak havoc on a scale exponentially grander than COVID, in my more brutally honest moments I find myself not necessarily opposed to pinning a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ tag on the door of a very clever species that has grown into such turbulent adolescence that – like any parent of a teenager will know – no one seems capable of preventing their own self-destruction and bringing most other living things down with it.

This ‘philosophical’ take on things is bolstered by my belief in our real nature as spirit. As immortal.

I can hear the slick roll of the eyes in the reader’s head and I understand this is why we don’t have a theocracy; why we must needs separate church and state, but it is my truth and with it come my reasons.

And you don’t have to be a Christian, Muslim or Jew to see that a global ideology fundamentally dubious of anything other than the physical, will place the prevention of death as it’s tip-top priority. That will willfully strip it’s citizens of the right to do business, move freely or even talk freely of alternative ways of understanding this pandemic, all in pursuit of preventing (and prolonging interminably) the death of the body.

But some things are worth dying for.

What we don’t tend to count in out cost-benefit analysis of the ‘eliminate’ response has been people’s lost livelihoods, the massive psychological harm of denying people means of occupying themselves, enjoying touch and anonymous travel, as well as the resentment and social unrest a heavy-handed government approach has invoked worldwide, not to mention the debt (62.1 billion in govt expenditure) we have incurred managing COVID the way we did and the pure economic loss of closing down businesses that we will continue to pay off for years to come.

It also fails to acknowledge the 3 billion odd single-use masks and other medical paraphernalia thrown away daily, and the huge backslide on our efforts to cut down on private plastics use in the developed world – generations late already.

So given all that, what would the cost have been if we’d chosen business as normal?

Without a single lockdown restriction or vaccine administered, 80,000 New Zealanders would have died.

On top of this, high as opposed to low vaccination rates in NZ will save thousands of people from dying and tens of thousands of hospitalizations per year of outbreak, which means thousands of vaccinated people also saved who are dying of non-COVID related causes.

Makes the measures we’ve put in place seem a little less draconian, doesn’t it? Despite the enormous cost to our way of life, in the end I decided calculating the price of that many lives into my vaccine decision was inexcusable .

Of course, the environment has clearly seen a boost from the way we’ve rolled with COVID too. The restricted travel more than anything: Less hydrocarbons in the atmosphere is a wonderful silver lining.

And those of us lucky enough to have a government support us financially through a lockdown have come to fresh appreciations of growing our own food, of downscaling our life’s canvas that we paint on and spending more time on relationships with a special few rather than material opiates.

We must continue these things at all costs. Not just for our wellbeing and that of the planet, which is paramount, but because severe climate change and the associated fluctuations in temperature and humidity would bring all of this plague business on us again in wave after wave if we don’t. Reverting to smaller-scale, sustainable, community-based living is not just a no-brainer for our wellbeing – it could be fundamentally effective against the wildfire spread of a virus in a needlessly globalized world.

I will get my second shot next week because for the meantime I trust my government and I believe that the majority of kiwis have made the right choice in keeping as many of us safe as we can. As a group, I believe we may just learn from this and look at the next pandemic slightly more practically. But then again, maybe not. The talk of mandatory vaccines has ramped up of late and I can’t help but notice the narrative predicted in the prophecies of anti-vaxxers being played out in front of their smug little unvaccinated eyes!

While I believe as many people should get the vaccine as possible, I believe they should not have to get it.

The Pfizer jab does a great job at preventing hospitalization and – over time – a middling job at preventing infection. That there will be minority nuggets of unvaccinated people in certain industries, for me, won’t ultimately change the fact we are all going to get COVID at one stage or another. I am all about slowing the spread but I think the impact of chucking hard working people out of jobs they love is disproportionate to the threat to public health they pose.

And we must be vigilant of any unprecedented, “temporary” changes in our law and liberties that are sold to us in terms of “doing the right thing”.

Let history be our judge.

I have to admit that – with a flat mate in nursing – the lower hospitalization rate Pfizer will give us is the clincher for me. That anyone vaccinated needing medical attention would have to wait for scores of unvaccinated to be treated for COVID is inexcusable for the sake of a worthy but less important debate about side effects. Pfizer, like all vaccines, is having some extreme effects. And while I fully expect that the media have downplayed them in service of the greater good, I believe the vast majority of people experiencing them also recover from them. Another factor to consider is that we are in the middle of an unprecedented, global case study and everyone has eyes on the participants! Of course we will notice these things in greater numbers than say for polio or MMR vaccines. Deaths in the time following vaccinations, while tragic, are unlikely to be directly caused by the jab and continue to be lower than what would be expected based off the natural death rate.

As an individual, given that I haven’t completely lost my faith in our political and scientific institutions (Illuminati, I’m BLOODY WELL WATCHING YOU!) and given the momentum of this wonderful nation I love, this time round I see one moral path only for me: If I am (even moderately) less likely to get it, I am less likely to pass it on.

To me, the choice of others is merely that. Our decision doesn’t have to qualify us as ‘team vax’ or ‘anti vax’ either.

You can have your jab and still oppose mandates

You can have your jab and throw the Lab Leak theory into conversation!

For me, we can have our jabs and still launch a revolution of holistic, sustainable and community-based living in a world that is wildly off-kilter.

I choose to both save lives and live out my convictions.