AMID all the discussion about vaccines being properly tested to make sure they are as safe and effective as alleged by their manufacturers, I’m wondering: how the hell do you know whether a medication such as a vaccine can possibly be effective, never mind safe?
The truth is, you don’t. You can certainly know when it does damage once the gunk is inside you, but as for safely preventing disease and infection, there is simply no way of establishing this.
If you don’t get measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, flu, polio, covid or shingles, for instance, how can you tell whether the vaccine has cleverly warded off the virus or whether you would never have succumbed to the infection anyway?
That is the problem with treatments which are sold for prevention, and increasingly it seems to me that such medications are a giant con. Vaccines are generally given to people who are not suffering from the disease they are supposed to stave off but to stop them from falling prey to the infection in the future. But whatever trials and tests are performed, there will never be a way of verifying whether whatever was in the vaccine prevented the disease from taking hold. That is why vaccines are the perfect moneyspinner for the pharmaceutical industry: they purport to protect you from something you may never have got in the first place.
If you do happen to go down with the infection after having the shot (or shots) that is supposed to prevent it, the vaccine producers once again have the perfect answer: yes, you have got a dose of covid, flu, or whatever, but it would have been far worse had you not had the jab.
Sadly, all too many have come to believe this. I know countless people who, in the past five years, have succumbed to covid despite having every jab and booster going. They will say, ‘Yes, I did have covid but thanks to the vaccine, it was very mild.’ Even our old friend Michael Mosley, one of the most indefatigable pushers of the covid jab, caught it after taking every precaution, and yet he continued to bless the vaccine as one of the wonders of the modern medical world.
The fact that those of us who resisted the intense pressure to get jabbed have, in the main, stayed covid-free, does not impress them at all. ‘We protected you,’ they say or, ‘You were just lucky.’
But are we ‘just lucky’? Take statins, another heavily-pushed medication. Around eight million people in the UK now take these pills and, as with the vaccines, they are routinely prescribed to people who are perfectly healthy. Statins are supposed to prevent strokes and heart attacks by reducing cholesterol. But how do you know whether you are in danger of succumbing to a stroke or a heart attack? You don’t. There is simply no way of telling. I have never taken these drugs and so far have not had a stroke or a heart attack, so whatever is protecting me from these age-related conditions, it is certainly not statins. I’m inclined to think it is sheer bloody-mindedness and impatience with illness that is keeping me well.
My late partner John Sandilands was prescribed beta-blockers for high blood pressure which, once again, is implicated in heart attacks. The pills never brought down his blood pressure but had the nasty side effect of making his hands and feet icy-cold, as these pills work by increasing blood supply to the heart and directing it away from far-off parts of the body. As time went on John was also prescribed statins and was eventually on a heady cocktail of pills. One evening I was contacted by one of his friends (we never lived together) to say that he had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack while making a phone call. Whether or not the many prescription pills he was taking towards the end prevented a stroke we cannot say, but they certainly did not prevent his premature death.
Would he have lived a longer and healthier life without all the pills? Nobody can ever be sure but what we do know is that they never made him well or did anything to reverse his hypertension. His doctors had a slick answer when he complained that the pills were not bringing his blood pressure down: ‘Yes, but it’s not going up.’ It seems they always have a ready reply as to why the pills they prescribe are not working, or are only working in the way you don’t want them to.
The same goes for all the many tests we are encouraged to have these days, some of which are painfully invasive, such as the cervical smear, or PAP test, for women, or prostate cancer tests for men. And what about an allegedly preventive double mastectomy, such as that recently undergone by 41-year-old actress Kara Tointon? Even the Daily Mail doctor, Martin Scurr, while applauding her ‘brave’ decision, pointed out that although excising the at-risk tissue may reduce the risk of cancer, it cannot entirely remove it. There was no suggestion that Kara Tointon already had been diagnosed with the disease. Once more, we are talking about ‘prevention’ and I increasingly wonder whether there is any such thing, and whether any medical interventions or tests carried out on healthy, well people do anything to halt a future disease in its tracks.
Even when a person is already suffering from a chronic disease, such as asthma, diabetes or arthritis, there is no medication that can reverse the condition or restore perfect health. The best that can be hoped for is ‘management’ to reduce symptoms, and once such medication is prescribed, it usually has to be taken for the patient’s lifetime.
Although there can never be any guarantees, the best way of staying healthy is not to take loads of pharmaceutical products, but to eat healthily and relatively sparingly, take lots of exercise and get as much sun and fresh air as possible. I know it sounds obvious, but there is no money in prescribing these sensible lifestyle suggestions, and modern medicine, sorry to say, is all about money and profits rather than wellness.
