By Jean René Saëns

Those that walk around unvaccinated are like drunk drivers. This is what the vaccinated are saying to the non-vaccinated. (Here’s looking at you Macron)

What a piss poor analogy.

Who is the drunk one here?

Who is under the influence of a drug? The vaccinated. “Two shots over here!”

“It’s only two shots. I’m good to drive, I’m not gonna hurt anyone.”

As for the unvaccinated, we are your sober friend telling you that even when you’re sober, you’re not always the best driver, and maybe you should wait a bit, sleep in your car if you have to…

“Hey, I’m sobering up! I need a booster shot over here!” 

(If it were my metaphor: The vaccinated are getting into a brand new self-driving sports car that was sped to the market. They’re finding out now that the airbags don’t always deploy when they’re supposed to, the seatbelt is painfully tight, and it needs regular maintenance to keep it running and street legal. The unvaccinated who have been exposed to the virus are as though driving a trusty beater as old as the driver. It may not be the newest, shiniest, gimmicky thing on the road, but it’s taken it’s dings and holds up in all weather.)

Why the comparison to drunk driving? Is this fun for anyone, like drinking certainly can be? Note I said drinking and not drunk driving is fun. Is the virus-stricken, mandate mad world fun for anyone? No one who’s right in their mind would say they enjoy these times. To compare the unvaccinated to the drunk drivers is to imply this pandemic is a gas for us.

Piss poor, miserably flawed analogy.

This analogy glosses over the fact that alcohol is legal. In spite of it’s checkered history and its character that lends itself to misuse… It is still legal. Because, as one may reasonably deduce, individual freedom (and let’s not omit free markets) is more important than the sordid eventualities (drunk driving accidents, domestic abuse, liver damage) that are all too frequently occasioned (someone dies every 52 mins in the US from a drunk driver, source: NHTSA) by irresponsible alcohol use. 

Piss poor, ill-conceived analogy.

If I am “drunk driving” by trusting my body to fend off foreign enemies, then I’ve been “drunk driving” my whole life. Which is patently absurd, since any state of intoxication indefinitely prolonged becomes not intoxication but a new type of sobriety (think functioning addicts, and if I be an addict to my own body, what can I say except that I cannot live without it). According to this falling apart at the seams, but still all too frequently regurgitated analogy, we were all drunk driving up until the vaccination campaign rolled around, allowing some to “sober up”. But it’s not that we’ve been drunk driving, it’s only the rules of the road that are being rigged. And many would have the unvaccinated run right off the road (restricted or no access to public spaces, places of commerce, worship, entertainment, etc.…)

We all must stop conflating the individual with the virus. The virus is a living, moving, growing, dying, changing force of nature. I am not the virus. It uses me, like it uses you to survive. We are not killing anyone. You are not killing anyone. We are all unwitting vehicles for an ugly nature at work. Death has and always will be an integral part of life. But should your mind flee in fright from this most fundamental of truths and insist on immaturely accusing your neighbor of murder by Covid, is the any different from blaming them for a flood because they took a leak in a river? The virus is a force of nature.

I go out into the world every day with a varying but never sub-minimal amount of civility and respect for my fellows. But how far does my responsibility towards them go if now the prevailing cardinal virtue is public health and wellbeing? 

Do I need to start brushing your teeth for you? Watching your weight for you? Should I become your personal trainer? Must I help you quit smoking? Drinking? Should I help you cross the street? Help you put on a tie correctly so you don’t choke yourself? Install CO monitors in your house? Help me keep you ever more tightly my brother.

What should I stop doing? Should I stop paying the taxes that go to pay for our military or intelligence agencies because that will invariably lead to someone getting killed? 

What am I not doing? Should I bust out prisoners on death row? Should I drop everything I am doing and go to med school in the hope of one day saving lives? Should I give all my money to charity? Donate my blood, my organs…Tell me! Help me help you!

But where was I? Ah yes. The jalopy that is the driving analogy.

Am I drunk? Am I? Are you not drunk on fear? On propaganda? On your own fake news and misinformation? On self-righteous virtue signaling? On your dope hope for a quick fix solution?

You are becoming true believers in a crusade to convert the heathens by coercion and force if necessary. 

Your faith in the vaccine as the best (and only) weapon in this fight is of a religious quality fervor.

And it is faith you are running on, because there are not enough (especially long term) studies to prove its safety. How could there be? All the breakthrough cases already speak to its efficacy as much as all the underreported adverse effects on VAERS speak to it’s dubious safety. Anecdotally, I know more people seriously impacted by the vaccine than by the virus. But no one listens to them or if they do, they bend over backwards to assure them that causality, in the case of adverse vaccine side effects, no longer applies, and that coincidence is everything. Science is real, logic repealed. 

My instincts and experience tell me that my body was designed to repel illness and practice homeostasis. My own experience with Covid tells me that I have nothing to fear. Not from Alpha to Omega.

It takes YOU and the virus to kill you. A normal to strong immune system defeats it in an otherwise healthy individual. Everyone knows this. I hear you. I know what you are thinking. I know you are dredging up a story of the odd, seemingly healthy young person who was buried by this virus. I hear you. But the exception only confirms the rule. A normal to strong immune system in an otherwise healthy individual defeats the virus.

If you are someone in a high-risk group for developing severe Covid, why ought I try to fix what isn’t broken in my body in order to compensate for the defects in yours?

Shouldn’t we all be doing what’s best for ourselves? 

I don’t deny COVID’s existence or it’s seriousness. But it seems as though many of the most frothing vax proponents adamantly deny the existence of vaccine side effects. But we are the drunk ones? 

Are you not drinking the kool aid and driving?

I will not break myself or break my word to myself to assuage your every worry. You will not break me by telling me where I can and cannot go, what I can and cannot do. You will not break me by waiving in front of me rights that you have rebranded and repackaged as privileges. Everyone is as free as they are strong enough to be. Push me. Test me. Find out how free I am.

What the hell is happening to us? Can we no longer live and let live? Or at least live and let die? Or are we unwittingly being drafted into what feels like a cold civil war? Because we are more and more being led to recklessly loathe each other. Perhaps we all need to sober up, vaccinated or not. We all want what’s best for ourselves, but to go asking everyone on the planet to agree with you and follow your way of thinking isn’t just preposterous, it’s dangerous. 

Take for instance what is happening in places from New York to Paris to Jerusalem. Slice it anyway you want to, brand it any way you want, ‘Key to NYC’, ‘Pass Sanitaire’ or ‘Green Pass’, it is nothing less than segregation. Say it with me, segregation. Let this unsavory morsel of a word roll around in your mouth for a while, try to sink your teeth into it. Me? It makes me spit. 

I spit it in the face of those who would have it this way. 

Segregation. 

What do you say brother? 

It’s got a mighty repugnant aftertaste, doesn’t it?