By Michael Nickerson
You won’t believe this, but hear me out. There was this paratrooper on an actual mission who decided not to jump. Just sat there and refused to budge. Seems he’d been reading up on the safety of parachutes after a friend shared a link sent to him by a cousin of his wife’s former gardener. And boy did he find some shocking stories about failed parachutes and their effect on the human body. Erectile dysfunction, blood clots, heart damage, even death! And he also found out that it happens a lot more often than people are letting on. So he told his fellow soldiers to go be sheep if they wanted to, but he was staying put.
But wait for the kicker: after having demonstrated some serious, outside-the-box critical thinking, he didn’t receive the plaudits and promotion he so richly deserved, but was instead kicked out of the military! Can you believe that?
Well here’s hoping you employed a bit of critical thinking of your own and said bollocks before ever getting past the first sentence. Of course it didn’t happen; made the whole ludicrous thing up…sort of. See, all you need to do is to insert “covid vaccine” for “parachute” and you’re away to the races. Where once it was nonsensical it suddenly becomes common sense for far too many.
I speak of course of the vaccine hesitancy that has many Canadians with too much internet access digging in their heels and refusing “the shot.” Why? It’s a plot by Bill Gates to inject microchips into the unsuspecting public, or just another overreach by governments wanting to control the masses, or because it causes infertility, autism, or will alter your DNA. There’s even talk about swollen testicles and people turning into monkeys…I kid you not.
Now in the case of Lt.-Col. Illo Antonio Neri, an RCAF pilot with 28 years of service, it’s because he apparently managed to squeeze in medical training during his off hours. You see, in an affidavit filed while trying to get the courts to intervene and stop disciplinary action for not getting vaccinated as ordered he stated “I do not have confidence in the government’s declaration that they are safe and effective.”
At this point there have been almost 10 billion vaccine doses administered around the world with nary an exploding testicle. As vaccines go, these are about as safe as you can get. Will we find that at some point in the decades to come there might be long-term problems? Well anything is technically possible, but I can only wonder how Lt.-Col. Neri gets through a preflight checklist without running from the cockpit with visions of engine fires or failing hydraulics dancing in his head.
I’m going to suggest he has gotten off the ground for the last 28 years because he trusts the engineers who design his planes, and the mechanics who maintain them, to say nothing of the basic physics behind that voodoo thing called flight. Yet he, along with over nine hundred fellow members of the armed service, is risking dismissal over accepting a simple jab.
To be fair, armed service members are way ahead of the general public when it comes to getting vaccinated, with close to 99% versus some 84% having braved the needle. However, that there is hesitancy at all speaks to a larger problem, namely how small groups of people are putting the rest of us in danger for selfish and ignorant reasons. Unvaccinated military personnel are placing themselves ahead of their fellows and their mission, defying an eminently reasonable direct order. And citizens who do the same don’t seem to care a wit about overflowing hospitals and burnt-out nurses or those who have gotten sick and died from a virus they are more likely to spread than not, to say nothing of an economy that won’t recover until this pandemic is under control.
Yet it’s a case of “my body, my choice and to hell with the rest of you”. Armies don’t run very well with that sort of attitude, and neither do societies. But that seems to be what you get when everyone’s an expert.
