We’ve been had.

Since many religious leaders have freely expressed their opinions about Covid vaccine mandates, I too will be permitted to state my thoughts, at least as a private individual.

First, despite what the Bishop of Rome has mandated for his own jurisdiction and what some lesser bishops have required in their dioceses, the official teaching of the Catholic Church is that vaccines “must be voluntary” (the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Note on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines, December 21, 2021).

The reason for this is that, in the case of the current vaccines, no compelling evidence exists that their effectiveness is proven to such a degree, nor that the disease itself is lethal to such a degree, as to force universal vaccinations. Of course, while they are largely ineffective at preventing Covid, the current vaccines are greatly effective in generating immense revenues for the government-pharmacological complex.

I say that the vaccines are ineffective based not on what I read on the internet or see on the news, which posit all sorts of contradictory evidence. I say this based simply by looking around. In the few dozen people that I know who have recently contracted the Omicron variant, most have been vaccinated. The vaccinated who have contracted Omicron have at least the same severity of symptoms as the unvaccinated. The vast majority of those who contract the current variant get over it within a week, whether they are vaccinated or unvaccinated. I have known families in which the virus sweeps through a household, but only the vaccinated get sick (this makes the unvaccinated feel a little sheepish, and the vaccinated feel a little resentful).

When the government was putting billions and trillions into developing a “vaccination,” it promised taxpaying citizens that once we took the drugs, we could return to the personal freedoms and economic prosperity we enjoyed before the lockdowns. The restrictions and government-induced fear, however, have not let up, particularly in those areas of the country where the vast majority are vaccinated (as in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live).

In my opinion, the vaccines hardly work, but they do not need to work. The virus is taking its natural course of becoming more easily transmitted but less virulent. If we allow it to, the population will achieve herd immunity, which honest immunologists recommended from the beginning (see The Great Barrington Declaration). Natural immunity is always preferred to artificial manipulation of our bodies’ immune systems. But there’s one problem with natural approaches to human health: you can’t make big money on them. They are free, and freely chosen by free people.

OK, so we’ve been had. The government has not been entirely honest with us, but doesn’t every government manipulate evidence to govern its people? In fact, don’t we play loose with the facts to some degree these days? We might be a little uncomfortable with government manipulation, but as long as the economy still works, we can live with it. As long as we can still get next day delivery on a bit of government corruption is OK, right? As long as there’s still money in our credit cards, and as long as we can stream pornography on our phones, we can live with government control and Big Tech censorship, right?

Our problem is not Covid, and it’s not even big government, big pharma, and big tech. The problem with ourselves. We have stopped believing in God, and stopped following his laws, and so we are at the mercy of the laws of men.

The above comes from Jan. 10 posting on blog of Father Joseph Illo, pastor of Star of the Sea, San Francisco.