Nanay: Victim of The Science

Guest Post by Visayas Outpost

Nanay died in her sleep two weeks ago while being treated at a local hospital here in Iloilo City, Philippines.  She was the mother of our housekeeper, from a small coastal village to the North.  The family believes that her death is directly attributed to the Covid-19 vaccine she received on December 31, but there is more to the story than just this anecdote.

As I have previously written about in “Camelot Theater”, there has been a heavy narrative being pushed worldwide to achieve the nebulous goal of ‘herd immunity’, for a pandemic that is not a pandemic.  Living as I do in a developing nation, it is this writer’s observation that poor countries – and the poor people living in them – pay the highest price for the fog of information filtering down from the West.  That fog can take the form of climate change, virus panic, financial market manipulation, and so on.  The decisions your officials make, Western reader, ultimately affect most people on Earth in some way.  It is my belief that Nanay would be alive today, if not for the spell countries like the Philippines are under right now by the information ministers in Europe and the US.  To be sure, we have our own problems here having nothing to do with the outside world, but Covid has been a special case.

Some background.  Nanay was in her late ‘60s, and lived her entire life in a coastal community where her family farmed rice.  By all accounts she was lean and healthy, without ailments or other maladies, with only high blood pressure to mark her age and lifestyle.  She had maybe visited the doctor a few times in her entire life.  She had probably never taken a vaccine, although without formal records these things are difficult to pinpoint.  Rural people in particular here have a skepticism of doctors and hospitals — not so much out of ignorance but out of personal experience.  Any visit to a hospital is risky unless you are wealthy; we simply do not have the equipment, training, or facilities common in developed nations.  Outside of Manila, anyone getting sick here better have a family member in attendance to bring food, and to keep track of everything the doctor says.  In Nanay’s case her heart stopped while she slept and it was several hours before she was discovered.

Most Filipinos’ experience with health care involves not even ‘city’ hospitals, but local ones operating on limited budgets.  Nanay’s husband, for example, suffered a bad broken leg last year in a motorcycle traffic accident.  Proper surgery and rehab were out of the question financially, not to mention travel restrictions because of Covid.  So they set his leg in a straight position rather than amputating it, and he was grateful.  The Western reader would have gone straight to the local ER, given their insurance card, and embarked on a road to full recovery within a very capable health care system.  If our system sounds below par, then we are not alone.  Countries all over the developing world operate much as we do; from Indonesia to India, from Argentina to Algeria.  With that in mind, there are a few very recent and pertinent vaccine experiences in the Philippines that are burned into peoples’ memories.

First is Dengvaxia, perhaps unfamiliar to the reader.  In 2016 a pharmaceutical company called Sonofi finished development on a vaccine to combat Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness that is an annual occurrence in this part of the world.  Dengvaxia was developed with Philippines as a clinical partner, and our Department of Health spent $67M to roll out mass doses of it to school children.  Within a year, Sonofi realized Dengvaxia was causing Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE), a condition which causes the body’s immune system to ‘lose its potency’, in simplistic terms.  The DOH suspended the program, but by 2018 there were deaths associated with Dengvaxia, and lawsuits; quite a scandal.  By 2019 the Philippines revoked Sonofi’s license on Dengvaxia, and there are criminal investigations underway.

Then there were the rabies vaccines for dogs, which ironically occurred at the same time as Dengvaxia.  It was a similar scenario: mass ‘push’ by the government, a budgeted program to get these vaccines into every corner of the country, with local clinical people administering free shots to all the villages.  It was great until the dogs started dying, or becoming partially paralyzed.  My wife’s family dog developed a constant leg tremor.  The promise was for a safe and free vaccine, so of course they were eager to accept it.  Against these real-world situations then, which are still fresh, the reader can understand why there is not only skepticism but resistance when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines.  My point is not so much to criticize the vaccine itself, but to draw attention to the system that administers it.

Consider this scenario:  A van from the clinic arrives in your village, and they unload a styrofoam cooler, and begin pulling out vials of Covid vaccine.  You are days’ travel from the international airport, or from any central storage facility.  How were these vials transported?  Were they kept at the proper temperature?  How sterile are those needles?  Were they made in China?  How much training does this worker have?  Why is she giving the same dose to adults and children?  Has anyone checked the expiration date?  Why are they telling you it is OK to mix second and first doses from different companies?  Medical systems are built on trust, and no doubt the Western reader has good insurance, and expecting the best system available.  But where I live we are paying by cash, and praying we don’t get an infection.  “Pay and Pray” would be a good description of our system, in fact.

It took a lot of effort to persuade average people about Covid vaccines here.  This has been evident since their rollout last year, and now we get to a critical point:  Financial incentives.  In 2020 the Philippine government re-allocated nearly half its budget to fund emergency measures to combat Covid.  About 73 Billion Pesos ended up being spent out of the 250 allocated.  Some of this money went directly to local Mayors, who are powerful figures throughout the Philippines, in the form of 1 Million Pesos each ($20,000 USD) for targeted vaccination percentage goals.  He can put that money in his pocket, or pay it out to families or staff, or even directly to someone like Nanay.  Most likely, he can donate to the local churches, who would then run a radio ad urging all parishioners to thank God for these vaccines.  Many rural families subsist on about 5 thousand Pesos per month…$100 USD…so the Mayor’s performance incentive is a significant tool.  In 2021 the WEF allocated over 25 Billion Pesos to the Philippines as Covid relief funds, offsetting 1/3 of what the government was spending…’greasing’ the incentives, as it were.  We also received ‘envoys’ from the WHO to ‘assess’ and to ‘recommend’ courses of action.

Nanay and her family got a free J&J shot on December 31, after some months of pressure.  With it, they each received vaccine card, one of the most important advantages right now in the Philippines.  Within two days she started to feel ill, the beginning of a five-week downhill slide.  It began with aches and pains, but something was wrong with her legs.  They lacked any strength, and they were painful.  She had general weakness and fever, and a few weeks went by with family just tending to her in the normal way.  When she did finally go to her local clinic, her blood work revealed the white cell count was way off.  Blood had be bought one bag at a time from the city, with cash, and they procured the only two bags of B+ available.  But her situation did not improve, and by the end of January the family admitted her to the hospital here in Iloilo.

Hospital protocol is to test first for Covid, and she turned up positive.  This meant she was confined to the Covid ward with limited access rather than the ‘normal’ ward.  Only one family member could be designated to attend her, and their phone could not get a clear signal in the building.  Nanay was diagnosed with severe anemia, cause unknown.  Outside family could not visit, but we finally learned that her blood count was getting worse.  Presumably the doctors were trying other things, but we will never know what.  There was nothing to do but wait, until we got the fateful phone call.  She had passed away between midnight and 3 a.m., without an alarm on the heart monitor machine.  Above the normal grief you would expect was a new concern: Covid patients do not get family burials, since they must be cremated.  Fortunately for the family however, the hospital tested her body for Covid again and got a negative result.

Good questions are being asked.  Why was she Covid-positive a month after getting vaccinated?  Why was she Covid-negative a week later?  Would she have been better tended in the ‘normal’ ward?  Would the family have taken her to the clinic sooner if they were not worried about getting tested themselves?  Was anemia the cause, or a symptom?  Old people get sick for all kinds of reasons – but has anyone checked if this was a reaction to the vaccine?  Maybe the timing is just highly coincidental.

The questions I ask are a little different:  What if there was no pressure for her to get vaccinated in the first place?  I do believe she would be working on her farm right now.  What if Covid had simply been treated by the international community as the Flu?  After all, it presents most of the same symptoms, and is treatable by standard anti-virals, and has about the same fatality rate.  At least she would have been in a fully-staffed ward.  Why has the push for vaccines now moved on to children, who have zero risk of a Covid fatality, even with Dengvaxia still fresh in our memories?  This government, along with most others, seems to have adopted the same approach as the WHO/CDC, rather than adjust their stance according to local experience.  What happens to a woman who has maybe never had a medical treatment her life, who suddenly gets a vaccine?  She could have easily had a reaction to something in the adjuvant (fluid) for example.  Did she have undiagnosed chronic anemia, and the vaccine somehow pushed her over the edge?  No one knows.

With Covid finally fading after two years, there is a question you may be asking yourself:  Was the international panic and haste really worth it in the end?  In Nanay’s case I have to say no.  You may disagree.  Are we to weigh the numbers, and try to calculate lives saved vs. lives lost?  The biggest takeaway when I consider Nanay, is that perhaps no one wins when you force fit a one-size solution onto a whole population.  She might have had a quick recovery in a Western hospital.  But we followed authority figures in distant locations, even in distant countries, for all of our Covid policies.  Those policies did not take into account regional differences in diet, climate, or genetics, all of which seem crucial in the case of Covid.  Those policies also overlooked common sense situations and even data, which local health officials should have compared.  In some crucial ways our authorities were absolved from using their own experience and instinct, by deferring to ‘superior’ international guidance.  Was the designation of ‘pandemic’ even accurate?  This alone may have made all the difference in how each country responded.

Consider that for 2020 & 2021 combined, the WHO lists only 55,000 Covid deaths in the Philippines.  Yet in 2018 alone, the Philippine DOH reported 60,000 deaths from ‘Flu & Pneumonia’ lung conditions – so, double the rate of Covid.  Let that sink in, and I urge the reader to look up similar information in their own state or country.  For us, Covid was essentially more mild than a normal flu season; yet we locked everyone down, closed the schools, watched many businesses fold (including one of our own), and are having debates about forced vaccinations.  There were silly things – months when restaurants could not sell alcohol, passes designed to only let one family member at a time into the grocery store, placing partitions between the seats on public transport; all humorous-yet-pathetic reactionary measures.  Currently, classes are still not meeting despite Covid being ‘finished’ for all intents and purposes.  (Full disclosure: I and my family here all had Covid, which was not very fun, but was dispatched with standard meds.  I do not even consider myself ‘anti-vax’, I simply assess the balance of risk).

In light of these facts and absurdities, let me offer the Two Movies analogy, which I have previously described in “Camelot Theater”.  On Screen 1 we have the Covid Pandemic, and all of its horror.  On Screen 2 we just have 2020 Flu, without any special moniker or added attention.  The news media mostly ignores it.  Schools continue having classes, old people still die occasionally from lung issues, and the businesses all stay open.  Our three employees keep their jobs.  Local annual death stats are effectively no different than the last ten years’.  It is a big yawner, I agree; not a very exciting movie on Screen 2.  This is exactly how life would have played out in many parts of the world if (a) the international media engaged in factual journalism; or (b) we had rational health authorities confident of their own assessments; or even (c) we were all just less trusting (gullible?).  Out here, we don’t have the power to prevent elite scientists and academics from messing around with Chinese labs, priming the pharmaceutical industry.  But no one reading this needs to be their guinea pigs, either – whether for a global-scale field trial of a new vaccine, or a mass social-conditioning experiment.

The Global Community has reacted to Covid in an unprecedented way, a sheer spectacle which ought never to be repeated.  It should be a trumpet call for humanity, to step back and consider whether New Normal is something we accept on faith in The Science (fact-checked for your consumption), or reject as anathema to the way free people live.  Outside the bubble, in places like the Philippines, we should be seriously reviewing just how our own policies are made and implemented, and how trickle-down dollars from global initiatives can wreak havoc on us in unexpected ways.  Inside the Western bubble as many reading this are, you have the power to identify and reject – and hold accountable – those responsible for the circus we have all endured for two years, and whose ripple effects will be bouncing around the globe for years to come.

If we peer through the fog encompassing fact and fiction, you may see that we live in a time that has exchanged the truth for lies, despite – or perhaps because of – our technical achievements.  A new religion called Science has emerged, and its Truth ministers cannot be questioned.  When these men in white coats speak, the whole world follows, even way out here across the Pacific.  Their silver-tongued phrases and media magic have our leaders and policy makers captivated, to the point of creating public policies that do more harm than good.  This religion demands your accommodation in increasing ways, making it impossible to simply live out a peaceful life, as Nanay wished to do.  Question it and you may be ostracized, de-platformed, or simply left behind.  My hope is that anyone reading this has already placed themselves in the hands of God.  If so, then I encourage you to avoid living in a spirit of fear, and certainly not to remain under the spell of far-flung technocrats who profit from your compliance.  The issue here is far bigger than just a vaccine, or the pervasive Covid narrative spewed out 24/7, of which Nanay was a victim.  It is not what has already been done in the name of Science that should concern us, but what will be demanded of you next.

Be vigilant, dear reader.

Visayas Outpost

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