COMING CLEAN

After writing against the lockdowns, school closings, masks, tests and shots from the day that each began, I must offer a confession:

I got jabbed. Four times.

As usual, I’ll begin with a story to explain why I did so and why I waited until now to disclose that I internalized an experimental substance.

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In my final Cornell undergrad semester, I was broke. A Nutrition major friend, also broke, told me his department planned a seven-week experiment, during which they would feed seven male students three meals/day and pay them $700—worth $2,500 today—to fulfill the experiment’s terms. It seemed too good to be true.

We weren’t the only ones who thought so. Fifteen men signed up. Department staff required all prospective subjects to keep a five-day food diary and to submit it for evaluation. Thereafter, the staff conducted a lottery of those deemed to have submitted acceptable journals. My friend, I and five others were delighted to have been chosen to participate. It felt like getting on a game show.

The study was ostensibly designed to test the effectiveness of a new, “non-radioactive mineral tracer.” In retrospect, I guess this was another, mutually lucrative academic/Pharma partnership. Soft Money 101.

We soon learned that the Nutrition Department was running a concurrent study involving seven coeds, something about exercise’s effects on riboflavin levels. More university fund-raising/publish-or-perish research regarding an inconsequential topic.

Every day for seven weeks, the men ate three meals in a large, low-pile-carpeted, north-facing-windowed room on the fourth floor of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall. Males and females dined at two different tables, which were ten feet away from a ping pong table. We sometimes played while waiting for our food to be served.

I don’t recall what the women ate. But the men were given the same breakfast every day: two bran muffins, a small glass of orange juice and a cup of milk. There were different lunches on alternate days. On Day A, lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk. Day B lunch was grilled cheese with bug juice. On Day A, we got a slice of meat loaf, peas and white rice for dinner. Day B dinner was chicken breast with green beans and rice. It was even more boring and bland than it sounds. Eating this way for seven weeks had a negative cumulative effect. Throughout, I fantasized about many forbidden foods.

And, like the old Borscht Belt joke, not only was the food bad, there were no second helpings.

When we began, the staff measured our body fat percentages by immersing us, seated on a stainless-steel chair/scale in 98.6 degree water while we breathed through a tube. Thereafter, they hooked us to electrodes and another respiratory tube and made us run on a treadmill to gauge our metabolism. They recorded our weights each day. In order to maintain our respective body masses, the staff assigned us supplemental, individually-calibrated Nilla Wafer rations. Based on my measurables, they determined that I burned 4700 calories/day. Thus, I got 17 cookies per diem, many more than anyone else. My study peers were envious, but they shouldn’t have been; Nilla Wafers aren’t much of a treat, nor very nourishing. Just empty, glycemic calories.

We couldn’t leave town for seven weeks, not even during Spring Break, because we had to be present, on-time, every day, for all three meals. By micromanaging our lives, the researchers knew the mineral levels they should expect to find in our bodies by using the “tracer” they told us they would administer toward the study’s end.

The men’s and women’s experiments differed in several ways. First, the women’s study lasted only five weeks. Second, the women had to run two miles/day on Barton Hall’s indoor track. This extra duty may seem onerous and unfair. But overall, the women had it easier than the men.

The women could drink whatever they wanted. The men couldn’t drink any liquid other than distilled water. We had to carry our hydration source in a backpack wherever we went; it was like being on a seven-week camping trip, though not as scenic.

The closest I came to breaking the rules was on a Saturday afternoon, playing basketball at the Barton gym. After the first game, I reflexively walked to a nearby water fountain to quench my thirst. As I bent over the fountain, my friend saw me and called out, “Stop! You’re not allowed to drink that!”

I spit out the fountain water, went to my backpack and pulled out my canteen.

The regimentation and weak-flavored food were unpleasant enough. But the worst part, by far, was that we—men only—had to collect and turn in all of our excrement. I won’t describe the logistics of that process. The all-female research staff wouldn’t have asked the women research subjects to do something so yicky.

They gave us each an outmoded, dark brown, vinyl gym bag in which to tote our scatological freight. Each morning, we had to use these bags to bring our daily output to the job site, where we placed items one and two on a designated table for some kind of analysis. People who knew us knew The Things We Carried. Strangers may simply have thought we odd men with gym bags had no fashion sense or were trying to be ironic. Our luggage was the opposite of a chick magnet; I had no girlfriend that semester.

Thusly unpaired, one Saturday night, another friend who wasn’t in the study and I decided to walk to an off-campus movie theater. While we passed through a suburban neighborhood in the dark, a police car pulled up behind us. A portly, light-brown- crew-cut cop stepped out and told us to stop and put our arms and hands away from our bodies. We complied.

He approached us and gruffly said that there had been some burglaries in the neighborhood and that he wanted to see the contents of my bag. My friend chuckled. The piqued policeman asked what was so funny. I said, “Officer, you don’t really want to see what’s in the bag.”

He said, sternly, “I’ll decide what I want to see. Open it!”

I unzipped the bag, lifted the half-full, gallon-sized Nalgene bottle from inside and handed it to him. He held it up to the streetlight. Mystified, he asked what it contained. I told him I was part of a nutrition study at the University, that I had to collect all of my excrement and that this was my daily yield, so far: solely, but abundant, liquid phase.

Recoiling and making a disgusted face, he passed the bottle back to me and said, “Go! Just go!”

Chill, officer, it coulda been worse. And urine is virtually sterile. Even in 1981, our culture was dysfunctionally germophobic. In 2020, this phobia would deepen beyond imagination.

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Looking back, it’s hard to believe that we put up with that study’s oppressive structure. While it was occurring, I often thought this study may not really have been about nutrition. Instead, it felt like a Milgram-esque exercise, designed to see how far they could push people for a few bucks.

They told us that they would mail each of us a summary of the study’s findings. Despite leaving a solid forwarding address, I never received the pledged summary.

—

During each of the study’s waning weeks, we had to swallow the vaunted, $400/each mineral tracer, with which they spiked our orange juice. Doing so resembled drinking the Jonestown Kool-Aid: who knew what was in such a concoction? At the time, I wondered if it was safe. Thankfully, forty-three years after imbibing what they put in front of me, I still feel good.

A half hour after downing our non-alcoholic mixed drinks, we rolled up our sleeves and allowed them to stick needles in our arms to collect blood samples to see how well the tracer worked.

Those were the four experimental jabs I took.

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Wait, you didn’t seriously think I had taken the Covid shots, did you?

If so, pardon me for channeling Tim Walz as he discusses his military stint: using ambiguous language in an attempt to deceive an audience.

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Getting a cold never scared me. I didn’t want the jabs to be credited for saving healthy people who were never at risk. Thus, I resolved from the get-go to be in the control group. I see most Pharma products, including vaxxes, as net health negatives. I didn’t want to take a shot that lacked a long-term safety record. I didn’t like people telling me what to put in my body, especially when this pressure to conform was macro-politically and commercially driven. Nothing could have made me take the faux vaxxes. The jails were too small to hold all of the holdouts.

Therefore, I left the Kool-Aid/mRNA-taking to the exalted, big-name colleges’ faculty, students and grads, who thoughtlessly, tribally, smugly and aggressively backed the entire mitigation crusade/charade. After hiding, masking, testing and injecting, nearly all of the many Ivy and other college grads whom I know have gotten “the Virus;” many got it multiple times. Some seem to have been injured by the shots. In contrast, my unhidden, unmasked, unjabbed wife, I and millions of other non-injectors have been fine. Injecting mRNA and demeaning and threatening those who didn’t showed how smart the “elite” jabbers weren’t. And aren’t.

Those who managed and attended the purportedly best colleges not only put up with the abusive Coronamanic rules and interventions. They self-righteously proselytized on behalf of these measures, while posturing about “Following the Science.”

Instead of passively and dogmatically “Following the Science,” I read and thought critically about the ostensible Covid science. As the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots didn’t make sense, I asked others questions about these. No one offered good answers. Most didn’t even try to. They unthinkingly complied and scoffed at those who didn’t.

During litigation, I’ve cross-examined “science experts.” I’ve seen them badly bend the truth to reach their funders’ preferred conclusions. There’s nothing intrinsically virtuous or authoritative about those with a degree, including a STEM degree from a high-echelon university. Nor should any mystique surround the credentialed. No deference is due: no matter who offers them, all assertions are subject to proof and logic.

It should have been obvious from the jump, to anyone who thought even a little, that each of the interventions: the lockdowns, closures, masks, tests and shots, would cause much more harm than good. But somehow, the best and brightest had big blind spots and didn’t foresee the vast, lasting damage these measures have caused.