Anglican Primate offers prayers of thanksgiving to St. Pfizer

It was only a matter of time before the latest religion – the Cult of the Covid Vaccinated – was appropriated by the Anglican Church. Primate Linda Nicholls experienced a flood of emotion when she was injected with her first dose of Pfizer. I suppose we could call this cultural appropriation. She makes no mention of tongues of fire or a rushing wind, but she is probably just being modestly reticent in the Anglican fashion.

Since Nicholls feels guilty under the burden of her vaccine inequitable western white privilege, there was no vaccine selfie. Apparently, battling vaccine inequity has become one of our baptismal promises.

Nicholls warns us that rumours and misinformation are rampant. I have to agree with her on that. For example, just the other day, I overheard someone make the preposterous assertion that the organisation Nicholls runs is a church!

From here:

The gift of a COVID vaccination

Last week, I received my first vaccine dose for the novel coronavirus. As I did, I felt a flood of emotions.

A vaccine is a promise for a future without all of the restrictions we may be living under, so I was delighted and relieved at taking this first step. But even in that moment, I felt guilty that I have this privilege and sense of security, in a world where many may never see a COVID vaccination at all, or at least not for several years.

While some countries desperately seek access to the vaccines, there is resistance among some Canadians to receiving it and, in the midst of anxiety and fear, rumours and misinformation are rampant. Every day of life contains risks. There are no guarantees in any part of our lives, so we work to reduce the risks and make the world as safe as possible for ourselves and all of our neighbours. This requires trust in those to whom we have committed the work of protecting public health and a willingness to work with them to follow protocols.

The rise of the vaccine selfie

Before all this started, I used to travel a lot and enjoyed photographing the places I visited. I was both amused and irritated (yes, I can be both simultaneously) at travellers who suffered from the compulsion of inserting themselves between their camera and what was often a spectacular view. No matter how good looking or vain the person, the effect was always to diminish not enhance the scene. I believe this is known as a selfie, the contemporary tribute to shameless narcissism.

As I like to remind my grandchildren, things are not getting better, they are getting worse: to confirm it, we now have the vaccine selfie. People are photographing themselves being injected with a COVID-19 vaccine. The preferred pose is to have the needle buried in a bare arm while the candidate smiles knowingly at the camera. What is this all about? Is it the next step in advanced virtue signalling? Is it a primitive superstition, an appeasement to pagan pandemic gods to convince them to pass over the vaccinated when the next variant sweeps the country? A type of masonic rite like rolling up your left trouser leg to welcome the initiate into the ranks of the immune?

I have no idea, but here is a good example: a vaguely familiar grossly overweight fellow who cares so much about his health that he is being Pfizered so he can go unimpeded into McDonalds for another cheeseburger.

For those who think I have lost all sense of proportion, take a look at this: CNN is complaining that their competitors have failed to display their vaccine selfies.

We are the COVID Borg: resistance is futile

I added this to my prior post about the COVID-19 vaccine but I thought it was interesting enough to warrant its own post:

About 6 hours after receiving the Pfizer vaccine my wife had an allergic reaction to it in the form of a rash around her wrists. After a brief consultation with her family doctor, she will be seeing a specialist in allergies to decide whether it is safe to have the second injection. Allergic reactions to the vaccine are quite rare, so my wife posted the image below on Facebook.

The “COVID-19 vaccines go through many tests for safety and effectiveness before they are approved” remark was placed there by Facebook – an AI bot, probably.

Now, what my wife posted was a simple fact, one, it seems, that goes against the tide. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s hard not to see a conspiracy when empirically derived and verifiable facts provoke little notes designed to cast doubt on their veracity. Our current propaganda machine and group gullibility would have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels.

The plague, the vaccine, and first Communion

I’ve been putting off writing this for some time because the thoughts percolating through my synapses had not settled into a coherent pattern. I may still change my mind on all this, but here goes.

This morning I accompanied my wife for her first injection of the Pfizer vaccine at our local hospital. I can’t bring myself to call it a shot or the preferred UK euphemism a jab; nor do I have much stomach for the equally irritating tendency for referring to getting the vaccine into our arms.

That is because the vaccine is messenger RNA that is injected into your circulatory system to later insert itself into your cells to persuade them to produce a spike protein that is present on the COVID-19 virus. Your immune system will react to attack the spike protein so that your body will know how to fight the virus should you become infected. Astonishing as it might be, the vaccine goes much further than your arm.

The vaccination process at the hospital was very well regimented. I was given a piece of yellow paper with “support person” written on it and I sat with my wife as she was given the injection.

The nurse asked if I had received a shot.

“No”, I said.

“Oh, why” she replied.

“I have a whole catalogue of reasons if you are really interested in hearing about them”, I said.

To my surprise she said, “yes”. My wife visibly shuddered.

I gave the nurse a condensed version of the following:

First of all, most of the current vaccines depend in varying degrees on the HEK-293 cell line. In Pfizer’s case (and Moderna’s) the cell line was used to test the vaccine. AstraZeneca used the cell line for production of their vaccines. The HEK-293 cell line was initially derived from the kidney of a baby aborted in the Netherlands in 1973. There is some speculation that the baby may have been a miscarriage, but the consensus seems to be she was aborted. Once killed, evacuated and dissected, her body parts were sold or donated to laboratories, one of which was the lucky recipient of her kidneys. From a kidney, the HEK-293 cell line was grown. The Janssen vaccine uses a cell line that originated from the retina of an 18 week old baby aborted in 1985. I can’t quite decide which I find more odious.

“I feel uneasy about benefitting from cells grown from the kidney of an unborn baby murdered in 1973”, I told the nurse. She stared at me blankly.

Now, one may argue that, even though abortion is evil, surely it is ethically justified to turn the evil to good in the form of a vaccine? The Roman Catholic Church argues that. Perhaps, but then you could apply the same argument to Dr. Mengele’s experiments on twins, couldn’t you? The Anglican Church, whose prophetic voice usually cannot be made to shut up no matter how annoying it sounds, is silent on the issue. Or you may want to point out that other vaccines which I have received also benefitted from the same cell line, to which I would respond: had I known at the time, I wouldn’t have taken them, either.

Secondly, messenger RNA vaccines have never been used before. Even though trials have shown the vaccines to be relatively safe so far, their long-term effects are still unknown. In fact, they are still in a Phase 3 trial status until April 2023. That is normal enough: what is unusual is that the test subjects are the entire human race.

“I have worked on technology most of my life”, I told the nurse. “For new technology, we operated on the principle that ‘if it can go wrong, it will’. Messenger RNA vaccines are new technology”.

The nurse stared at me blankly. Then she looked at my wife as she took the needle out her arm and said, “So there is conflict in the family.”

Let me pause here and note that it is interesting that the usual view today is that having a different opinion about something means there is “conflict”.

“No”, I said, “we each have made our own decisions and respect each other’s views: there is no conflict”. I almost added, “this is a family, not the Anglican Communion”, but I didn’t.

What does this have to do with the title, you may be wondering. Well, the vaccine seems to have taken on all the characteristics of a secular sacrament. The reverence and excitement we might once have experienced at our Confirmation and first Communion have largely evaporated. We are all, by nature, still religious creatures though, so we have an innate compulsion to revere something. What better than the salvific effects of a COVID vaccine. When we are injected with the mRNA elixir of life, we join a new community of the Newly Vaccinated – my neighbours now greet me with “we got our shot yesterday, did you get yours yet” and are eager to welcome me into the safe hallowed halls of the Immune. Instead of a new Bible, the newly vaccinated are presented with a certificate – soon to be digitised, I suspect – and an appointment for their Second Communion – sorry, Vaccination.

As I said, at the outset, I may voluntarily change my mind about all this. Or be forced to by governmental or ecclesiastical ostracism. In the meantime, I have some yellow stars ready to be sewn on to my clothes.

Here is a brief postscript to the above:

About 6 hours after receiving the Pfizer vaccine my wife had an allergic reaction to it in the form of a rash around her wrists. After a brief consultation with her family doctor, she will be seeing a specialist in allergies to decide whether it is safe to have the second injection. Allergic reactions are quite rare, so my wife posted the image below on Facebook.

The “COVID-19 vaccines go through many tests for safety and effectiveness before they are approved” remark was placed there by Facebook – an AI bot, probably.

Now, what my wife posted was a simple fact, one, it seems, that goes against the tide. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s hard not to see a conspiracy when empirically derived and verifiable facts provoke little notes designed to cast doubt on their veracity. Our current propaganda machine and group gullibility would have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels.

Justin Welby criticizes Canada for over-ordering COVID vaccine

From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised Canada for massively over-ordering supplies of coronavirus vaccine, hindering the rollout of jabs to the world’s poorest nations.

The Most Rev Justin Welby told Parliament the North American country had in the pipeline more than five times what it needed for its 38million citizens.

The government of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has reportedly secured 76million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and up to 56million of the recently-approved jab developed by US firm Moderna.

Meanwhile, here he is being injected with a COVID vaccine dose that he could have donated to someone in one of the world’s poorest nations:

A list of vaccines that were developed using aborted baby cells

The Charlotte Lozier Institute has published a chart cataloguing the COVID-19 vaccines that were either developed or tested using cells from aborted babies. Just about all of them, as it turns out:

The question is, are you willing to save your life by taking a vaccine that was developed or tested using parts of a murdered baby?

Canada is due to receive six million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in the first quarter of 2021. Both vaccines were tested using aborted baby cells for some of the tests.

God and the Internet

The December Anglican Journal has an article all about the joys of online worship. My church has had online worship (even though I take part in it, I’m not yet convinced that that term is not an oxymoron) since March, so I have experienced first hand much of what the article explains.

One thing I didn’t know, though, is revealed in this helpful diagram: God is plugged directly into the Internet. I had no idea. I wonder if He is on Facebook?

The missing component in the church’s COVID-19 response

This is how the church is responding to the Wuhan virus that is creating worldwide havoc.

I’ll start with the most fatuous: almost every Anglican archbishop is exhorting us to light a candle. A bit like this:

I have nothing against candles – except that we now have incandescent, fluorescent and LED lights that work better and don’t set things on fire. The problem is, whenever something bad happens, people compulsively light candles to symbolise…. something, nobody really knows what. Instead of a candle, why aren’t the bishops telling us to put a cross in the window; at least that is a clear symbol that announces to passers by the convictions of the occupants.

Then we have the synchronised recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. That can’t be bad, other than the “Thy will be done” bit. What, perish the thought, if His will is to smite what is undoubtedly an evil generation and its ecclesiastical enablers, hip and thigh?

Lastly, the church is no longer meeting. I find myself in two minds about this. As far as I am aware, never in the history of the church have Christians been afraid to congregate. If persecuted, Christians met in secret. I believe that the church continued to meet during the black death – someone correct me if I am wrong. Are Christians just as afraid of death as everyone else? I know, we don’t want to see the grim reaper marching through our congregations, that’s why I am in two minds about it.

What is the missing component? Repentance. Admittedly, the Anglican Church of Canada is in a state of constant repentance about bringing Christianity to the original inhabitants of Canada. But what about the very real current evils it tolerates – even celebrates – in our society? In Canada, 100,000 babies are murdered in the womb every year; euthanasia is now legal and has killed more people than the Wuhan virus (as of this writing); children are fed transgender nonsense by adults and being butchered to become something they are not and never will be. Has the church stood against any of this?

I know that to even suggest that God might be judging the world will evoke shrieks of horror from all, the loudest coming from clergy. But what if it is true? Should not the church be calling on the country to repent just in case? Before it gets even worse.