I was Asked About Vaccines and what I think about them.

The questions I get most often about vaccines are: Do your animals get vaccines?  What is your viewpoint on vaccines?

The short answer is: Nope, our animals don’t get vaccines.    The pigs don’t get vaccines and neither do the cattle.  A few of the cattle might be vaccinated before they get to our place or into the freezer, but not many.  I don’t know of any vaccines for chickens though I am sure they are out there somewhere.

What about mRNA vaccines?  Short answer is:  Nope.  Same as above.   

I tell anybody who asks that my pig farmers tell me they have never heard about a mRNA vaccine for pigs and nobody is pushing them to vaccinate their pigs and never have.  

The cattle farmers tell me pretty much the same thing.  They aren’t being told they must vaccinate their animals. As a beef farmer myself, I have never been told I must vaccinate my cattle.  It might be a different story if I were selling breeding stock across state lines, or calves going into a feedlot but I am not doing that.  As a kid, we didn’t vaccinate that I can remember.  If cattle were being trucked around a lot, they were vaccinated for things like Brucellosis or Black Leg.  Brucellosis causes miscarriages in cattle and can ruin a herd in a season.  They used to tell the farmer that he had to euthanize his whole herd if he had Brucellosis in it.  I don’t know if that is still the case or not.  Black Leg is caused by a microbe in the soil. I can’t remember if it is a bacterium or a fungus or a virus.  If a cow gets it, they are usually dead in a day, maybe two.  Quite often the first the farmer knows about it is the cow laying there dead in the pasture.

I have told my people that there was no mRNA vaccine for pigs. I was wrong about that. There ARE mRNA vaccines for pigs and have been for several years.  Since 2018 per the data I have now.

My response is still true however:  Nobody is telling my pig farmers that they must vaccinate their pigs with any kind of vaccine, let alone mRNA vaccines.

Now for my viewpoint about vaccines. I think I should probably get further into vaccines so that you know what I actually think about vaccines in detail.  Whether or not it pisses you off.

First, I think vaccines are fine.  I also think (after looking into it as covered below) that mRNA vaccines are fine.   Let me explain the main part of that viewpoint with a little story. 

Back in 2020, we raised the first batch of pigs we have ever raised here at the farm since I got back in 2008.  Feeder sized pigs were dirt cheap that spring because Covid had shut down the big pork processing plants. The pigs had nowhere to go when they were grown and that backed up the whole supply chain.  All the way back to baby pigs.  Baby pigs were dirt cheap.  A guy I know bought some for a song and raised them from 40 pounds up to about 60 pounds and then sold them to me.  I paid about half the usual going rate for them. There were 56 of them.  They were various sizes by the time I got them. Some small, still around 40 pounds, some up around 100 pounds. 

I bought a pig feeder and trained the pigs to electric fence.  Then I put them out on pasture behind electric fence.  They were doing fine.  I was certain I had the world by the ass as my Pa used to say.

I also had a lady who was raising 9 other pigs for me.  I had contracted with her the previous year to raise these pigs.  She got into a ‘discussion’ with a calf she was raising and wound up with a broken collar bone.  She was no longer able to feed her pigs.

I said I would take them and put them in with my pigs.  She was going to sell them to me for a good price after all.

I went to get them, I think they weighed between 80 and 100 lbs apiece.  She had NO method of loading them. Not a fun thing to do, load a bunch of 90 pound pigs by hand.  You catch him by the hind foot, drag him over to the pickup, grab him by the ear and also that hind foot and hoist him into the truck.  I have heard there are methods of catching them with ropes but the closest I got was a rope circle under their neck and grabbing that hind foot.  That didn’t work nearly as well as the ear though.  If they wriggled out of the rope (which they quite often did), you had to start all over again except the pig now knows you are out to get him and he is definitely good at ducking and dodging.  The pig is screaming bloody murder and wriggling like a very muscular crazy thing while you have him by the foot. It seemed that this operation was very funny to watch, though it didn’t seem funny to me at the time.  As he hits the floor of the truck, he immediately calms right down and goes to checking out his new surroundings and talking to the other pigs there in a very calm manner.  Sort of like ‘Well I got away from HIM, where’s the food in here?”

I got those 9 pigs back to my place and put them in with my 56 pigs.  I now had 65 pigs.

About a week later, there were a few pigs that looked kind of down in the mouth. They were not eating and were just lying in the shade. They didn’t want to get up when I went over to see how they were doing.  The next day they were worse.  The day after that they were dead. I called the vet and he said they had a sort of influenza.  He asked me about my pig herd and I told him I had gotten those 9 extra pigs about a week ago among a bunch of other useless data.  

We gave some of them shots but it did little good. Over the next few days, while the disease was going through my herd I lost 15 pigs. He did an autopsy on one of the pigs and verified that it had problems in its lungs. That 15 dead is about 23% of that batch of pigs. That works out to be about 12.5% of a years’ worth of pigs. Not quite a quarter of my at home pig herd gone in a few days. Luckily I didn’t have all of that year’s worth of pigs here at the farm. It was still a financial as well as spiritual blow that was no fun.

The vet said that those ‘new’ pigs probably were carriers of the flu and had transferred it to my pigs.  He said those outside pigs had probably had that flu when they were babies and since it is not fatal to a baby pig, they wound up being inoculated but my pigs had never had it and so were not inoculated.  He said there were vaccines that could be given to baby pigs that guarded against such sicknesses.  He said that if pig herds are not vaccinated, they can expect to be hit with diseases like that from time to time.  He said that a good way to guard against such a thing is to keep a totally closed herd.  Don’t take in any pigs from the outside and do NOT mix batches of pigs.  He said that sometimes people could transmit diseases to pigs also.  Or trucks that haul pigs might have the disease in them.

Ohhhh…  Now it made sense why one of our first pig farmers would not let me real close to his pig pens and wouldn’t allow my normal trucker to haul his pigs.  I could see that his pigs were outside, I could see they were doing fine, had shelter, had food, had lots of space so I didn’t press the matter.  I just thought he was a bit of an odd duck.  Our current pig farmer is OK with a buyer who is going to buy more than a few pigs coming over and seeing the pigs.  He does not do farm tours and he does not let random strangers into the place though.  Now that all made sense to me.  Before I had just thought they were being extra safe out of an abundance of caution. Some farms do farm tours and get away with it.  If I raised pigs and also did farm tours I would have to look into it more.  Maybe I would allow it, maybe not.  For now, we have someone else raising pigs for us and they can handle that risk as they see fit.

I asked the vet about vaccinating my remaining pigs and he said I could do that but it would be like closing the barn door after the horses were already out. I didn’t vaccinate them.

Would I have vaccinated my pig herd ahead of time if I knew about this?  Yes indeed.  12.5% of a years’ worth of pigs is nothing to sneeze at.   I had enough other pigs lined up so that I could at least replace the dead ones, but it was not cheap and it was not easy even though pigs were relatively cheap that year.

If you were a customer of mine that year you might have noticed that pork prices didn’t go up that year, but they definitely also didn’t go down.  They could have gone down if I hadn’t had to live through that fiasco.  We also sold a lot of other meat that year because Covid really screwed with ‘big meat’ supply chains as well as people’s heads and that kind of softened the blow.

This situation was just another ripple effect of Covid.  I bought those pigs because they were cheap.  They were cheap because of Covid.  No Covid and I would have done things the same as the year before.  Also I wouldn’t have bought that lady’s pigs because I would have had no place to put them.  She would have had to sell them on the open market and probably got less for them than I paid her. Yes, things are much more complex than they appear at first glance.

Would there maybe have been some illness or death caused by the vaccine if I had vaccinated my pigs?  Maybe, but it would not have been 23% of the herd.  It would have been a valuable thing to do ahead of time IF I knew that I was going to get an extra batch of pigs that were disease carriers.  IF I had even known about such things at the time.

Yet another costly lesson.  Again, some lessons are cheap, others are costly.

Now let’s get into mRNA vaccines.  

In order to do that, we will need to go through the whole history of old timey inoculation then 50’s and 60’s vaccines and nowadays mRNA vaccines.

First, there was inoculation.   Back in the day… Anybody ever seen the movie about John Adams near the time of the Revolutionary War? His wife had their kids inoculated for smallpox.  The doctor came over and took some of the pus from a dying kid he had in the back of his buggy. Toward the end, the red spots caused by smallpox become spots filled with pus called pustules.  The body is fighting the disease as hard as it can and this is causing the red spots to turn into spots of pus on the sick person’s skin.  Anyway, the pus includes a weakened version of the smallpox microbe. It had been attacked already by the dying kid’s immune system after all.  The doctor then went to the Adams kid and made a scrape on their skin and introduced the pus there.  The kid then got a mild version of smallpox and was immune after that.  The Adams kid’s body had a much better chance of fighting off the weakened version of the disease.  The Adams kid’s body afterwards recognized any stronger versions of the smallpox microbe as an intruder and went after it, killing it before it could get a foothold in the body.  The people back then didn’t know how it worked, they just knew that it did work.  What was happening was the inoculated person’s body made a record of the smallpox microbe’s DNA and knew that if it ever saw that thing again it was to attack immediately.  If the Adams kid got a stronger version of the smallpox microbe (like from a sick kid whose body wasn’t fighting the sickness really hard and making pustules yet), the Adams kid would have a much worse case of smallpox and would have a much better chance of dying themselves.  Did people die of the smallpox inoculation?  Yes they did, but there were fewer deaths than if they had NOT received the inoculation.

Second in time were vaccines like the ones most of the US went through in the 50’s and 60’s.  I think I was in about he 4^th grade, so that would have made me about 10 years old.  A vaccine is a more advanced version of the above.  Instead of getting the smallpox (or polio, or tetanus, or Covid, or Ebola, or whatever) microbe from a pustule, the doctor or scientist or lab technician gets the disease microbe, grows it outside a body (that’s called in vitro and I just recently learned that word) in such a manner that it loses its ability to cause disease.  They select the weaker ones of those, reproduce them in a lab and put those in the vaccine.  I didn’t dive into that process enough to know exactly how those steps are done.  ‘Live’ vaccines can produce a strong immune response which can mean both long-term immunity and a higher chance of side effects.  This is per Johns Hopkins Medicine: (Link).

Other lab technicians then take that weakened microbe and administer it to school kids, or soldiers, or whoever so that their bodies can recognize that microbe as a bad guy. They ‘teach’ the immune system to attack it.  When the strong version of the microbe is seen, the immune system attacks it very early, before the microbe gets a chance to take over the person’s body and mess up that body bad enough to kill it. 

By the way, the microbe isn’t REALLY out to kill anybody, it just wants to live its life and raise its kids in that nice warm, moist, place where all the food is available (inside the host’s body).  As it does that, it greatly increases in numbers and that causes the body to get sick and die.

Did people get sick and die because of vaccines?  Yes they did, but the amount of people who got sick and died was much less than if the disease had been allowed to go through the population like a wild fire.  Very few things in life are perfect. Diseases like Polio, Tetanus, Smallpox, Whooping Cough and many others were either eradicated or knocked way back. This link has a good overview of vaccination and its history and use.  A fun fact I didn’t know is that richer countries are more covered by vaccines than poor countries, mostly because of better schools and more money to get the vaccines around.

Third, are mRNA vaccines. I’m going to call them vaccines even though they are not the same technology as the earlier type of vaccines.  Like a nuclear submarine engine is not the same as a WWII diesel sub engine.  They do the same thing but the technology is vastly different.  I am sure there are some who will want to split hairs here but that is the way I am going to do it.

mRNA vaccines are much quicker to manufacture because they use a different, fancier technology.  The technology they use comes from gene manipulation and gene splicing technology and that didn’t exist until fairly recently.

At this point I am going to switch back to a story format because that covers how I learned about this subject, and also includes the steps I took in finding out.  I think it is a pretty good story, but then I like the author so what do you expect.  

Someone sent me an article titled ‘What Safety Studies Have Been Done on mRNA Swine Vaccines?’    There was no byline and I couldn’t find the article on the internet so I emailed the person who sent it to me and asked them who wrote it.  They said it was written by Dr. Joseph Mercola, MD. Well and good.  I thanked them for that.  We will get back to that in a bit. The problem with the byline was a problem in transferring the article through email. I later signed up for Mercola’s newsletters and gained access to the article and its byline and source citations.

In the meantime, I had been looking at the article.  When investigating anything, the detective (watch some cop shows, or read some mysteries for the reference on this) looks for things they don’t understand and asks questions about that thing, The detective either becomes able to understand it or they find other things they don’t understand and ask more questions, dig for more data.  Sooner or later, by pulling these strings, they come up with the murderer.

Same thing works when you are trying to figure out pretty much anything.  You actually don’t NEED to know anything about the thing you are looking into, though it makes things quicker. At the same time, if you start out with some wrong ideas in your head you can often go astray.  This is how the detective story gets interesting.  They go off on a few wild goose chases a few times before they come up with the actual murderer.  You just need to be able to dig up data ask questions of yourself and look up the answers to those questions until you do understand it.

You can expect to be looking up a LOT of words in order to fully understand what you are looking at. This is especially true if the thing you are looking at is highly technical or not well understood by the broad public.

You probably know what I mean about this words thing, but I think this is more important than you think. That is right, I am living inside your head. I am going to give a few examples whether you like it or not.

Let’s say you aren’t into car mechanics and have tried talking to an inexperienced or otherwise slightly unaware mechanic about what is wrong with your truck.  The mechanic who doesn’t realize he is talking to someone who doesn’t know much about cars will use a lot of words that you don’t understand.   They see someone who they think is fairly smart (you forgot to act dumb, or you look kind of like a mechanic) and they pop those words on you.

EGR valve is a good example.  The first time I heard that word I was about to punch the guy in the face.   Then I stopped the guy and asked him what that meant.  He looks at me blankly and goes “what does what mean’ and I say ‘EGR’.  He knew it was a valve on his exhaust system that hooked to the intake but that was about it. He didn’t even know it himself.  I looked it up later and found out it means Exhaust Gas Regeneration.  They take your exhaust gas and recycle part of it back through the engine.  This lowers the amount of oxygen in the intake and increases the water vapor content in the combustion mixture and that reduces the Nitrous Oxide in the exhaust gases. Nitrous Oxide is the bad thing they are trying to get rid of. Now at least I have an idea of what it is and does.  Most old timey diesel mechanics don’t like EGR valves very much, but there you go.

Or someone who has been dealing with politics for a long time says some word you don’t understand.  Like: “The demos was unmoved.” I was hungry at the time I read this and nearly broke my computer.  Well F&*K YOU, you over-educated prick!  That is what went through my head. I wrote the guy a nasty comment.  I at least left the swearing out of it. Then I looked up what a demos is.  A demos is nothing more than the people being talked about politically.  It comes from Greek. It is the population being thought of or talked about as a political unit. I think the dictionary I used was the Oxford Online. It only took a minute on Google. Demos had nothing to do with demographics.  It had nothing to do with demonstrations.  It had nothing to do with demo-ing (demolishing) a wall. Well F#$K YOU, why didn’t you just say that then?!?  Caroline (my wife) made me go get a sandwich. After a minute and about three bites I realized: He didn’t say that because he has been around politics for a long time and demos is just another word to him. Probably has a PHD in political science or something like that. He doesn’t even think with the fact that he needs to be communicating with everybody, not just political nerds.  He deals mostly with political nerds anyway.  Probably is way smarter than me, but does he have to rub it in? Another bite.  Chew. Swallow. Probably doesn’t even realize he is rubbing anything in.

I hope you get what I am talking about.  Using a bunch of words others don’t understand is an excellent way to keep them from being on your side. Also an excellent way to not get our ideas across.  Communication is the transfer of information over a distance after all. Kevin Hart said something about the getting and keeping them on your side thing in an interview once.  When I saw it I said Right ON! and now I can’t find that interview anymore so you will have to take my word for it.  Unfortunately, the other side of this coin is that someone can explain stuff to people who don’t know all the words (using words most people know) but leave out some data.  The upshot is that they can then pull the wool over someone’s eyes most thoroughly and easily.

Bottom line is if you find something you don’t fully understand, check into it and learn enough of the words so you at least have an idea of what is being talked about.  You will get into a lot less trouble that way.  Yes, I realize this is a VERY tall order and is NOT easy.

Do I look up everything I don’t know?  BLEEP NO!  How do you think I have so many experiences I can write about later?  Most of the things I write about are experiences I have because I didn’t understand something as fully as I should. Do I wish I DID look it all up?  YES.   A lot of times I (or you or anybody) don’t even know there is something THERE that should be looked up and that is mostly where experience comes from.  Like the boxer said:  It is the blow you don’t see coming that knocks you out.

OK, enough of that rant.  Back to the article my friend sent to me about safety in mRNA vaccine studies.

I started reading it.

What I was looking for was references to studies. I wanted to check out the actual studies it is based upon.  I mean learned publications that are peer reviewed.  Peer review is when a bunch of people in the same field as you look at your work and tell you if it is good or not.  If you want a funny version of this, go to the Facebook group called:  “I see you don’t know shit about welding”.  I joined that group to try and find out about welding.  It is actually pretty good if you can get past the jokes and poking fun at the bad welds.

The first sentence was about how the subject of mRNA vaccines for pigs was unbeknownst to the public. The first reference was to a YouTube video from 2018 of some guy talking about Merck coming up with their new product that had to do with mRNA vaccines in pigs.  Wait a minute here, you (Joseph Mercola) just got done saying that this was UNBEKNOWNST to the public.  Yet here is a guy doing a you tube video about it for a reporter.  That seems a bit knownst to me.  I only watched the first bit and came up with that.  

The second reference is titled “Environmental assessment for Merck Animal Health’s RNA Particle Prescription Products for swine Influenza and other disease agents”. It was from July 2018. In other words, here is Merck talking in public about their mRNA products in 2018. My question is:  If this is unbeknownst to the public, what is it doing out here on the internet getting knownst?  Seems that something unbeknownst would be something that was harder to find.  

OK true enough, it wasn’t trumpeted on the first page of the NY Times, but the data was out there. Just because the fact that I am writing Substack Posts about farming stuff doesn’t make the front page of the NY times is hardly reason for me to start saying that someone is hiding the data and it is unbeknownst to the public.  I mean, I had much more trouble figuring out why I couldn’t find a byline on JMs article than I did finding those two publications.

The 3^rd reference winds up at a White Paper (a white paper is basically some kind of blurb.  If I write something about my bacon, that could be called a white paper in the broadest sense of the term. Usually a white paper is more technical than that…).  There were no references to any studies about mRNA vaccines in the Merck White paper either.

OK, the references aren’t panning out.  Main thing they are doing is make me ask more questions about where the original document came from.  

So let’s just go into more of the things I don’t get about the subject itself.  What the heck is mRNA after all?  I definitely didn’t understand the word mRNA.  Aha!  The meat of the thing! Something I can look up that I don’t have to get JM to show me the way.  I know that RNA has something to do with cells and reproducing cells and making sure they are the same time after time and that is about it. I didn’t know what mRNA was.

What the heck is mRNA and how is it different from straight up RNA?  Per the encyclopedia Britannica,  mRNA (that is a link, from now on links will look like that) is a molecule in cells that carries codes from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the sites of protein synthesis in the cytoplasm (the ribosomes).  I remembered from high school biology that cytoplasm is basically the goo that makes up the inside of the cell. The ribosomes are apparently part of the cytoplasm.

But what is a Ribosome again?  A ribosome is part of a cell. Here is MY understanding of what a ribosome is.  If you want the real deal, click this ribosome link it goes to the National Human Genome Research Institute and has some nice videos etc. The cell has a cell wall, a nucleus, some mitochondria (still don’t know what those are) and some ribosomes.  Maybe some other parts but I didn’t go there.  I was in deep enough as it was.  The ribosome’s job is to synthesize (make) proteins.  They use various amino acids and fats and other stuff to do that. I decided I might not need to get farther into the weeds about the names and specific uses of the nuts and bolts and welders and wrenches and lubricants that are used so left it at that.

The DNA is in the nucleus of the cell and there is messenger RNA that carries the codes from the DNA of which proteins to make to the ribosomes that make it.  Car proteins versus Bus proteins vs Washing Machine proteins I guess…  Anyway, the messenger RNA carries this code to the ribosome which is the basic factory that makes the needed protein, car, bus, washing machine, or whatever type of protein is needed.  Right down to the number of wheels and how big the gas tank is supposed to be in that car protein.

The ribosome (the little factory) then makes the needed protein out of the various types of amino acids and other chemical compounds.

What happens is they…

THEY in this case are scientists, or biochemists or lab technicians or other smart guys who have done a whole bunch of schooling about it.  Anyway, they do stuff that I cover (!LIGHTLY!) a bit later on.  HERE is the link about this and if you really want to get into the weeds, you click that link.  I did and pretty quickly got in over my head. Except for some things I found useful.  I got the gist of the thing and I pulled those things back out and decided I would trust them on this for the most part.  I have a son who helps run a biochemistry lab at a major university and I trust him to do the right thing here.  That is good enough for me.  If not good enough for you, click that link above and may God have mercy on your soul.  BUT TAKE HEART! If you figure out what all the words mean to the point where you can use them in some self-made sentences, you will be OK.  I warn you; It will take you a while because it goes into a lot of stuff about vaccines, both old and new, both mRNA and traditional. Also about the nitty gritty of the nuts and bolts that make up cells. There are lots of moving parts that make up cells and proteins and those parts are NOT wrenches, and welders like I mentioned above. There is a lot of data to learn there and unless you have already done some college courses about biochemistry and cell structure you will be stumbling around in the dark for a while. If you have done those college course, you probably already know the data and are looking at this article with scorn or laughing your ass off.

Anyway, THEY figure out which protein can prevent or treat a specific disease (Covid, or Swine Flu, or whatever) and they then design an mRNA strand that carries instructions for that protein.  How they specifically do the designing is beyond me.  Again, if you want to know, take some college courses or dig into that above link.  The link goes into manufacturing of mRNA vaccines and the problems that have to be overcome to do it.

The first hints of the possibilities of mRNA vaccines have been around since 1990. They figured out that proteins could be caused to appear in live tissue of mice by injecting mRNA into mouse muscles. Over the next 10 years other studies showed that mRNA could cause immunologic responses (active immune system responses, the body actually fighting disease responses) in different cell types both in test tubes and in live tissues. That brings us up to about 2000.  Links about these studies are here, here and here.

I couldn’t totally understand those studies because of too many words I had never seen before and didn’t want to take the time to learn all those words but I got the gist of it. Then I fell back on Web MD.  Web MD said basically that mRNA has the ability to deliver a specific set of instructions to your cells to make pieces of protein used by certain viruses.  This causes an immune response that fights off viral attack.  Here is the link.  You will have to scroll down a bit to where it says What are mRNA vaccines?

In MY OWN WORDS, this all comes down to the following analogy. Similar to the way I used nuts and bolts and welders etc. as an analogy for the things the ribosomes make:

Imagine we live in a country, there are many cities in the country. Each city can be called a body.  The country would be a largish group of people. City A is being attacked by guys in blue shirts that have 75 buttons. The city A cops don’t recognize the guys in blue shirts with 75 buttons as bad guys right away so the guys in blue shirts with 75 buttons come in and start living inside City A.  They are eating the food of the citizens (cells) of City A and using the sewers of City a with their toxins. This makes City A sick. The guys with blue shirts with 75 buttons on them get a good start and are multiplying like mad before the city A cops even know they are there.  The city A cops start fighting and they kill some of the guys in blue shirts with 75 buttons.  These dead blue shirt with 75 buttons guys and cops who are killed in the fight block up city A’s roadways and sewers and some citizens can’t get food and air so the body dies. Yep, that is city A.  City A dies. This is a person dying with his lungs full of mucus.  Are you with me so far?

The country overall sees this happening and tries to find out what is going on.  They send in some intrepid (per Oxford intrepid means: fearless, adventurous, often used for rhetorical or humorous effect) person.  The intrepid person comes back with a blue shirt with 75 buttons. NOT the whole guy, just the shirt. The whole blue shirt with 75 buttons guy would be the old style vaccine or maybe an inoculation, I’m not sure and my analogy is not perfect.  The blue shirt with 75 buttons is the mRNA version. The intrepid person in this case is the lab tech who gets a slice of the disease and runs away.  Anyway, Intrepid tells the bosses of the country that if they just tell the cops to shoot anybody with a blue shirt with 75 buttons on sight, they can kill the blue shirt with 75 buttons disease before it gets started.

The bosses send out messengers to all the cities cops (messenger RNA vaccine, get it?) to watch out for guys with blue shirts that have 75 buttons and shoot them on sight.  The cops (immune system) then know what they are looking for and the blue shirt with 75 buttons guys don’t get a chance to even gain a foothold in any more cities.

Hooray for our side!  No blue shirts with 75 buttons around here! The guys wearing the shirts are full of holes even though the cops were only shooting at the blue shirts with 75 buttons.

One of the good things about mRNA is that it goes away once it is used.  I am not sure how it goes away but I think it is sort of like when a factory gets an order for a bunch of widgets, they file that order and they then go to making the widgets.  Or maybe they turn the message into welding rods? Or maybe they burn the order to make steam to power their tools. Bottom line is it goes away and doesn’t exist in the body after 2-3 days.  Remember, it is the MESSENGER RNA, not the actual RNA or DNA itself. Also, the messenger RNA does not alter any DNA anywhere so it doesn’t cause mutations.

Well… That was the major part of this whole thing right there.  Now to further inspect that article…

OK, back to the references. I checked some at random. #6 turned out to be a Zoetis (another big company) product comparison chart.

#7 was a USDA summary of studies supporting USDA product licensure.  Maybe we are getting somewhere here! I would expect there to be studies linked to the summaries but there were not.  I looked at a few summaries and it looked like the drugs were doing the job.  I am definitely not a lab scientist but I know how to look up words I don’t understand. The lung lesions… A lung lesion is basically scarring or injuries in the lungs, like from pneumonia. The first reference that popped up lesions was from the National Cancer Institute. I figured a lesion is a lesion, whether caused by cancer or by pneumonia. Anyway, the lung lesions in the vaccinated pigs were much less than the lung lesions in the placebo injections.  Oh yeah, a placebo is a nothing pill or drug. If they are testing drug A they give group X drug A and group Y a placebo, a flour pill or maybe a sugar pill.  They don’t tell either group if they are getting the drug or the placebo.  So they can tell whether the drug is making a difference or not because they have two groups right next to each other and the only difference between those two groups is one is getting the drug and the other is getting the sugar pill.

I looked at some other references but they were things like someone’s Substack post, another article in a magazine, something about a drug company submission to the SEC (Why the SEC? In a learned article, who cares whether the thing is covered under the Security and Exchange Commission.) At any rate, most of the references were not very good but seemed to be just fluff or to make the article look good.  

I did not see any references about complete studies other than the summaries already mentioned above. 

By the way, even if the writers ARE using citations, it is smart to CHECK at least some of those citations because a very clever trick is to cite things like Wikipedia, or news articles that don’t in turn use peer reviewed citations. In other words, they look good but don’t carry a lot of weight. News articles where someone claims something is not a citation.  Wikipedia is not a valid citation, anybody can go into Wikipedia and type whatever they want. Anybody can write an article and get it posted on the internet where millions of people can see it.  Doesn’t mean it is true.  Just means it is out there.  Actual citations are in learned publications, like Science, Journal of Medicine, maybe Auto Researcher Monthly, The MIT Press, High up Muckety Muck Astrophysics Weekly.  Things like that.  You get the idea.  

In my OPINION, and I am NOT a trained observer, just someone who knows how to figure out what things mean and say.  I think JM did a pretty bad job of backing up his point so far.  The main thing is I would expect is a deeper look at the studies that were done and how their science was flawed. I would expect someone who is an actual doctor to have to learned publications and access to a wide array of peer reviewed knowledge.

Note that JM states that there weren’t enough safety studies. But he doesn’t state that he tried to find the studies themselves.  Only that he found the summaries.  That is not a very bad thing in itself. I couldn’t find the studies either and I looked.  They might be technical secrets owned by Merck or something like that. There did seem to be a good number of studies about mRNA safety studies in humans. This link has many references to studies about the safety of mRNA Covid vaccines in humans. The link is to a learned article in The National Library of Medicine.

Then I read further into the document.

JM brought in data from a final study summary mentioned above.  This is the place he gets his most shocking and damning data.  Stuff about 24 pigs dying with no apparent reason, 55 pigs having anorexia, 20 pigs having lameness, etc.  These numbers seemed high to me.  Lameness?  In a pig that got a shot under his SKIN?  With a shot that goes away after 2-3 days? Tumors?  Again, with a shot that goes under the skin with a product that goes away after 2-3 days?  55 pigs with anorexia?  From a shot under the skin?  24 pigs died and we don’t say why? There should at least be some swelling around the locations of the shots.  The swelling around shot locations is covered in the study though and the pigs got better from those things. 55 pigs with anorexia and 24 pigs dying without a reason and 20 pigs with lameness doesn’t make sense.  So I really wanted to see those studies but couldn’t find them.

The mRNA vaccines DID come up with much better results for lung lesions than the placebo pigs also, so the mRNA vaccines DID work.

There was a word I didn’t understand in that final summary that came up with the funky numbers.  VeDDRA guidance.  Google says it is the Veterinary Dictionary for Drug Regulatory Activities (VeDDRA) and that it is A list of standard clinical terms to be used in reporting suspected adverse events in animals or humans after exposure to veterinary medicinal products. The reference on this is a guidance glossary put by the UK government.

If you click that link you will see that an Adverse Event is: Any observation in animals that occurs AFTER (emphasis mine) any use of a veterinary medicinal product, WHETHER OR NOT CONSIDERED TO BE PRODUCT-RELATED, (emphasis mine on that too) that is unfavorable and unintended. Ref. The Veterinary Medicines Regulations 2013 (as amended), Part 1

Note that it says ANY observation in animals that occurs after any use of a vet product.  WHETHER or NOT that observation is considered to be product related or not.

So they count pretty much anything bad that happens to the piggie after he got the shot. If you don’t know the definition of that word VeDDRA you can easily think that all the bad things that happened to the piggies were because of the vaccine.

That just didn’t make sense.  Then I realized that when I was a kid, we raised pigs. We always had at least a few pigs around the place.  We would eat at least one of the litter ourselves and that would leave some to sell for cash.  I was a kid then but it seemed that the baby pigs were always dying or coming up with a disease or body abnormalities.  Pa said that is just the way pigs are and that is why they have so many piglets. The mama lays down on one and squashes it to death by mistake.  Or she has only 8 teats for 10 piglets.  When she lies down to feed them, the 2 littlest ones or unluckiest ones get left out.  They get to be runts if they are lucky, or starve to death if they are unlucky or have a weak will to live. One has a herniated belly button.  Another has a herniated testicle.  He said pigs are a food animal and one of their ways of keeping the species going is to provide lots of food for the predators so there would still be some left to carry the species on.  Turkeys are the same way. Chickens are the same way.  Heck, APPLES are the same way. Acorns are the same way. Out-produce the predation is a good survival strategy.  I doubt the little pig being eaten by a coyote would think it is a good strategy.  Still, it IS successful.  There are WAY more domestic pigs alive today than there are wild ones. Domestic pigs are way more successful than wile pigs even though wild pigs are a menace in some places.

The percentages in the JM referenced study seemed to be kind of similar to our batches of baby pigs.  I looked up the percentages of deaths and those various diseases in a normal batch of baby pigs and came up with almost the same numbers.  They were not exactly the same, but they were very similar.  My link here from the National Library of Medicine is not the study I originally found but it has most of the same data. I didn’t note down the first study I found and then couldn’t find it again but the second one was pretty close.

It seems to me that JM is expecting the mRNA vaccine to take care of the mama pig lying on and squashing her babies.  He expects the vaccine to take care of the fact that the mama pig has 8 teats and gave birth to 10 piglets.  Those two are going to have Anorexia, or be unthrifty at least, if not dead.

It seems to me that Dr Mercola might have either:

1.      Decided he knew what he wanted to find and then went looking for data to back it up. Or

2.      Didn’t do a very good investigation of what was really going on.  Maybe he just didn’t figure out what the letters VeDDRA stood for and the didn’t find out what the word meant and what it would cause.

Bottom line also MIGHT be that I knew what I wanted to find and looked until I found the right data.  Maybe so but I consciously tried to not do that.  But…. You know how bias goes.  It is a tricky bastard.

Could it be that JM left out some very needed data and is just snowing me?  Could be, I thought.  Let’s see if we can check this out by looking at JM himself.

I looked up JM.  I started with Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is NOT a good place to get hard data from, but it IS a good place to get some background data and a place to start.  Wikipedia said that Dr. Joe Mercola was an osteopathic doctor (I looked that up and found out that an osteopathic doctor IS an actual MD).  The second paragraph said that he was famous for being one of the worst spreaders of misinformation about vaccines on the internet.  Hmmm, but not good enough for me, I try not to believe Wikipedia.  But Wikipedia did give some references.  He had either sued a couple of places or they had sued him about it.  Wikipedia stated You Tube and the NY Times.

I figured that JM should be rolling in dough if he had good cases against those two companies.  They are big companies and have lots of money.  If they are defaming him unjustly he should be able to make them pay.

I pulled the string on the two suits and found out that JM had been kicked off You Tube for spreading misinformation and had sued them.  He also sued the NY times for ‘Assault, Libel & Slander’ on 21 July 2023.

The You Tube one was apparently over, so what happened there?  Was it settled out of court? I searched around and found out that the case had been dismissed.  JM hadn’t gotten his money.  Case dismissed basically means that the judge has decided that there isn’t enough there to bring it to trial.  I did not immediately find any evidence that JM had appealed the ruling. I then found out that the Ninth Circuit rejected another lawsuit over his account being terminated. So it looks like it was appealed and the ninth circuit told him to get lost.

Per that link, JM basically said that his account had been terminated without enough prior notice.  The Ninth Circuit said that ‘Mercola’s strained reading of the You Tube Terms of Service was ‘not plausible.’ ‘

Plus: “to construe the Modification Clause to prohibit the immediate termination of an account that causes harm to others would be contrary to protecting the public. In September 2021 when YouTube terminated Mercola’s account, it was reasonable … to consider “anti-vaccine” postings to be harmful to the public.”

If you want to read the whole thing, here is the link.  

Again, to me, Case Dismissed means that the person bringing the suit (JM) didn’t have enough case to bring it to trial or to win.  In other words, he lost that one.  Maybe I am wrong, maybe he is still fighting it but I doubt it.  

The NY Times case has been going around and around in the courts.  Motion, Counter Motion, Filing, Counter Filing.  That has been going on for more than a year.  I don’t know how long these things usually take, but it looks like it might also be just a delay tactic.  Keep the court case in the air long enough and he can continue to sell his stuff on the internet.

It also seems to me that YouTube and the NY Times probably have pretty potent legal departments of their own.  They wouldn’t publish something or cancel someone’s account without knowing something about it.  They would have to know that they have some pretty strong legs to stand on or they wouldn’t put something out there. 

If someone says I am wrong, that is one thing and probably won’t result in much more than a yelling match or me being grumpy for a while. Calling YouTube or the NY Times wrong without having some pretty strong evidence to back you up wouldn’t make much sense.  Unless of course you wanted to delay the verdict as long as possible so you could continue to sell stuff in the meantime.

Wikipedia also said that JM in an affidavit stated that he is worth over 200 million dollars.  He made his money by selling vitamins and other cures on the internet.   I sell stuff on the internet too and I am well short of paying myself 200 million bucks. But then I don’t have a noisy thing to grab people’s attention with like ‘vaccines bad’ or some such.  All I have is: ‘Naturally grown meats good!’ ‘GrassFed Beef Good!’  Yeah… Not about to make 200 million bucks with that!  At least not with only 190 acres that we have the use of and a few friends producing. But at least I am not involved in lawsuits with YouTube or the New York Times, or Joe Mercola….  Yet.

Before we go any further, let me say that I have bought several ‘cures’ over the internet in my day.  I still have bottles of some of them. A lot of places that sell stuff like that will try to get you on a subscription where they bang your credit card every month and send you a bottle every month. That is why I still have bottles of a few of those cures around.  I gave up on them and then a few bottles later, realized that I needed to actually DO SOMETHING to make the bloody things stop coming! I have never stuck with any of those cures except Vitamin C and maybe a few other vitamins.   I swear by vitamin C.  It might be mostly in my head, but I am CERTAIN I have cured several colds and knocked down several infections with Vitamin C.  I go to the Wal Mart and get another bottle whenever I run low so at least nobody is banging my credit card every month for it…

So back to the bottom line:  Vaccines are Good as long as you must have them.  They kill less than the alternative.

If you can figure out how to not need them, so much the better.  Ways to not need them:  Live in the country and don’t go to town if you don’t have to.  Maintain your distance if you DO have to go to town.  Keep your pig herd or cow herd as closed as you possibly can.  Be ready with antibiotic shots in case something does get sick.  Figure out some way to have a strong immune system.  And the final way to not need vaccines: Be lucky.

Now I KNOW that those who are vaccine skeptics out there will almost certainly not be swayed by what I have written here.  That is OK with me. Someone DID ask me what my views on vaccines and mRNA vaccines were and I did an honest appraisal and came up with what I came up with. You don’t have to believe it.

My son, the Biochemist has tried to change my mind about Vitamin C too and it hasn’t worked, so you aren’t the only one that doesn’t listen to ‘reason’.  There is that.

I will live with any consequences of my taking vitamin C whenever I feel a cold coming on or when my teeth hurt.  I am responsible for my own health and my own body and that is OK.  I do have free will after all.

You will live with any consequences of you not getting vaccinated and not getting your kids vaccinated.  You are responsible for your and your kids health and all your families’ bodies and that is OK.  You have free will after all as well.

My personal bottom line under it all is that I have lived through a lack of vaccines and it was NOT a pretty sight.  I had to drag 15 pigs over the hill to be buried.  If that had been my parents and the sample size was us 10 kids (I and my siblings), there could have been 2.3 of us buried instead of growing up to live our lives. Remember the 23% of the pigs because of no vaccines from above? 23% of 10 kids is 2.3 kids.  Even if 0.3 of a kid died from something going wrong with a vaccine (it didn’t, and .3 kids out of 10 is a VERY high number of adverse reactions) it is still a very good deal. It IS true that kids are not pigs and pig vaccines will not work on people and all the rest of it.  I am not saying the situations are the SAME, I am saying they are SIMILAR to a degree. At any rate, in my viewpoint, vaccines are still an excellent deal.

You do you and I will do me and hopefully we can live together peacefully.

No worries. 

SV