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“You pay regular amounts and if your house or your car or your health or your life has something bad happen to it, then we might pay you back. And if nothing bad happens, then you’re paying for nothing. It’s like gambling. But sad. And not fun at all but not really optional.” 

When you apply this to vaccination, it’s even sadder for those who refuse to sadly gamble at all. It’s not just that you might get COVID-19 which may open you up to other infections throughout your life that you would otherwise have batted away.

Because you can get any number of vaccinations and still get a new version of COVID-19 as the virus mutates, the little bastards.

And if you get COVID, or COVID again, .

I’m not saying Long COVID is necessarily worse than other diseases children can get in Florida where a dodgy state surgeon general (his wife is a faith healer) has .

“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Joseph Ladapo said last week. “Your body is a gift from God.”

Well, it’s a gift from God that might be radiant with polio, measles, diphtheria, mumps, chickenpox, Hepatitis B, or whooping cough.

Fear of vaccines long ago became a social contagion. An Alberta nurse, , this month has just written a long Maclean’s magazine piece about how she became an anti-vaxxer.

It’s a remarkable tale. Doctors wouldn’t listen to her, giving her bad advice on childbirth and then breastfeeding. After she was talked into unnecessary surgery, “I lost trust in my doctors” she wrote. “I felt like they didn’t tell me the full story.”

She found herself relying on online information, some of which was hugely helpful as she lived the lonely life that new mothers come to know. Wellness websites took their readers seriously. They cared. It was only later that she realized that they could take you down a dark path.

“By the time I had my third child, I had full-blown orthorexia: an obsession with eating healthy food. I was so consumed by the fear of toxins and processed food and Big Pharma that I stopped seeing food as food; it became poison.”

Greene came to understand . Terrified that her children might get Long COVID, she finally had them vaccinated and became a practical nurse herself.

Thanks largely to cranks like health secretary RFK Jr. — his motives elude me — and , many people are wandering in a forest of bad information. Some have contracted social contagions, quarrelling over nonsense around issues like autism, transgenderism, eugenics, and speed cameras.

Americans are obsessed with personal health to the point of neurosis. The New York Times offers a version of the Daily Mail fear channel full of health rumours, even as KFC sells chicken-flavoured jelly beans, followed by . Is there no middle ground for a nation of toddler tastes?

Why are Albertans following the American lead? Vaccines good. Chicken pills not good. I bring you this simple message.