A Mother’s Letter

How do you make an impossible choice?

A woman wrote to me this week, in a quandary. She is a mother, and like the vast majority of mothers, she loves her children fiercely and completely. She goes by Quinn. She and her family have lived in more than one place, and now find themselves in the country that I was born to, and which I call home: the United States of America. But this great country of ours is forcing her to make choices unlike any that have come before.

What follows are Quinn’s words. She wrote them to me, and is allowing me to share them with you. What can we do for her, for her son, for all of her family, and for all of us?

We are a family of Canadian citizens—two parents and two kids, one boy and one girl—who have lived in the United States for four years. We started our Green Card process before Covid, but are only now reaching the end. The CDC now requires that all immigrants be vaccinated against Covid to pass the immigration medical. We finished our medicals before the requirement was put in place, but my 10-year-old son just had his medical rejected because of an administrative error on the part of the immigration doctor.

Now, in order to get the medical done, my 10-year-old needs the Covid shot. My healthy, happy, almost never sick 10-year-old son. Twin vise grips of fear and rage have settled around my heart. When Bret had his recent conversation with Konstantin Kisin, he talked about the fact that as a parent, you will run into a burning building for your child. But once you have a second child the calculation changes.

This is the horrifying place that we find ourselves now. I can save my son and move my family back to Canada. But we run the very real risk that somewhere in the next few months new mandates will be brought in that might force someone else (or all of us) to get the vaccine, and then maybe the booster. The only place where we are guaranteed that this will not happen is in one of the red states in the U.S.

The private school that our children go to said from the very beginning that they will not be mandating anything (masks or social distancing or vaccines), and that it’s up to the parents to decide how they wish to proceed. So I have no worries there. 

Now, I weigh the future of my whole family. How do I weigh the possibility of my husband being required to take a booster, against the possibility of my little boy being harmed? How do I weigh the damage it might do to my daughter if we go somewhere new and there's a mandate, against the possibility of harm to my son? 

Boys get heart damage more from the Covid vaccines, but experience fewer fertility issues, I think. I know sperm count goes down but sperm is continually produced, so presumably (!! unconscionable that we have to use words like "presumably" for future fertility) by the time my son wants to have kids the damage will have passed. Girls get less heart damage but I worry about what damage would be done to my daughter’s eggs. 

How do I weigh the fact that my daughter is finally happy somewhere and not depressed? What does that weigh? How do I weigh that I don't want to go back to Canada? How much does it weigh that we don't want to move because we think the U.S. is the best place to wait out the insanity?

How much do I weigh that the school they are going to is awesome and teaches logic and responsibility and that failing often and early is a good way to learn? Am I just saying stuff to make myself feel better? Am I putting too much weight on future unknowns because it's easier to not move, thereby putting my little boy in danger? 

I keep thinking that you must be getting an overwhelming amount of these messages and most would probably be more heartbreaking than mine. How does my story compare to someone who lost their life's work when their business closed, or someone who is now homeless, or someone who has lost a child to suicide? At least my kids are still alive. But some little part of my brain knows that all those parents who lost their kids due to vaccine injury also thought their kids would be fine. It's less than 1% right? No one thinks their kid would be in that tiny percentage. What if my kid is? How will I feel then about the weight I put on the various scenarios?

I have tried to stay away from reading about the vaccine this week. If I am sitting in a prison camp and have to do what I need to do to survive, then whatever I choose is not my choice. Therefore, knowing more of the harms only paralyzes me further in making a choice. But I cannot abdicate my responsibility to my children. I cannot just blindly give my son something and hope for the best. Also: did I just decide that I am as if in a prison camp? I can move. I can save him from getting the shot.

I watched the interview between JJ Couey and Kevin McKernan. Now it feels even more scary. I read Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions a while back. The idea of the possibility of prions is terrifying to me. 

I keep remembering a time when I was a kid, and I lost something that I was going to get in big trouble for. I kept praying fervently to God to help me find it. Of course, I didn't find it. But I hoped so very much that maybe this one time this one prayer would be answered.

I am not religious. I keep thinking that I should try to be, maybe it will help. But I cannot pray for help with this. Why is my suffering more deserving of miraculous help than someone with a dying family member? Or someone contemplating suicide? Or some child who is being abused or trafficked?

I am brought to the very real possibility that I will have to go through with getting my little boy vaxxed. I would have preferred to give him the J&J shot, since at least the pseudouridine and long-lived mRNA is not a problem there, not to mention that it’s only one shot. But J&J is only approved for above 18-year-olds. I am sure I might be able to get a doctor who would be willing to supply that (in our upside-down world, isn’t it just typical that that wouldn’t be a problem?). But I worry that I would get to the immigration doctor and he wouldn’t accept it, forcing me to get another round of shots on top of it.

I am trying to figure out how to minimize the harms downstream of what seems like the only choice before me. If my son is vaccinated and does suffer an adverse event—is injured by the vaccine—I will follow the FLCCC’s guidelines on post-vaccine injury for Ivermectin and HCQ. I think starting the morning of the shot is probably good, or maybe one day before, that way there will be circulating anti-virals already in his system. I ordered really good probiotics just to boost his gut. He is brown from all the time he spends outside, but I will add some Vitamin D just in case. I will ensure that the person delivering the shot aspirates the needle. I am going to space out the two injections as far as I can. I will be very careful with him for two weeks afterwards since his immune system will be on high alert. 

I also worry about the lipid nanoparticles. I wonder, given that they need to be kept cold, if adding a warm press to the injection site immediately after the injection would denature some of them, spilling the mRNA before it reaches a cell. But then I worry that the warmth will trigger an immune response. Maybe warm and then cold? Should I add some antihistamine or cortisone to suppress immune function for a day?

Back to that vise grip of rage. I don’t even give the kids cough medicine, since it depresses the body’s natural attempt to rid itself of a pathogen, and here I am wondering what cocktail of drugs to give to my healthy child.

I keep hoping for the agent who flagged my son’s medical to mysteriously, bureaucratically, have a quota to fill, and for them to go back and put my son’s papers through. Or that we get to the nurse who has to give him the shot, and the nurse squirts the contents into a garbage can and fills out his card anyway. These people must exist, right? What happened to “First, do no harm”? Do they really not see?

Thank you for reading. Somehow sending my anguish out into the void helps a little bit.

And I am back to praying for whatever miracle the universe can send my way. I suppose just like there are no atheists in foxholes, a terrified mother’s heart will grasp at any wisp of hope that presents itself, no matter how faint.