Anti-vaxxers make conspiracy from coincidence

Special artist shines in two LARAC shows

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To show how unsuited Robert Kennedy Jr. is to be the country’s top health official, I’m going to describe some coincidences I’ve experienced.

After high school, I took a year off, and in the summer of 1978 went to Portugal to work in a hotel run by my aunt. Two of my many cousins, Susan and Amy, both from New York City, were there at the same time, and we had some fun together.

I left Portugal at the end of the summer, went other places and did other things, then went home to Saranac Lake. The summer of 1979, I traveled by bus to my first year of college at Stanford University in California, criss-crossing the country and hopping off at various places, such as St. Louis, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico. As I stepped down from the bus in Santa Fe, I saw Susan and Amy. They, too, were doing some traveling and happened to be at that moment at the Santa Fe bus stop.

After college, I went to live and work for a year in Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area, with a population in 1984 that exceeded 29 million. One day, while I was sitting in one of the city’s tens of thousands of restaurants, a friend from Stanford passed on the sidewalk, glanced in the window, saw me and joined me for lunch.

After I returned to the Adirondacks, I went down to New York City a few times to visit my cousin Chris. During this handful of weekend visits, I ran into friends from Stanford three times — once in the subway, once in the bus station and once late at night in the street, while I was walking and wondering where in the city this very friend lived.

All of these incidents are unremarkable, and I’m sure readers right now are thinking of their own more astonishing stories of coincidence.

Look at a coincidence from the perspective of an individual who just experienced it, and it seems improbable. But consider the context of the individual’s years of moving through a busy world at the same time as millions of others, with billions of events constantly occurring, and you see that coincidences are bound to be happening somewhere every second of every day, and a few of them will probably happen, sometime, to you.

This brings us to the federal database called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS is a self-reporting system, where people can describe any adverse medical condition, from arm soreness to liver cancer, they experience after receiving a vaccination.

The VAERS site does not limit the reporting period, so you can list ailments that arise the day after a jab or a month or six months afterward.

The reports serve as an early warning system, alerting authorities if a pattern arises that could possibly mean a problem with a vaccine.

The reports are not evidence of anything in themselves, any more than running into someone you know in a big city far from home is evidence you are being followed.

The reports are, in the vast majority of cases, either expected and minor responses to a shot, such as arm soreness, low fever and fatigue, or not a response at all but coincidence.

The VAERS site says this under the heading, “Guide to Interpreting VAERS data”:

“When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.”

This is what the site says under “VAERS Data Limitations”:

“Millions of vaccines are given each year to children less than 1 year old in the United States, usually between 2 and 6 months of age. At this age, infants are at greatest risk for certain medical adverse events, including high fevers, seizures, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Some infants will experience these medical events shortly after a vaccination by coincidence.”

In the anti-vaxx world where Kennedy is a leader, the VAERS reports are often a centerpiece of the argument. Using VAERS reports in the way the site says they cannot legitimately be used, Kennedy has called the COVID vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

His arguments are specious, but many people, including local people, have latched onto them.

People get sick every single day, and some of them die. A case could be made for the deadliness of any activity — going fishing, attending a wedding, having scrambled eggs for breakfast — if the criteria was that sometimes people died afterward.

Retired pediatrician Kathleen Braico made the case for vaccines far better than I can in a guest essay we published last week. She fears a return to the days before vaccines when thousands of children were dying each year from childhood illnesses like measles. So do I.

In a community, we rely on each other to keep terrible diseases in check through mass vaccination. The more people choose not to vaccinate, the more likely the diseases will spread.

Kennedy has hurt many people with his distortions and lies, and that will get worse if he becomes the secretary of Health and Human Services.

We may not be able to stop him from being confirmed, but by getting ourselves and our children vaccinated, we can at least limit the damage he will do.

Joy

No creature in my life expresses more joy than our dog, Ringo. The way he wags not only his tail but his entire body when he comes to the door to see us or someone else he knows; the way he lifts his head and licks his nose while he’s being petted; and the way he squirms on his back in the snow while I pull him along by his harness are a joy to watch, as you can see in this video:

Art

LARAC has another great members’ show up now in Lapham Gallery in City Park. The quality and diversity (that dreaded word!) of the work is impressive. The show is up through Feb. 19.

Patrons check out the work of LARAC members while Phil Casabona, executive director of LARAC, takes notes on a piece that was recently purchased.

Leena Kutti

I saw a print I really liked at a recent juried show at LARAC, and I bought it when I saw it was priced under $100. Here it is:

This print by Leena Kutti was for sale at a recent juried show at LARAC. Here, it is hanging on the wall of our dining room. Kutti based the work on a photo of her mother’s of a party with friends from Estonia.

Another Kutti print was for sale at the current members’ show, with a similarly low price, and I bought that, too. In “Reunion Party” (above), I love the expressiveness of every one of the faces, each of them expressing their pleasure in the moment in their own unique way. I gave the artist, Leena Kutti, a call at her home in Washington County, and we talked for almost an hour about her horses, her artist friend Barry, her family and her discovery when she worked at a publishing house of a stash of Beatles photos and documents in the building’s basement. She was shy about her own art, because, she said, she hasn’t worked at it steadily for years (the prints are decades old), but I think it’s wonderful.