Many readers may have already had the revelation I am going to describe in this post, and for some of you this may be an obvious point, but this experience was new to me. We were discussing the scriptures as part of “Come Follow Me” this week and I finally began to understand the story of Adam and Eve.

This revelation came after more than 200 endowment sessions and dozens of times reading Genesis and the Book of Moses. My wife, in comments during “Come Follow Me” and in talks she has since sent me, was the one who created the spark that helped me comprehend a bit more.

Here is the issue. As most readers know, Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and are given two commandments: 1)be fruitful and multiply and 2)don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Note that the tree is in the “midst” (or exact center) of the Garden of Eden, so the tree is central to the story. Satan “beguiles” Eve, and she figures out that Adam and Eve cannot do 1) without doing 2). So, she eats of the tree, explains it to Adam and Adam agrees and they both eat of the tree. Eve is the heroine of the story because she figures it out and tells Adam: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.” (Moses 5:11).

Bottom line: without eating of the tree, Adam and Eve would still be in the Garden of Eden and would never have been able to keep the first commandment, which was to be fruitful and multiply.

I had always seen this story as showing that the Lord gave Adam and Eve a puzzle of sorts. What I did not understand until literally this week is *why* the Lord did things this way. I was always confused by the question: why?

It always seemed to me a very strange way of doing things. Wasn’t the Lord tricking Adam and Eve? Why give them one commandment that they cannot fulfill without breaking the second commandment? Why not give them the second commandment first and then once they broke that commandment introduce the first commandment? Why did the Lord not say: “Adam and Eve, now that you have transgressed my law, I give you another law, which is to be fruitful and multiply.”

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I started my career paying attention as a researcher to medical side-effects – but in a different way than you might usually think. Most researchers try to count any of a range of effects associated with a particular treatment. My own approach was trying to understand different ways the same antidepressant side-effects were interpreted or “narrated” differently.     

One story from my interviewing study epitomizes why this became so personally interesting to me. After a woman experienced a panic attack for the first time after starting Zoloft, she recounted telling her friend Emily that this medication is “making me have panic attacks!” However, her friend responded, “It’s not the medication, it’s your anxiety that you want this to work so bad.”  Only partially satisfied by this answer, the woman continued to ask her friend, “are you sure? Are you sure, Emily!?”  After checking with her doctor later, this woman was likewise told that her underlying anxiety, not the drug, was the problem. Instead of tapering her off the first drug, then, she was prescribed a second drug to address this “newly uncovered problem” of anxiety.       

A strong, unquestioned bias. Why did this doctor focus on her underlying condition as the most likely condition for her panic attacks – rather than the antidepressant itself? It’s certainly not because the evidence compelled such an interpretation. It’s well known among physicians that medical treatments can induce a wide range of surprising effects. And, in this case, a 2014 study confirmed that after taking antidepressants for a short time, approximately 7% of participants developed antidepressant-induced jitteriness/anxiety syndrome (up to and including panic attacks).

Despite that kind of evidence, a clear bias exists in official pronouncements and medical interpretations about unpleasant effects following treatment. Dr. Peter Breggin, a well-known psychiatrist I interviewed several years ago, was one of the first to point out that when a treatment has positive effects, it gets the credit. But when any untoward effects arise, the strong bias is to attribute them to the underlying condition. 

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This story was just released:

As I warned in this post, there will be more and more information being released in the coming weeks and months on side effects from the COVID vaccines. Please also read that post to understand that you can support the Brethren and the Church, as I do, while also recognizing that the vaccines are increasingly problematic, especially for younger people and pregnant women.

Someday in the future, hopefully soon but probably years from now, we will look back with shame and horror at how the majority of people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. How could we have locked down healthy citizens for months for a virus with a 99.8 percent survival rate among people under 50? How could we have abused our own children by forcing them to wear masks that do nothing but harm? How could we have forced our children to take a vaccine that does more harm than good for young people?

The historical comparisons to this period in history are myriad. We can look back at the 17th century witch hunts or the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, 1950s McCarthyism or even 1930s Germany. What is happening to our society has been described as Mass Formation Psychosis, but the easiest way to think of it is a mass cult phenomenon where people lose their ability to think critically because of fear. Remember, germaphobia is still an illness — our society has turned it into an art form.

Check out this guy:

Or this person:

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The media is pushing you to freak out about the Omicron variant of COVID-19, but the truth is the virus mutation is relatively harmless. There have been no more than a handful of deaths attributed to Omicron worldwide, and even those deaths are questionable. Leading British virologist Clive Dix said:

“We’re not seeing serious disease yet and we’re not seeing death. The picture looks like it’s now a milder virus – and that’s what you expect with viruses. They mutate to become more transmissible – they’re not looking to be deadly, because otherwise they don’t get transmitted,” Dix explained.

In fact, many experts in the field say that Omicron is displacing the much more dangerous Delta variant and will give people immunity to more deadly variants. What this means is that COVID-19 is mutating into a background pathogen — like the common cold and the flu — that will be around for decades to come. Yes, some people will die each year — just as they do from the cold and the flu — but the numbers will be manageable and, for most people, our immune systems will adjust and provide us protection from serious illness and death.

So when it comes to the vaccines, most of us must ask ourselves: why would we get vaccinated or get a booster? If you have natural immunity, meaning you have gotten the virus and are now healthy, it turns out that getting vaccinated may be harmful:

“If natural immunity is strongly protective, as the evidence to date suggests it is, then vaccinating people who have had covid-19 would seem to offer nothing or very little to benefit, logically leaving only harms—both the harms we already know about as well as those still unknown,” says Christine Stabell Benn, vaccinologist and professor in global health at the University of Southern Denmark. The CDC has acknowledged the small but serious risks of heart inflammation and blood clots after vaccination, especially in younger people. The real risk in vaccinating people who have had covid-19 “is of doing more harm than good,” she says.

A large study in the UK32 and another that surveyed people internationally33 found that people with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection experienced greater rates of side effects after vaccination. Among 2000 people who completed an online survey after vaccination, those with a history of covid-19 were 56% more likely to experience a severe side effect that required hospital care.33

Patrick Whelan, of UCLA, says the “sky high” antibodies after vaccination in people who were previously infected may have contributed to these systemic side effects. “Most people who were previously ill with covid-19 have antibodies against the spike protein. If they are subsequently vaccinated, those antibodies and the products of the vaccine can form what are called immune complexes,” he explains, which may get deposited in places like the joints, meninges, and even kidneys, creating symptoms.

In this environment, in which the risk is almost exclusively from a virus that is relatively harmless, it makes no sense at all to go and get a booster shot. And indeed the scientific literature is pointing this out.

A new Dutch study titled “SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households” found that Omicron is a lot more infectious than Delta. But we also find this information:

“Comparing households infected with the Omicron to Delta VOC, we found an 1.17 times higher SAR [secondary attack rate] for un-vaccinated, 2.61 times higher for fully-vaccinated and 3.66 times higher for booster-vaccinated individuals, demonstrating strong evidence of immune evasiveness of the Omicron VOC.”

The higher infectiousness for injected people is increasingly clear; the data shows that Omicron appears to prefer the jabbed, based on hospitalization numbers and information from areas that track breakthrough cases. But this study shows a significantly higher infection rate for BOOSTED people, which suggests that the more jabs you get, the more likely you are to catch Omicron, and presumably, any future variant derived from Omicron.

This should be crystal clear: the study shows that if you get boosted you are MORE LIKELY to catch the latest mutation of COVID-19.

A new Canadian study titled “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against Omicron or Delta infection” similarly found negative efficacy of the jabs against the Omicron variant, especially starting 90 days after the second shot.

The study also found protection from Omicron from the second shot dropped to essentially zero after 30 days. Regarding boosters, the study found that while protection increased immediately after receiving the third jab, its efficacy quickly fell to 37% after only seven days following the third shot.

No study has ever been done on the long-term health consequences of the boosters, for adults or for children. I want to repeat that. No study has ever been done on the long-term health consequences of the boosters.

So, why would you inject yourself –and especially your children — with a cocktail of who knows what when the available scientific evidence indicates you are more likely to be harmed than helped by the booster?

Meanwhile, public health officials continue to urge you to take the jabs, and they are already talking about the need for a second booster in a few months. Friends, let’s use some basic common sense. If the booster is so beneficial, why would another one be necessary? Are you really going to go get another booster every four months for the rest of your lives, when the dominant variant of the virus is less dangerous than the flu or common cold?

A last point: the Church’s guidance on vaccination says: ‘We know that protection from the diseases they cause can only be achieved by immunizing a very high percentage of the population.” Immunization includes natural immunity, which multiple studies show is even more protective than vaccination. Vaccination early in the epidemic was appropriate for many people, especially the elderly or those with co-morbidities. At this point, virtually all Latter-day Saints will have caught COVID-19 or been vaccinated, which means they are immunized. Don’t get boosted, people!