The word on the street suggests that most of the vaxxed and boostered now realise that their shots were in vain.

Yet the most severally jabbed, weirdly, still fear getting COVID.

WHOOPS

They know that their efforts to buy the narrative were a whoops moment in their lives. A pretty massive whoops moment. And yet they still cling to the wreckage of their blunder.

Who wants to look like an idiot? The investments they made were considerable. They abused the unvaxxed. They had them ostracised, sacked. They broke off friendships. Families were split asunder.

They invested their all. They totally bought into another big scam. Perhaps the biggest of all.

Dr Natalia Solenkova of Florida this week was the victim of a false claim that she had said the following: “I will never regret the vaccine. Even if it turns out I injected actual poison and have only days to live. My heart was and is in the right place.

“I got vaccinated out of love, while antivaxxers did everything out of hate. If I have to die because of my love for the world, then so be it. But I will never regret or apologise for it.”

The doctor was “deluged in harassment”. The Leftist US corporate media were gloating. The hoax took in Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein. Rogan was said to have “jumped on a wave of vitriol”. The tweet was described as “incendiary”.

Astonishingly and without any sense of irony or self-awareness, some media outlets lambasted Rogan’s poor fact checking.

These are the clowns who have been spreading misinformation and disinformation, covering up policy blunders and worse, and propagandising about the vaccines (and masks and lockdowns) for two years, ignoring real science and cancelling truth tellers without demur.

These people would not know a fact if they fell over it. And unlike the COVID media, Rogan didn’t try and cover it up, or obfuscate. And what he said about what he assumed to be a real tweet was itself quite measured.

The fake tweet took Craig Kelly in as well.  Kelly reacted thus: “What type of doctor would ‘never regret or apologise’ for ‘injecting actual poison’ into patients or themselves – especially when they didn’t do their homework?

“When she needed to show logic, reason and critical thinking in the best interest her patients – instead they got emotion, hysteria, groupthink and virtue signalling.

“And to justify this to herself, she has to hate the antivaxxers – to create a belief in her mind that she’s a good person compared to hateful antivaxxers – when she was the type of person wanting those that said ‘no thanks’ to be injected with an experimental genetic agent or be locked up and excluded from society…”

 (Kelly had not acknowledged the fake at the time of writing).

That Solenkova didn’t say these words is neither here nor there, really. The suggestion – presumed to originate from COVID dissidents, but maybe not; it just might be a clever double bluff – simply shows the level of vitriol between the two sides of the vaccine debate.

Like all wars, this one is dirty, and there is a lot at stake for those who bought then on-sold the vaccine propaganda.

WEAPON

And fake news is now a weapon, used relentlessly in a number of ways. Creating fake news, labelling truth as fake news, and trying to win the follow-on PR battles – in this case by smearing both Rogan and the implied perpetrator(s) of the hoax – are three of the areas of battle.

There is another issue here. One has little doubt that the views attributed to the doctor are widely shared among the vaccinator brigade.

The level of devotion to the vaccines among their champions has been borderline insane.

Here was the Victorian chief of the Australian Medical Association not so long ago: “Victoria AMA says COVID-deniers and anti-vaxxers should opt out of public health system and ‘let nature run its course.”

The AMA chief was one among many. I seem to recall at least one premier suggesting that the unvaccinated would and should be “excluded from society”. Following Noam Chomsky.

One says deny them health care, another, deny them food. The Australian newspaper’s Jack the Insider (Peter Hoysted) never took a backward step in abusing those who, now absolutely correctly, saw the jab as an awful mistake.

“Your refusal has cost all of us,” President Joe Biden said to unvaccinated people.  (This from The Atlantic, which recently published an absurd plea for victims of the COVID State to “just forgive” the perpetrators).

It was not pretty. The unvaxxed were, quite simply, the “new deplorables”.

The LA Times headed one editorial in 2021: Bring on the crackdown. The unvaccinated must be held accountable.

Our very own Canberra Times insisted: Anti-vaxxers should face punishments for refusing COVID vaccinations.

Shaming was never enough for the rabid vaxxers of the national capital.

ABC fixture and “much loved” Peter Goers OAM claimed in Adelaide Now (part of the consistently pro-vaxx Murdoch stable): There is no convincing the most stupid anti-vaxxers but why should we suffer their “freedom” as they infect others with disease and insanity.

So, the unjabbed were “insane”. “Diseased”. And, of course, “stupid”.

The Spectator’s Melissa Kite has experienced the wrath of the vaccinated: “ ‘You’re one of them anti-vaxxers,  said the brusque northerner who was seated opposite me at a friend’s supper party,” she wrote.

“ ‘Why do you think I got COVID and was really ill even though I’m up to date on my jabs?’

“And he fixed me with a murderous stare. I said: ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Next to me, the builder boyfriend was wearing his glassy-eyed look of panic.

“We can feel a dinner-party vaccination lynching coming a mile off. But this was peculiarly alarming.”

Some people suggested in late 2021 that the unjabbed be excluded from church. Some churches, at least for a time, actually did this. Big W and Kmart were off limits. None of this should be forgotten.

So, believing that Dr Solenkova’s words were genuine is not that great a stretch. We know that many real people believe this rubbish.

There are two potential paths – other than begging for forgiveness – for the invested vaccinators, who now have very, very little plausible deniability.

One is the sheepish response – “I would have been a lot sicker without it” – the other is to go on the attack.

BIZARRE

Many of those heavily invested in a bizarre, false narrative of the vaccines will go to the wall for this. Sadly, all those medicos who failed their own ethical standards by not warning their patients about the jab possibly caused the deaths of many.

Worship at the ideological altar of vaccinism can be lethal. God knows what drove these people.

While many of the lower-tier vaccine evangelists wouldn’t go out on this ridiculous limb, they were, nonetheless, useful idiot believers whose actions and words might well have caused real people to die.

Those who maintain their pro-vaxx position should be called to account. They are not lunatics. They are our friends and family.

Obama thought that small town Americans clinged to “their guns and religion”.

Well, these folks cling to their ideology. They never let a tsunami of peer reviewed studies get in the way of a good lie.