SSRIs, Vaccines, & Shallow Reductionism

As we relate in our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, we were astonished in 2021 when our public health authorities started telling us that the new mRNA COVID-19 shots confer better immunity than natural immunity.

This struck us as an extraordinarily fanciful notion. Since Jenner, the entire vaccine enterprise was predicated on introducing a weakened version of a pathogen to the body to induce its immune response.

The COVID-19 vaccine was designed to instruct the deltoid muscle to produce the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to induce the body’s immune response to this protein. How could this convoluted process produce better immunity than exposure to the virus and all its antigens? This notion implied that the novel technology did not so much activate the human immune system as improve it, suggesting that its designers had somehow transcended nature.

The reality of the human immune system—and all the factors that either strengthen or impair it— is extremely complex and cannot characterized and quantified merely in terms of blood antibody counts. Likewise, the reality of mental health cannot be reduced to measuring and manipulating serotonin levels in the brain.

This kind of shallow, reductionistic thinking would have us believe that a large percentage of humanity is suffering from defective brain chemistry that can be improved by a pharmaceutical product.

I thought of this today while listening to Tucker Carlson’s most recent interview with the psychiatrist, Josef Witt-Doerring, about the myriad dangers of SSRI “anti-depressants.” Our friends, Dr. Peter and Ginger Breggin, have been talking about these dangers for over thirty years. Dr. Witt-Doerring’s observations are 100% confirmatory of what they have been writing and talking about.

As Carlson and Dr. Witt-Doerring discuss, there are innumerable reasons why we may feel sad or unhappy with our lives. As philosophers since Aristotle have pointed out, bad habits and poor routines are the most common and correctible causes.

The biggest conceptual error that we modern humans make is thinking that the good life is a comfortable life without challenges and impediments. In fact, the “comfortable model” is the exact opposite of the reality of the human condition, in which we experience our greatest joys and triumphs in the act of overcoming challenges and impediments to attain our goals.

This is why people who indulge in an “easy” life of comforts, sensual pleasures, and passive entertainments tend to be miserable, while people who strive to learn, grow, and attain tend to be joyful and have a positive self-image that they justly feel they have earned.

I highly recommend watching the interview, especially if you are contemplating taking SSRIs. Especially terrifying is the so-called paradoxical side effect in which the patient’s feelings of anxiety and sadness are greatly amplified by an SSRI.

A few years ago, an old friend in Vienna was experiencing stress and frustration in his job, and it began to affect his mood and sleep. Instead of helping my friend to develop strategies and routines for coping with his work stress, a psychiatrist prescribed an SSRI. The next day my friend went to his country house, where he experienced a paradoxical side effect. At some point that night, he reached for a target pistol he kept in his country house and shot himself.

For years I thought about the senselessness of my young friend’s death. I am confident he could have worked through his tough time and come out a stronger and more resilient man if he had not taken the advice of a psychiatrist with a shallow, reductionist concept of the human mind and spirit.

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