Forgiveness
By Dan McDunn
Dan and I connected through my piece on Michael Lewis, and I’m truly grateful that he agreed to share his story.
There’s much to be unpacked about how the believers treated the non-believers, and contributions like Dan’s are essential for preserving this part of the historical record.
With thanks to Dan McDunn for his willingness to share.
Forgiveness
By Dan McDunn
The young adult minister at my church likes to quote Nelson Mandela as saying, “not forgiving someone is like poisoning yourself and waiting for the other person to die.” I see this. I understand it. I have a hard time contemplating all the loss in my life for not having a heart of forgiveness these last 4 years. I wish I could let all the covid madness go, forgive others for getting swept up in it and get on with life normally in my hometown. I just haven’t been able to do it, yet.
I live in Berkeley, CA, and in the last 4 years it has become a very challenging place to live as a critical thinker that values unfettered intellectual inquiry, freedom of speech, human liberty and bodily autonomy. My wife is a 3rd generation Berkeley native, which is why we are here, and I love the weather, the outdoor activities, and I do enjoy jousting with the Marxists and other command economy aficionados. Frankly, as challenging as some aspects of living in this group think community are, I don’t really know what I would do without the endless challenges to my fundamental beliefs in the value of the individual and pacifism.
We have spent the better part of 15 years here now, raising a family, and pouring into the community. If you have a son between the ages of 15 and 19, odds are extremely good that I have coached or coached against one of their teams, lead them on a Boy Scout campout, advised them on career day at the high school, or simply been an encouraging presence in their classroom or field at one of the K-12 schools where I have volunteered my time and donated our financial resources. Around town, you can see my name on a half dozen eagle scout project plaques, my company logo at the football and baseball fields, on the mountain bike team jerseys, and at the charity golf tournaments held by various organizations. I ran for public office in 2020, and my business has built, or rebuilt, over 250 dwelling spaces. I have given more of myself to this community than most would ever contemplate. While you were at the pub, that was me coaching your son on the pitch, field or trail, speaking to city council or the school board, and building badly needed housing for our community… I loved every second of it.
I don’t particularly know why it was clear to me in March of 2020 that what we were being told about covid wasn’t entirely true, but it was crystal clear from the first second we began hearing about it. That awareness, willingness to speak up, and an existing large network to speak to, was the beginning of the end for my social and civic life in a town that I loved.
On March 25, 2020, to try and instill calm, I sent an email to my large network referencing John Ioannidis’ statistical work on the risk posed by the virus. I used it to suggest that perhaps the risk was not as great as we were being told, and here was some evidence that you can use to bring comfort to your household. I did not claim that we should ignore the potential risks posed by this virus that we still knew little about, but rather I wanted to encourage everyone to relax and not let fear get the best of them. This email led to an epic flame fest by my friends and family, and me resigning my membership to the email list that I had helped create all in under 24 hours.
My office manager quit on March 26, 2020, claiming that I did not care about my employees or community because I waited in line for coffee that morning and bought my whole crew burritos for lunch that day, again waiting in line at a crowded restaurant. I suppose he would have preferred that I sit inside my house and panic and send an able-bodied healthy workforce, working outdoors by the way, home to do the same thing. As evidence of just how strong the early propaganda was, my office manager had, heretofore, been a devout believer in Libertarian Philosophy. So much so that he had dedicated several years of his life to the Free State Project in New Hampshire, where he lived as an active member of that community. We had spent over a decade working together and exploring free market ideas as a side hobby, but in under a week he had gone full lock down authoritarian, and I was the devil. Sad as this is to say, and after dozens of attempts on my end, I haven’t spoken to him since!
Shortly thereafter, California locked completely down, and I had to send everyone home, shutter the sites, and sit inside and wait. What happened during the lockdown? Mercifully, I had quit drinking several years earlier. And I will never stop thanking God for that! Having never been a video game player, I did pour myself into Fortnite chalking up about a half dozen Battle Royale victories! Thankfully, the wait for essential workers was quite short. I think it was only about a month before construction workers could return to work, and we went right back to it. My largely Latino workforce was super happy to get back in the field! They were, for the most part, not playing along with the laptop class’s version of the pandemic and were unafraid to be outdoors working hard. We all got covid eventually, just like everyone else. Not surprisingly everyone handled the illness without difficulty.
Life proceeded nicely from the summer of 2020 to early 2021. The kids were home with no school, my wife was working from home, but I was out in the field every day, masking only to meet clients and to go indoors at supply houses. Some of the kids’ outdoor sports returned, with useless masks of course. Remember the gaiters? LOL That was the mask of choice even after all the studies said they were useless. The mountain bike team was practicing, and I was riding 3 days a week. I coached from the back so I could ride without a mask. I sometimes pulled it up in large group settings to avoid the side eye. Our lives were pretty normal, and I am extremely proud for how my kids thrived during the pandemic.
Everything was going along just fine and as the vaccine hit the scene in early 2021, I can remember that the heaviness that had settled over the community was beginning to lift. A lot of people won’t remember this, but in the beginning of the vaccine rollout it was perfectly inside the realm of polite conversation to discuss your plans for the shot. Not getting it was a viable option and not one that was wholesale disqualifying from future participation in civil society. As people shared their decision to take Moderna, J&J or Pfizer and all the reasons why that was the one they wanted, I shared my intention not to take any of them. I have never even taken a flu shot, so why would I take this one? It was, after all, an experimental technology never used on humans, with a dismal track record in animals, for a virus that posed no risk to my family. No one booted me from the tribe during that era for having that position.
I will never forget April 6, 2021, and where I was when my wife called me to tell me that her best friend had died in her sleep the night prior. I was coming out of a port-o-potty on a job site, and she phoned me from my sister’s house in Denver where she had started Spring Break early with the kids. I would be joining them at my dad’s house in Dallas one day later. Sabra had spoken to her friend the night before, she had been at the gym, she was quite fit and healthy and was a mere 47 years old. She had taken her first dose of the Pfizer shot 6 days earlier. My wife reported the death to VAERS, and we would later find out her dose from batch EN6201, is one of the most toxic Pfizer lots. We attended our friend’s memorial in July of 2021 in Portland and her then 16-year-old daughter came back to live with us, and she has been living ever since.
Unfortunately for our ability to continue a normal life in Berkeley, right after our friend’s death I decided to share openly and with fervor about the temporal proximity of her death to the injection of the covid vaccine. A few days after our friend died, I read on Facebook about the death of a high school classmate’s 39-year-old husband, also in his sleep, also unexpectedly. Less than 2 weeks after that, while on a mountain bike team ride, I learned of the death of one of the coaches on the local Jr. High team. This man died on a team ride in front of his 11-year-old son and the son of one of the high school coaches who I had been friends with for over a decade. That was 3 deaths in my circle all within a few weeks at exactly the time the vaccine began rolling out to my peer group. This was too much for me, so I began pounding the table to try and make people aware of what I had just seen firsthand.
No one wanted to listen. I was quickly being labeled a nut and a conspiracy theorist. That summer of 2021, our community lost 6 recent high school graduates, and there were loads of random deaths among young people reported in the paper – from car accidents to seizures to drownings to straight up unexplained deaths. As I am writing this and reflecting about that time nearly 4 years ago, I don’t think panic is too strong a word to describe the stress I was experiencing worrying about friends and family that were continuing to take this experimental injection. At this point, I have lost count of all the deaths in my circle. Tragically this list includes the deaths of two of my friends’ minor children, a turbo cancer and an unexplained death in her sleep.
By the time that Fall of 2021 was rolling around, despite the fact that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had stated publicly that the vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission, the pressure to vaccinate was getting extremely intense. The schoolboard had taken up the idea that without vaccination kids should not be allowed to attend school. The California state legislature was working on SB871, which would have made covid vaccination mandatory for all students attending any school, public or private, in the state.
My kids were being kicked off teams, disinvited from parties, and generally losing all access to their friends and social lives. Remember, this is after the CDC Director said that the vaccine did not stop infection or transmission. Why would no one pay attention to the truth being delivered by the CDC Director herself?
In September, one of our kids had a significant mental health crisis. 2 days later I was thrown off the high school mountain bike team coaching staff. When I shared all of that, and the accompanying pain with one of my best friends, he said, “well, that is the way it is right now.” I will never forget that comment. It cut me to the bone. The extreme persecution persisted through the entirety of the year. I continued to pound the table for the preservation of our rights with everyone I encountered. When the issue was on the agenda, I did not miss a school board meeting to advocate for bodily autonomy. I threatened to sue the district, even though there were literally zero attorneys willing to engage with me on this topic. I was later told in confidence by a school board member that the legal threat is what backed them down, so they took my bluff!
Shortly after I presented early studies on the health risks from the vaccine to teenage males, of which I have 3, to the Berkeley School Board in the fall of 2021, my middle son was assaulted in his robotics class by the son of a vaccine zealot. He lost 10 days of school with a concussion. The high school leadership did nothing. That is the same school leadership that never stops talking about racial inequality yet gleefully had two lines to enter all campuses. One for the vaccinated and one for the unvaccinated. Odd that one of the first school districts in the country that attempted racial desegregation had 2 lines to get onto campus, one of which was nearly 100% black, as only 54% of the black student population took the covid injection. I digress.
As our former lives continued to burn to the ground, we did begin making a whole new set of friends that shared our values. Because I was so loud from the very beginning, I was easy for people to find. And boy did people find me. They found me on Twitter. They found me at the school board meetings. They found me through my company Web site. And I found the other loud ones as well, and between the loud ones and the quiet ones all reaching out to each other a beautiful network of freedom fighters emerged. We had several gatherings to support each other in the madness, and a few of the people in this group became quite prominent on the national stage. I treasure these people. I also treasure my rediscovery of Christianity, and love my church community, which never wavered from their love of me and my family. In hindsight, I would not change a thing. Give me more pain if it brings more people like this into my life!
In December of 2022, right after Elon bought X, we hosted a party for the doctors and lawyers suing Gavin Newsom over AB 2098. This was an Orwellian law that would have made deviating from the “approved medical consensus” grounds for losing a medical license. This, in a state that once highly valued alternative healthcare ideas.
Recently announced NIH director candidate Jay Bhattacharya arrived at this party straight after his visit to Elon’s offices. He had many stories to tell us about the censorship program they were uncovering in the first days of the Twitter Files. A nicer guy I have never met. Thank God for his courage during the pandemic, and thank God, we will have him as part of the new administration. This party felt like a critical turning point in the trajectory of the covid madness.
By that Spring of 2023, the school board and state had realized that they could not continue to press on the vaccine mandates and medical “misinformation” laws any longer and things were finally almost over. These days things continue to get better for the unvaccinated and no one, NO ONE, wants to talk about it now. Would you want to come clean about your behavior, which led to such suffering for nothing? Or face the truth about these experimental products which you injected into your body? It is my impression that a little cognitive dissonance about both topics is quite useful.
As much as I want to, I can’t seem to forgive the people that participated in all of this. When I encounter former friends on the street or drive past their houses all I can see is them retreating away from me, rolling up their car windows, grabbing their kids and keeping them distant from me, as they did in late 2021 and 2022. I hear them calling me a grandma killer and a science denier to my face. I remember my best friend in the comments section in the local online news outlet demanding that my kids be barred from school, social events and sports opportunities. I see the school board president, Ty Alper, on a zoom meeting, pounding the table in delight as he called to take away prom from the unvaccinated. I remember being disinvited from the block party, a friend’s 50th, being thrown out of my band, innumerable sporting events and social engagements. I can recall the pain that I experienced when the Berkeley High Mountain Bike team said I could not coach anymore, a team I had donated many 100s of hours and several thousand dollars to, and the one activity I still had in common with my autistic teenage son. Any presentation of facts, rational argument, the death of my wife’s best friend, plea to our previous friendship fell on deaf ears.
I could go on and on, but what is the point? If you are reading this, on this blog, your experience was probably quite similar.
Even now in late 2024 with all the evidence that exists that avoiding the shot placed no one else at any greater risk than if you had taken it, there is no one that will engage with me to discuss it, let alone apologize for their participation in systematically eliminating my family’s right to function normally in society for the better part of 2 years. The YMCA here did not reopen to the unvaccinated until December, 2023. The Aurora Theater did not reopen to the unvaccinated until October of 2024! There was not a lick of outrage by the community that these prohibitions were arbitrary, useless, and de facto creating a system of oppression that disproportionately impacted people of color, even long after everyone, vaccinated or not, had covid at least once.
I have made some effort to forgive and move on, but it failed quite dramatically. I reached out to a handful of my former best friends at the end of the summer this year and invited them for coffee. We caught up on things, work, family, activities we once shared together… At the end of the conversation, I apologized to each of them for my part in the dissolution of our friendship. Although I am not sure how I was supposed to act as I lost everything that I cared about while they stood by idly and watched, I do know I could have been better. When I apologized, I half-heartedly expected that this would inspire a quid pro quo exchange, and that on the other side of my apology would come one from them. They would acknowledge they had a part in ruining a lot of lives, mine included, and we would hug it out and things would return to normal. All 3 of them, in their own way, said something to the effect of, “well, a lot of people needlessly died for avoiding the vaccine…” There was nothing on the other side of that statement and we parted ways. They were still plugged into the propaganda matrix.
For some reason these exchanges allowed me to move on from these friendships forever. I haven’t completely forgiven them, but with their reaction to my apology, I no longer miss them being a part of my life. We are just too different, and I can see that clearly now. I honestly think that for me to forgive my friends and family, and the community at large, that got swept up in this temporary retreat from rationale thought and compassion for alternative points of view around big-pharma products (heretofore one of Berkeley’s core values), there needs to be some reflection and recognition that what transpired during the mandate era was wrong. I need for them to see me, not as a selfish monster for avoiding the shots, but as someone that cares deeply about my friends and family. They need to see that I simply did not lose my critical thinking skills due to the fear inspired by the state with the assistance of the media. I just don’t think that is too much to expect, particularly when less than 20% of Americans have taken the Fall 2024 covid booster. If the CDC recommends the current dose, and 80% have refused it, wouldn’t that put my 2021 position in the 2024 majority? I just got here earlier. These folks should be thanking me because if people like me, hadn’t stood up to shot 1 in 2021, would that 80% even still have the right to refuse shot 9, 10, 11 or whatever number we are on?
In any event, with Jay Bhattacharya being elevated to the director of the NIH under the new administration, I am optimistic that my viewpoint will see some additional light. Could we see science replace #thescience? Might that snap people out of their trance so that they can see what they did to families like mine? Will bodily autonomy and freedom of speech, all speech, once again become sacred American values? I hope some of that is true. Will apologies from formerly treasured friends and family members accompany that awakening? We can pray for that, but I sincerely doubt it. Without those apologies, will I ever be able to drain the poison from my body and be able to fully forgive those that were swept up in this madness? I am working on it. Maybe I just need more time.
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Thank you for sharing your story. It's heartbreaking. Perhaps someday, under another name, I will share my own story. I will say though that these covid years have been like living through a horror movie; so many people's minds and hearts so strangely and so suddenly clamped shut. But those of us who could see what was (and still is) happening are, more and more, realizing that were were never alone, although it seemed so in 2020-2022, and, slowly but surely, we are finding each other.
My old friends (who sound a lot like your old friends)-- I gave up on them a long time ago. They were making no more sense in their thinking about all things covid in 2024 than they were in 2022 or, for that matter, 2020 and, as a general principle, without an abundance of caution, I don't attempt to bang sense into people who are not in their right minds. Some of these individuals I'm still friendly with, but it's "smile and wave," gee, I'm so busy these days, don't know where the time flies, etc. I much prefer my own company, or new friends of more sturdy character. I miss them— but I always have to remind myself, what I miss is my misperception of them as having character and intellect and heart that they did not in fact have.
I often wonder how this will play out. It seems to me that some now know they've been conned, but they don't want to talk about it. Most continue to take refuge in the old canard, "imagine, it would have been worse, I might have died of covid if I hadn't taken all those boosters." I learned early on that attempting to speak frankly with them is like poking an intoxicated person with a stick. So I don't.
I'm not saying my choice in this painful matter is best for others, but it's best for me.
As a practicing physician I knew there was something drastically wrong when they told doctors not to treat patients until they needed hospitalization! When in human history has that been the case? Vaccines don’t treat infections, and I took an oath. None of my patients had to be hospitalized because I used the FLCCC protocols which include ivermectin, the so-called “horse wormer” that works like a charm. High dose vitamins and -voila!- everyone lives.
PS- I’m wondering why more ob-gyns are not going to jail for treating young women bleeding to death in their ER’s ? What happened to their oath?