My Story: Joel Pryor, Founder of the WSI

Why I got my first jab voluntarily, adamantly refused my second, and then eventually caved in for the sake of my family

The following story was written by Joel Pryor, the founder of the Winston Smith Initiative. It was first published online on October 3, 2023. Please read until the end for an updated author’s note.

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I got my first dose of Pfizer in August 2021. At the time I had some concerns about the safety of the vaccine, but I nonetheless believed that it would prevent me from catching and spreading the virus. I didn't want to be responsible for infecting my older and more vulnerable family members, so I walked into the clinic and rolled up my sleeve voluntarily.

To be honest, I was fine afterwards. I remember feeling relieved and thinking that my concerns about the vaccine's safety had been overblown.

I was scheduled to return three weeks later for my second dose — but during that time, I stumbled across a study that made me reconsider the appointment.

The study was from Israel, and it had found that fully vaccinated individuals were getting infected at an alarming rate. After doing some more research, I learnt that similar observations had been made in the US, the UK, and other countries as well.

I decided that if the vaccine wasn't going to stop me from catching and spreading the virus, then it wasn't worth getting. So I didn't go back for my second dose.

I also expected, in light of this emerging evidence, that the politicians would drop their mass vaccination targets. But they never did — in fact, they doubled down.

In November, Annastasia Palaszczuk joined other state and territory leaders in making vaccination compulsory across a broad range of industries. I was living and working in Queensland at the time. On November 22 I attended the freedom rally on the Cairns Esplanade, where the column of people marching against the mandates was kilometres long.

It made no difference. A few weeks later, I lost two jobs because I wasn’t fully vaccinated.

I needed a new way to support myself, so in early 2022 I packed my bags and drove to Mildura in the hope of finding work as a harvest labourer. I took a job at a vineyard owned by a down-to-earth couple who thankfully didn't give a damn about my vaccination status.

For the next two months, all went well. I felt like I'd beaten the system. But then I received news that changed everything.

I found out that my grandfather was dying. He’d been diagnosed with cancer months earlier, but while I was in Mildura his condition became terminal. From that point forward, my family knew that he was going to be spending more and more of his time in hospital.

Unvaccinated people weren’t allowed inside hospitals as a visitor, so I had to make a tough decision: should I continue to remain unvaccinated out of principle, or should I submit to the jab so that I could visit him in his final months?

After thinking long and hard, I made the difficult decision to go back for my second dose.

I believed at the time that I was making the right decision. A large part of me still believes that. When he died, I was there in the room alongside other family members. It makes me uneasy to think that I might’ve missed that moment because I was forced to wait outside.

But there are pros and cons to every decision — and in my case, there was a disturbing downside.

Several weeks after getting the second dose, I became aware of a tender lump in my groin. At first I thought it was a swollen lymph node, so I ignored it and hoped it would go away.

It didn’t. 48 hours later, it was larger and even more painful. Worried, I booked the next available appointment with my GP.

The GP examined the lump, then stood back with a concerned expression on his face. “That feels like a blood clot,” he said.

He sent me to get an ultrasound that same afternoon. The ultrasound confirmed it — I had a 25mm blood clot in the vein in my groin.

My GP’s initial suspicion was that I had a genetic disorder that predisposed me to clotting. He put me through a series of tests to gather more information.

Surprisingly, the results all came back within the healthy range. I didn’t have a genetic condition, nor did I have any of the problems that would normally be associated with blood clotting. As far as the tests were concerned, I was healthy.

My GP was baffled. He said that in more than 20 years of practicing medicine, he’d never seen a spontaneously occurring blood clot in a fit and healthy 26-year-old.

He explained that if the clot had formed in a deeper vein, I would’ve been at risk of a pulmonary embolism, a potentially deadly condition that occurs when the clot breaks apart and gets lodged in the lungs. But I was lucky — the clot was superficial, and therefore not life-threatening.

I took some mild blood thinners and it eventually broke down without any further complications. That was more than a year ago and I haven’t had any issues since (touch wood).

But the fact remains that I developed a blood clot for no discernible reason, seemingly out of nowhere. To this day, my GP is at a loss to explain it.

I strongly suspect that my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine was to blame for my health problems. Clotting is now a known side effect of the mRNA vaccines, although that wasn’t acknowledged when they were first rolled out.

But as I said, I’m one of the lucky ones. I dodged the bullet. Others weren’t so fortunate.

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UPDATE (Sunday March 10, 2024):

The moral of this story is that, for many people, the decision to get vaccinated against Covid-19 was not an easy one.

The vaccine rollout was accompanied by a full-scale propaganda campaign that used fear and shame to maximise compliance. I’m man enough to admit that I fell for the propaganda, at least initially. I got my first dose voluntarily because I believed that I’d be endangering others if I didn’t.

Later, after learning that the vaccines were far less effective than advertised, I changed my position. I held out on getting my second dose, a decision that cost me two jobs and strained my relationships with family and friends. It turned me, like so many Australians, into a second-class citizen in my own country, locked out of gyms, pubs, restaurants, and a vast array of public venues and events.

The social alienation was difficult, but it wasn’t what compelled me to eventually get my second dose. That decision was motivated by a sense of obligation to my family, and particularly to my dying grandfather. I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting outside in the hospital carpark while the rest of my family was at his bedside. That would’ve been immensely painful for me — but more importantly, it would’ve seemed as though I was making a political point at the expense of a terminally ill relative.

That would not have been true, of course, but there was no way in which I could’ve argued my case without appearing horribly self-centred. Emotion has a way of impairing reason, and at the time my family was understandably emotional. There was no amount of scientific evidence I could have presented that would have convinced them that my stand was reasonable. Under the circumstances, my refusal to get vaccinated would inevitably have been perceived as an act of disrespect towards my grandfather at the time when he most needed our love and support.

And so, for the sake of not making the situation even more stressful and heartbreaking than it already was, I set aside my concerns and once more rolled up my sleeve. It didn’t make anyone safer, but it did enable me to enter the hospital — and so it was that I ended up by my grandfather’s side on August 25, 2022, the day that he passed.

You could argue that my decision was cowardly: that I sacrificed my principles in order to preserve my reputation. You could further argue that if everyone had taken a stand, the mandates would’ve crumbled — that the insanity only prevailed because people like me weren’t willing to endure discomfort for the greater good.

And yet I did endure discomfort: I lost friends, money and a lifestyle I cherished as a consequence of my refusal to get my second jab in the latter part of 2021. I had to resort to picking grapes in the summer heat for minimum wage in order to stay afloat financially. I experienced the unshakeable shame of knowing that I was viewed as stupid, selfish and filthy by those around me, including by some people whose opinion I had always valued.

My capitulation came only when my decision to remain unvaccinated threatened to hurt the people I cared for the most — and this is where so many Australians drew the line. I know many parents who were staunchly opposed to the vaccines, but ultimately submitted because refusing to do so would’ve jeopardised their employment and therefore their ability to provide for their family. As I wrote in my essay Tyrannity:

Failure to submit was not a crime technically, but it nonetheless carried a punishment that for most people was unbearably severe. For those with careers to preserve, mortgages to pay and kids to feed, there was no real choice. Acquiescence was their only option.

And therein lies the evil of the mandates. By making vaccination a condition of employment, they obliterated the informed consent of every Australian who couldn’t afford to lose their income. They took our careers hostage, brandished a sledgehammer over our future, and put a gun to the temple of those who relied on us. They were a vicious tool of subjugation — short of an actual physical threat, the most compelling form of coercion imaginable.

This is why I wholeheartedly dispute the blanket characterisation of those who got vaccinated as “cowards”. To this day I’m not sure whether getting my second shot was the right decision — but what I do know, without doubt, is that the decision wasn’t made freely. It was forced upon me by an utterly irrational government policy that should never have been implemented in the first place, much less maintained for as long as it was.

We all have a unique story of the pandemic. For some of us, that story was one of resistance at all costs; for others, of strategic surrender. But we can’t allow these decisions, made under extreme duress and in the shadow of an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, to continue to divide us going forward. The one thing we all have in common is that we did what we believed was right at the time.

The right thing, now, is to come together in pursuit of truth, justice and accountability. That’s the mission of the Winston Smith Initiative. I implore you to join us.