A Retrospective of a Trauma
Julie Ponesse’s new book is a tender attempt at tackling the invisible epidemic of the COVID era – of how we all became each other’s victims.
Julie Ponesse was a professor of ethics at Huron University College, Ontario, Canada, until, in 2021, the institution mandated the students to be vaccinated against Covid-19, and Ponesse found the move unethical. Refusing to comply, she was banned from the campus and hence lost her job. The occasion is captured and reflected upon is her short essay-like book My Choice from 2022. Her latest release, Our Last Innocent Moment, published last year by Brownstone Institute, is a more thorough retrospective on the period of time many are now eagerly trying to forget, but which we all experienced, to say the least, as something out of the ordinary.
The data
Our Last Innocent Moment is not an academic treatise or a scientific study. Its aim is not to convince the “non-believers” or to accuse and convinct. Not at all, rather it is an attempt at understanding, and even more than that, an attempt at self-expression that others might recognise themselves in. Though centered around the Covid crisis of 2020–2022, it is a book about questions far greater than that. Where are we in today’s society, what are actually our values – or if there are ant left – and what compelled us to polarise so drastically over those years. As Ponesse herself says, it is about losing “our spirit and our sense of wonder” in a society “crippled by certainty” – a society embarking on a pursuit of “moral absolutes”. It is about “a shift towards the ‘politics of intent’ which assumes that, if your intentions are noble and your compassion boundless, you are virtuous, even if your actions ultimately lead to disaster on a colossal scale.”
The data is there though, at least some of it, which should compel us to look back. Ponesse points out how, for example, a Pfizer report released by FDA by the US Court order confirms company’s awareness of the negative efficacy of the vaccine as early as November 2020, how the company soon hired 2,400 employees to process adverse event reports (that were otherwise claimed non-existent), how they knew the vaccine could cause myocarditis within a week of injection, how the shot’s lipid nanoparticles did not remain at the injection site, etc, etc. Each and every one of them alone should be sufficient cause to pause and ask whether the treatment wasn’t causing more harm than benefit. But, obviously, that never happened.
She also quotes a public letter by more 500 physicians in the US, addressed to president Trump during his first term in office, that, among other concerns, stated, in May 2020, in the wake of lockdowns, how “suicide hotline calls and liquor sales had both increased by 600% and 150,000 Americans per month experienced missed cancer diagnoses.”
A more general question is raised about the interweaving of the medical scientists and the pharmaceutical industry. For example, she states, a British Medical Journal review back in 2017 showed that “50% of editors of the world’s most influential medical journals were receiving money from the pharmaceutical industry.” “Medicine and science have proven themselves to be closed systems,” she hence claims quite at the onset of the book, “echo chambers in which even the most minute deviation from their orthodoxies cannot survive.”
The wound
Whether the harsh policies of the time were acts of malice, naivety, stupidity or greediness is another matter. It is however clear by now that most of them did not work and the collateral damages of them were hardly accounted for, the report of a US Congressional Committee being the latest confirmation of it. However, this is not a book about what to prove with the facts. As Ponesse concurs, “I have yet to hear of someone being convinced of the absurdity of the COVID narrative on the basis of reason or evidence alone.”
The thing we missed out on as a society or as people wasn’t really the data, but the depth of our humanity, the book finds. How was it many felt not only capable, but even willing to excommunicate, stigmatise and cancel anyone who dared question their narrative, or ‘science’ – which Ponesse aptly calls ‘scientism’, treating the notion of science as something akin to a dogma. “The invisible epidemic,” she says, was how we all became each other’s victims, and at times with such lauded force and ill will that would have seemed unthinkable before that.
She tells several moving stories to illustrate that, both from her own life and those of her friends and acquaintances – how a family who had vaccinated would suddenly disallow their child to mingle with anyone who hadn’t, how couples who weathered the trials of infidelity and banktruptcy and child loss but who separated over COVID-19, or how a CBC (Canada’s State Broadcasting) journalist, worn down by the atmosphere where “dialogue itself” was though to be “harmful”, left her job. But perhaps the most striking of them all is a headline in Canada’s largest national newspaper, wishing “Let Them Die” to those who refused to “do the protocol”, a wish that was largely accepted in public calm. It is pretty sure it would be rightfully an absolute uproar to even consider such a headline about any other social, racial, ethnic group. Why could such hatred raise its head then in this particular circumstance?

Ponesse’s concern lies in how we have generally come to view the world, and ourselves as human beings, in our Western societies. “What most interests and worries me,” she writes, “is not that the authorities demanded our compliance, nor that the media failed to ask the right questions, but that we submitted so freely.” The deeper issue, she finds, is our intolerance of uncertainty, and hence we are clinging to certainty wherever it is offered, even if it is all inescapably illusory. It is that great fear of losing control than makes one readily willing to submit to being controlled, or even find “comfort” in it, and then to step up to defend that illusion, even despite the obvious erosions of liberty that it will bring. Certainty thus becomes an absolute god, to be revered and if needed, manufactured. We have seen this before, where collectivism has replaced its natural opposite, or enemy – individualism. Straying from the group and refusing to outsource one’s thinking, even if it leads to uncertainty, will thus be seen as a threat to the collective project.
And the greatest injury of it, Ponesse points out, wasn’t even making people lose their job or connections, or have their bodily autonomy repressed – the injury that has been far less talked about was a moral one, and a double one at that. “What makes all of this injury so much worse,” she writes, “is that it largely goes unseen (or unacknowledged).” Denying that it ever happened, or downplaying its size and meaning in every meaningful way, creates a “double trauma” – “victims of the COVID-19 narrative are not only victims of state-sanctioned physical and psychological abuse”, they are also victims of the denial that any of it was unjust, or, as Ponesse finds, that “any of it ever happened”. And as a result, “so many feel invisible.”
The poetry
It feels significant that the introduction of Ponesse’s book opens with a quote from Walt Whitman, the great American poet of the 19th century. Whitman’s famous collection Leaves of Grass, which he kept rewriting throughout his life, feels a relevant rudder of direction here. Already the title – Leaves of Grass – is a statement of proportion and perspective, and a suggestion of a different kind of cohesion. It gives significance to something very small and seemingly commonplace, but is also a hint of the vast firmament above those leaves of grass that make them living, moving, possible.
Trauma won’t pass just with a passage of time, Ponesse warns, and as quoted above, having yet to see anyone who would change their mind on “the basis of reason or evidence alone”, it is hard to expect a ready apology or help from the perpretators of the trauma. Rather, as we have seen, they are being pardoned. For admitting the wrong would mean a permanent down-ranking of oneself in the public eye and it seems human nature, or ego, to avoid it. True catharsis would anyhow require “much soul-searching and atonement,” Ponesse notes, “and I worry that this might be too much to expect at a time when introspection is so unfashionable.”
What Ponesse advises here is to rather give up on the expectation. “The only way forward,” she says, “might be to honour our injury by remembering the harm, while letting go of the idea that those who harmed us will be part of the story of our healing.” The solution is not to become stubborn and harsh in return. There is little to be achieved by retribution, for it wouldn’t fill the lack of the acknowledgement of harm, she points out. A better strategy would be return to the devices of Walt Whitman and truly accept one’s fragility, which is the heart of true poetry. To build oneself up again, even with the wound – it is precisely “in trying to be superhuman that we have turned ourselves into savages.” “Facts, alone, will never be able to answer the questions we really need to ask,” Ponesse writes, poetically. “The cure is to realise our place in something greater than ourselves.”
Our Last Innocent Moment is not really a hopeful book. It doesn’t look to the horizon and see a great reckoning coming. I guess the best case scenario would be that when we look back at this work a generation later, we will see the stated as obvious – and if we don’t, it is likely that we are lost and forgotten. “A war is being waged on us,” Ponesse warns, “over whether our lives mean anything at all”, referring to the pressure to have one’s liberties curtailed, little by little, as over the Covid crisis, to ultimately convince a person “that all the little choices he makes everyday are futile”. But expressing the pain, just for the personal advantage of having expressed that, can be a part of the healing too. “Darkness always creates the greatest opportunities for growth and self-awareness, and for us to intentionally remake ourselves for the better,” she concludes with a glimmer of dawn.
Very personal and honest, a touching read.
Dr. Ponesse’s personal website is julieponesse.com.
Excellent and needed reflection. Liked and shared. Thank you.
So true. As Aldo Sterone put it rightly *, Covid era broke the notion of being a citizen. i.e. a member of a community where every person is valuated as such.
I would say worse : Covid war on the people crudely put into light the fact that no one matters for the psychopathic rulers above us. And the less short-sighted among us realize it is so since the dawn of time.
* https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-Ca-u001s