“The country that was once predicted to be the first to vaccinate its entire population had the highest per-capita caseload of anywhere.” That country is Israel. See Bloomberg’s scary headline: “Israel’s Covid Surge Shows the World What’s Coming Next.” The situation points to something that we ignore at our peril, that any government would mandate a vaccine that doesn’t work should signal stupidity. But governments aren’t that stupid. It’s an agenda. By allowing the hosts of mutants to interact with others, a leaky vaccine that lessens symptoms short-circuits natural selection and prolongs the pandemic. (See my Are We Forgetting Darwin?)
From a humanitarian standpoint, the mass vaccine program is a disaster. In the United States, the delta mutation may be cresting. If so, this indicates that herd immunity is growing again through infection with this variant. But the vaccine can’t stop the mutants. Infection produces twenty times the antibodies produced by vaccination and antibodies produced by actual exposure to the virus have a better memory. At some point, the 99.9+% of those who will suffer at most a flu-like illness from the virus are going to have get one or more of these mutants. It’s the same process populations had to go through with adenoviruses and rhinoviruses. And humans still need lots of exposure to these cold viruses to develop the immunity that will protect them in their latter years. We should not be where we are. We are not here because of the unvaccinated. Scientists needs to bury their hubris and let evolution do its work.
CNN carried the headline: “‘Completely incorrect’: Dr. Fauci pushes back on DeSantis’ vaccine claim.” But Governor Ron DeSantis is right. If you are in a high risk category and you believe the vaccine can help prevent serious illness, then consider taking it. But the risks from the vaccine may outweigh the risks of the virus to a healthy person. Also, as trends in cases suggest, mass vaccination is prolonging the pandemic (see A Pandemic of the Vaccinated). The effort to portray the unvaccinated as the problem is one of the more despicable mass propaganda campaigns of the last several decades. Authorities have moved from humans-as-disease-vectors to a specific group of humans are-the-disease. The idea that it’s only the unvaccinated who can contract and spread the viruses is a big lie. We know that the vaccinated carry and transmit the virus to others. This fact makes the propaganda all the more obvious. Yet people keep falling for it. Scientific literacy is not in good shape.
People are also falling for the big lie about ivermectin. The Ohio judge who ordered a hospital to administer ivermectin to a COVID-19 patient has changed his mind. (Somebody got to him.) “Judges aren’t doctors,” the judge said in overturning his own ruling They don’t have to be. It’s not like doctors know everything anyway. Through medical error, over-treatment and under-treatment, doctors and medical staff kill people everyday, hundreds of thousands every year. No industry is responsible for more death and injury than the medical-industrial complex. Do they save lives? Sure. But they also kill. Besides, wasn’t it judges who said people could be compelled to be inoculated with the small pox vaccine, a ruling that other judges ran with, including judges today that are allowing mandates for mRNA gene therapy? (See The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.) Judges can’t compel doctors to stop denying patients access to a drug the efficacy and safety for which is backed up by dozens of studies?
Have you heard about the Rolling Stone magazine story about Oklahoma hospitals being so swamped by ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims were turned away? Turns out that it wasn’t true (see National Review’s“Like a Rolling Stone” for details). Rolling Stone did not issue a correction or retraction, however, but an “update.” Clever. (It this really why Matt Taibbi left the magazine?) The ivermectin panic is a straightforward case of propaganda and confirmation bias. It started as a local story with one source. Because the corporate news media wants stories that show ivermectin in a bad light (the scientific research indicates that it is effective in preventing and treating COVID-19 and that is bad for the pharmaceutical companies that advertise with corporate media—for details see my See Profits Before People: Civilians Denied Cheap and Effective Therapeutics—and because elites want to make people in the heartland look like ignoramuses who foul everything up, they picked up the disinformation and ran with it without bothering to confirm the facts. The usual suspects like Rachael Maddow and Joy Reid took the bait big time. Only one of the hospitals this doctor worked for (he has privileges at more than one) reported cases of ivermectin problems and—I will use quotes here because this is the spokesperson’s characterization of the supposed tsunami of ivermectin overdoses—these amounted to a “handful” of cases. There is zero evidence that this had anything to do with bed shortages in Oklahoma hospitals.
This story is an example of corporate propaganda that began with the planting of disinformation that could not in the end withstand factchecking. But that doesn’t mean it won’t prove successful in the end. Many people heard it, believed it, and won’t bother to find out whether it is true. It fits the narrative and that is too often all that matters. These are the sort of people who dishonestly characterize ivermectin as “horse dewormer” or ignorantly believe that’s what it is. It’s not. Ivermectin is listed on the WHO’s 2019 Model List of Essential Medicines under the category anti-infective medication. Then there are those outlets (CNN is exemplary) that, in supposedly clarifying the story, turn it into an attack on those who debunked the story.
Such stories are hard to get rid of once they have been planted. Remember needles and razorblades in apples? Or Richard Gere and gerbiling (there’s no evidence gerbiling is even a sexual practice—although one can imagine some cosmopolitan type doing it because he thinks it is thanks to an urban legend)? I have no doubt that there were parents back then rationalizing the fact that, while there was no evidence that Halloween apples contained needles or razorblades, it was best to throw out the candy. When people are frightened, they imagine incredible things. Stories of poison-laced Halloween candy were more frequent, for example, in the context of the Tylenol scare. Richard Gere’s gerbiling was a product of jealousy over the tendency of wives and girlfriends to dwell on his good looks.
The manufacture and exploitation of fear is an important driver of mass hysteria used by elites to manipulate the emotions of the gullible and control them. (A sampling of my essays on panic: The Enduring Panic Over SARS-CoV-2; Panic and Paranoia Deaden Humanity and Sabotage Its Future; Viruses, Agendas, and Moral Panics.) The COVID-19 pandemic is a clinic in moral panic. Tens of billions of dollars have been made on it. Of course, not from ivermectin, which is why there is so much disinformation concerning it. There’s no money in ivermectin. Or hydroxychloroquine.
Sociology is not merely concerned with external social forces and relations but also with the mental life of its subject matter, which necessarily includes people. At least it should. I have always found sociological work that excludes or minimizes concrete individuals and human agency as incomplete at best.
Lately, I have been writing more about matters of psychiatry and social psychology. Although I have an undergraduate degree in psychology from a major state university, critics may claim I am unqualified to speak on this topic. In addition to several years conducting program evaluation for an alcohol and treatment facility, in which, despite not being qualified to evaluate clients, I was nonetheless exposed to psychiatric categories, cases, and industry-wide aggregate statistical patterns, I also have a masters degree and a PhD in sociology.
There is a robust social psychology in my chosen discipline. George Herbert Mead, a principal founder of the perspective Herbert Blumer tagged “symbolic interactionism,” describes his own views as “social behaviorism.” Erving Goffman writes powerfully on mental life, as you will see below, as does Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (social constructionism). Howard Becker and his cohort pioneered labeling theory. There is also a robust tradition in sociology of critical examination of the institution and practice of medicine. This essay is an instantiation of that tradition.
Have doctors “over-treated” this woman?
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a condition where persons obsess over perceived defects in their appearance. A woman with an emaciated body sees a fat person in the mirror. Another woman wishes to be an alien because the human form is ordinary. She want to become a “beautiful monster,” as the woman in the above video who appears to be wearing a mask describes herself. A man might see an arm that shouldn’t be there, so he removes it with a power tool. Another will crush his legs beneath concrete slabs so doctors will amputate them. The transabled person, if you will accept that construct for a moment, is a person who feels trapped or feels like an imposter in his own body. It’s the wrong body and he seeks to transform it into the right body, to become that which he feels is in him. His disability is by choice. Another man finds his genitals alien to him. I am describing actual cases.
The person suffering from BDD may desire to surgically alter her appearance in ways that are disfiguring to those who do not suffer from this disorder—and even to herself, if and when she realizes what she has done. In a bid to specify BDD in light of these cases, which are growing in frequency, a newer label has emerged, namely Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This named disorder appears around 2013. BIID is diagnosed when a person has a pathologically strong desire to remove an appendage or substantially alter his body. It is a species of BDD.
Some doctors believe persons who want to transform their bodies in disfiguring ways should be allow to do so. Such surgery is already occurring in the United States. Align Surgical Associates Inc., a medical firm based in San Francisco, endorsed by, among others, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Medical Association, and the Aesthetic Society, will perform a surgical procedure known as “nullification” on those who wish “to enjoy a relatively smooth genital area,” a “mostly unbroken transition from the abdomen down.” The firm offers this procedure for those who wish to “enjoy a body that looks closer on the outside to the way they feel on the inside.” Some people wish to have no genitals and Align Surgical Associates Inc. will make that happen. For a fee, of course. (The firm’s website has a gallery, if you are interested.)
I did not label the practice of complete removal of genitalia “nullification.” This is the term Align Surgical Associates Inc. use in marketing their services. It’s an industry term. In a world increasingly conveyed in Orwellian Newspeak, nullification is a straightforward way to describe a procedure that erases the genitals. To nullify is to make of no use or value, to cancel out, to invalidate. The difference between invalid and invalid is only a matter of pronunciation.
At this point, I want to emphasize two things. First, just as we have sympathy for those stricken with cancer or other serious physical afflictions, we must also have sympathy for those who suffer from mental afflictions, who feel trapped in the wrong body or find normal appendages alien or repulsive. The agony of such obsessive and self-destructive thoughts is nothing we would wish on others or should make light of. In the effort to destigmatize mental illness (without excusing the harm such illnesses may cause), we must treat such conditions seriously and in a manner that future generations won’t look back on in horror at the harm the doctor wrought. Psychosurgical interventions, such as the lobotomy, serve as poignant reminders of the excesses of surgical intervention in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.
Second, there are cases where a person has a defect, disfigurement, or a feature that does not conform with social expectations and wishes to change her or his appearance to experience greater inclusion in society. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about this in his landmark work Stigma, published in 1963. Goffman defines stigma as an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” (see this essay for a useful summary of his ideas and their elaboration in the literature). Plastic surgeons play an important role in helping persons suffering from physical stigma achieve a more socially inclusive appearance. The desire to erase or minimize physical stigma with surgical intervention is not BDD, but rather an effort to normalize a person.
One response to the desire to alter one’s body to align with social expectation is to demand that society reform its expectations—as if these expectations are arbitrary or chosen. Fat shaming is to be met with body positivity or children should be presumed genderless, to take two examples. The lethality of obesity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the wrongheadedness of the fat acceptance movement. However, social expectations roots, at least in part, in natural history and serve necessary functions for, among other things, the successful propagation of the species. Gender cannot be entirely disentangled from sex for this reason: humans don’t always get the sex of their desire right, but, if gender aligns, they get it right enough to produce offspring. We are startled by the woman’s appearance in the video because we have brains that evolved to detect faces that are within a normal range of appearance. Fetishes aside, faces lying outside that range create anxiety because they signal danger, deformity, or disease. Our brains tells us that she is a monster.
We can see that the woman in the video has disfigured herself. One is lying to himself if he says he believes she hasn’t. Or, again, maybe that person has a fetish for beautiful monsters. Perhaps, at first, she could not see what she and her doctors had done. In her mind, she was becoming what she feels on the inside. She thought she had cheeks like a hamster, she tells us in the video; she wanted bigger cheek bones. The process unfolded for her in much the same way it did for Michael Jackson. Was it Jackson’s goal to resemble a white-faced version of the Red Skull from Marvel Comics? At some point, people who do this to themselves must realize they have altered their face beyond the normal. The woman in the video certainly does. She realized this because of the societal reaction she provokes, especially from children who have not yet learned the practice of civil inattention. Rationalizing perhaps, she now describes herself as a monster, but a beautiful one. In the few short minutes we see her, it appears that a cluster B personality disorder accompanies her BDD.
I need to say more about stigma to get to the heart of the problem I see with surgical intervention to treat the various forms of body and identity dysmorphia. I will get at this by telling you story.
One day, I was picking up my son from school. All the parents were waiting outside, as they always do. There was a man on crutches who was missing a leg. He was unfamiliar to those assembled. At least I had never seen him before. Maybe a visiting uncle? A war veteran ready to face the world? Those who knew the man could see them engaged in civil inattention, i.e., the habitual disregard for abnormality. The adults behind the man, when they thought nobody could see them, stared at the empty space where a leg should be.
Of course, the man knew he had a leg missing. He also knew those engaged in civil inattention were acknowledging that fact by not acknowledging it. The thing with civil inattention is that its occurrence is quite conspicuous to those who are its subject. They shoulder the burden of knowing they are different, that everybody knows they are different, but that people are ignoring the difference because they believe regarding the difference would cause the person embarrassment or pain. It’s an act of reflexive empathy. Mature civil inattention can be so complete that the person doing the disregarding is not even aware that he is doing it. It is automatic.
My mind was working in that particular sociological way as I stood there observing the scene. I knew I was about to experience a Goffmanian moment. I wondered how many other parents knew what was about to happen. Soon, the bell would ring, the kids would burst from the school doors, and they would all see the man with the missing leg. Soon enough, the bell rang and the children burst from the doors, chockfull of the energy tedium accumulates. The limb difference immediately disrupted the expected social flow. The children’s gait quickly reduced to a slow walk. Mesmerized, they all looked at the empty space their parents had pretended not to notice. It was all the children could focus on. Of course it was. It was if time had slowed down.
I watched, one by one, as parents scolded their children, in that silent way, with a firm squeeze of the arm, and sometimes a hush when the child asked what they did wrong. I imagined the talk on the way home. Not hard to imagine. The children were made to feel bad over something they had no control over. Their animality worked as it should. But it is precisely our animality that requires suppression in human society. They were punished for being what nature made them, disciplined with an eye towards reflexively burying that nature beneath on overbearing ego.
In Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Anne Hathaway’s character, the Grand Witch, has missing fingers.
How far should we take denial of abnormality? Perhaps you remember a recent controversy concerning Warner Bros’ remake of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Anne Hathaway’s character’s hands depict an abnormality or deformity (or difference, to be politically correct) called ectrodactyly, commonly known as “split hand.” Advocates from the disability community, self-appointed spokespersons the social problems literature sometimes refers to as “moral entrepreneurs,” complained that the depiction is insensitive and even harmful, as it associates disability with disgust, evil, fear, loathing, monstrosity, etc. Warner Bros apologized for any offense caused.
The complaint is problematic for a couple of reasons. I have already at least implied much of this. It is not the portrayal of limb difference that causes anxiety or instills fear in children, reactions that may take extreme forms, for example apotemnophobia or dysmorphophobia (pathological fear or loathing of missing limbs or deformities respectively). Even a slight deviation from the normal can produce anxiety in many children. At least it will draw their attention. As people with strabismus (crossed eyes) or ptosis (drooping eyelid) will tell you, slight misalignment of an eye or a squinty eye will almost invariable cause children to ask, “What’s wrong with your eye?” Especially if their parents aren’t around. As a child, I suffered from apotemnophobia, a malady that my parents quickly corrected in a series of dinners with a lovely young friend of theirs missing her arm at the elbow. At first, I didn’t want to come out of my bedroom. Soon she once driving me to the movies in her VW. I marveled at her ability to shift gears.
Children only learn civil disobedience—the ability to disregard deviation or disturbance—over time. Moreover, extreme reactions towards difference are not always marked by fear and loathing. In some children and adults, limb difference may generate attraction, for example, in apotemnophilia, a fetish for amputees. And, of course, in a properly ordered personality, empathy is the common response, which reflect one’s horror at the thought of this being their own circumstance. The point is that it’s not the reaction that is social, but rather the non-reaction. The initial reaction is natural. The animal brain, an evolved organ, assumes normality. We inherited facial recognition wetware from our ancestors. It’s primordial. If a face is not quite right, it will produce anxiety or fascination. Phobias and fetishes are rooted in recognition of physical or behavioral deviation from the norm. Differences may produce anxiety or empathy, but they are inevitably experienced.
Second, monsters of all sorts, vampires, witches, etc., are the sublimations of behavioral and physical abnormalities in people. The real world is the concrete substance of folktales and myths, horror stories. It is the source of Zemeckis’ vision of the Grand Witch. This has been a feature of human society since the dawn of civilization—and likely long before then. Fear management and negotiation of difference may be functional. If a witch in the Warner Bros movies should not be so depicted because that is offensive to some in the disability community (and we cannot assume the moral entrepreneurs speak for the community—or that there even is a community), then there are great many movies that should not have been made or should not be made in the future. But if there are useful functions associated with literature and art made around difference, should we avoid it for the sake of those who are offended?
Which brings us to the heart of the problem: things have flipped. What we see in the cases of surgical treatments of BDD and BIID is changing the appearance of a person not to erase or minimize an objective appearance others find startling or revolting, but changing appearances others regard as normal into something they will find startling or revolting. The person seeking surgery in this case falsely perceives a defect or deformity, and in changing that feature, produces one.
In the video, the interviewers refer to what doctors did to this woman (will they do more?) as “treatments.” The doctors are making money by disfiguring her. The more people doctors can convince to accept as treatment for psychiatric disorders the surgical altering of the body to align with delusion, the more money these doctors can make cutting on people. The woman reports that none of the medical staff who have treated her have ever told her that she has gone too far. Look at her. Those who are supposed to care for her enabled her transformation into “beautiful monster.” The interviewers rationalize the situation saying that appearance is “subjective” and that the surgeon who believes she has been “over-treated” (even he can’t get away from the Newspeak) is expressing an opinion that apparently has no greater weight than the opinion of the victim of the medical-industrial complex.
This is a psychiatric disorder. As Thomas Szasz taught us, the mind is not something that can be defective or diseased. The notion of mental illness is a metaphor. But that doesn’t change much practically. The mind lives in the brain and the brain can be damaged, defective, or diseased, and such conditions can result in disordered thoughts and distorted perceptions. In BDD, there is a disruption in the normal process of transduction of environmental stimuli. The brain has difficulty accurately mapping the body and processing visual information. Those suffering from BDD have difficulty processing other faces, which confirms their perception that there is something wrong with their bodies. They see neutral faces as angry and judgmental faces. This suggests that something is going on in the regions of brain that process body language and facial expression, chief semiotic indicators of attitude and intent.
There is still a great deal we do not know about the pathophysiology of BDD, but “clues to its possible neurobiological substrates and abnormalities in information processing are starting to emerge,” writes Jamie Feusner and associates in “The Pathophysiology of Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” published in Body Image (2008). Here’s part of the abstract:
“This article reviews findings from genetic, brain lesion, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and psychopharmacological studies that have allowed us to develop a tentative model of the functional neuroanatomy of BDD. There is likely a complex interplay of dysfunctions in several brain networks underlying the pathophysiology of BDD. A combination of dysfunctions in frontal-subcortical circuits, temporal, parietal, and limbic structures, and possibly involving hemispheric imbalances in information processing, may produce both the characteristic symptoms and neurocognitive deficits seen in BDD. An improved understanding of the pathophysiology of BDD will be crucial to guide the development of better treatments.”
When the medical industry develops those better treatments, how will society rationalize the legacy of the beautiful monsters who paid for the palatial estates of ambitious and enterprising plastic surgeons? Will we be allowed to tell the truth about it? Will we be allowed to use that truth to prevent the creation of future monsters?
I have seen this meme now several times. Pay attention to language. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, not a bacteria. Bacteria are much bigger than viruses (by at least a factor of ten). Viruses range in size from 0.02 to 0.25 micron diameter. Bacteria are also much less likely to be aerosolized than viruses. They are heavier and fall downward at a faster rate. This is why surgeons use face mask, so that bacteria do not fall from their noses and mouths and contaminate surfaces (or are less likely to do so). Aerosolized viruses are not in the form of respiratory droplets that masks are designed to stop. That’s why that other meme showing the man pissing on another man’s leg is so absurd. Aerosolized particles are nothing like urine. Viruses easily go through and around the sides of masks. Wearing a mask to stop a virus is like trying to keep out mosquitos with a chainlink fence.
Because viruses are so small, they remain in the air for days. Inside. Not outside, where sunlight kills them. Inside, where the experts told everybody to go. Viruses accumulate inside. So when you’re at the grocery store with your mask on, and there have been people in the store with COVID-19, you are walking through aerosolized virus, suspended for an even longer time thanks to constant airflow. Your mask does not protect you.
Stephen Petty – On PPE and Aerosols
Watching lectures by industrial hygienists on the efficacy of masks vis-a-vis viruses (for example, see above), it becomes obvious that the obsession with masks amounts to a ritual act in the worship of the corporate state. Masks are like hijabs. Both function to avoid offending powerful entities that limit freedom for the sake of glorifying control. The only things wearing them will protect you from are shame and discipline.
There are some other useful conclusions to draw from what industrial hygienists are teaching us. First, most people have been exposed to this virus repeatedly but not everybody who is exposed gets sick. Why? It is likely that, since most of us have had coronavirus infections throughout our lives, we already enjoy some immunity from it. As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, coronaviruses are among the several viruses that causes the common cold (rhinoviruses and adenoviruses are other common cold pathogens). This means the R0 associated with SARS-CoV-2 is low compared to, say, the R0 with measles. I am not choosing the most extreme R0 to make the comparison. Anthony Fauci is the man who argues that SARS-CoV-2 is so contagious that we need to reach the same vaccine coverage as measles (around 95 percent) to reach herd immunity. SARS-CoV-2 is more in the R0 range of the flu. That means that, if these vaccines work, a big if, we surpassed herd immunity by virtue of the numbers vaccinated so far, approaching 55 percent for fully vaccination, with more than 60 percent having received at least one shot, which expects tell us has a significant degree of efficacy. But the vaccines are leaky, which means that they don’t prevent infection. The likely reason why we are back where we were during the peak (see chart below) is leaky vaccines that keep the vaccinated healthy enough to get out in the world and spread the virus and, moreover, keep the more sickening strains from being victims of natural selection.
COVID-19 cases have soared with the spread of vaccination.
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According to the CDC, during the 2018–2019 season, 136 deaths in children with laboratory–confirmed influenza virus infection were reported in the United States. The CDC notes that influenza-associated pediatric deaths are likely under-reported as not all children whose death was related to an influenza virus infection may have been tested for influenza. Using several sources of data, the CDC estimates that there were approximately 480 deaths associated with influenza in children during 2018–2019. For the 2017-2018 flu season, 186 pediatric deaths were reported, which was the highest number since the 2009-2010 season, where 348 pediatric deaths were reported. The CDC does not estimate numbers for these other seasons in the report, but if they look anything like the estimates for the 2018-2019 season, then the numbers of pediatric deaths in any of them greatly exceed pediatric deaths from COVID-19.
COVID-19 involves vastly higher rates of testing, so the need to estimate is not as pressing. As of August 26, 4.8 million children had tested positive for COVID-19. To date, taking the greatest range of ages that could conceivably be classified as children (0-18), there have been 470 pediatric deaths during the pandemic. Keep in mind that this is over an eighteen-month time span, a much greater timeframe than any flu season (ask yourself why they are doing a continuous run of disease and death with COVID-19 and not breaking it up into seasons like influenza, which is also a continual thing). This means fewer pediatric deaths over a longer period of time from COVID-19 compared to influenza. The pediatric case-fatality rate for children is 0.00979. The infection fatality rate is considerably less than this. And they want to mandate masks and vaccines. We locked down schools for this.
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According to the CDC, the average number of serious health conditions, or comorbidities, associated with COVID-19 deaths is four? as I have reported before, according to the CDC, only five percent of those who have COVID-19 listed on their death certificate died of COVID exclusively. This is why it is important to eat right and exercise. Obesity is a real killer. But should we mandate it?
Are progressives irate over the Texas law telling women what they can do with their bodies also calling for mandatory vaccines? I remember them calling conservatives hypocrites for carrying signs saying “My body my choice.” A hypocritical position works both ways.
I got push back for this. A pregnancy is not contagious. This, of course, misses the point. The principle in question is bodily autonomy (libertarian concern) over against harm to others (communitarian concern), not whether pregnancy is contagious. If one is going to argue that the state can violate a person’s bodily autonomy for the sake of other people on a medical matter, then the argument about abortion is lost. The fetus is alive. It is a human by virtue of its genetics. Abortion kills a human. Therefore, the woman’s body can be controlled for the sake of the fetus.
That’s the wrong argument. Totalitarianism flows from the abandonment of the principle of bodily autonomy. It makes people pawns of technocratic goals, of public health authorities (who, quite clearly, are not oracles). This isn’t at all like a man who intentionally harms others. Imagine the state commandeering our bodies to support the lives of those with diseased kidneys. It’s not my fault somebody’s kidneys are diseased. They can’t have one of mine. Indeed, the case against abortion is much stronger than the case for vaccines because vaccines are imposed on healthy people who may not get infected (and may be injured by the vaccine), whereas an abortion is almost guaranteed to kill a human being (there have been a tiny percentage of fetuses that survived an attempted abortion). And hundreds die every year waiting for a kidney, while most people have two functioning ones. Isn’t society killing people with kidney disease by failing to use other people’s kidneys to save them?
COVID-19 is not the only contagion. There are a myriad of pathogens transmissible through human contact. If that’s the principle, then we should mandate vaccines for each and every vaccine produced by Big Pharma—and administer all available antivirals for those who testing positive. HPV for men. Who cares if they don’t have a uterus. His body must be clean for others. Etcetera. It won’t do to say that COVID-19 is more serious than all those other pathogens—as a factual matter, it’s not. In fact, if you are not obese, then you will are almost certain to survive COVID-19. So why don’t we regulate civilian food intake? Why don’t we poke people with sticks until they get off the couch? No, we instead recommend people diet and exercise and get a vaccine. If they don’t to do these things, that’s on them.
Even if one wanted the argument to be about contagion, it is clear at this point that there is COVID-19 vaccine in existence or in the conceivable future that prevents infection and transmission—or even sickness and death—from SARS-CoV-2. It’s like influenza, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, etc. (all potentially lethal, by the way). Look at the trend lines in the above chart. The vaccine not only isn’t working, but it’s increased use is associated with a rise in cases. Are the causally related? Could be. There’s a compelling argument about that. However, we are now back where we were when COVID-19 was at its worst, and it’s not because people aren’t getting vaccinated.
The communitarian argument crashes not only on the rocks of bodily autonomy, but upon the spiked protein of a leaky vaccine. What the vaccine does do is make people who are infected less sick. If a person wanted to reduce his personal risk of getting sick, he’d think about the vaccine and weight the risks. Same with going on a diet and exercising. But that’s up to the individual.
It has pointed out to me as if I didn’t know that the Supreme Court has long held that the state has the power to compel vaccination. See my essay The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes, where I analyze the Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905), the decision that upheld state government’s power to compel smallpox vaccination, ruling that, under certain circumstances, citizens are subject to the police power of the state on matters of public health. Despite the very narrow constraints the decision placed on state power, the Supreme Court has since interpreted state power to compel vaccination—and other things, including forced sterilization—broadly.
As I wrote in that essay, “Every third person died from smallpox, and the rate was even greater for babies. Survivors were often blind and scarred for life. The modern smallpox vaccine, developed in the nineteenth century, is a live virus preparation of the vaccinia virus, which is safe and cross-protective for cowpox, monkeypox, and smallpox (variola). The smallpox vaccine is effective in preventing infection in 95 percent of those vaccinated. Get back to me when SARS-CoV-2 becomes that lethal and there is a vaccine that successful.”
Are cultural explanations of racial disparities always racist? A WordPress user self-identifying as an “educator and aspiring writer currently residing in Robbinsdale, Minnesota,” recently posted a blog titled “What Critical Race Theory looks like in my Social Studies classroom.” He cites a USA Today op-ed he uses in class that “enumerates the significant racial disparities that still exist today, particularly in regards to economic and education.” The author insists that “[t]hese disparities are not ideological inventions.” Indeed they are not. Blacks as a group trail whites as a group in every significant category of social endeavor.
“They are measurable and objective facts,” he continues, “and as I say to the kids, there are two ways to explain them.” I present below those two ways in the teacher’s words, with Explanation #2 said to be “a great representation of what Critical Race Theory looks like in practice—seeking to explain how structures and systems work to produce the racial inequities that have existed throughout history and that continue to exist today.” He adds, “It also shines a light on the absurdity of one of the primary attacks levied against Critical Race Theory by its opponents: That it teaches white students that they are all a bunch of racists.” It is not an absurdity. The portrayal of all whites as racist lies at the heart of critical race theory.
“Explanation #1: The racial inequality that still exists today exists because there is something wrong with black people. There is something about their race or their culture that prevents them from achieving educationally or economically at the same level as whites. The problem with this explanation is that it is literally racist. It literally ascribes to black people some sort of shortcoming or inferiority that is rooted in the color of their skin. Luckily, for those who believe in the inherent equality and potentiality of all human beings regardless of skin color—who believe that, everything else equal, black people, white people, and people of any race or color would all succeed and struggle at roughly the same rates—there is another explanation.
“Explanation #2: The racial inequality that still exists today exists as a result of the historical and/or modern-day societal forces that produced it. The racial disparities that exist in our country are not and have never been ‘natural.’ They were intentionally manufactured by a country literally founded on the idea of white supremacy—an idea that was built up and fortified over centuries through the history outlined above. And while achievements during and since the Civil Rights Movement have dealt great blows to the system of white supremacy, we still very much live with that system’s legacy, and live with a current system that, despite many well-intentioned actors, continues to produce racist results.”
The teacher’s Manichean formulation fails. The United States was not “literally founded on the idea of white supremacy.” It was founded in the context of world slavery to establish a nation based on individual liberty and rights, promising within two decades to abolish the slave trade—and keeping that promise. It is a nation so not white supremacist that it fought a civil war to emancipate blacks from bondage, a war that saw three-quarters of a million Americans, the vast majority of them white, lose their lives, with millions more left without limbs and sound minds. I won’t pursue this here, since I have at length documented that historical arc of justice that proves the validity of American ideals. I want to take up Explanation #2.
Explanation #2 rests on an utterly false premise, namely that cultural explanations in the realm of race relations are racist. Recall the author’s words, “The problem with this explanation is that it is literally racist. It literally ascribes to black people some sort of shortcoming or inferiority that is rooted in the color of their skin.” The teacher’s argument presupposes that cultural differentiation is rooted in racial differences, which he explicitly defines by a phenotypic marker, the degree of melanin in the epidermis. The irony here—and this irony obtains whenever anybody reduces culture to race—is that the author is literally ascribing to black people the culture that in may, at least to some extent, explain the disparities he identifies as resulting from racism.
Racism is a belief and practices based on this belief that the human species is objectively divisible into racial groups differentiated not only by phenotypic markers, but also by innate behavioral proclivities, cognitive abilities, and moral aptitudes. Like religion, racism is an ideology. It uses language not to describe but to construct a reality. It invents constituents of an imaginary world. When one says that criticism of attitudes, customs, habits, norms, and values, i.e., culture, is racist, the necessary assumption is that culture is a projection of racial types that don’t actually exist, at least not in the way it presumes they do. Culture is not a projection of differentiated genotypes. Culture is socially constructed, learned, and transmitted. Even if we agree that there is such a thing as “black culture,” it is certainly acquired by blacks and members of any other race who are socialized in that environment.
The criticism of culture is not an attack on a person’s immutable attributes. It is a criticism of that which the person can abandon or change. Cultural criticism is concerned with attitudes, customs, habits, norms, and values that harm or limit individuals. There are cultures with features that are destructive and moribund, that deny human rights and degrade human dignity, and these cultures may be taken up by people of any race. In order for individuals to develop to their full potential, they need to throw off that culture, at least throw off those elements that prevent self-actualization.
Consider whites for whom culture is a barrier to success. For every poor black person, there are three poor white persons. Does one suppose the attitudes, customs, habits, norms, and values that fails them are an expression of skin color? There’s a word for that supposition (I think you know what that word is). When I raise children, I work very hard to shape their attitudes, conduct, and values in a manner that logic and experience show are valid and sound ways to live a successful life. If they take up action and belief that are contrary to this, my role as a parent is to intervene and make a course correction.
Like everybody who pursues this, frankly, racist line of thinking, this high school teacher is confusing individuals with abstract categories. He is stereotyping. But people are not personifications of demographic categories. Demographics are aggregates—generalizations based on assumption and induction. He insists that he never teaches his students that all white people are racist. Yet he collapses culture into race (selectively, of course, since he would have no hesitation criticizing what he would identify as “white culture”). The white kids in his class must be racist because their skin color associates them with the culture of white supremacy. Critical race theory literally identifies white culture as the “perpetrator’s perspective.”
There are black capitalists and managers who exploit the labor of white proletarians. There are affluent blacks in all walks of American life. Academics. Lawyers. Scientists. Were they able to achieve these things while maintaining the cultural sensibilities that scholars (such as Glenn Loury or Roland Fryer) find hold back other blacks? Or did those blacks who transcended the impoverished conditions of their birth achieve these things because they adopted the cultural norms and values that lead to success in life? They surely would not have found advantage in adopting the cultural sensibilities that hold back so many whites.
The question of disparities is answered by asking questions about class and culture. Race has little to do with the achievement gap—except for those who believe in innate racially-differentiated cognitive capacity or who want to change standards to rationalize the failure of our educational system to close the racial achievement gap, a problem exacerbated by telling black kids that they live in a world that means to oppress them and that their rise or fall has nothing to do with norms and values. How else is one to account for the fact that six percent of the US population commits more than half of the homicides in America? That has nothing to do with culture? So the white oppressor makes black men kill other black men? How does that work? Or do blacks have a greater propensity to kill other people? Sounds racist, doesn’t it?
The choices we make in life affect the trajectory of our biography
The above video is a powerful illustration of the failure to address the role of culture in derailing the lives of our young people. The program suggests that he is touched by running into somebody with whom he attended middle school. That’s not what is happening here. This is a grief reaction. The regret and shame this man is made to feel by seeing clearly, probably for the first time, the end points of two different life trajectories overwhelms him. He has failed himself and those who believed in him and he realizes it.
Are cultural explanations of racial disparities always racist? Only if you conflate race and culture.
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Over at the Manhattan Institute, Heather Mac Donald has been examining a controversy about classical music. (I wrote about this controversy back in February; see Whiteness in Music Theory. Yeah, It’s a Thing.) The controversy is that, because classical music is a European tradition, and because Europeans are white, classical music is an expression of white supremacy. The reality that few black musicians make it to elite symphony orchestras confirms the racist character of classical music. The fact that the Europeans who invented classical music happen to have less melanin in their epidermis is lost on the identitarians. For them, this proves the assumptions that race is real and that differential cultural expression is a project of innate differences between the races.
Conductor and violinist John McLaughlin
In a recent essay (“For the Love of Music”), Mac Donald writes about conductor and violinist John McLaughlin Williams who has a question for the advocates of removing to longstanding practice of blind auditions. Blind auditions is where musicians auditioning for a chair perform behind a screen while judges assess their playing ability independent of their identity. Those in pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion realize that this practice disproportionately excludes blacks, so they argue for a paradigm shift. They seek to change the selection criteria from excellence to identity. Deliberately put more blacks on orchestras so the composition of the orchestra looks like the composition of the United States is the idea. “Why hold an audition at all?” McLaughlin Williams responds. “Why not just send in a head shot?”
“I never gave race any thought and never used it in my career,” Williams says. Mac Donald elaborates: “His colorblindness was an inheritance from his family. His parents—both accomplished pianists—met as music students at Howard University. Williams grew up hearing Chopin nocturnes and études, Bach partitas, and Beethoven sonatas on the family piano. Did it matter that those composers were white males? ‘It never came up,’ he answers. Williams’s parents also played William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay, and other black composers. But they acknowledged the greatness of the musical canon. ‘It’s why we play these things. All great ideas that have ever been born in the world were meant for everyone.’”
Was there a time when the music business was racist? Of course. There was time when sports and many other things were racist. Williams tells Mac Donald that the classical music industry was “racist in the day but not now by any means.” He does, however, understand the “reflexive charge of discrimination.” He opines that history makes it almost impossible for “black people to believe that any reverse in fortune or progress is not rooted in racism, because in the past, it always, always was.” Williams puts his finger on something I have talked about on Freedom and Reason, for example with respect to the 1619 Project, the idea that what is hailed as progress is white supremacy merely adapting itself to changed circumstances. This will be the subject of my next blog
Many of the drugs used for individuals of one animal species are effective and safely used in the treatment of individuals of other animal species. It makes sense when you consider that all mammals have a common ancestor. As I warned in a recent blog, we ignore scientific materialism at our peril (see Are We Forgetting Darwin?). Hundreds of drugs approved for use in cats, dogs, and horses contain active ingredients indicated for purposes identical to drugs used in human populations. They’re generic equivalents.
Ivermectin preparation for deworming horses
What’s the difference between ivermectin used in humans and horses? Brand name, dosing, and delivery. If you talk to those who work around animals (farmers, horse trainers, veterinarian staff), if they are forthright, and before the corporate propaganda campaign against ivermectin they has little reason not to be, they will admit to taking the drugs they give their animals. They understand which drugs work for which ailments and in what amounts. Now they have to worry about people looking at them in horror because they used a horse dewormer as a prophylactic or treatment for COVID-19. But that will only stop them from telling you about it.
In the May-June article, “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19,” published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, researchers found that ivermectin is highly effective in the treatment of COVID-19. “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”
A July-August article from the same journal, “Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines,” also found the drug to be effective in the treatment and prevention of COVID-19. In fact, the evidence indicates “that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.” Their study assessed 24 randomized controlled trials involving 3406 participants. “Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.” (You will find a good review of the data here.)
Doctors have long been empowered to prescribe off label. But pharmacists are not prescribing or filling prescriptions for ivermectin. Why? We live in a monopoly capitalist society where the regulatory agencies of the state apparatus have been captured by corporate influence and power. The truth is that cheap and effective therapeutics for COVID-19 aren’t profitable. Vaccines, on the other hand, are generating enormous profits. Pfizer’s mRNA platform is on track to generate sales of more than 33 billion dollars this year. Moderna is reporting that advance purchase agreements for 2021 represent more than $19 billion in sales. Profit lies in novel commodities and patents and control over demand. For these reasons, pharmaceutical companies have never been much interested in repurposing their drugs unless it gives a drug a new lease on life.* There is no money in ivermectin (same with hydroychloriquine). So don’t take it. (I cannot rule out that Trump derangement syndrome isn’t behind some of this.)
If authorities don’t want civilians taking ivermectin branded as horse dewormer, then they should stop denying civilians access to ivermectin branded for use in humans. Because it’s the same drug with the same benefits and the same safety profile. People are getting sick and dying because they are being denied the drugs they need to stay healthy and save their lives—and they are being shamed away from seeking those drugs by relentless mocking and ridicule. We are always hearing about the the “antivaxer” dying of COVID-19. How many people have died after refusing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine because MSNBC told them it was horse dewormer? Where are those news stories?
* A notable exception to the reluctance to repurpose (but not the only one) is Sarafem, brandname for fluoxetine hydrochloride, an SSRI used in the treatment of PMDD. Fluoxetine hydrochloride is also known as Prozac, marketed for the treatment of depression. SSRIs work in nonhuman animals, as well. Fluoxetine hydrochloride is used to treat a variety of behavioral and mood disorders in dogs and cats. For example, it is used in the treatment of separation anxiety in canines.
C. Wright Mills, the author of The Power Elite (1956) and The Causes of World War Three (1959).
C. Wright Mills saw clearly the coming New Fascism, a growing threat I write about in Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. For Mills, fascism wasn’t going to come in the form of demagogues. It wasn’t going appear as ethnonationalism. It wasn’t going to be obviously rightwing. These are historical features of fascism. The plain Marxist and bonafide liberal must ask: What is the foundational logic of fascism?
In his The Causes of World War Three (1959), Mills captures the spirit of the New Fascism (see also his 1956 The Power Elite):
“The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as ‘functions’ of a rational social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima—are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally—and absurdly—planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.”
I have written about Sheldon Wolin’s thesis of “inverted totalitarianism,” presented in his book Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Political scientist Bertram Gross anticipates Wolin by several decades in his 1980 Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. His analysis finds corporations melding with centralized state power. He argues, moreover, because capitalism is a global economic system, this combination is playing out on the world stage. Fascism is not intrinsically nationalistic. I have written several blogs on the character of the moment (see Scapegoating in the Era of Inverted Totalitarianism; Why I am not a Progressive; The Social Character of the Trump Moment; We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears; Navigating the Spectacle). Until people see this clearly, we won’t save democracy, let alone make progress towards a more free and equal world order.
In March of 1929, a group of women hired by propagandist Edward Bernays, who had been retained by George Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, the executive who sought “a gold mine right in our front yard,” marched in the Easter Sunday Parade smoking cigarettes, which had been elevated to the status of “Torches of Freedom.” Psychoanalyst AA Brill had coined the phrase to describe the nasty habit, theorizing that women innately desired to smoke, but were constrained by the social taboo against it and traditional feminine attitudes. Brill advised Bernays to take advantage of changing values and the psychodynamic phenomenon of “oral fixation.” The marketing campaign thus leveraged the first-wave feminist movement for profit, even recruiting feminist Ruth Hale to call on women to join in the march. “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
A Torch of Freedom
When the first HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine became available in 2006, with the FDA approving Merck’s Gardasil, it was soon marketed with a stealth campaign of advancing the rights of girls and women, especially those from underdeveloped countries. In developed countries, surveillance measures, primarily the pap smear, had proven effective in reducing the morbidity and mortality of cervical cancer, which HPV is said to cause. Such measures are not widely available or affordable in underdeveloped countries. The vaccine was said to remedy that, although, as with the wearing of masks by the vaccinated in the COVID-19 pandemic, the failure of HPV vaccines to prevent cervical cancer comes with a recommendation to have routine pap smears anyway. More recently, marketing has targeted men and boys, who, while they cannot develop cancers associated with the female anatomy, are identified as carriers of HPV and urged to do their part for sake of girls and women. Moreover, some women’s groups working from the standpoint of sameness feminism, for example groups advocating for immigrant rights, have argued that mandating the the HPV vaccine for girls and women is sex discriminatory.
Beyond the question of efficacy, the HPV vaccine comes with safety concerns. There are side effects—or other effects as a close associate often reminds me to call them for the sake of accuracy. Although transnational corporate captured WHO denies it, Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a condition marked by sudden onset muscle weakness caused by peripheral nervous system damage provoking the immune system to attack the subject’s body, has appeared in a number of recipients of the vaccine and a statistically significant association has been found to exist between the vaccine and autoimmune diseases and central and peripheral neurological disorders.
There is a woman whose staunch progressive feminism stands at the core of her identity. Critical of conservative women expressing skepticism about the safety and need for the HPV vaccine, she was elated when the HPV vaccine became available for the daughter. One day, in a highly public manner, the mother announced her intention to vaccinate her daughter against HPV. Later, when she was away from the crowd, a man asked her if she had looked into the harm the vaccine was known to cause, especially GBS. He hesitated saying this, of course, because, what if, heaven forbid, something bad actually happened. But he felt he needed to say something since he had studied the issue and knew about the risk. Determined to go through with the symbolic gesture, she brushed off his concerns as trivial even if true. Within days of the jab, the girl was paralyzed.
The mother in the news story shared below had a different reaction when she learned that the vaccine had damaged her teenage daughter. She had no political-ideological motive to not wish she had this decision to do all over again. Listen closely to the way this local news station spins the information.
A Case of GBS
Did you note the line about how there was no cause for concern because Merck and the regulatory agencies Merck has captured found that Gardasil was no more likely to cause GBS than any other vaccine? Buried lede: all vaccines cause GBS. Authorities and the media have known this at least since the 1970s. In 1976, pharmaceutical corporations and governments around the world, including the US government, manufactured a swine flu epidemic. I’m not exaggerating. Despite the fact that there were no confirmed cases of swine flu anywhere on the planet outside of thirteen soldiers at Fort Dix, a US military facility in New Jersey (sound suspicious?), the government rolled out a massive vaccination program accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign involving print and television media. Millions of Americans were injected with the experimental swine flu vaccine.
The consequence of the program: scores of people suffering vaccine injury, several hundred of them developing a sometimes lethal and always devastating paralytic condition called, you guessed it, GBS. Shamefaced, the government canceled the program. That was before they could count on mass desensitization of the other effects of vaccines. Since then, mainstream news organizations have run interference for vaccine manufacturers by dissimulating the link between the vaccines and GBS. However, as Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert on vaccines and bioterrorism, points out, at least ten separate studies of the 1976 swine flu vaccine have confirmed the link.
I covered this story more than a decade ago on Freedom and Reason in the blog Medical-Industrial Propaganda: The Swine Flu Pandemic of 1976. In that blog, I shared a national news story about the case. YouTube has removed it. In his prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell called this technique the “memory hole,” which appears in the novel as a tube down which workers at the Ministry of Truth disappear news stories inconvenient to the Party. But, unlike the Party apparatus of Airstrip One, the Internet is full of holes. We don’t yet live in the People’s Republic of China. I kept the video in my archives. I have now posted it to Rumble so you can viddy it, my brothers.
The Swine Flu Epidemic of 1976
I have argued on Freedom and Reason that progressivism, despite its rhetoric of speaking truth to power, is the popular ideology and policy philosophy of corporate governance. It will come as no surprise to many of my readers, that corporations sell products that are unsafe and unnecessary. For the sake of profits, corporations manufacture needs and exaggerate problems to stimulate consumer desire for their products. Recognizing that the population is not monolithic, that insecurities, preferences, and worries (which advertisers in part engineer) are demographically variable, they differentially target groups with deft propaganda techniques tailored to particular anxieties, desires, and sentiments. It doesn’t matter if the danger a corporation markets is in the brand of cigarettes or a niche vaccine or a war, the goal is profit, and the same emotional and psychological manipulations are deployed with remarkable efficacy.
The FDA-approved Pfizer-BioNTech product, which will roll out under the name Comirnaty, a novel mRNA gene therapy sold as a vaccine alleged to prevent COVID-19 (which, I hope by now, readers know it doesn’t) will be marketed to individuals sixteen years of age and older. The Pfizer vaccine, along with Moderna (which just applied for full approval) and a couple of others, continues to enjoy emergency use authorization that shields it from any liability (Pfizer has been indemnified in dozens of countries around the world). The FDA approved Comirnaty based on early clinical trials which reported few other effects and more than 90 percent efficacy. The real world experience with these vaccines finds people experiencing Bell’s palsy, clotting blood, Grave’s disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and even death, while data from Israel can’t get the Pfizer vaccine to 40 percent efficacy. (See The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; A Pandemic of the Vaccinated.)
Especially disturbing in all of this is the marketing to teenagers and young adults, particularly males, who are at special risk for cardiac diseases (myocarditis and pericarditis) that have life-long consequences. More than marketing. There are now mandates. Mandatory vaccination of the U.S. military will begin ‘immediately,’ the defense secretary says, yesterday’s New York Times reported. There are 1.5 million active duty military personnel. The majority of them are young men.
According to a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, according to a real-world case-control nation-wide study from Israel (the country in which authorities determined less than 40 percent efficacy for Pfizer in preventing infection and only a little greater than efficacy in preventing COVID-19 disease), the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was found to be associated with a threefold increased risk of myocarditis. The media will want to tell you that those who contract COVID-19 are also at risk for myocarditis. But the authors of the study caution readers not to make that comparison.
“The effects of vaccination and of SARS-CoV-2 infection were estimated with different cohorts,” the authors write, emphasizing that “they should be treated as separate sets of results.” The researchers find that the “good safety profile” the FDA used to approve the Pfizer vaccine was found in preapproval trials (approval via emergency use authorization). This is not the case with real-world data. Young men are particularly vulnerable to heart disease associated with this vaccine, disease that has life long consequences. The reason for this is that the spike protein the mRNA vaccine teaches the cells to produce causes inflammation of tissues throughout the body. The heart muscle and lining (as well as the lungs) is especially subject to disease with downregulation of ACE2 receptor associated with the S spike protein. This is associated with the site of action namely the ACE2 receptor. ACE2 receptors are greater in number in males than females because of testosterone. (For the record, I told you this would happen on Freedom and Reason). And who knows what the effects will be on younger children.
Yet I can see the progressive father and son, likely at the son’s urging, noisily marching to the physician’s office where the son will receive the jab for the “good of the community.” I can see the obnoxious Facebook statuses, the images of young men getting jabbed or showing off their bandaids encircled by a colorful virtue-signaling ribbon, “I’m doing my part!” Big Pharma has colonized territory deep in the progressive mind establishing vaccination as the public face of ritual action of devotion to scientism. The vaccine hesitant and skeptic are secular heretics and infidels. Authoritarianism and fear deliver even more to Big Pharma (the Associated Press reports “Half of US workers favor employee shot mandate: AP-NORC poll”).
“I’m doing my part!”
Ever seen the mock advertisements in the 1997 film Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s shoutout to fascism? “I’m doing my part!” Heinlein appears to dig authoritarianism, but Verhoeven satirizes fascism in spectacular propaganda displays. Central to the politics of the book and movie is the differentiation between citizen and civilian. Citizenship is earned. People who join the Federal Service and honorably discharged are given the franchise, which bestows upon them privileges civilians so not enjoy. John Rico explains: “The difference lies in the field of civic virtue. A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, of which he is a member.” You know, like the virtue of getting jabbed and the privilege that comes with showing one’s vaccine passports. Internalizing authoritarianism comes with pride in having to justify your reason for being (anywhere, eventually). Did I mention that Starship Troopers is about fascism?
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CNN is sad because Saint Fauci’s Big Pharma-serving narrative (at around 20 bucks and rising a pop, and masks everywhere, all fed by fear, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to very profitable) threatens to harm the chances of progressives in the mid-term elections. At least analyst Stephen Collinson is sad. The headline to his “analysis” tells us all about it: Fauci’s new 2022 timeline for Covid fight could be a political disaster for Biden and Democrat. Here’s a taste: “If the emergency does go on that long [through 2022],” he writes, “it will offer an opening for Republicans who are seeking to brand Biden’s presidency as a failure—and who are seizing on his chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan to paint a broader narrative of political decay.” The disastrous presidency of Joe Biden is a partisan construction, a “branding” and a “painting,” Republican propaganda that gives the dreaded Orange Man a chance to reclaim the White House.
This anxiety, a reflection of the absurdity of rank-and-file progressivism, is part of what lies behind the urgency of vaccine mandates. The true believers, their faith in the CDC and the FDA at religious fervor intensity, are all in on scientism’s miracles. They can save 2022, they believe, if they make the virus go away. “I’m doing my part!” But Fauci knows that vaccines won’t stop the virus. He has headed an agency for decades that never believed they could eradicate the flu—or any other RNA virus—with vaccines. Coronaviruses have always been with us. They will always be with us. The best way to deal with a perennial virus is to facilitate its evolution into a less-serious pathogen by building actual herd immunity (by letting younger people get it, for example) and reconcile ourselves to the fact that some years will be worse than others. But the best way for stakeholders is not the best way for shareholders.
The power of propaganda lies in portraying the ordinary and normal as extraordinary and abnormal. To be sure, SARS-CoV-2 came out of the gate impressively, killing an unusually large proportion of the elderly and morbidly obese it encountered. That is was less impressive among everybody else was obscured by lumping everybody into the same risk category and then showing the public the horrors of case-fatality rates, punctuated with sheet-draped corpses, slit trench graves, and exhausted and distraught nurses and physicians. They turned everybody into potential disease vectors via mask mandates. Now they are doing the same with vaccines. They deranged the social order by quarantining the healthy. The moral panic was replete with rampant war metaphors (Some Virus Did Something).
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I have blogged a lot on the COVID-19 pandemic. I have decided to index these blogs here (except for what I cited in the present entry). This is not an exhaustive list nor is the list annotated. I used Google to search for entries, and Google has not been kind to my blog (albeit, it is not as bad as Facebook). I may update this post with more links and annotation. Quite a few blogs contain discussion of the pandemic but are mainly about other things. I have decided not to include these for now.
Somebody asked me to explain why a vaccine that does not prevent infection but is associated with less severe symptoms among the infected compared to those of the unvaccinated is a problem. “So the vaccine becomes something of a therapeutic,” the person remarked in so many words. “Isn’t this a good thing?”
Not necessarily. The reason is found in grasping basic evolutionary biology, a paradigm that is exquisite in its logic and powerful in its explanatory power. Wherever the discipline of biology is on the question of ontogenesis, there is, outside of a handful of creationists, little doubt among scientists that the theory of evolution explains how, once life appears, all life changes over time. That same exquisite logic applies to microbes, including viruses (even if the question of whether viruses are properly living things is not finally settled).
Charles Darwin, who codiscovered the principle of natural selection in the mid-nineteenth century
Here’s how I explain the problem. A virus has no interest in killing or immobilizing its host. The virus needs relatively healthy people to be up and moving about and interacting with other potential hosts to transmits itself. It needs the host’s cellular machinery to reproduce itself. A virus that kills or immobilizes a significant number of its hosts won’t get around as much as a virus that produces mild to moderate symptoms. For example, cold viruses (of which coronaviruses is one type) have evolved via natural selection of random mutation (mistakes occurring in the process of the virus copying itself) to be more contagious but, for those with reasonably intact and experienced immune systems, either asymptomatic or associated with only mild to moderate illness.
This process yields circumstances in which children get half a dozen or more colds a year, while adults get one or two colds annually (having more experienced immune systems), and life goes on. Thanks to the process Darwin describes to explain his discoveries, over time the less dangerous variants of a virus become the dominant variants of the virus and life goes on. Herd immunity works alongside decreasing severity of illness to produce situations in which humans live, work, and go to school in environments teaming with microbes that rarely severely sicken them. (Influenza is a bit different because of the way it ravages cells. But its dominant variants nonetheless present with less severe consequences over time, as well. It makes you a lot sicker than an adenovirus or rhinovirus, but the vast majority of people live to tell about the experience.)
One of the ways this evolutionary process may be disrupted is the development of interventions that allow persons with more dangerous variants of a virus to suffer less severe illness sufficient to allow a greater proportion of the sick to be up and moving about interacting with other potential hosts than they would otherwise. Good for them, of course. They are not as sick as they could be (at least proportionally speaking, since many still get very sick and some die). But this can be bad for a population.
If a vaccine is highly efficacious in preventing infection, and a sufficient number of people are vaccinated, or have acquired immunity through infection, then the virus struggles to find those who are not adequately protected and the vaccine is successful. However, if the vaccine is leaky, that is, the vaccine suffers low efficacy with respect to preventing infection yet continues to enjoy significant efficacy in preventing severe symptoms, then this allows the vaccinated to carry more dangerous variants of the virus to more people, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Mutations that would have likely been weeded out during natural selection may indeed thrive in a context where the typical natural trajectory has been derailed. Add to this low durability of a vaccine and those who are vaccinated themselves increasingly begin to suffer severe symptoms.
It may be that, in time, the virus will continue to evolve to become less dangerous, but its path to this end will have been drawn out by the intervention. More troubling, it could also be the case that more deadly mutations survive to produce an even more dangerous situation for everybody.
Imagine a scenario where a population, appearing to have reached herd immunity via natural acquisition to a virus, suddenly sees an explosion of infections with widespread deployment of a vaccine. I hasten to emphasize that the problem is not vaccines per se. The problem is leaky vaccines with low durability. One would expect that the medical-industrial complex would not confront such a development with humility, but would instead double-down on hubris while casting aspersions on the skeptic. The vaccinated could not possibly be the problem. They follow orders.
Yesterday we learned that, in Los Angeles, 30 percent of new COVID-19 cases are so-called “breakthrough cases.” That term “breakthrough case,” is an industry euphemism for poor vaccine efficacy. It means that fully-vaccinated individuals fail to develop effective immunity for the target pathogen. Data show that, of the vaccines, the most efficacious, the Pfizer mRNA platform, is less than 40 percent effective in preventing infections.
Despite this, it not only continues to enjoy emergency use authorization, but is set to be approved by the FDA next week. If you were worried about mandates before approval, brace yourself for approval. It’s not like the authorities have ever been concerned about Nuremberg. Now they will hammer the vaccine hesitant relentlessly. “What’s your objection now?” As if there is not good reason to object to these vaccines. No matter. Whether the thing works or not, you will need that vaccine card to be a functioning member of society. Passports are here. And they don’t come with free masks.
It’s highly likely that the number of “breakthrough cases” in Los Angeles and around the nation is much greater that what is being reported. A vaccinated person has reason to believe, based on the propaganda he received from trusted sources (the CDC and Anthony Fauci, CNN and MSNBC, Facebook and Twitter), that the cold symptoms he is experiencing—if he experiences any symptoms at all—do not indicate COVID-19 and therefore there is no need for a COVID-19 test. Maybe he doesn’t need to get tested. But his reasoning for not doing so is faulty. Hospital testing as part of routine intake assessment is discovering that COVID-19 infection is rampant among the fully vaccinated.
The authorities are telling us that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That is not true. Scientific study shows that the fully vaccinated carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated and, given that the vaccinated tend to be healthier individuals able to interact with others in social situations, their positive status unsuspected, the vaccinated are almost certainly major contributors to the rise in COVID-19 cases. Operating with a false sense of security, they are infecting other people, vaccinated and unvaccinated. But this reality has to be pushed out of view. After all, we need to get shots in the arms of children and infants.
Looking at the chart, it appears, as I warned only a few days ago, that the progress the nation made prior to widespread vaccination, when it appeared we had reacher herd immunity, has been erased with the introduction of the vaccines. I am not necessarily saying this rise is mostly due to vaccines. But you might consider that possibility. The media won’t. And now deaths are rising, too (see chart below). Thankfully the case fatality rate is down, which is likely the result of the expected evolutionary path viruses take to become less lethal and thus more communicable, a path again very likely helped by those healthy enough to socially engage with others.
That these trends are occurring during the summer months is alarming. If you look at the trends in the first chart, last year’s cases went down during late July and August. They didn’t start significantly rising again until late October. Moreover, the numbers then were nowhere near the numbers they are presently at any time prior to peaks experienced during the fall and early winter 2020-21 when viruses usually prove most devastating due to cold weather and confined social spaces.
The speed and incline of the current upward sweep does not bode well for the upcoming COVID-19 season. COVID-19 may very well be sweeping the nation again. And with our borders open wide on the south, the millions pouring into the country are bringing new strains of the disease, as well as other diseases long ago eradicated in the United States (more than half the world’s nations are represented among the immigrants, and the vast majority of them are Third Worlders), this winter may be catastrophic. Where are the immigrants going when they get here? I suggest you take look at what’s happening across the souther United States.
I leave you with several clips from today’s War Room Pandemic’s special on vaccines and therapeutics and corporate state machinations. Remember, vaccine hesitancy is the rational default position.
Dr Reveals Stunning Truth About Covid Vaccine
We Have ‘Leaky Vaccines’
No Test, Just Get Vax Card
Shocking Report Out About Covid Vaccine Injuries
There’s An Alternative And Ethical Strategy To The Jab
Pharmacies Told Not To Distribute Medications That Combat Covid
Western civilization, the pinnacle of world historical development, materially and morally, is facing two foreign totalitarian threats: the People’s Republic of China and Islam. The PRC is the secular paradigm of authoritarian statism, an Orwellian nightmare world of total control (China Represents the Existential Threat of our Time—and the Democratic Party is an Enabler). Islam, not quite the threat the PRC represents, is nonetheless the most aggressive form of clerical fascism in the modern period, its doctrine of subordinating all of society to God plagiarized from the worst of ancient Western Asian ideas, maintaining the cruel grounds its sources, Judaism and Christianity, long ago departed. Collapsing the profane into the sacred and the backwardness that ensures, and without effective Western opposition, a substantial proportion of Islam’s 1.8 million adherents is ripe for incorporation in the Middle Kingdom’s sphere of influence.
Throngs of people running alongside a US Air Force C-17 preparing for takeoff at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021
Considering these threats, especially in light of the global order Western transnationalists have sought for decades, this conjuncture, a gathering historical moment that appears as an unfolding, could not have come with a worse US president. Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski began this debacle in the 1970s—allowing Iran to fall to the Islamists (Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?) and building up Islamism in Afghanistan, the later ultimately producing the Taliban and preparing the way for al-Qaida to establish a base of operations (Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan), so it is in some sense expected that Biden should be installed to finally betray the Afghan people—and the world.
The seriousness of the threat makes telling people “told you so feel” feel cheap and petty. But there is truth in there: the Democratic Party is aligned with the transnationalists managing the decline of America and the West; the consequences of Party hegemony is predictable.
Biden is compromised by his decades-long association with Chinese Communist Party (“Dear Hitler…” or Joe Biden is the Neville Chamberlain of Our Time). But he is not the only one who desires the rise of the PRC. Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, who advised Biden as Vice-President and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of the State, is on record as not only encouraging the PRC’s rise but creating “an environment more conducive to a peaceful and positive-sum Chinese rise.” The rhetoric of cooperation with the totalitarian People’s Republic comes with the expressed desire to gently push the PRC is a democratic and liberal direction. As if that is possible under totalitarian communism. As if the West hasn’t fallen down on its commitment to either value. If it was hard to detect two years ago, the ensuing two years made it plain that the CCP model of social control was one of the PRC’s major exports.
Detainees in a political education camp in Lop County, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang, China, April 2017.
The managed decline of America is an integral part of the transnational project to shift global hegemony eastward as a step towards materializing the dream of a one world corporatist government—the realization of which requires cancelling the Enlightenment (The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). Hence lockdowns and vaccine passports, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, and the postmodernist rejection of scientific truth and objectivity (what Brown University economist describes as “identitarian epistemology”), all of which I have blogged about extensively on Freedom and Reason. Full of the hubris that a life disconnected from reality and money-power intoxication bring, and dismissive of the Thucydides Trap, the transnational elite appear to believe they can finesse the decline of America and the West. If so, then their derangement threatens humanity. But there’s more to it than conceit and ignorance (See Why Did The West Build Up China?America at a Crossroads: Corporations Poised to Take Control of the Republic.)
What is the Thucydides Trap? Harvard political scientist Graham Allison coined the term to describe the dilemma the United States faces with a rising China. Based on his analysis of sixteen cases over 500 years in which twelve resulted in Kinetic war, Allison warns that the likely result of a situation where a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one is military conflict. The dilemma gets its name from the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” It is not always possible to escape a process with military conflict as its apparent terminal point, but it should be obvious that the strategy of managed decline of the ruling power coupled with building up the rising power is precisely the wrong strategy if one wants to avoid war—unless the goal is to incorporate what remains of the former into the latter. In concrete terms, that would mean dismantling democracy and liberty and assigning the peoples of the West to the role of serf in a global neo-feudalist order governed by transnational corporations (see section three of Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics; see also What the Flag Officers 4 America Letter Gets Wrong). Of course, the other option in avoiding war is to stop building up the rising power.
One only needs a handful of facts to understand this existential problem. I will use one to illustrate: China’s control over the means of the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.
Under cover of global climate change, Western elites are transitioning their economies from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. The batteries that run electric vehicles depend on rare earth minerals (REMs). Leveraging US and Europe’s pension funds and other money-capital to fuel the rapid development of its high-tech sector, the establishment of free trade zones, and expansion of PRC-controlled infrastructure around the planet—Western finance pumps hundreds of billions of dollars of direct investment into China annually—the CCP now effectively controls most of those regions where REMs are found. China alone is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world production of REMs. China produces three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles. Afghanistan is one of the richest countries in terms of REMs. Last year, REMs in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth between 1 trillion and 3 trillion dollars. Biden has just effectively handed Afghanistan to the CCP.
Beyond Afghanistan’s resources, Biden gave the CCP the greatest gift a world power could give: the abandonment of the Afghan people signals to Xi Jinping that the US will likely not intervene when Taiwan falls to the PRC. Taiwan is the center of advanced chip design and production. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing is to the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions what fossil fuels were to the Second Industrial Revolution. (Without mentioning China, the Party of Davos, i.e., the World Economic Forum, tells its audience what’s at stake in this article: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond.”) The nation that dominates in this area will control the economic—and political and military—power in the world. When the United States under Trump limited Huawei’s ability to outsource its chip designs to the Taiwanese chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the CCP threatened to retaliate. The CCP understands what is at stake. Deprived of these foundries, US consumer and defense industries would be set back at least several years (see “The Chip Wars of the 21st Century”).
The progressive left screams “Western imperialism!” when one expresses concern over the loss of control over the global means of production. But the question is what sort of world do you want to live in? One in which the people are governed by a democratic republic with a bill of rights focused on individual liberty? Or one in which a centralized state governed by corporate power controls every aspect of human affairs? What sort of world do you think the rank-and-file Chinese want to live in? The United States is the paradigm of a nation founded on individual liberty and human rights—proving its validity by realizing its founding ideals in history by ending the slave trade, abolishing chattel slavery, recognizing universal suffrage, and granting equal rights to all regardless of race and sex. The secular nation-state our founders established is a blueprint for people around the world to adopt in building more equal and just societies. Why are Western elites giving up on these values?
Establishment ideology tells us what progressives elites have in store for us. Its followers live in a dream world where the West is evil and those outside it are the enlightened ones. To speak of American and Western exceptionalism is “ethnocentric” and “nativist.” To criticize cultures that do not recognize the ideals democracy and liberty is “racist” and “xenophobic.” In the eyes of progressives, and this is explicitly articulated in the rhetorics of critical theory and thirdworldism, the West is a vehicle for white supremacy and patriarchy. There can be no progress here—the system merely periodically reconfigures itself to sustain race and sex privilege.
In their deep loathing of America, and fetishization of simulacra of the exotic, progressives pine for a mythical world beyond experience and knowledge—a world where people live simple uncomplicated lives. The brutal truth is that the world outside the West is a world where men own women and girls and throw homosexuals from towers. It’s a world of total surveillance and control. Islam erases the line between government and religion, asserting only one true God and doctrine, casting everybody into a hell on earth. Chinese communism is a religion where the Party is God—and that God promises an earthly heaven, what the Chinese have long referred to as the Middle Kingdom. Our enemies don’t think in terms of months and years. They think in terms of decades and centuries.
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