Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

> Government hides the truth, spreads FUD...

Science Denied: The Biden Vaccine Mandate
by Jeffrey Tucker

https://brownstone.org/articles/science-denied-the-biden-vaccine-mandate/

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/08/06/cdc_director_vaccines_no_longer_prevent_you_from_spreading_covid.html
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting-immunity-found-after-recovery-covid-19
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-strange-neglect-of-natural-immunity/
https://gbdeclaration.org/

President Biden has decided to go hard on the virus. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Sadly for him, those tiny little pathogens don’t pay taxes, don’t
vote, don’t have Social Security numbers, can’t be drafted, and don’t
answer phone calls from poll takers, which is to say that he and his
agencies cannot really control them. That must be frustrating, poor
man.

Instead his plan is to control what he can control: people, and, most
immediately, federal workers and the employees of large regulated
companies. For him, the key to crushing the virus is the vaccine. Not
enough people are obeying his demand for near-universal vaccination.

In a maniacal move of wild desperation – or as an excuse to try out
the most extreme powers of his office – he is using every weapon that
he believes he has to assure compliance with his dream of injecting as
many arms as possible. Only then will we crush the virus, all thanks
to his leadership, all the complaints about “freedom” be damned – and
never mind that the realization of his dream did not work in Israel or
the UK.

What are the immediate problems here? At least five:

    1. The Biden mandate pretends that the only immunity is injected,
not natural. And so it has been from the beginning of this pandemic,
even though all science for at least a year – actually you can say
centuries – contradicts that. Indeed, we’ve known about natural
immunity since 400 B.C when Thucydides first wrote of the great Athens
plague that revealed that “they knew the course of the disease and
were themselves free from apprehension.” Biden’s mandate could affect
80 million people but far more than that have likely been exposed and
gained robust immunity regardless of vaccination status.

    2. This natural immunity is long-lasting and broad, and we’ve
known that since last year when the first studies revealed it. You can
say that the addition of a vaccine provides even more but it’s new and
untested relative to most drugs approved by regulators, and many
people are concerned about possible side effects of this vaccine that
was approved much faster than any drug in my lifetime – and there is
not one living human being in a position to say with certainty that
these skeptics are wrong.

    3. The mandate presumes that everyone is equally susceptible to
severe outcomes from getting exposed to the virus, which we’ve known
is not true since at least February 2020. In this entire 18-month
fiasco, we’ve not seen any serious high-level communication about the
huge range of demographic gradients in infection based on both age and
overall health. This ignorance is a consequence of poor public-health
messaging, and is grossly irresponsible. The aggregated mandate from
the Biden administration ignores this completely, as did the models
that suggested lockdowns in the event of a virus from the Spring of
2020.

    4. Biden seems still of the belief that vaccines stop infection
(he claimed this many times) and spread but we know with certainty
that this is not the case, and even the CDC admits it. The best guess
at this point is that it can help in preventing hospitalization and
death but this experiment is still in its early stages, and the
relationship between cause and effect in human affairs is not as easy
as throwing around two data sets and saying one caused the other. Most
cases in the developed world now are occurring among the vaccinated –
and we all know this because we have vaccinated friends who got Covid
anyway. Some have died. We are not idiots, contrary to what the Biden
administration believes. Nor do any of us have all the knowledge and
answers. And it is precisely because science is uncertain that the
decisions surrounding it need to be decentralized, depoliticized, and
open to correction rather than being imposed by top-down mandates.

    5. Biden’s order flies in the face of basic human freedoms and
rights. There is no other way to put it. And it is this fact that is
the most prescient for the multitudes who are right now seething in
anger that one man who happens to hold power can make health decisions
for the whole population regardless of their perfectly rational
judgements. When the needle filled with liquid is forced into the arms
of people who either have natural immunities or do not fear exposure
to the pathogen, it gets personal, and people get really mad,
especially after they are still forced into masks and denied other
essential rights.

Truth is that my phone has been blowing up all evening since Biden’s
speech. People are demoralized, panicked, furious, and even at the
point of losing it completely over this despotic moment in which we
are living. Most of us believed that we live in a scientific age in
which information would be broadly disseminated to the world and this
technology would somehow prevent us as a society from falling prey to
charlatans, mob mysticism, and brutal methods of population control,
not to mention to the deployment of superstitious talismans and
quackery. That turns out not to be true, and this is perhaps the
greatest shock of all.

Scientists worked for many hundreds of years to understand pathogens.
They worked to understand their effect on the body, the range of
susceptibility to both infection and severe outcomes, the demographics
of vulnerability, the means by which we come to be protected from
them, and the opportunities and limits available to people to protect
themselves and others. After all this, humanity put together
institutions that protected human freedom, individual rights, and
public health, while preserving peace and prosperity in the best of
times.

In the last 18 months, all that hard work and knowledge seems to have
been shredded, replaced by superstition masquerading as some kind of
new science of social and pathogenic control. In this year and a half,
we’ve observed no clear successes and unrelenting flops. One year ago,
humanity had the opportunity to embrace the wisdom of the Great
Barrington Declaration to protect the vulnerable while letting society
otherwise function. Governments instead chose the path of ignorance
and violence. The list is long but it includes: travel restrictions,
capacity limits, business closures, school shutdowns, mask mandates,
forced human separation (“social distancing”), and now mandates of
vaccination that, quite apparently, vast numbers do not want.

It’s all designed so that governments can prove to the world that they
are powerful enough, smart enough, educated enough to outsmart and
manage any living organism, even an invisible one that has been part
of the human experience since humans had experiences. In this, they
have completely failed – in more ways than it is possible to count.

We keep thinking that surely, surely, we will come to the end of this
madness. I personally believed it would end the second week of March
2020. Instead, it gets worse and worse, the illusion of control having
seized the barely functioning brains of the ruling classes of the
world’s richest nations. If this doesn’t prove the astonishing
stupidity of the world’s most powerful and educated, nothing else in
history does.

The great myth that has clouded our vision and our expectations has
been that we as a people had progressed beyond the kind of statist
shibboleths and fanatic brutality that define our age. The truth is
that we are not.

This very day, a Karen attacked me for being maskless. I looked at her
and thought only of the poor people in Colonial America who dared
being caught wearing buckled shoes and therefore running afoul of the
sumptuary laws, or of the religious minorities in Medieval Europe who
were scapegoated for every plague (look up the origins of the the
phrase “poisoning the well”), or the demonization of rebels in the
ancient Roman empire or the disapprobation of heretics in the hundreds
of years that followed the fall of Rome.

It is a mark of a primitive society to attribute to political
compliance or noncompliance what rational science shows is a feature
of the natural world. Why? Ignorance, maybe. Power ambitions, more
likely. Scapegoating is apparently an eternal feature of the human
experience. Governments seem particularly good at it, even when it is
less believable than ever.