It's not only political, it's a smoke and mirrors distraction for the fact our healthcare system was woefully unprepared for the pandemic that every educated person knew was coming. It's a lot easier to blame the unvaccinated than to take responsibility for the fact that the U.S. has fewer hospital and fewer doctors per capita than almost any other industrialized country, that we didn't have an adequate stockpile of PPE, and that we have allowed the food and beverage industry to make Americans sick so that as soon as the pandemic hit many of them died.
I've thought about writing on exactly this. The reason our hospitals are so at risk of being overrun is the "just-in-time" logistics logic we've extended to ICUs (scaling them to be just under full census during normal times) for economic efficiency. Hadn't thought until your comment about how that relates to our lack of PPEs — in the US, at least, this was a pandemic of neoliberalism as much or more than it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
For basically this reason, all of the urgent headlines about hospitals being "near capacity" ring hollow. The US hospital system does not have capacity to handle a pandemic above and beyond a spike in an ordinary flu season. That would not be profitable. Covid spikes are only noteworthy when hospital capacity is substantially exceeded, which does seem to have actually happened a few times. But since omicron, I've just been seeing the misleading "near capacity" line. Which means its a sorta bad flu at most.
This refusal to acknowledge that the vaccines have utterly and completely failed as a containment strategy goes beyond mere political point scoring. I would call it something like "mass formation," but the AP fact checkers tell me this is false ; ).
A brief history lesson reveals how insane this all is. On May 12, 2021, the New York Times reported on a troubling spike in Covid cases in Seychelles following a massive Sinopharm vaccine rollout. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/business/economy/covid-seychelles-sinopharm.html. To go back and read it now is stunning. The gist of the article is that Sinopharm was a failure, as proven by the spike in cases following mass vaccination, and that only the more effective mRNA vaccines can get us out of this. Then, in July 2021, Israel saw a huge spike in Covid cases following their massive Pfizer rollout. But there was no similar article describing Pfizer as a failed containment strategy.
To the contrary, NYT began running articles from its editorial board and the freaking ACLU calling for mandates around this time because the vaccines were so "stunningly effective." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/opinion/biden-covid-vaccine.html?searchResultPosition=2. It was already very clear at this point that the vaccines were a failed containment measure. But the establishment was doubling down. And the scapegoating of the "unvaxxed" was only just picking up steam, and has continued to grow since, in spite of the evidence. Presidents, doctors, scientists, academics, politicians, Supreme Court Justices, journalists, business leaders, celebrities, etc., have all lent their voices to the lie that the unvaxxed are the source of our problems and are putting others in danger. We have known this was a lie since July 2021.
Yet this lie is the foundation of the entire international Covid regime that has grown in strength in the ensuing eight months. I use NYT comments to assess what can and cannot be said in "polite society." Comments pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, i.e. stating the FACT that the vaccines have completely failed as a containment strategy, are "moderated" out of existence. You cannot say that 2+2=4. My very progressive friends and family know on an intellectual level that 2+2=4, but still bristle when it is pointed out to them. While saying 2+2=4 is not allowed, comments perpetuating the dangerous and demonstrably false "pandemic of the unvaccinated" myth rise to the top of the rankings. The level of cognitive dissonance and hysteria at play here goes far beyond simply "politics." We are dealing with something far more evil.
We are dealing with the primal scapegoating impulse that rears its ugly head in times of turmoil throughout history. We are dealing with a primal attempt to purge the "unclean" from society. Fortunately we are now civilized enough that this means "only" removing people from tech platforms, sports competitions, jobs, restaurants, places of public accommodation, airplanes, etc., instead of marching them to the gas chambers or the killing fields. But it is the same primal impulse at play.
Charles Eisenstein and Paul Kingsnorth have done a brilliant job explaining this phenomenon. We must heed their warnings or this goes to a very dark place very fast. 2+2=4. The vaccines have failed as a containment policy. The Covid regime that rests on this lie must be dismantled immediately. Those who perpetuate this lie must be called on their bullshit.
It's interesting that Leighton points out that while in the US, the debate over vaccine mandates seems to pit liberal urban elites against the (presumably more right-leaning or at least more populist) masses, these political positions could have very well been switched if Trump had been reelected. Where I'm sitting in Quebec, the provincial government has been fairly heavy-handed in trying to push vaccination, imposing a vaccine passport and even floating the idea to impose a special tax on the unvaccinated. But our government isn't exactly left-wing: while it's relatively centrist in terms of its positions, it's also mostly popular among older demographics. So the complaining that I've heard against our government (on Reddit for example) has been about how it's a government of Boomers that doesn't care about younger generations. For example, when the government imposed a 10pm curfew two weeks ago (not related to vaccines, but certainly a covid-related measure that has authoritarian features; thankfully they removed the curfew yesterday), much of what I heard was how this does not affect Boomers who're asleep at 10 anyway, and who are presumably deathly afraid of coronavirus, but does affect Zoomers. (Not necessarily my own opinion, but what I heard.) And the actual left-wing party has been critical of the government's handling of the pandemic, including its authoritarian aspects.
This is not to say that positions here are flipped exactly the other way around from how they are in the US regarding response to the pandemic, just that they fell along somewhat different lines. But both Canadian federal politics and Quebec provincial politics have seen the rise of new political parties that are ostensibly right-wing, but mostly interested in opposing covid measures. These parties haven't really been successful for now, but we'll see what happens in the future.
100% agree. Still reeling that I see it this way now given my half-century of living within the educated liberal hive mind you so incisively describe. I’ve started counting the number of times colleagues, relatives or friends make derisive comments about Trumpers, vaccine deniers, mandate deniers (including SCOTUS ones), non-maskers, anyone who lives in surrounding less affluent conservative counties, white people in general (and we’re white, but it’s always those other white people), and so on. It’s daily.
I tried to explain to [someone] (who can't wrap her mind around the fact that the vaccines don't stop the spread) that the OSHA mandate, if SCOTUS affirmed, would have set a very dangerous precedent. She didn't get it. I explained that she might like this mandate and this government but what if a future government -- one she doesn't like -- uses the precedent to force a mandate on her that she didn't agree with. That was a political argument, not a science argument but she still didn't get it.
Very good article. One correction though. The vaccine doesn't "prevent you from ending up dead or intubated". It might reduce the risk of ending up dead or intubated but it doesn't prevent it.
As the academy became increasingly dominated by liberal elites (or those who became liberal elites), it stands to reason that liberal elites worship "science": science is far more likely to draw conclusions to our liking (I say "our" because I am a liberal elite by background and training, if somewhat less philosophically so), because we are disproportionately represented among scientists and because educated elites understand how to use science as a frame to support our ideas (both cultural and political), regardless of the quality of the science or the facts actually evinced in the research. We echo-chambered ourselves into the delusion that only we are smart and educated and we worship intelligence and education, and that there's no need to seriously consider the ideas outside of the mainstream elite institutional ideas.
I wonder if this is some weird symptom of our decadence: that in many ways our lives are so good that facts don't even really matter to us anymore as much as the status that being seen to "win" them confers. In a world where facts are the difference between misery of hunger, poverty, or illness, and relative comfort, facts matter a lot. When they are the difference between status / morality and guilt and lack of moral authority, they still matter a great deal, but in a very different way. And facts matter in a material way much more to those who have less power and status than they do to those in power.
Superb post. The only thing I might disagree with is the assumption that if Trump had been elected in 2020 he would have pushed for vaccine mandates. I doubt very strongly that he would have done this.
Oddly, I seem to have read that the majority of anti-mandaters and anti-vaxers (at least insofar as the mRNA is concerned), are either high school educated or post four-year degree. It’s the four year degree holders who seem to take everything the government says at face value. Interesting….
Many people who do not go to college see "the system" as a fundamentally malevolent force. They therefore use "the establishment is lying to me to keep me down" as a heuristic for deciding what is and is not true. People with a college degree learn the logic behind public policy and science, but don't learn enough about how it all works to peak behind the curtain. People with a graduate education, on the other hand, learn how to look into the black box and identify distortions, manipulations, and propaganda. They see how the sausage is made. In the current moment, the least and most educated arrive at a rejection of official narratives through different methods - the least educated by applying their heuristic and the most educated by critically evaluating evidence and narratives. However, they fill the vacuum with different content. The least educated are more likely to gravitate towards less evidence-based alternatives (Qanon, 5G, microchips, etc.).
Of course, many highly educated people go along with false narratives when they should know better. This is primarily because their status and careers depend on it. As the saying goes,
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
Nice evaluation. I agree. To unpack the heuristic approach, I would submit that education does not always reflect intellect, and vice versa. Common sense goes a long way when deciphering the sophistry of “experts.” When Fauci and Birx held press conferences in 2020 to explain how they would count COVID deaths by including deaths “with COVID,” and when the CDC continues to harp on the importance of cloth masks in absence of any definitive study showing their efficacy, and when an experimental vaccine has thousands of censored MDs and research scientists-at the expense of their careers and reputations-warning the world of its potential dangers, red flags raise in the minds of most individuals who have a little common sense. The meme is excellent in that it displays the college grad’s sophomoric extrapolations based on nothing at all. They are victims of indoctrination away from individual thinking and enlightenment to the “collective” and utopian “greater good.” I deal with the idiocy of academics on a daily basis, being one who teaches in the college system. I have come to realize the college degree, in some cases, does more harm than good…
Yes, that is a good nuance to add to my admittedly sweeping generalizations. Part of what you learn in college is that your intuitions are wrong. Trusting your intuitions is "unscientific." People who have not had their brain warped by this process, on the other hand, rely heavily on intuition. Given the corruption in so many academic and scientific fields, intuition, irrespective of intelligence or education, can be a superior guide towards truth and wisdom. As my faith in our institutions has crumbled over the past couple of years, I've been rebuilding the relationship with my intuition that my many years of higher education beat out of me. And I think that's a positive development.
Nicely put. Progressive will pay electorally especially for the failure of school COVID policy. Nothing gets the electorate so riled as when you mess with their kids, who have been treated as pawns in this political game.
Good article. I would still like to see the studies that point to the vaccines ameliorating symptoms. Beyond the CDC’s talking head “saying so,” I haven’t uncovered hard data. Australia and the UK are seeing the fully vaccinated out pace the unvaccinated in hospitals.
Yes! Why can't we get that data. If the CDC says they don't have the data, then how did Walensky have the data that showed those that were vaccinated and in hospital with severe illness had at least four risk factors? And conversely, why didn't she also mention how many risk factors the unvaccinated in hospital with severe illness had. I would think if it was much less than four, she'd let us know. The fact that they are not transparent is exactly why so many people don't trust any of this vaccine narrative. Just give us the damn data!
Certain data has been available on the CDC website for months and months; it’s just not talked about in mainstream media and washed over by the bureaucracy. My particular beef with the “lessens severity of symptoms” narrative is that this would be impossible to get unless they’re tracking reinfection by those who’ve acquired natural immunity, which we know by their own admission they are not. One would have to contract the disease unvaccinated, recover, get vaccinated, then contract it again to measure the efficacy of the “vaccine” that way. How exactly do Walensky and Fauci, who seem most of the time to be talking out their asses rather than citing scientific literature and peer reviewed studies, come up with these comparative remarks, when they don’t even track natural immunity reinfection, and have admitted that obesity and comorbidities are the determining factors for hospitalization and death? Healthy people have a low chance of death, according to data that’s been out for a year…
I hear this question. Someone in my neighborhood is the head of Biostatistics at UPenn Medical School and writes a Covid blog where he parses data like this . Here’s a link if you’d like to peruse his blog. Also, he’s been supportive of natural immunity serving like a vaccine and has blogged with data on this effect, as well.
My phone is still smoking after reading this. Well argued & magnificently articulated. Also, I hadn't previously spotted Leighton's argument that vaccine mandates are a portal to health care rationing, which of course you already have in America, but I'm in France 🤔
“Their particular expertise is not relevant to the issue at hand, which is not about science. It’s about power.”
The real debate not mentioned here is about a combination of science, freedom of thought and money. I am a now and have always been a sovereign person. I reserve the right to make my own decisions especially about my body. I resented their censorship of opposing viewpoints. At age 75 I took both shots of the Pfizer vaccine as soon as they were available. I was luckier than I realized with no adverse effects.
When the virus escaped from Tony Fauci’s dangerous gain of function research efforts, there was a serious disagreement among the actual experts about how to best deal with this emerging public health catastrophe.
The experts opposed to the vaccine route did not believe, for good reason, we had the time to develop and properly test a vaccine for safety for this type of virus. There was a failed vaccine history going back to AIDS. The opposition experts thought the best approach would be to repurpose drugs that we knew were safe because of their wide usage plus they had antiviral properties. They found one of the drugs that cost about a penny per dose could prevent the viral infection. This and others could be used to stop the spread of the infection quickly knocking out the disease. Both Japan and India used these repurposed drugs to virtually kill the virus in their populations. No such luck for us. Our for-profit health care officials did not like a repurposed solution even though the drugs already had a long history of being safe for humans because there was no profit to be made.
The most profit ever made from any vaccine was around $20 billion. Pfizer made $33 billion last year and expects another $36 billion this year; so, vaccines and only vaccines it is. There was on big problem with this for-profit decision. The opposition was correct that there would never be enough time to develop and test a vaccine to our current standards; it had to be an FDA emergency authorization. To get an emergency vaccine authorization, no alternative treatment could be available. If an alternate treatment became available, they could lose their emergency authorization along with their record profits.
To keep the opposition repurposed drugs from being made available, our for-profit health care establishment used their power to prevent any repurposed drugs from being prescribed or in most cases even available. This is not about power because they had plenty of power to do this and they used that power. This was about making enormous sums of money to vaccinate the world many times over.
To keep the lid on this they had to not only suppress the availability of cheap repurposed drugs but to ban even any discussion of the repurposed drugs. Now they’re in dangerous political territory by stepping on freedom of speech to secure profits.
With Omicron things have changed again. Before Fauci, for a vaccine to even be a vaccine, it must prevent transmission. Their “vaccine” provides no transmission protection against Omicron, maybe making you even more vulnerable. Their vaccine is now only a drug they can claim will prevent serious illness after infection. The repurposed drugs can provide that cheaply without the dangerous side effects that are known with the vaccines plus stop the infection if started. The FDA has been ordered to release the secret data they used to grant their emergency authorization in 8 months instead of 75 years they claimed they needed due to a court ruling. We should now find out more about how dangerous these vaccines really are.
The world scientific community outside the reach of our corrupt for-profit health care establishment have been conducting studies on these repurposed drugs. The FDA refuses to even look at the data. Any political party that stands behind Fauci and his corrupt establishment is committing political suicide in the next national election. They did it for money, not power. They will pay.
Nearly all of this is completely on point and insightful, but I might take issue with the idea that the vaccine mandate issue would be completely flipped between Democrats and Republicans were Trump to have been reelected. The politics around "15 days to slow the spread" were probably analogous, Trump supported it, but Republicans in general and #MAGA in particular were fairly skeptical from day one, more so as it went on, whereas Democrats were all in (as long as it didn't involve banning travel from China).
I think vaccine mandates would've travelled a similary path, and ended up being a lot more complicated and somewhat less partisan. Trump would've been promoting the vaccine, but not mandating it federally. Democrats would've been downplaying Trump's role in developing it, but mandating it at the state and local level. Vaccine hestitancy in minority communities would've been highlighted, if only to blame it on Trump's "careless roll-out", but rural white hesistancy would've still been condemned, just not blamed on Trump.
Reminds me of the counterfactual that always runs through my head, what if Colin Powell had run and won the GOP primay against W in 2000, and become the first black President? Where would race relations be today? I can't help but believe that they wouldn't be far, far, far less divisive and partisan. Leftists of all races would've (generally) opposed him, and right-wingers all races would've (generally) supported him, making his race not really a factor. As the nation's most prominent black person, this would've had a huge cultural and political impact, likely to this day. Instead, Obama was the first black President, and he and the Democratic Party had a huge incentive to portrary opposition to him as racially-motivated. That has reverberated throughout culture and politics ever since.
It's not only political, it's a smoke and mirrors distraction for the fact our healthcare system was woefully unprepared for the pandemic that every educated person knew was coming. It's a lot easier to blame the unvaccinated than to take responsibility for the fact that the U.S. has fewer hospital and fewer doctors per capita than almost any other industrialized country, that we didn't have an adequate stockpile of PPE, and that we have allowed the food and beverage industry to make Americans sick so that as soon as the pandemic hit many of them died.
I've thought about writing on exactly this. The reason our hospitals are so at risk of being overrun is the "just-in-time" logistics logic we've extended to ICUs (scaling them to be just under full census during normal times) for economic efficiency. Hadn't thought until your comment about how that relates to our lack of PPEs — in the US, at least, this was a pandemic of neoliberalism as much or more than it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
For basically this reason, all of the urgent headlines about hospitals being "near capacity" ring hollow. The US hospital system does not have capacity to handle a pandemic above and beyond a spike in an ordinary flu season. That would not be profitable. Covid spikes are only noteworthy when hospital capacity is substantially exceeded, which does seem to have actually happened a few times. But since omicron, I've just been seeing the misleading "near capacity" line. Which means its a sorta bad flu at most.
This refusal to acknowledge that the vaccines have utterly and completely failed as a containment strategy goes beyond mere political point scoring. I would call it something like "mass formation," but the AP fact checkers tell me this is false ; ).
A brief history lesson reveals how insane this all is. On May 12, 2021, the New York Times reported on a troubling spike in Covid cases in Seychelles following a massive Sinopharm vaccine rollout. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/business/economy/covid-seychelles-sinopharm.html. To go back and read it now is stunning. The gist of the article is that Sinopharm was a failure, as proven by the spike in cases following mass vaccination, and that only the more effective mRNA vaccines can get us out of this. Then, in July 2021, Israel saw a huge spike in Covid cases following their massive Pfizer rollout. But there was no similar article describing Pfizer as a failed containment strategy.
To the contrary, NYT began running articles from its editorial board and the freaking ACLU calling for mandates around this time because the vaccines were so "stunningly effective." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/opinion/biden-covid-vaccine.html?searchResultPosition=2. It was already very clear at this point that the vaccines were a failed containment measure. But the establishment was doubling down. And the scapegoating of the "unvaxxed" was only just picking up steam, and has continued to grow since, in spite of the evidence. Presidents, doctors, scientists, academics, politicians, Supreme Court Justices, journalists, business leaders, celebrities, etc., have all lent their voices to the lie that the unvaxxed are the source of our problems and are putting others in danger. We have known this was a lie since July 2021.
Yet this lie is the foundation of the entire international Covid regime that has grown in strength in the ensuing eight months. I use NYT comments to assess what can and cannot be said in "polite society." Comments pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, i.e. stating the FACT that the vaccines have completely failed as a containment strategy, are "moderated" out of existence. You cannot say that 2+2=4. My very progressive friends and family know on an intellectual level that 2+2=4, but still bristle when it is pointed out to them. While saying 2+2=4 is not allowed, comments perpetuating the dangerous and demonstrably false "pandemic of the unvaccinated" myth rise to the top of the rankings. The level of cognitive dissonance and hysteria at play here goes far beyond simply "politics." We are dealing with something far more evil.
We are dealing with the primal scapegoating impulse that rears its ugly head in times of turmoil throughout history. We are dealing with a primal attempt to purge the "unclean" from society. Fortunately we are now civilized enough that this means "only" removing people from tech platforms, sports competitions, jobs, restaurants, places of public accommodation, airplanes, etc., instead of marching them to the gas chambers or the killing fields. But it is the same primal impulse at play.
Charles Eisenstein and Paul Kingsnorth have done a brilliant job explaining this phenomenon. We must heed their warnings or this goes to a very dark place very fast. 2+2=4. The vaccines have failed as a containment policy. The Covid regime that rests on this lie must be dismantled immediately. Those who perpetuate this lie must be called on their bullshit.
It's interesting that Leighton points out that while in the US, the debate over vaccine mandates seems to pit liberal urban elites against the (presumably more right-leaning or at least more populist) masses, these political positions could have very well been switched if Trump had been reelected. Where I'm sitting in Quebec, the provincial government has been fairly heavy-handed in trying to push vaccination, imposing a vaccine passport and even floating the idea to impose a special tax on the unvaccinated. But our government isn't exactly left-wing: while it's relatively centrist in terms of its positions, it's also mostly popular among older demographics. So the complaining that I've heard against our government (on Reddit for example) has been about how it's a government of Boomers that doesn't care about younger generations. For example, when the government imposed a 10pm curfew two weeks ago (not related to vaccines, but certainly a covid-related measure that has authoritarian features; thankfully they removed the curfew yesterday), much of what I heard was how this does not affect Boomers who're asleep at 10 anyway, and who are presumably deathly afraid of coronavirus, but does affect Zoomers. (Not necessarily my own opinion, but what I heard.) And the actual left-wing party has been critical of the government's handling of the pandemic, including its authoritarian aspects.
This is not to say that positions here are flipped exactly the other way around from how they are in the US regarding response to the pandemic, just that they fell along somewhat different lines. But both Canadian federal politics and Quebec provincial politics have seen the rise of new political parties that are ostensibly right-wing, but mostly interested in opposing covid measures. These parties haven't really been successful for now, but we'll see what happens in the future.
100% agree. Still reeling that I see it this way now given my half-century of living within the educated liberal hive mind you so incisively describe. I’ve started counting the number of times colleagues, relatives or friends make derisive comments about Trumpers, vaccine deniers, mandate deniers (including SCOTUS ones), non-maskers, anyone who lives in surrounding less affluent conservative counties, white people in general (and we’re white, but it’s always those other white people), and so on. It’s daily.
I tried to explain to [someone] (who can't wrap her mind around the fact that the vaccines don't stop the spread) that the OSHA mandate, if SCOTUS affirmed, would have set a very dangerous precedent. She didn't get it. I explained that she might like this mandate and this government but what if a future government -- one she doesn't like -- uses the precedent to force a mandate on her that she didn't agree with. That was a political argument, not a science argument but she still didn't get it.
Very good article. One correction though. The vaccine doesn't "prevent you from ending up dead or intubated". It might reduce the risk of ending up dead or intubated but it doesn't prevent it.
As the academy became increasingly dominated by liberal elites (or those who became liberal elites), it stands to reason that liberal elites worship "science": science is far more likely to draw conclusions to our liking (I say "our" because I am a liberal elite by background and training, if somewhat less philosophically so), because we are disproportionately represented among scientists and because educated elites understand how to use science as a frame to support our ideas (both cultural and political), regardless of the quality of the science or the facts actually evinced in the research. We echo-chambered ourselves into the delusion that only we are smart and educated and we worship intelligence and education, and that there's no need to seriously consider the ideas outside of the mainstream elite institutional ideas.
I wonder if this is some weird symptom of our decadence: that in many ways our lives are so good that facts don't even really matter to us anymore as much as the status that being seen to "win" them confers. In a world where facts are the difference between misery of hunger, poverty, or illness, and relative comfort, facts matter a lot. When they are the difference between status / morality and guilt and lack of moral authority, they still matter a great deal, but in a very different way. And facts matter in a material way much more to those who have less power and status than they do to those in power.
Superb post. The only thing I might disagree with is the assumption that if Trump had been elected in 2020 he would have pushed for vaccine mandates. I doubt very strongly that he would have done this.
It’s interesting- I think you are probably correct, although he now seems very keen on taking credit for the vaccines.
Oddly, I seem to have read that the majority of anti-mandaters and anti-vaxers (at least insofar as the mRNA is concerned), are either high school educated or post four-year degree. It’s the four year degree holders who seem to take everything the government says at face value. Interesting….
This phenomenon is illustrated well by the "mid-wit meme." https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/the-midwit-meme-and-the-rittenhouse My theory on this convergence between the least and most educated is as follows:
Many people who do not go to college see "the system" as a fundamentally malevolent force. They therefore use "the establishment is lying to me to keep me down" as a heuristic for deciding what is and is not true. People with a college degree learn the logic behind public policy and science, but don't learn enough about how it all works to peak behind the curtain. People with a graduate education, on the other hand, learn how to look into the black box and identify distortions, manipulations, and propaganda. They see how the sausage is made. In the current moment, the least and most educated arrive at a rejection of official narratives through different methods - the least educated by applying their heuristic and the most educated by critically evaluating evidence and narratives. However, they fill the vacuum with different content. The least educated are more likely to gravitate towards less evidence-based alternatives (Qanon, 5G, microchips, etc.).
Of course, many highly educated people go along with false narratives when they should know better. This is primarily because their status and careers depend on it. As the saying goes,
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
This would make a good post.
Looks like Brian Chau and Tablet were thinking the same thing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rule-of-midwits As is usually the case with articles in Tablet, this piece does a great job exploring this issue.
Nice evaluation. I agree. To unpack the heuristic approach, I would submit that education does not always reflect intellect, and vice versa. Common sense goes a long way when deciphering the sophistry of “experts.” When Fauci and Birx held press conferences in 2020 to explain how they would count COVID deaths by including deaths “with COVID,” and when the CDC continues to harp on the importance of cloth masks in absence of any definitive study showing their efficacy, and when an experimental vaccine has thousands of censored MDs and research scientists-at the expense of their careers and reputations-warning the world of its potential dangers, red flags raise in the minds of most individuals who have a little common sense. The meme is excellent in that it displays the college grad’s sophomoric extrapolations based on nothing at all. They are victims of indoctrination away from individual thinking and enlightenment to the “collective” and utopian “greater good.” I deal with the idiocy of academics on a daily basis, being one who teaches in the college system. I have come to realize the college degree, in some cases, does more harm than good…
Yes, that is a good nuance to add to my admittedly sweeping generalizations. Part of what you learn in college is that your intuitions are wrong. Trusting your intuitions is "unscientific." People who have not had their brain warped by this process, on the other hand, rely heavily on intuition. Given the corruption in so many academic and scientific fields, intuition, irrespective of intelligence or education, can be a superior guide towards truth and wisdom. As my faith in our institutions has crumbled over the past couple of years, I've been rebuilding the relationship with my intuition that my many years of higher education beat out of me. And I think that's a positive development.
Indeed it is, my friend! Stay strong!
Nicely put. Progressive will pay electorally especially for the failure of school COVID policy. Nothing gets the electorate so riled as when you mess with their kids, who have been treated as pawns in this political game.
Good article. I would still like to see the studies that point to the vaccines ameliorating symptoms. Beyond the CDC’s talking head “saying so,” I haven’t uncovered hard data. Australia and the UK are seeing the fully vaccinated out pace the unvaccinated in hospitals.
Yes! Why can't we get that data. If the CDC says they don't have the data, then how did Walensky have the data that showed those that were vaccinated and in hospital with severe illness had at least four risk factors? And conversely, why didn't she also mention how many risk factors the unvaccinated in hospital with severe illness had. I would think if it was much less than four, she'd let us know. The fact that they are not transparent is exactly why so many people don't trust any of this vaccine narrative. Just give us the damn data!
Certain data has been available on the CDC website for months and months; it’s just not talked about in mainstream media and washed over by the bureaucracy. My particular beef with the “lessens severity of symptoms” narrative is that this would be impossible to get unless they’re tracking reinfection by those who’ve acquired natural immunity, which we know by their own admission they are not. One would have to contract the disease unvaccinated, recover, get vaccinated, then contract it again to measure the efficacy of the “vaccine” that way. How exactly do Walensky and Fauci, who seem most of the time to be talking out their asses rather than citing scientific literature and peer reviewed studies, come up with these comparative remarks, when they don’t even track natural immunity reinfection, and have admitted that obesity and comorbidities are the determining factors for hospitalization and death? Healthy people have a low chance of death, according to data that’s been out for a year…
I hear this question. Someone in my neighborhood is the head of Biostatistics at UPenn Medical School and writes a Covid blog where he parses data like this . Here’s a link if you’d like to peruse his blog. Also, he’s been supportive of natural immunity serving like a vaccine and has blogged with data on this effect, as well.
http://wix.to/3cDsC_Q?ref=m_cl
My phone is still smoking after reading this. Well argued & magnificently articulated. Also, I hadn't previously spotted Leighton's argument that vaccine mandates are a portal to health care rationing, which of course you already have in America, but I'm in France 🤔
“Their particular expertise is not relevant to the issue at hand, which is not about science. It’s about power.”
The real debate not mentioned here is about a combination of science, freedom of thought and money. I am a now and have always been a sovereign person. I reserve the right to make my own decisions especially about my body. I resented their censorship of opposing viewpoints. At age 75 I took both shots of the Pfizer vaccine as soon as they were available. I was luckier than I realized with no adverse effects.
When the virus escaped from Tony Fauci’s dangerous gain of function research efforts, there was a serious disagreement among the actual experts about how to best deal with this emerging public health catastrophe.
The experts opposed to the vaccine route did not believe, for good reason, we had the time to develop and properly test a vaccine for safety for this type of virus. There was a failed vaccine history going back to AIDS. The opposition experts thought the best approach would be to repurpose drugs that we knew were safe because of their wide usage plus they had antiviral properties. They found one of the drugs that cost about a penny per dose could prevent the viral infection. This and others could be used to stop the spread of the infection quickly knocking out the disease. Both Japan and India used these repurposed drugs to virtually kill the virus in their populations. No such luck for us. Our for-profit health care officials did not like a repurposed solution even though the drugs already had a long history of being safe for humans because there was no profit to be made.
The most profit ever made from any vaccine was around $20 billion. Pfizer made $33 billion last year and expects another $36 billion this year; so, vaccines and only vaccines it is. There was on big problem with this for-profit decision. The opposition was correct that there would never be enough time to develop and test a vaccine to our current standards; it had to be an FDA emergency authorization. To get an emergency vaccine authorization, no alternative treatment could be available. If an alternate treatment became available, they could lose their emergency authorization along with their record profits.
To keep the opposition repurposed drugs from being made available, our for-profit health care establishment used their power to prevent any repurposed drugs from being prescribed or in most cases even available. This is not about power because they had plenty of power to do this and they used that power. This was about making enormous sums of money to vaccinate the world many times over.
To keep the lid on this they had to not only suppress the availability of cheap repurposed drugs but to ban even any discussion of the repurposed drugs. Now they’re in dangerous political territory by stepping on freedom of speech to secure profits.
With Omicron things have changed again. Before Fauci, for a vaccine to even be a vaccine, it must prevent transmission. Their “vaccine” provides no transmission protection against Omicron, maybe making you even more vulnerable. Their vaccine is now only a drug they can claim will prevent serious illness after infection. The repurposed drugs can provide that cheaply without the dangerous side effects that are known with the vaccines plus stop the infection if started. The FDA has been ordered to release the secret data they used to grant their emergency authorization in 8 months instead of 75 years they claimed they needed due to a court ruling. We should now find out more about how dangerous these vaccines really are.
The world scientific community outside the reach of our corrupt for-profit health care establishment have been conducting studies on these repurposed drugs. The FDA refuses to even look at the data. Any political party that stands behind Fauci and his corrupt establishment is committing political suicide in the next national election. They did it for money, not power. They will pay.
Alayna
Nearly all of this is completely on point and insightful, but I might take issue with the idea that the vaccine mandate issue would be completely flipped between Democrats and Republicans were Trump to have been reelected. The politics around "15 days to slow the spread" were probably analogous, Trump supported it, but Republicans in general and #MAGA in particular were fairly skeptical from day one, more so as it went on, whereas Democrats were all in (as long as it didn't involve banning travel from China).
I think vaccine mandates would've travelled a similary path, and ended up being a lot more complicated and somewhat less partisan. Trump would've been promoting the vaccine, but not mandating it federally. Democrats would've been downplaying Trump's role in developing it, but mandating it at the state and local level. Vaccine hestitancy in minority communities would've been highlighted, if only to blame it on Trump's "careless roll-out", but rural white hesistancy would've still been condemned, just not blamed on Trump.
Reminds me of the counterfactual that always runs through my head, what if Colin Powell had run and won the GOP primay against W in 2000, and become the first black President? Where would race relations be today? I can't help but believe that they wouldn't be far, far, far less divisive and partisan. Leftists of all races would've (generally) opposed him, and right-wingers all races would've (generally) supported him, making his race not really a factor. As the nation's most prominent black person, this would've had a huge cultural and political impact, likely to this day. Instead, Obama was the first black President, and he and the Democratic Party had a huge incentive to portrary opposition to him as racially-motivated. That has reverberated throughout culture and politics ever since.
Once again…a brilliant piece…Leighton. ‘Educated strata”…please leave the confines of your academic community more often.