Pascal’s Wager for COVIDystopic Times or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Coronapocalypse and Eat Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

by Laurie Calhoun | Apr 2, 2021

Being of a naturally skeptical bent, I have harbored doubts from the very beginning about the upheaval of the entire world rationalized by politicians everywhere because of a virus which kills less than 1% of the people it infects. I watched in amazement as country after country closed their borders to foreigners, imposed “common sense” quarantines, lockdowns and mask mandates, and shut down entire economies. I was perplexed by the inability of anyone in the position to craft policies to recognize that what really needed to be done was to isolate vulnerable persons, allow everyone else to go about their business, and eventually we would achieve herd immunity.

This approach was rejected early on as untenable because, it was claimed, COVID-19 was simply too elusive. In contrast to many other deadly viruses known to mankind since time immemorial, we could not develop herd immunity to COVID-19, because there were documented cases of persons who had become reinfected after having already recovered. To my mind, that was the first red flag that perhaps the virus had not simply leapt from bats to humans when some hapless soul in Wuhan ate a bowl of soup. I started to wonder whether this was not some sort of Frankenstein gain-of-function virus, engineered in a lab by DARPA-funded scientists under the guise of national defense, to figure out what to do in case some other government developed such a virus to wipe out its sworn enemies.

The idea that COVID-19 was developed in a lab and accidentally released by human error was rejected by all of the CNN-certified authorities, so I naturally listened to the science and began focusing on other matters, such as whether the project of inoculating all of the 9 billion people on the planet with a vaccine might be a way of ending the pandemic. There were plenty of companies enthusiastic to pursue this project, and within months Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, in addition to a variety of companies in Russia and China, had already developed their vaccines, having been generously funded by governments so obviously keen to save lives.

Fine, I thought to myself. Now everyone who is vulnerable can get the vaccine, and those who are not can go about their business, become infected and then recover from the virus and its associated symptoms upon robust people, such as the “blah” feeling reported by Tom Hanks upon landing on Australian shores in March 2020 shortly before that entire country closed its borders seemingly forever. There was no question in my mind that we were on the way to the exit ramp of the highway to a dystopic world where no one is allowed to travel or congregate in groups for fear of transmitting the virus to persons who might die as a result. The situation was easy to comprehend by appeal to Pascal’s wager (mutatis mutandis):

The Question of Efficacy in Preventing Transmission and Infection

Further doubts, however, began to creep into my mind as I witnessed a variety of zealous public relations efforts to persuade people invulnerable to COVID-19 to get the vaccines. Front and center in luring the public to do what the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have determined must be done have been COVID-19 guru Dr. Anthony Fauci and vaccine entrepreneur Bill Gates, who incidentally has revealed in interviews his fabulous financial success in the vaccine sector. I think that everyone, on both sides of the COVID-19 lockdown divide, can agree that a twenty-fold return on his investment is nothing to scoff at.

Fauci got right to work promoting the Moderna vaccine by pointing out to African Americans that, in fact, the vaccine was developed by a black woman. This struck me as an odd selling point, and I confess to have suspected racism. I looked up Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett on Twitter and found this on her profile: “Virology. Vaccinology. Vagina-ology. Vino-ology.” Not sure that the latter two count as credentials, but one thing is clear: vaccine hesistancy among African Americans has a well documented and understandable history, resulting in part from the horrifying Tuskegee experiments, in which black men infected with syphilis were left untreated “just to see what would happen.” That’s right: nonconsensual human experimentation was not the province only of the Nazis. It has happened right here, in the United States, as well. In turning Dr. Corbett into something of a media darling, Fauci’s idea appears to have been that people would be persuaded that a black woman would never dream of acting so as to harm other black people. That line of argumentation is unfortunately impugned by the fact that black nurses were among the perpetrators of the Tuskegee study. Indeed, the program coordinator, Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie, was an African American woman. Nonetheless, Fauci may have succeeded in convincing some people to roll up their sleeves, to wit, those entirely ignorant of the details of the disturbing Tuskegee saga, which lasted a shocking forty years.

My next concern arose when some “experts” began exhorting pregnant women to “get the jab,” insisting that there was no evidence of harm to pregnant women from the new vaccines. I decided to look into the studies done before the emergency authorizations and discovered that pregnant women were not included in the first round of human trials. This finding naturally reminded me of the disturbing story of Thalidomide. That drug seemed very safe in initial clinical trials, which, however, excluded pregnant women. Ultimately, 40% of the babies of women who had been given Thalidomide as a remedy for morning sickness died around the time of birth. Of those who survived, thousands were born deformed, many with fin-like limbs. As is always the case, it took time for the longterm side effects to be sorted out. That is because each patient is unique, with different biological and environmental factors, including the medical treatment in question, acting upon her body. Approved in 1956, Thalidomide was not pulled from the European market until 1961. Why would anyone be encouraging pregnant women to “get the jab,” given the well-documented history of Thalidomide and the apparent invulnerability of infants and small children to the COVID-19 virus? I puzzled. After all, the word teratogen exists because there are substances which predictably lead to birth defects, and they are discovered when, and only when, pregnant women are exposed to those substances. Thinking about the case of Thalidomide and possible side effects provoked another Pascal’s Wager assessment:

The Question of Unknown Side-Effects—Both Short-Term and Long-Term

The worst case scenario would be that the “vaccines” do not actually work and also have devastating side effects. Clearly, then, the rational choice for a given person is going to be a function of how vulnerable he or she is to the disease which the vaccines are intended to protect against. If one has a 99.5+% chance of surviving COVID-19, has no known comorbidities and therefore is unlikely to suffer severe illness, even if infected with the virus, then it is difficult to see why he or she would want to opt for the treatment, given that the risk of longterm side effects is entirely unknown—ranging anywhere from 0% to 100%. Fine, I concluded again. People who want the vaccine can get the vaccine, and everyone else can resume their normal life. Yet Fauci & Co. did not agree. I continued to puzzle over pregnant women being enthusiastically exhorted to “get the jab,” and those concerns were exacerbated when vaccine trials on children began, complete with a social media campaign featuring images of “heroic” pro-science kids rolling up their sleeves.

Eventually, after reflecting on this conundrum for quite some time, the firm believer in freedom of choice in me capitulated, concluding that, as in everything else, parents and pregnant women would have to decide what to do for themselves and their offspring. I decided to move on to other matters, as it was obviously futile to engage further with the mobs of people online who have redefined “prudential person” to mean “antivaxxer”. Instead, I turned to the rational grounds for believing that Moderna and its diverse research team have succeeded in producing a COVID-19 vaccine, which is defined by the CDC as follows:

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.

Going directly to the source, Moderna’s own website, I learned that the company specializes in gene therapy and has been operational for a grand total of ten years. They received a substantial DARPA grant in 2013, but have no FDA approvals for vaccines or devices to date, aside from the emergency authorization granted in December 2020 for the COVID-19 treatment. All of the COVID-19 therapies, whether m-RNA (as in Moderna’s case) or vector based, have been labeled “vaccines” not only in the hope that they may act as vaccines, but also in order to benefit from the legal immunity enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers in the United States, thanks to the PREP (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparation) act. Anyone who suffers harm as a result of these government-funded elixirs will have to take it up with the government, not the manufacturer. Unlike normal businesses, which must bear the legal brunt of the negative effects of their products upon human beings, Moderna is like a child being allowed to roam free, its parents prepared to clean up any messes which may result. Perhaps Moderna will get lucky and have produced a miracle cure, but the statistics on new medical treatments are not that encouraging. Of 5,000 new drug candidates, only a tiny fraction of them (5 out of 5,000 or .1%) are judged from the animal trials to be safe enough to be tested on human beings. Of those which are tested on human beings, only 20% eventually achieve (regular) FDA approval and are taken to market (.02% of the original candidates). Of those pharmaceutical products which make it to market, some are eventually recalled. From January 2017 to September 2019, 195 drugs previously approved by the FDA were recalled because of safety issues.

Now, many people have died of COVID-19, and no one wishes for that to happen to themselves or anyone they know. It is also true that very ill and vulnerable people are often willing to gamble on experimental treatments. In the case of terminally ill patients, what do they have to lose? It is unclear, however, why any rational person not at risk of death from COVID-19 should want to offer up, without compensation, his healthy body as a Petri dish to a government-subsidized and protected industry with a well-documented history of not only deception and fraud but also what are arguably human rights violations, above all, in third world countries. Moderna, being new, with no products on the market, has a clean slate to date (all none of its products have had no untoward effects on human subjects), but the Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca tallies of criminal fines and settlements are awe-inspiring, to put it mildly. No one ever said that human experimentation was going to be risk free, but the fact that billions of dollars in compensations have been doled out to people harmed by pharmaceutical and other chemical companies underscores a sober truth: it is inherently dangerous to introduce novel foreign substances into human bodies, even in the best of all possible research and development scenarios.

The spec sheets for both the Pfizer and the Moderna shots explicitly state that they “may” prevent one from getting COVID-19 (which implies, of course, that they may not), and that “There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.” These information sheets (which hardly anyone rolling up their sleeves appears to have read) also state plainly that “Serious and unexpected side effects may occur,” which should in any case be obvious since they were developed and tested over a course of months, not years (note: the average time to market for a new drug/device is 12 years). There simply is no longterm data yet—whether positive or negative. The makers themselves of these products rightly express ignorance as to their efficacy in preventing and transmitting disease, touting confidently only their therapeutic effect in reducing severe symptoms and diminishing the likelihood of death, both of which are in any case exceedingly rare for persons under the age of 50, according to all available statistical data. Feeling “blah” does not count, I presume, as a “severe symptom,” so it is unclear whether vaccination would have helped Tom Hanks at all. But who knows? One or more of these companies may succeed in producing a COVID-19 panacea, I mused. Until I remembered the problem of new virus variants.

The current slate of vaccines were developed against a dominant strain of COVID-19 last year, but the many variants, created through mutation and apparently numbering in the thousands, are by now so widespread that there are grounds for believing that even if the current vaccines work against the dominant strain, and even with strong vaccine compliance, vulnerable people will continue to die, sooner or later, while everyone else will be spared, not because of the vaccines, but because they were never vulnerable to the virus and its variants in the first place. As is always the case, given human variability, there have been some outliers, young persons who died or suffered harm from Coronavirus infection. On the other hand, more elderly people than one might surmise, given the media coverage, have survived. COVID-19 does not come close to being a death sentence, although the chances of dying are significantly increased for patients with comorbidities. Still, in some places, the average age of a COVID-19 victim is the same or even older than the average life expectancy of people more generally.

Curiously enough, persons who already survived COVID-19 are also being exhorted to get the vaccines, even though the very fact of their ongoing existence definitively demonstrates that their immune system is hardy enough to combat the virus. For other diseases caused by viruses and for which vaccines exist, the reason for getting the vaccine is to avoid at all costs getting the disease, which in cases such as Ebola and Yellow Fever are very deadly to anyone, regardless of age or comorbidities. But the vast majority of people infected with COVID-19 experience only mild symptoms and do not require medical treatment. Reflecting on these matters, I circled back to my previous concern: Why should any healthy person believe that taking an experimental vaccine is a good idea, particularly if they already survived COVID-19?

As I continued to mull over this question, I marveled at the massive media marketing budget for COVID-19. All of the circular stickers on the ground and all of signs everywhere relaying important information such as the permitted capacity of persons inside stores, all scientifically calculated to three significant figures to yield numbers such as the 163 shoppers admitted to the local TJMaxx at a time. Even more impressive have been the ads on television and the internet everywhere encouraging people: “This is our shot. Let’s take it!” among a slate of similarly benevolent-sounding slogans. People may feel better when others hop aboard the vaccine train, and they may attempt to shame those who do not, but does any of this behavior have anything to do with whether or not the treatments will ultimately work? It seems safe to say that neither the virus nor the vaccines have any interest in the hopes and aspirations of human beings. Ironically, the pressure being put on people—threatening the requirement of vaccination for travel, work and play, and the lavishing of praise upon those willing blindly to accept as-of-yet unknown risks—appears to be having the opposite of its intended effect.

If it were so obvious that the vaccines worked and were the only solution to our current predicament, then why would Queen Elizabeth take to the airwaves to denounce people who refuse to get vaccinated as “selfish”? Why would Tony Blair insist that we will not be free again until vaccine passports become available? Why did former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama team up to produce a video in which they attempt to persuade people to get the vaccine? (Bush states in the ad, “The science is clear.” He was equally confident about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs.) Why would CNN be admonishing those congresspersons who have declined the vaccines made available to them, including those such as Representative Thomas Massie who have already recovered from the virus and therefore must have developed antibodies and T-cells in response? On its face, all of this propaganda seems vaguely insane, and it is scaring people away who might otherwise have agreed to participate in the experimental trials.

Sowing doubts even more effectively than appeals by confirmed liars in high places, more than twenty countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Finland, Thailand and, most recently, Canada, halted their distribution of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in response to a number of blood clot cases. When the cases in Norway were first reported, the trusty mainstream media went into overdrive, dismissing “baseless” claims of connections between the blood clots and the vaccine. It seemed strange to me that over the course of the past year, every person who died with COVID-19 was recorded as having died of COVID-19, while no one who died after vaccination was acknowledged to have been killed by the vaccine. The in some cases deadly blood clots were “purely coincidental” was the judgment decreed by journalists onboard the vaccine train (before the matter was even investigated) and echoed by parrots throughout Facebook and Twitter to assuage the fears of persons who might be discouraged by the news from rolling up their sleeves. Even after the AstraZeneca vaccination resumed in most of these countries, some of them changed their guidelines. France, for example, having initially claimed that the AstraZeneca vaccine showed no benefits to elderly persons, reversed course to decree that the vaccine should only be used on persons over the age of 55. Canada, for its part, announced that they would be administering the AstraZeneca vaccine only to persons between the ages of 50 and 65. The governments which stopped and then resumed vaccination claimed that they had done so out of “an abundance of caution,” but when some scientists concluded that there was indeed a connection between the blood clots and a rare autoimmune response elicited by the vaccine, they also jubilantly reported that they had found a possible cure for that problem. By all means, take the AstraZeneca vaccine, and if you develop blood clots in your brain, then we’ll give you some other treatment to save your life! (If you have no Big Pharma stocks in your portfolio, now might be the time to buy.)

Many businesses have joined in on the public relations campaign and are rising to the challenge of convincing their customers that vaccination is the way to go. Qantas, the largest Australian airline, has adopted the punitive approach, alerting everyone everywhere that they will not be boarding any of their planes without first presenting proof of vaccination. But one company has gone above and beyond to offer what may finally be needed to convert the intransigent skeptics: Krispy Kreme. The doughnut giant has announced that anyone presenting proof of vaccination at any of their stores will be entitled to a free doughnut. Mind you, this is not a one-off promotion. Every vaccinated person is being offered a doughnut every single day that they show up at any of the Krispy Kreme locations with their trusty vaccination card in hand. Needless to say, this propitious development necessitates a revision of the Pascal’s Wager assessment:

To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate?

Luckily there are Krispy Kreme doughnut shops dotting the vast landscape of the United States, and, more importantly, there is one down the street from me. My fate, therefore, along with that of thousands, if not millions, of my fellow citizens (including, I presume, Representative Massie) is now sealed. I will be rolling up my sleeve, not because I believe in the novel m-RNA vaccines, nor because I think that it is in my best interests to undergo an experimental treatment for a disease to which I am not vulnerable and from which I have already recovered, nor because George W. Bush and Tony Blair want me to, nor because I care what Queen Elizabeth thinks of me, nor because the only way I can ever travel to Australia again will be to “get the jab.” No, I will be rolling up my sleeve for the sole purpose of receiving a free doughnut every day henceforth. I trust that, in recognition of the Krispy Kreme executive team’s manifest magnanimity, the government will confer upon their company the label “essential business” to protect it from revenue loss in the event of any future lockdowns.

In Defense of Statues and Other Texts—All of Them

by Laurie Calhoun | Jan 21, 2021

There has been a lot of discussion and some action on the question whether statues portraying or representing men currently regarded as scoundrels by self-styled “good people” should be permitted to stand. On its face, such a view would seem to imply that many of the public squares and buildings of the great cities of the world must be razed, which strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum. Pick any leader you like: Churchill, Truman, De Gaulle, in any country, at any time, and look closely enough at his record and you will find dubious decisions made with deplorable consequences. The leaders who saved the world from the Nazis may be considered heroes today, but that does not imply that they were somehow flawless, as is nowhere more obvious than in what happened in the Soviet Union after World War II, when millions of Russians became the victims of a regime which had worked with the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States to halt Hitler’s mad quest to conquer the world.

Looking at more recent leaders, there are a good number of libraries, institutions, and buildings dedicated to men such as George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair, who together wrecked Iraq after concocting bogus pretexts for the invasion of a sovereign nation. For his part, Barack Obama attacked Libya before leaving it in shambles and dramatically increased the use of lethal drones to kill suspects abroad, including U.S. citizen persons of color who were executed without indictment or trial. Obama also dropped bombs throughout his two-term presidency (an average of seventy-two per day in 2016), targeting seven different countries across the Middle East and Africa. The military policies of each of these men have caused untold human misery, yet buildings and foundations continue to be named after them.

Those who wish to raze statues and rename buildings are for some reason not talking about their contemporaries, and the idea of prosecuting men such as Bush, Blair and Obama at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity does not seem to cross their minds. Indeed, we find celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres and former first lady Michelle Obama entirely willing to overlook the war crimes of their buddy George W. Bush. President Obama himself opted not to prosecute those responsible for the Bush administration’s widely decried torture of human beings at Abu Ghraib, Baghram, and Guantánamo Bay prisons, among other places. Obama claimed, “That’s not who we are,” but effectively left torture as an option on the table for other administrations, including his own. He also “solved” the problem of the extended detention and mistreatment of terror suspects never charged with crimes by defining them as guilty until proven innocent and incinerating them with missiles launched from drones.

Remarkably, despite the horrors perpetrated under their watch, the esteemed opinions of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Barack Obama continue to be sought out. As far as I can tell, many people are entirely ignorant of the foreign policy record of Barack Obama, whose reputation seems to have received a big boost by the brash and boisterous demeanor of his successor. Mention Libya to a fan of Obama, and you are likely to receive a puzzled look in response. It was not, of course, Obama’s intention to catalyze a resurgence of black African slave markets in Libya through his ousting of Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, but that was nonetheless one of the consequences. When it comes to relatively mild-mannered men such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the prevailing prioritization of intentions over consequences translates smoothly into a willingness to forgive the perpetrators of catastrophic campaigns of mass homicide along the lines of the tried-and-true just war line: They meant to do good. So powerfully does the assumption of good intentions among compatriots hold sway over people that even Henry Kissinger, despite his role in perpetrating and perpetuating the Vietnam debacle, which resulted in millions of deaths, has managed somehow to continue to be revered, at least in some circles.

The same charitable interpretation is not, however, extended to the men whose effigies have been damaged or destroyed all over the United States in something of a mad frenzy to decry them as evil, while highlighting the protesters’ goodness by contrast—if only to themselves. Dozens of statues and monuments have been vandalized—spanning the time period from Christopher Colombus to Ronald Reagan—but the “cancel culture” crowd has focused especially on what have been interpreted to be the racist overtones of effigies of Confederate soldiers and officers from the Civil War, as a result of which slavery was finally abolished. As educated people know, the Civil War did not commence as a simple one-issue battle over whether slavery should be permitted, any more than the United States entered into the mêlée of World War II “in order to save the Jews.” (What went on at the concentration camps was discovered upon, not before, the liberation.) At the end of a conflict, when history is written by the victors, moral motivations are invariably emphasized over what were originally political reasons for taking up arms. In the case of the Civil War, economic objectives among secessionists and federalists, including President Abraham Lincoln, were what gave rise to the war. Nonetheless, the abolition of slavery is naturally viewed as a felicitous consequence of the loss of the war by the Confederate army.

I am not interested in debating the virtues and vices of the many men throughout history who held slaves, as did some of the founding fathers of the United States, but would like to suggest, rather, that calls for the destruction of statues and the metaphorical burning of texts, better known as censorship, are misguided. This is, first, because such works have always and everywhere been the result of intelligent human beings’ acts of creation. It is true that nearly no one knows anymore who created the vast majority of public squares and statues. In the case of structures erected in ancient and medieval times, it is plausible that they were produced under duress by persons enslaved, because that’s how things were done back then. But the fact that the Roman Colosseum was built with the blood, sweat and tears of slaves made to realize the vision of non-slaves (Emperors Vespasian and Titus) does not imply that the structure should be erased from the face of the earth. To do so would accomplish nothing beyond depriving the world of memory traces of centuries past.

What we know about the more recent structures being defaced is that their production involved the industry and creativity of artists who were not slaves. There is a reasonable sense in which the statues can be viewed as works of art rather than effigies to bad men who no longer exist or insane calls to make slavery legal again. The idea that destroying such works will somehow diminish racism rests on the entirely false view according to which an artifact has a single, definitive, immutable interpretation. This is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of art. A statue of a Confederate soldier can be as much a tribute to all soldiers who fight and lose as it is to any individual racist’s beliefs. The concept of “invincible ignorance”, that at least half of all soldiers are fighting for an unjust cause (which follows logically from the fact that at most one side can be right—though both can be wrong), has throughout history been invoked to protect the soldiers on the losing side who followed what to all appearances were legal orders in promoting a mistaken leader’s cause. Again, a fine-grained study of history reveals that many men who fought on the side of the Confederacy were not doing so out of hatred for African Americans and were not in fact slave owners. Moreover, there were racists among the Union army’s ranks, and some among them did own slaves. It is true that, had the Confederate army prevailed, then slavery would likely have lasted longer in North America than it did. It is also true, however, that many other countries managed to abolish slavery without such a bloody and protracted war.

When we allow one person or small group’s interpretation alone, the least charitable of all possible interpretations, to dictate the meaning of a work, we are allowing them to delimit reality precisely in the manner of a tyrant. Works of art, like written texts, are by their very nature subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning to an individual comes finally to be a function of that person’s background beliefs. Non-didactic artists and writers may not even know what “message” they were attempting to convey when they created their works, and they often discover meanings only after the fact, while considering the object from the perspective of a reader/interpreter. The fact that slavery was widespread throughout the ancient world does not imply that all ancient texts should be erased and artifacts destroyed. The fact that Aristotle may have believed that women were only partial persons does not imply that we must interpret his every word as expressive of that idea. Nor should the fact that a few pseudo-intellectual Nazis took the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as supportive of their ridiculous Weltanschauung lead us to burn all of Nietzsche’s books.

In a truly liberal society, such as that championed by nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill, according to whom the “marketplace of ideas” is a cornerstone of democracy, the possibility of learning and correcting the errors in our ways mandates that we remain receptive to other people’s points of view. Even if we find the views of others despicable, this does not imply that they should be effaced. Practically speaking, it would be highly imprudent to prevent everyone who disagrees from speaking, because then we would never know who our true enemies are. But the primary reason for opposing censorship is that no censor has a monopoly on the truth. We are all wallowing in beliefs forged through a random assortment of arbitrary interactions, processing information as we encounter it, accepting some claims while rejecting others, based, ultimately, on how they cohere with our current worldview.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel of speculative fiction, Fahrenheit 451, the government is being run by leaders who believe that they are right and anyone who disagrees is wrong, and that books which promote other, “dangerous” world views must be destroyed in order to prevent poisoning people’s minds. The most famous works of dystopic fiction, including George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, also caution against the perils of permitting small committees of fallible people to delimit the contours of reality as they please. Reading such works, in which censorship is a key component of governance, it may seem obvious that the worlds depicted are anti-humanist. These are worlds where intelligent persons are treated as criminals for having ideas which differ from what has been deemed the proper way of viewing things. Despite the popularity of such works of fiction in recent times, an ever-increasing number of people have come to believe that we should topple the statues of “bad men” and remove classic works of literature from school curricula. The next step down a slippery slope should have been predicted when all of this began: some people should not be permitted to speak in the public square, for their words may be dangerous.

The recent removal of President Donald Trump from both Twitter and Facebook, on the grounds that he allegedly used the platforms to foment violence, specifically, the raucous protest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been applauded by self-proclaimed “liberals” all over the planet, despite the fact that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from those who wreaked the violence, and publicly denounced it as wrong. Note that no one held Democratic party leaders or candidates responsible for the many violent protests and widespread looting in cities all over the United States throughout 2020. Yet Michelle Obama, who in befriending George W. Bush let war crime bygones be bygones, wrote a two-page letter exhorting the Big Tech social media giants to permanently bar “infantile” Trump from sharing his words with the world, claiming that he was responsible for what happened on January 6. Her sentiments were echoed and amplified throughout the mainstream media, with many people parroting the refrain that it is the prerogative of private companies to conduct their businesses as they please, and offering a pithy response to those who disagree: “If you don’t like it, leave.”

It is true that the Big Tech companies are not bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects the free speech of citizens. Twitter and Facebook have been censoring, “curating” content, and banning users for years now. In recent times, and most aggressively during the 2020 election cycle, they have adopted the measure of attaching “child safety” warnings to posts, alerting users that content is dubious according to the company’s fact checkers. What happened in this case, however, was startling because one of the alternatives to Twitter, Parler, where people banned from Twitter or annoyed by their censorship or “child safety” warnings sometimes migrated, was removed nearly immediately from the Google , Amazon and Apple app stores, effectively suppressing the speech of everyone who did not like Twitter and left (as they had been told to do). The symbiosis between the government and Big Tech became undeniable when incoming President Biden tapped Facebook executives to be a part of his cabinet, and one hopes that lawsuits charging monopolization will put an end to the squelching of alternative views and ensure that history, though continuously rewritten by the victors, will not be entirely erased.

Donald Trump’s tweets were certainly a bizarre phenomenon in U.S. political history and surely one of the reasons for his polarizing presence the world over, with people revering and reviling him in close to equal numbers—at least judging by the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. For Big Tech to effectively uphold Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” trope in favoring one half of the country over the other can only exacerbate the deep divisions already on display. Michelle Obama is entitled to her opinion, but so are the more than 74 million people who voted for Trump in the 2020 election. Donald Trump was the president of the United States for four years, and his often emotive Tweets are historical texts, for better or for worse, which should be accessible to all.

Unfortunately, the so-called liberal people who demand and applaud the silencing of Trump do not appear to understand what they are advocating. They do not appreciate that humankind has progressed over millennia as a result of a lengthy experiment in testing out various ways of looking at the world. To claim, for example, that the works of Mark Twain should be censored because they contain the word ‘nigger’ is to forget that societies have changed in part as a result of people’s having read such books. It is in fact arguable that to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee would do no more than to hasten the process of forgetting how wrong human beings were, for most of history, in upholding slavery, not only in the United States, but all over the world. Likewise, from an antiwar perspective, every monument to World War I (and they exist in many different countries) stands as a testament to the sheer insanity of sending millions of young men to their deaths for essentially nothing. Again, one look at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where the names of the many men who died in a misguided war are inscribed, serves as a reminder not to make the same mistake all over again.

To oppose the razing of historical structures on the grounds that they were commissioned by or represent “bad” people is not to deny that communities have the right to decide how to decorate their public spaces. Sometimes sculptures in parks and squares are removed or replaced, but to pretend that unilateral acts of vandalism will reduce racial tensions is delusive in the extreme. It is both puerile and false to assume that a single interpretation exhausts the value of any work of art or text. The truth is not a function of whatever arbitrary group of people happen to have acceded the corridors of power or whatever angry protesters have taken it upon themselves to wreck what they happen not to like, based on their own, necessarily limited, interpretations. Rational adults are aware that all people are fallible and that no one can pass strict “purity” tests.

Should the Roman Colosseum, which was not only built by slaves but also used as an arena for gladiator battles between slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of the upper classes, be pulverized, and the land on which it stands be turned into a parking lot? That is the direction in which this childish movement is going. To cancel culture is to cancel the extant evidence of the process human beings have gone through to get where they are today. The Nazis attempted such a cancel culture project, denouncing modern forms of art as “degenerate” and permitting only aesthetic views in  conformity with their delusive project of furthering the Aryan race. Some may take offense at my comparison of these two cases, but they differ only in details, not in approach. Both define cultural history as having effectively ended with the current view of those who would erase the past and dictate all that may exist in the future. Both are obtuse, shortsighted and small-minded.

Despite their foibles and deficiencies and myopia and biases, some human beings nonetheless make the effort to contribute their intellectual energy to produce new works and texts for our consideration. We need not and will not like all of them, but to say that we should destroy them is tantamount to the tyrant’s decree “Off with their heads!” in response to the annoying dissenters who may emerge among his ranks. The censors tomorrow may not agree with your interpretations and may decide that you need to be canceled at their caprice. The grandest irony of all is that if such a view had prevailed in the pre-abolition United States, with the suppression of the texts and speech of all those who disagreed with the laws of the land at that time, then slavery would never have been abolished.

Welcome to Zombie Pharm

by Laurie Calhoun | Dec 23, 2020

Imagine a world where you were required to cover your face and nose whenever you stepped out of your home or when anyone came to your door. No one would know when you smiled or frowned and the difficulty of communicating the ideas you attempted to share would eventually deter you from saying much of anything at all, frustrated as you would be by the annoyance of always having to repeat yourself. There would be no point in asking anyone questions requiring more than a “yes” or “no” answer, because more complicated replies would be muffled by their masks and not worth the time and effort needed to decipher.

Imagine a world where all inhabitants of a city, state or country were told where they could go and what they could do, not only in public, but also in their homes and in privately owned businesses. Healthy persons would be quarantined to prevent other people from becoming ill. Good citizens would be enlisted and surveillance and tracking apps used to identify anyone who refused to abide by emergency lockdown and curfew orders or the required hygiene measures. Small business owners would be fined for attempting to run their businesses or neglecting to enforce emergency laws. Employees would be arrested for attempting to go to work.

Imagine a world where private tech companies collaborated with government bureaucrats to censor your written speech. You would not be permitted to share texts which conflicted with the official story of whatever the authorities claimed that they had done and were doing and wanted you to believe. You could still write texts, on your own computer, but there would be nearly no one around to read what you had to say. The censors could not suppress texts faster than they could be written and shared, however, so some would slip through. This would necessitate visits from the state police to the homes of those who had attempted to incite violations of any emergency laws which happen to have been enacted by administrators to protect their constituents. Whether or not the measures actually helped anyone would be entirely beside the point, because everyone knows (from all of the “just wars” throughout history) that all that matter are the lawmakers’ publicly professed intentions to do good. The perpetrators of what were deemed dangerous texts would be arrested and taken away, if necessary, by force.

Imagine a world where journalists were required to promote the official government line in order to keep their jobs. No text or report which reflected poorly on the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex would be allowed. A few of those who “indulgently” refused to comply might then impudently begin their own publications, such as The Intercept, issuing their interpretation of what was going on in the few sequestered places (made difficult to find by Google) where independent journalism was still possible.

Imagine a world where the independent media, too, had been infiltrated by persons keen to hold the line, to defend what they had been persuaded to believe (by hook or by crook, carrots or sticks) must be upheld as the truth. Anyone who attempted to share inconvenient “disinformation” or “fake news”, as it would be denounced, would then have their work edited to conform with “the official story”. The “traitors” (as they would be characterized) who disagreed would have two choices: either to stop writing or to flee to another place with even fewer readers than before, such as Substack.

Imagine a world where publishers who revealed crimes committed by governments would be subject to criminalization: arrest, incarceration, isolation, extradition and more. Those who exposed murderous crimes would themselves be treated as though they were violent criminals, even when they had never in their lives wielded any implement of dissent beyond a pen.

Imagine a world where oppressive lockdown and curfew policies were said to be necessitated by case surges of “infections” in persons many of whom, while testing positive, manifested no symptoms at all. Suppose that the tests being used were revealed to be notoriously inaccurate, by some estimates, 90% inaccurate. Yet the testing continued on, ever faster and more furiously, and the case surges would serve as the basis for preventing healthy people from living their lives. When vaccines emerged, everyone who tested positive before but survived would still need to be inoculated, because, the “Listen to the Science” crowd would insist, it might be possible to become reinfected. People who had already survived the dreaded disease would only know that they were safe and not a menace to public health if they took the new vaccines, whatever they were, and whether or not they had been demonstrated to prevent and transmit infection, and no matter what the unknown side effects might be. Because, obviously: Science.

Imagine a world where people with life-threatening diseases were required to postpone their treatment because another disease, 95% of whose victims were octogenarians or older, had been designated by select “expert” epidemiologists as more dangerous and life-threatening than cancer, heart disease, stroke, and the other top killers of human beings. Imagine a world where distraught and desperate people reduced to poverty and rendered homeless through not being permitted to work began turning to deadly drugs such as Heroin, sometimes Fentanyl-laced, with the result that, in some cities (such as San Francisco), more persons died of overdoses than of the disease serving as the pretext for the laws forbidding those people from working.

Imagine a world where citizens were required to undergo medical treatments not known to prevent disease but believed to alleviate the symptoms of a disease for which the vast majority of humanity suffer only minor symptoms. This would be undertaken in the name of public health, but the effect would be to harm some of those who were not vulnerable to the disease and essentially had been tricked or coerced (since uninformed “consent” is not really consent) into volunteering as subjects in an enormous experimental trial with the aim of determining the outcome of introducing into human bodies certain foreign substances deemed potentially profitable by the companies which produced them. Most people would line up enthusiastically for such vaccines on the basis of widely disseminated claims of 90% and 95% efficacy lauded by well-respected experts, with details about the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” available only in the fine-print of a few more nuanced articles which nearly no one read.

Imagine a world where people who had already survived the dreaded disease and also had been vaccinated were nonetheless required to abide by all of the ongoing hygiene measures, from wearing a mask, to staying home, to taking more vaccines on a schedule determined by their government. There would be no need to explain what any of this was for because all good citizens would already be accustomed to reciting the mumbled refrains (behind their masks): “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!” and “We’re all in this together!” Everyone would have to comply, everyone would need to be quiet, everyone would be required by law to roll up their sleeves for the clearly compelling reason that a global pandemic was tearing through the world like a tsunami, wiping out everyone in its path. Except that most of the victims were dying at the same rate and age as the actuary tables would have predicted even if the culprit virus had never arrived on the scene. And the death toll over the course of the year would be about the same as for any other year, but with a slightly different distribution in causes of death.

Imagine a world where you were required to present your health record on demand and you would not be permitted to enter stores, restaurants, schools, to work or to travel without first proving that you had agreed to participate in an experimental vaccine trial for a disease from which you were at minimal risk of harm. The local health authorities would determine when you needed to present yourself again, for a new treatment, as the virus in question could morph unpredictably over short intervals of time into something else, thus necessitating that you and everyone else on the planet prepare your bodies once again, just in case this time around it might be more dangerous to you and those around you.

Imagine a world where a healthy person’s refusal to undergo medical treatment for a potential future possible disease to which he was not vulnerable, according to all available statistical indicators, was taken as proof of his suffering from another disease, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), as clearly indicated in the latest edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The person thus diagnosed would be required by law to submit to whatever medication would make him more amenable to the other forms of medical treatment to which he was opposed because obviously there would be something very wrong with him, constituting as he would a grave danger to public health.

Imagine a world in which children were taught from an early age that it was unsafe to touch other human beings or to be touched by them. They would be required to wear masks and full-face plastic shields and to wash their hands frequently and to attend school by video conference because, they would be sternly instructed, otherwise they might kill somebody else’s parents or grandparents, even though they themselves were not ill. If the children found any of this a source of anxiety, they would be prescribed psychiatric medications to transform their view of the world, so that they would accept rather than reject what they were told were “the new normal” contours of reality.

Imagine that everyone around you embraced all of the above and undertook public shaming campaigns against anyone who disagreed. Their faces would turn red and they would shriek in righteous indignation, “Listen to The Science!” whenever anyone attempted to point out the manifest absurdity of what was going on. They would denounce as degenerate, anti-science, anti-vax ignoramuses anyone who pointed out that pharmaceutical firms are profit-driven, publicly traded companies whose success depends on their ability to develop, produce, and market new wares.

Beware the ‘Nurse Ratched’ State

by Laurie Calhoun | Dec 6, 2020

Advocates of minimal government have often warned against “The Nanny State,” which rears its ugly head whenever bureaucrats try to tell people what they should do and how they should live. There is a sense in which all governments do that, through the very enactment of laws, but Nanny-leaders mete out prescriptions which vastly exceed what can be fairly portrayed as an attempt to protect people from one another. An extreme example of this sort of overreach occurred in the United States during the Prohibition Era, with catastrophic consequences. Not only did outlawing the enjoyment of alcohol not prevent people from drinking, it actually catalyzed a massive expansion of organized crime all over the United States, as career criminals stepped in to provide people with the means needed to imbibe. No one wants to go to prison, which is why murder was on the rise throughout Prohibition, with blood flowing in some cities nearly as freely as whiskey and wine.

Such unintended consequences have arisen wherever recreational drugs have been outlawed, and experiments such as the one in Portugal, where drug-related deaths diminished significantly after decriminalization, may have helped to propel some in the United States to accept the legalization of marijuana. The state of Oregon recently went even further, by legalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs as well. Just as economics played a major role in putting an end to the thirteen-year Prohibition fiasco, the voters of some states may have been persuaded to permit recreational drug use after having seen the massive tax revenues being collected through pot shop sales in states such as Colorado. Whatever the reasons may have been, the slow dismantling of the legal framework undergirding the “War on Drugs” is certainly a welcome development to anyone who rejects the Nanny State.

The trend toward tolerating alternative lifestyles more generally, however, conflicts starkly with what else has been going on in 2020, coincidentally one century after the ratification of the Volstead act. Policymakers attempting to save people from COVID-19 have pulled out all the stops—going above and beyond, in their view—to protect their constituents by issuing new and ever-changing edicts about how people ought to behave. This might be more tolerable if there were any genuine benevolence on display. Instead, what we are witnessing is an increasingly despicable effort to blame citizens for the failure of policies implemented in response to the arrival of the virus on the scene. When restrictions intended to stop the virus are imposed but cases and deaths then increase rather than diminish, this has been taken to prove to those crafting the new rules that citizens did not in fact do as they were told, and they are, therefore, responsible for the current state of the health crisis.

I have been in Austria, Wales, England and the United States over the course of 2020, and in each of these countries I was surprised to find the very same finger-wagging reproach of citizens by government administrators who wish to blame what is manifestly nobody’s fault on somebody else. All over social media, angry mobs continue to lash out at those who refuse to stay home or “mask up,” and many government leaders now address their constituents as though they were toddlers or, perhaps more aptly, the residents of Nurse Ratched’s ward.

This is a strange conception of government, according to which politicians do not work for the people who pay their salaries but instead are their guardians, who alone can decide what the populace may and may not do. The phenomenon is not unique to the dictators-in-waiting who run states such as California and Michigan. Citizens all over the world are continually being threatened by government officials that if the case numbers do not go down, then lockdowns will be ordered or tightened, and more businesses will be closed, and further restrictions imposed, as though anything anyone does at this point has an effect upon a virus which is nearly everywhere and beyond anyone’s means to control. This punitive paradigm may have been possible to uphold with a straight face until late October, and many on the cacophonous COVID-19 caravan in the U.S. and in the U.K. have ceaselessly carped about their own incompetent government’s response, contrasting it to the approaches of the admirable leaders of countries in the European Union and Oceania, who obviously knew what they were doing!

But then along came the resurgence of cases in Europe, particularly in countries which had been held up for months as shining examples of how a government ought to manage the crisis. Germany had tough lockdowns, mask requirements and probably the best contact-tracing program around. They restricted the entry of people from any country with an unacceptably high “infection rate” (scare quotes are necessary given the widely acknowledged problems with the PCR tests), and anyone at the border who did not present proof of not being COVID-19 positive was either quarantined or turned away (some were also fined). So how does one explain the new wave of “infections” all across Europe? It must be the case that the naughty plebeian Europeans were lying about their contacts, meeting in large gatherings, and brazenly violating social distancing and mask ordinances. None of the case surges throughout the Northern hemisphere has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that more people invariably fall ill with the onset of winter.

In the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued in November a nationwide month-long lockdown order in response to a resurgence of cases which villagers tended to blame on the haughty Londoners—who obviously had been flouting the rules by partying and congregating in pubs and then spreading COVID-19 dust everywhere they went—from England to Wales to Ireland to Scotland, and back again! That was, however, not my impression. What I found upon my arrival in London at the end of October (before the new lockdown) were empty streets, shuttered stores, and restaurants and pubs with very few patrons. Realty signs were all around, and the place looked frankly like a ghost town. My train from Norfolk to London was nearly empty, as were all of the trains I took in the U.K. from July to November, when I finally decided to leave in exasperation at the abrupt and arbitrary cancellation and closing of any- and everything I might want to do and see.

Throughout this crisis, not only the governors of Democratic states in the U.S. but also the prime minister of Australia and the health minister of the U.K. have exemplified the Nurse Ratched mode of governance, repeatedly threatening their constituents with ever-sterner measures should the epidemiological situation not improve, under the assumption that case surges decisively demonstrate not that the policy initiatives were worthless but that people were not following the rules. Sadly, many citizens, terrorized by the mainstream media’s nonstop fear-mongering about COVID-19, have accepted this absurd blame game, which has broadened what was already, long before March 2020, the chasm dividing a populace torn in two. Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get much worse as those who blithely agree to do as they are told become increasingly intolerant of those who refuse to do the same. Yes, the small paper cups on trays will be coming your way soon. What will you do? People are already taking sides, and the ironies continue to multiply.

Leftists have often wielded the slogan “My Body My Choice” in protesting any attempts by the government to limit a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion. It is highly ironic, then, that some among them should now be agitating vociferously for the universal vaccination of people worldwide against COVID-19. The “Listen to the Science” crowd immediately shuts down anyone who dares to suggest that the decision about whether to allow foreign substances to be injected into their own body should remain the prerogative of individuals themselves. They denounce anyone who resists the call to vaccination as “antivax,” even when they are not vulnerable to the disease in question and have no problem whatsoever with time-tested vaccines. Those who express any hesitation whatsoever to roll up their sleeves are ridiculed as “antiscience,” even when they are in fact scientists by profession. When none of those inflammatory insults work, there is always the tried-and-true “selfishness” charge: you are a selfish, heartless human being if you are not willing to vaccinate yourself to protect other people from death.

Let us look soberly at the scientific facts, setting to one side all possible conspiracy mongering about 5G, microchips, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset,” chemtrails or anything else. First, COVID-19 is highly contagious but nowhere near as deadly as the pandemics of the past, and it specifically targets elderly persons with other health problems. An overall 99.5+% survival rate is not the sort of danger which would ordinarily lead a healthy young person to undertake a risky regimen to protect him- or herself. Why “risky”? At the most fundamental level, because safe and effective vaccines have always required years to produce and test, invariably involving, as they do, unknown side effects. The reason for this can be summed up in a simple, undeniable phrase: human variability.

For any trait, sensitivity, capacity, etc., found in human beings, its distribution can be plotted over a bell curve with a tiny percentage of people occupying the extreme ends of the curve. Those people are the “outliers,” who will be much more (or less) sensitive to a particular environmental factor than is the average person. Perhaps the simplest way of thinking about this human variability and its relevance to the vaccine issue is in terms of food allergies. No one knows that they suffer from a peanut allergy, for example, until their body encounters peanuts. Similarly, a person with Celiac disease will discover this fact only upon consuming gluten. When vaccines are manufactured, they contain components with which a given person’s body may never have come in contact before. Most people will not be harmed by any of the components, as the vaccines have been rigorously tested on other animals even before human trials begin. Once extensive, long-term testing in large groups of human subjects has been completed, then the company producing the vaccine can assert with confidence that the risk to patients is quite low. The risk is never zero, however, just as the risk incurred by doing anything whatsoever is never zero. There will always be some people who are more sensitive than others, and they may end up being harmed by one or another of the components of any vaccine. There is nothing mysterious or conspiratorial about any of this, and in fact it is precisely why vaccine manufacturers insist that, before distributing their product widely, they must be granted indemnity in the event of the unforeseen and unpredictable side effects upon a tiny percentage of those inoculated.

All of this to say: there is always risk involved in taking a vaccine. People decide for themselves, for example, whether or not they should take the seasonal flu vaccine, the reported efficacy of which has ranged from 19% to 48% over the past five years. This implies, according to epidemiologists themselves (not “antivaxers” or conspiracy theorists), that more than half of the people vaccinated have not been helped by the flu shot in the least. Were any of them harmed? It is difficult to say, because people become ill and die all the time, and there are usually far too many variables working simultaneously to be able to single out the cause of post-vaccine harm, particularly when the subjects are already elderly and frail. Those who sing the praises of the annual flu vaccine, including the public relations teams behind the aggressive marketing campaigns launched by governments to encourage their citizens to undergo vaccination, generally seem to believe that the efficacy rate is much higher than it is. From a consideration of the marketing material alone, one would be forgiven for concluding that the flu shot is rationally obligatory and 100% effective and safe. Having once examined the statistics, however, there is some cause for restraint.

Just as no one should be able to force you to drink green tea because they believe that it is good for your health, and no cancer victim can be compelled to undergo chemotherapy against his own will, individuals themselves must decide whether rolling up their sleeve for the annual flu shot is a good idea or not. Those who are young and hardy will most liking survive the flu in any case, and there is a real chance that the vaccine which they take—there are multiple versions every year—will not help to combat one or another of the virus strains which they happen to encounter anyway. It is literally a gamble. There are people who maintain that they never became sicker than after having taken a flu shot, but vaccine advocates quickly sweep in to silence them by insisting that they must have already been exposed to the flu before inoculation. In fact, the only reason for believing such an explanation is manifestly that one wishes to support universal vaccination. It may or may not be true. One thing is undeniable: pharmaceutical firms are profit-driven companies, whose revenues will wax or wane with general public sentiment about the wisdom of their many-splendored cures.

The current situation is quite a bit murkier than the case of the seasonal flu shot, because most of the COVID-19 vaccines being developed employ a novel RNA technology never before licensed for use in human beings. In the vaccines which have stood the test of time (measles, polio, etc.), a tiny amount of pathogen protein is introduced into a patient’s body so that it will preemptively ready itself for an immune response in the event that the virus is later encountered. Usually the virus matter introduced is dead, but sometimes it is live, and this is by design—it depends on the pathogen and is determined through extensive experimentation. A live vaccine induces a minor bout of the disease, which is much less likely to lead to death than is an unprotected body’s encounter with the wild virus. Anecdotally, I can report that after having received an obligatory Yellow Fever vaccine (which is live) before traveling to Ghana, I was quite ill for about five days. The cause and effect was clear: I was suffering a minor bout of Yellow Fever, thanks to which my body developed the antibodies needed to protect me from the disease during my trip to Africa.

Suppose, now, that the new COVID-19 vaccines worked just as the time-tested vaccines. In that case, before agreeing to be inoculated, a reasonable person would require some sort of assurance that the vaccine itself will be less likely to harm the patient than is the wild strain of the virus. Because the survival rate among people exposed to COVID-19 is greater than 99%, it would be prudent for a person to take the vaccine only if their prospects would be improved through vaccination. At this disease risk level, without any such guarantee, one may or may not wish to take an experimental vaccine. People in the vulnerable categories, advanced seniors and those who are exposed regularly to the disease in healthcare contexts, may well feel that it is worth the risk, and they will likely be first in line for the vaccines once they are made available.

It is of utmost importance to bear in mind, however, that the vaccines currently regarded as most promising for controlling the outbreak of COVID-19 do not involve the time-tested approach. Rather than introducing proteins from the offending organism (or a simulacrum), the front-runner vaccines introduce foreign pieces of viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) which will instruct the person’s own body to produce the immune system-galvanizing viral proteins itself. The presence of those pseudo-foreign proteins (coded for by foreign RNA but produced within the human body), will then initiate the needed immune response. In other words, there is an extra step involved. The foreign RNA is introduced, then the person’s body produces the proteins coded for by the snippets of RNA, after which the needed antibodies will be generated by the body in response. This ingenious scheme (if it works!) involves the human body tricking itself into triggering an immune response by producing what are empirically indistinguishable from traces of the offending virus itself. What could go wrong?

Perhaps nothing will go wrong, but the fact (of science!) remains: such vaccines have never been used in human populations before. In attempting to discuss this matter with various people (civil discourse is not always possible with the “Listen to the Science” crowd, ironically), I have been amazed that there should exist persons fully prepared to agree to totalitarian control over their very own bodies while knowing absolutely nothing about the history of vaccine development. They simply do not care that the novel vaccines are novel, nor that those who volunteer to take part in the largest experimental trial of vaccines in human history are essentially offering their bodies up as Petri dishes to pharmaceutical firms. Some vaccine enthusiasts appear not even to know what RNA is and attempt to discredit anyone who disagrees with their gurus in white labcoats (most of whom have financial ties to Big Pharma), despite the fact that plenty of published literature exists on the topic of vaccine harm. Advocates for forced universal vaccination appear to be unfazed by possible conflicts of interest and are not at all bothered by the sudden appearance of Bill Gates (whose company Microsoft violated anti-trust laws) in their social media timelines exhorting everyone everywhere to get on board with the global vaccination regime [sic].

Beyond all of the factors relevant to new vaccines more generally, one can quite reasonably inquire, in this case, whether anyone should trust a company (AstraZeneca) which “accidentally” (through a “manufacturing error”) gave thousands of its vaccine trial participants only half of their first dose, reported a 90% efficacy figure, but subsequently discovered that the true efficacy rate in those fully dosed was only about 62%. In other words, in the AstraZeneca trial in question, the less vaccine the subjects received, the better they fared. None of this is to suggest that anyone should expect laboratory technicians to be perfect, for they are human. But that is part of the gamble one takes in agreeing to participate in such a study, as can be seen throughout the history of vaccine development, which has left many bodies in its wake (mostly animals of other species, but also some human beings).

The reason why the healthy Western subjects of pharmaceutical drug trials have always been generously remunerated—in the third world they are not—is because they are risking their own well-being and even life by agreeing to ingest substances with unknown side effects, which cannot be predicted a priori. Indemnity clauses are always included in the contracts for those who agree to participate in experimental drug trials precisely in order to prevent any victims (or their survivors) from seeking compensation should something go awry. It is of course possible, and one certainly hopes, that the injection of foreign RNA into human bodies may not cause any lasting harm, but the unvarnished truth is that we simply do not know what the long-range and unforeseen consequences will be, because this has never been done before.

In all of the excitement over the splendid reported efficacy rates (90%, 94% and 95+%) of the front-runners in the great COVID-19 vaccine race, I have seen no mention by anyone of the survival outcomes of placebo subject classes. Why might that be? Whenever new drugs and remedies are scientifically tested, this is done with a contrast class of subjects who are given not the treatment being studied, but a placebo substance, which is considered to be inert vis-à-vis the disease to be defeated. This is the only way to demonstrate that the remedy is more helpful than doing nothing at all. In the case of COVID-19, there are a few key factors to bear in mind. First, based on the death charts of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many other institutions as well, it is evident that any placebo remedy which I myself decide to take—water, vegetables, vitamin C, quinine, even air—already has a 99.5% chance of keeping me alive, even if I am exposed to and become infected with COVID-19. I may, therefore, stick with the placebo for the entirely rational reason that its efficacy rate in keeping me alive is likely just as high, if not higher, than that of any possible vaccine.

Big Pharma’s tactic of neglecting to report on the outcomes of placebo studies for its vast array of antidepressants and anxiety remedies was for years ignored. Eventually, a few courageous psychiatrists and psychologists revealed that, for many of the best-selling psych meds prescribed to millions of people all over the world, placebo subjects fared just as well and sometimes even better than those taking the drugs, particularly in long-range studies. In other words, many people prescribed psychotropes for acute cases of depression, anxiety and grief produced by life traumas such as the loss of a loved one would have improved over time, even if they had taken no drug at all. Mention of such results was routinely omitted from reports touting the efficacy of psychotropes for the plainly diaphanous reason that taking no medication does not produce any profit for drug manufacturers.

Similarly, the companies touting the virtues of their new vaccines designed to save humanity from COVID-19 make no mention of placebo class survival outcomes. Nonetheless, many people have been encouraged by the reported results, relieved that at last they will be able get back to living their lives as they please. In reality, the current misery of healthy individuals being victimized not by COVID-19 but by political policies crafted in response to the virus has no logical connection to the invention or success of any vaccine. Rolling up one’s sleeve cannot be made a condition upon ending policies which do not protect but rather harm most of humanity. Instead, the policies should be ended because they never had and never will have the advertised effects.

Remarkably, when anyone dares to express skepticism about the decrees of the new COVID-19 czars, this is taken to illustrate that they need to be protected from themselves and also from harming others. Somehow we have found ourselves in a world governed by Nurse Ratched-esque individuals who repeatedly scold us for the failure of their previous policies to put an end to COVID-19 and appear ready and willing to punish us further for not agreeing to do as they say and, now, to roll up our sleeves. They call it “treatment,” and they have already purchased, using taxpayer funds (what else?), “free” vaccines for all. From the perverse perspective of these government officials, it is our fault that the virus is running rampant, and, therefore, we must line up for our paper cup on the tray. If anyone objects to being made into the subject of an experimental vaccine trial, for any of the many non-conspiratorial reasons outlined above, they are to be denounced as lunatic fringe extremists and de-platformed across social media.

This frightening transformation of citizens into subjects is now so widespread that even some business leaders are promoting the same line, apparently believing themselves to comply with what they have been told over and over again are the dictates of science. The CEO of Qantas airlines recently announced that they will be requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination for anyone attempting to board their flights. Needless to say, I will not be traveling to Australia again anytime soon, because my body is my own, and I do not agree to offer it up as a Petri dish in a large-scale clinical trial by any profit-driven company, and certainly not Big Pharma, whose amorality (at best) and manifest greed has already been firmly established through its many large-scale campaigns to drug everyone for anything—from infants to nonagenarians—with psychotropes. (Did you know that “Prozac” for dogs and cats is now a thing?)

It is precisely because of the unavoidable dangers involved that individuals, who alone will bear any negative consequences arising from their choices, must retain control over what is done to their own bodies. Yes, there are COVID-19 outliers as well: younger persons who suffer worse health outcomes than the vast majority of their peers, and it is possible that any given person will be an outlier in that sense. But there are already mountains of demographic statistics available on the dangers of COVID-19, while none whatsoever exist yet for the new vaccines. Free people must therefore decide for themselves whether the risks of taking an experimental antidote to a disease are outweighed by its alleged benefits. When authoritarian leaders and their associates in the corporate world paint themselves as benevolent, insisting that they are only trying to save the world from the dreaded disease, they are forgetting the most important quality of their constituents and customers: they are free to determine their own destinies and to assume risks which they themselves regard as rational and to reject those which they do not.

The United States Supreme Court recently upheld citizens’ first amendment rights of religion and assembly, even during a global pandemic, and one hopes that as lawsuits continue to wend their way up the judicial chain, the grip of authoritarian policymakers will be further diminished. Human beings should never be held hostage to the demands of those promoting universal vaccination, and least of all when their own danger of succumbing to the disease in question is small. If my own chances of dying from COVID-19 were 50%, rather than less than .5% then it might well be rational for me to gamble, just as many cancer victims, out of desperation, have agreed to submit to experimental treatments. But I am neither sick nor particularly vulnerable to the novel COVID-19 virus, so I’ll take my chances with my own immune system and my preferred placebo remedy of liberty. I may no longer be welcome in Australia, but there’s always Brazil. Or perhaps I’ll go to Mars.