Throttling the Truth: Why the Case of Julian Assange Is More Important Than Ever

by Laurie Calhoun | Aug 24, 2021

In a world with a functional Fourth Estate, the case of Julian Assange would be on the front page of major newspapers every day. Instead, it has been all but blacked out. Perhaps this makes sense, given that the raison d’être of Wikileaks, according to its founder, was to provide to the public important news which is omitted by the mainstream media outlets. To defend Wikileaks in a sustained way would be for network news channels and syndicated newspapers to acknowledge, at least tacitly, that they have been coopted by the government, as critics have long maintained. Nonetheless, the unwillingness of truth-driven journalists to say more about what is going on is puzzling and suggests that the situation is far worse than we may imagine. The future of press freedom is at stake and, with it, the very possibility of dissent.

In some ways, the U.S. government’s quest to silence Assange has already succeeded, for the founder of Wikileaks is no longer having any effect on the world, and he has had very little effect since 2018, when his internet access was cut off. From 2011 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, having sought asylum there in order to avoid persecution by the U.S. government. He was wrenched from his safe haven in 2019, when the government of Ecuador stopped protecting him and permitted the British government forcibly to remove him from the premises. This appears to have been a case of bribery or threat, and most likely both, given the well-established modes of “persuasion” used by the U.S. superpower to bend lesser powers to its will. Whatever ultimately precipitated his ejection from the embassy, Assange was taken away by agents of the United Kingdom and placed in Belmarsh prison, where he remains today, awaiting the court’s decision on whether to extradite him so that he can be made to stand trial in the United States on charges of espionage.

Assange, an Australian citizen, published troves of secret documents stolen by whistleblowers who wished to illuminate what they took to be malfeasance, both in the Global War on Terror and in the DNC’s (Democratic National Committee) efforts to determine the outcome of the Democratic presidential primary election in 2016. I suspect that, if the extradition quest succeeds, the death knell for Julian Assange will have been not the dissemination of war-related materials, such as the shocking Collateral Murder video showing Reuters journalists “neutralized” in Iraq by soldiers hovering above in an Apache helocopter, but the revelation that the progressive candidate Bernie Sanders never stood a chance against the pre-selected nominee of Democratic Party elites, Hillary Clinton.

I say this because despite the fact that Assange’s asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy was abruptly ended under President Trump, and may well have been a cynical and primarily political ploy to further discredit the already discredited Russian collusion narrative, the Biden administration continues to pursue Assange just as ruthlessly. According to the Russian collusion hoax, which dominated U.S. political discourse for more than three entire years and continues to be discussed by some pundits still today, Trump was elected as the president of the United States in 2016 only because of the Russians. Trump’s election had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton was an abysmal candidate who haughtily called half the nation “deplorable,” nor because she was a hawk who rallied for the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, nor because she was instrumental in persuading President Obama to bomb Libya, among other foreign policy disasters to her credit. Just as I doubt that President Biden will pardon whistleblower Daniel Hale, because doing so would tarnish the image of Barack Obama by acknowledging that he lied about the drone program, I doubt that Biden/Harris will drop the charges against Assange, who is blamed by all self-styled right-minded Democrats for the election of Donald Trump.

Whoever shared the DNC email trove with Wikileaks (whether Russian trolls or Seth Rich, the DNC staffer murdered in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016—or perhaps someone else altogether) the missives clearly revealed to Bernie Sanders voters that they had been played. All of their hours of volunteer work, all of their hard-earned cash donated in small sums to a campaign doomed to fail from the start, were obviously for naught. There can be little doubt that some Sanders supporters declined to vote at all in 2016 after discovering in Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails what had been going on behind the scenes at the DNC. Thousands of registered Democrats left the party in what they hashtagged as a #DEMEXIT protest, and some among them went even so far as to vote for Donald Trump. For this, Assange will never be forgiven by millions of people, some of whom continue to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and persist in blaming the Russians for every catastrophe under the sun. Rational people recognize, of course, that if the DNC had not rigged the election, then there would be no reason for their voters to be angered by the primary result. Resolute “I’m With Her” Hillary Clinton supporters are not bothered in the least by the behind-closed-doors shenanigans of the DNC, but only by the fact that they were made public by Wikileaks.

Assange also shared with the public evidence of U.S. war crimes, so one reason his case is rarely mentioned by anyone in the mainstream media is simply that war coverage is slanted to support the U.S. military. Viewed as a simple market-driven problem, the major news channels today are primarily in the business of infotainment rather than journalism, and it seems unlikely that pointing out that taxpayers fund the murder of innocent people abroad could do anything but lower ratings. The networks are obviously more interested in audience satisfaction than truth, as the case of Rachel Maddow illustrates. A judge recently ruled that Maddow is not a journalist but a liberal activist, who offers hyperbole in place of facts and “distorts reality.” This, however, is supposed be fine because her viewers are expected to know that she is not reporting the news but sharing her own often emotional views. During the Trump years, the author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power somehow lost the journalistic plot to become Hillary Clinton’s arch apologist, ironically comporting herself in a manner not unlike Alex Jones and abandoning altogether her former role as an antiwar critic. Needless to say, Maddow, in contrast to Jones, has not been deplatformed across the Big Tech outlets and denounced as a lunatic, for she, unlike Jones, is a useful sensationalist, who has come dutifully to serve the establishment.

There was a time, years ago, when Julian Assange was still being discussed quite a bit in the mainstream media, and that initial, propaganda-riddled coverage seems to have got lodged in people’s minds. In my travels around the world, I have been surprised by the responses of people in completely different places to my questions about the founder of Wikileaks. Anecdotally, I can report that there are apparently intelligent, reasonably well-informed people, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and even Assange’s country of citizenship, Australia, who believe that he is an underhanded, morally despicable criminal. This they take to have been demonstrated by the fact that Assange was summoned back to Sweden to answer allegations of rape some years ago but “bolted,” as his critics characterize it, rather than confront his accusers back in 2011.

A decade after Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, it no longer seems to matter to many of those same people that Swedish authorities abandoned the Assange case for lack of evidence to sustain an indictment. The initial portrait painted of Assange, in a very effective discreditation effort, as someone who cowardly evaded justice by hiding out in the embassy, seems to loom larger in many people’s minds than the crimes which he exposed. Needless to say, this morally unsavory portrait was made even uglier to Hillary Clinton Democrats after the leak of DNC emails which most likely did contribute to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, regarded by so many as “unthinkable.”

The Assange haters, in clinging to the image created for them by the media, are either unwilling or unable to consider rational explanations, such as simple prudence, for Assange’s decision to protect himself through seeking political asylum. To offer only one of many possible examples, consider the plight of Michael Hastings, one of the most public antiwar journalists to have emerged on the scene in the twenty-first century and whose work actually ended the career of General Stanley McChrystal. Hastings died under strange circumstances in a single-car automobile accident on June 18, 2013, shortly after having told friends that he was being pursued somehow by the FBI, and also that someone had been tinkering with his car. Suggestions to the effect that there may have been foul play involved were swiftly dismissed, and Hastings has by now been forgotten by all but a few “conspiracy theorists.” But it is a fact that single-car accidents are a specialty of the CIA, and Hastings had picked fights with people in very high places. Indeed, at the time of his death, Hastings was working on an exposé of Obama’s lethal drone czar, John Brennan, who had been confirmed as CIA director on March 8, 2013. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) declined to investigate the case, and Hastings’ wife, Elise Jordan (a former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice, improbably enough), went out on the media circuit to insist that the death was an accident.

Whatever may or may not have been done to Hastings, the point is that Julian Assange, being acutely aware of what the CIA and its affiliates were capable of doing, acted altogether prudently in protecting himself by seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, and remaining there up until he was forcibly removed. The Collateral Murder video footage, after all, depicted the execution of journalists. Even more ominously, Obama’s expansion of the drone program effectively normalized extrajudicial killing, formerly known as “assassination,” of noncitizens and citizens alike. From the cases of Anwar al-Awlaki, his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan (editor and publisher of Inspire magazine) there can no longer be any doubt that the U.S. government is willing to kill even its own citizens with no due process whatsoever.

Before being muted and sequestered, Julian Assange, like both Michael Hastings and Anwar al-Awlaki, was a very public and vocal opponent of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East. Once in the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange and his lawyers were spied upon, which surely counts as evidence that his concern for his own safety was sound. Added to that, according to his defense team, there were discussions among Spanish paid operatives about taking Assange’s life while he was living under asylum. Nonetheless, Assange, who has been kept in Belmarsh prison with very little interaction with anyone for more than two years, is being treated as though he were a convicted criminal.

On July 7, 2021, the UK High Court ruled that the U.S. government could continue its quest for extradition, and on August 11, 2021, a judge ruled that Assange will remain in prison while the U.S. government is permitted to expand the grounds for its appeal, having raised doubts about the mental health pretext used in the January 4, 2021, court judgment according to which extradition to a supermax prison in the United States might lead to Assange’s suicide. What is undeniably a concerted effort to muffle the founder of Wikileaks is succeeding, for he continues to be wholly consumed with the matter of his own survival. This despite the obvious violation of procedure through spying on him and his lawyers, and despite the fact that Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a key witness in the U.S. case against Assange, revealed in an Icelandic newspaper that he had fabricated his story in exchange for immunity offered to him by U.S. authorities.

The U.S. government wishes to try Assange under their expansive interpretation of the 1917 Espionage Act, for having illegally obtained and disseminated top secret U.S. government documents. But surely Assange has neither a legal nor a moral duty to support the government of the United States, least of all when he believes that it regularly commits war crimes, evidence of which he has made public and for which he is now being persecuted. As many critics have insisted, to claim that Assange violated U.S. law by publishing documents obtained and shared by whistleblowers sets a very dangerous precedent by expanding the power of the state to the point of being able to stifle dissent by preventing journalists anywhere from reporting on war crimes committed by governments anywhere. This is a step onto a totalitarian slope, allowing only the state propaganda department to determine what constitute the facts and allowing the government both to deny and to hide all evidence of the government’s own crimes, such as those detailed in the Afghanistan War Diary and the Iraq War Diary published by Wikileaks.

After twenty years of squandered blood and treasure, the U.S. war on Afghanistan ended unceremoniously with the Taliban taking over the country, demonstrating once again, as the saying goes, that Afghanistan is “the place where empires go to die.” Predictably, the major networks have continued to tap the usual suspects, the incompetent war architects themselves, to criticize not the war itself but the manner in which it was ended. While foreign policy experts seem at the moment to be consumed with an ugly blame game, I suspect that the timing of the U.S. withdrawal had more to do with other, more ambitious projects in the works, and in no way reflects an abandonment by political elites of their imperial aims. For it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a vigorous and well-orchestrated effort, in countries all around the globe, to create a different sort of world altogether, one where places such as Afghanistan no longer matter much at all.

Placing the case of Assange into the broader context of ongoing efforts to squelch dissent, it is noteworthy that the Biden administration press secretary, Jen Psaki, recently revealed, in a display of open scorn for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, that the government is “working closely with Facebook” to stop the dissemination of what they regard as misinformation. But Psaki herself is open to charges of disinformation, not only about the COVID-19 vaccines, about which she parrots Fauci, claiming a mythical “The Science” as her source of knowledge, but also whenever she speaks about Biden’s predecessor. In an exchange with a reporter over negative vaccine messaging by Biden before becoming president, Psaki quipped, “I would note that at the time, just for context, the former president was also suggesting people inject versions of poison into their veins to cure COVID. So I think that’s a relevant point.” There is no film or document in which Trump tells people to inject themselves with poison or to drink bleach, because he never did.

The Biden Ministry of Propaganda continues nonetheless to keep these tropes alive just as surely as the Bush team continued to pretend that Saddam Hussein really did have WMDs and was somehow in cahoots with Al Qaeda, even as it became increasingly obvious that neither was true. The situation has become far more perilous now, however, for the very future of the republic. The government has long worked closely with the mass media news outlets, especially to promote war, but the very possibility of whistleblowing is in danger of being altogether eliminated as the government works with the Big Tech companies to censor so-called disinformation on the only available alternative news source, the internet. Already in 2021, the U.S. government seized entire websites in Iran, and there is little reason to think that they will stop there. After all, one country’s cyberattack is another country’s national defense.

In her press conference, Psaki was referring to “misinformation” about COVID-19, meaning reports in conflict with the administration’s own narrative, but by the same logic, there could no longer be any dissent from the misadventures of the U.S. military, no matter what they did. Convicting Assange as a spy would likely put an end to what small amount of true journalism continues on today, cementing the current substitution of propaganda for news, with the government granting the government itself the right to black out sites such as Wikileaks altogether. Before sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki were removed from the internet, he was “convicted” of terrorism in the public eye by extrajudicial state execution. If Assange were convicted in a court of law of espionage, then some in the government could be expected to feel justified in erasing every trace of his work from the world.

If the internet, along with the mainstream media, comes to be completely controlled by the government, then dissent will be impossible, and a formerly democratic society will have been transformed into a totalitarian system, where oligarchs determine what may and may not be said, and those who demur are criminalized, not for violent or fraudulent acts, but for disagreeing with “the official story” and standing up for the truth. We have seen how redefining “offense” as “defense” and “bombing” as “humanitarian intervention” were cynical but highly successful ploys to promote the war machine. Those who dare to dissent, like Assange, and manage to do it effectively, are discredited and deplatformed, by hook or by crook.

In the current COVIDystopic climate, even credentialed scientists and doctors are permitted only to parrot the decrees of the government’s small committee of policymakers with clear financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. When they dare to demur, backing up their dissent with data-based research, they are deplatformed. Remarkably, it has become official government policy in many places around the world that healthy people can be criminalized as public menaces and citizens required, on pain of loss of civil liberties, to serve as subjects in experimental trials for medical treatments of which they have no need. Under Obama, the presumption of suspect innocence was perversely inverted to become a presumption of guilt and used as the pretext for executing thousands of persons located outside areas of active hostility. Now we are witnessing an inversion of presumed health to sickness, with citizens being required to demonstrate their vaccination status in order to go about their daily lives. We have seen over a matter of mere months political leaders go from attempting to bribe citizens to undergo experimental vaccination in exchange for lottery tickets, cash payments and free food, to criminalizing their very attempt to conduct their lives peaceably in civil society by attending public events, dining out, using public transport, visiting museums or going shopping.

The Department of Homeland Security recently listed “Opposition to COVID Measures” as one of its “Potential Terror Threats.” What happens next? We know from history that once groups of people are convincingly portrayed by the government as despicable criminals and pariahs, then there is no limit to what “good people” will do to see that they be eliminated, and those who have freely declined the COVID-19 vaccines are now being punished in the cities of Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, where they are no longer permitted to participate in society. The most frightening aspect of the propaganda campaign currently underway is that it has been propagated through easy-to-parrot soundbites (such as “Listen to The Science!”) which many people, in states of total self-deception, proclaim from the hilltops against what they take to be the unwashed, unvaxxed, unmasked and ignorant enemy. So convinced are compliant citizens by now of their moral righteousness that many of them will not even engage in discussions with those who disagree.

The revelations of Julian Assange, Bradley/Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale demonstrated for all to see the government’s assertion of the right to kill anyone anywhere, without indictment or trial, on whatever grounds it deems sufficient. Assassination is certainly the most direct and facile way of dealing with dissidents who are articulate enough to defend themselves in a court of law. Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, was able to convey clear, antiwar, anti-imperialist objections to the U.S. government’s fiascos in the Middle East. Rather than allow him to pose an intellectual threat to the official story, by having him stand trial in a court of law, al-Awlaki was summarily silenced for all time through incineration by lethal drone.

Perhaps, then, no one should be surprised by the increasingly aggressive attempts by Western governments to coerce citizens to submit to experimental medical treatments, even while death has been acknowledged to be one of a number of documented side effects. The latest spec sheets for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines now include a full paragraph warning about the danger of myocarditis, yet the propaganda campaign to vaccinate young persons at nearly no risk from COVID-19 plows ahead with the CDC now recommending a third “booster” shot for everyone who has already received two shots, regardless of their age or health condition.

As data continues to be amassed, more and more research studies are appearing to vindicate “the quacks” who disagreed early on with the reigning global public health narrative. These studies may be ignored by the Biden administration’s Ministry of Propaganda, but we must patiently await the day when the fear of the virus no longer propels people blindly to follow the government’s arbitrary diktats, nor to pressure their neighbors into doing the same. Public health officials, being political appointees, will not save the world from what looks at this point to be an inexorable march toward totalitarianism. Our last best hope lies in the courts. We must mount lawsuits to defend our civil rights, and we must, along with Julian Assange, cling to our faith that there are still a few sane and rational judges who have not been politically or financially coopted, nor terrorized by the sheer fear of death after a year and half of non-stop propaganda. Those judges will assess the data and side with the truth in defending societies from their bureaucratic tyrants run amok.

How Not to Treat Human Beings as Moral Persons

by Laurie Calhoun | Jul 16, 2021

Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher, famously espoused the following maxim of morality:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity…never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

The terms of this principle, a formulation of what he calls “The Categorical Imperative,” are rather abstract, but Kant also provided a more practical test for determining whether a prospective action is morally permissible or not:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

According to Kant, violations of this formulation of the Categorical Imperative embroil one in a “practical contradiction.” It is not immediately obvious what he means by this, which is why his oeuvre continues to be a lively subject of debate among professional philosophers. Those sympathetic with Kant’s general outlook have sometimes drawn parallels to more familiar principles of the major religions, including the Golden Rule:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Even without having studied philosophical ethics, many people will nonetheless aver that when we talk colloquially about someone using another person, the implication is that it is immoral. Excellent examples include notorious “black widows” (and widowers), who murder their spouses in order to gain possession of their wealth. In fact, every case of mercenarily motivated murder would seem likewise to violate Kant’s Categorical Imperative—and The Golden Rule. The idea of not using people solely as the means to our selfish ends coheres rather well with commonsense morality and is embedded in the legal systems of modern western democracies.

Much ink has been spilled over the past few centuries by some scholars in rejecting Kant’s deontological theory in favor of more practical, teleological or consequentialist, approaches such as utilitarianism, according to which one should always act so as to maximize the happiness or pleasure (or “utility,” as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham termed it) of the greatest number of people. According to utilitarianism, no action is excluded from the outset, because one must determine what its consequences will be in order to know whether it is right or wrong. If a black widower donates his miserly wife’s estate to help people in dire need, then a strict utilitarian might in fact deem the murder (intentional, premeditated act of homicide) to be the right course of action. More generally, if by sacrificing one person or a small number of persons one will thereby save millions of morally equivalent others, staunch utilitarians will insist that the sacrifice not only can but should be made.

Quasi-utilitarian reasoning is found frequently among calls for wars of so-called humanitarian intervention, which promoters claim will save many more people than doing nothing, even though there will invariably be some “collateral damage” victims who die as a direct result of the bombing itself. The outcomes of modern bombing campaigns never reflect the sunny forecast of those who set the intervention machine in motion, but even if they did, this rationalization for “humanitarian intervention” assumes that killing and letting die are morally equivalent, a position which is rejected within the bounds of civil society. Except in rare cases, involving persons with special obligations of care, such as physicians and parents, we do not regard permitting people to die as the moral equivalent of killing them.

The ongoing mess in the Middle East shows how wrong the prognosticators were when they claimed that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would be swift and simple, ushering in an era of peace and democracy for Iraqis, who instead went from suffering under the rule of a despot to living in a chaotic and deadly environment in which their security and quality of life were severely degraded. The state of Libya a decade after the 2011 bombing campaign and the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi is another striking example of how wrong interventionists can be about the consequences of their “well-intended” programs of homicide.

One reason why hawks reach so facilely for utilitarian rationalizations for their wars may be that in this approach to normative morality there is no need to reflect seriously upon the plight of individual soldiers. The end justifies the means and, yes, that will include the sacrifice of some young persons in the prime of their life. In galvanizing support for invading and bombing other countries, the effects on soldiers—the thousands who may be physically maimed or killed, and the many thousands more who may be psychologically wrecked by the experience—are not mentioned at all because they are not recognized as real until after the fact, and then only by some. Indeed, the U.S. military itself has repeatedly and systematically denied responsibility for injuries to soldiers—caused by the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the bombing of chemical facilities in the First Gulf War, the use of burn pits during the occupations, etc.—even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the soldiers were harmed not by the enemy but as a direct result of their own military leadership’s callous disregard for the well-being of troops.

Utilitarian-esque reasoning is quite versatile and is readily invoked in debates on a variety of other military matters as well. Opposition to military conscription, for example, can be made on the purely utilitarian grounds that coerced soldiers are unlikely to fight as effectively as volunteers. Accordingly, whenever soldiers are forced to fight, rather than invited to do so, the outcomes will likely be worse than they would otherwise have been. In World War I, this problem was “solved” by sending wave after wave of young men to their deaths, effectively expending them as cannon fodder.

The Kantian reason for opposing military conscription, whereby unwilling persons are coerced to fight, kill and possibly die in wars over which they have no say, differs markedly from the utilitarian perspective. Efficacy, far from being morally decisive, is in fact irrelevant in the Kantian moral framework. What is wrong with conscription is not that it will have negative consequences but that such soldiers are treated merely as the means to the ends of political elites. Alongside draftees, many a volunteer soldier has been squandered as cannon fodder, but so long as he freely entered into the Faustian bargain of agreeing to kill and risking his own life in exchange for employment, benefits, etc., then he is not being used in the same sense in which every drafted soldier is.

Now, there are good reasons for thinking that war as a means to conflict resolution is at least irrational, if not intrinsically immoral, because no one should ever agree to kill complete strangers at the behest of war promoters, many of whom stand to profit from war—whether financially or politically, and often both. But as a result in part of the long-entrenched myth of heroic warriors who take up arms everywhere and only in the name of “justice”—so long as they are on our side!—wars do continue to be waged and fought, victims slain, and soldiers sacrificed. Relative to that world, delusional though it may be, forcing persons to take up arms is still worse than allowing them to do so.

As shocking as it may seem, twentieth-century soldiers were experimented on in a variety of contexts, under what appears to have been the assumption that they had already signed their lives over to the military, so why not? During the 1991 Gulf War and in the following years, U.S. soldiers were required to be vaccinated against Anthrax using a yet-to-be-approved (by the FDA) pharmaceutical product which caused significant bodily harm to some of the troops. As a result of the Anthrax vaccine fiasco, soldiers are no longer required to undergo experimental treatments, including the emergency authorized COVID-19 vaccines, which have yet to receive full FDA approval. Needless to say, the pharmaceutical and biotech companies involved are doing everything within their means to obtain an early approval so that the vaccines can be mandated by law in a variety of contexts, including the military.

More generally, the current COVID-19 crisis provides a refractive lens through which to distinguish the two very different ways of conceiving of morality, the deontological (as exemplified by Kantianism) and the teleological (as exemplified by utilitarianism). Human experimentation, such as the mass vaccination programs currently underway, is carried out under the utilitarian assumption that the sacrifice of a few will ultimately save millions of lives. Every medical treatment, even those which have received years of testing and full FDA approval, has negative outlier effects on a small portion of the population, and it is purely a matter of misfortune to be one of the persons who ends up being harmed rather than helped. No one has been singled out for harm, so the situation is similar to a lottery where most people win the prize—in this case immunity or, at the very least, better prospects for survival in the case of infection—but a small percentage do not.

The Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System (VAERS) dababase catalogues the reported harms caused by vaccines, and in the case of Covid-19, these have included myocarditis, severe allergic or immune reactions, and Bell’s Palsy, among other possible effects, up to and including death. That these vaccines are being distributed in an ongoing experimental trial is underscored by the fact that the specification sheets for recipients and caregivers were recently updated to reflect the incidence of heart disease as a rare but possible side effect. That risk was not recognized in the early, much smaller, trials, nor in the initial roll-out to elderly persons, but became clear only when younger persons began to be vaccinated, who would ordinarily not have heart troubles, as older persons sometimes do.

So long as patients are properly informed of the potential dangers, if ever so slim, to their health and well-being, then it is their prerogative to incur risks in exchange for the prospective benefits of vaccination, should they deem this to be the proper course of action for themselves. In other words, the case may be viewed as similar to a fully informed person who agrees to enlist in the military, even while knowing the risks involved. There are, however, some curious factors in the present case which together suggest that nothing like morality is driving the quest for universal vaccination. Most obviously, a heavy-handed and ubiquitous propaganda campaign is being used to persuade persons to believe that it is somehow wrongheaded, ignorant and/or selfish not to agree to serve as a subject in an experimental trial of a treatment for which many of them have no need, given their prospects for survival even without the vaccine.

Under normal circumstances, individual persons, so long as they are mentally competent, are deemed the appropriate authorities about which treatments to undertake in efforts to protect themselves and enjoy good health—or not. Free people are also permitted to smoke, eat junk food, avoid exercise, consume alcohol as they please, and engage in risk-taking activities such as rock-climbing at their caprice, even though each of these behaviors may result in premature death. In the current crisis, we have seen endless exhortations to universal vaccination from figureheads such as President Biden and Vice President Harris, both of whom recently emoted on Twitter: “Get vaccinated, or wear a mask until you do!” Such sweeping prescriptions on the part of persons with no information about the individual patients whom they are sternly enjoining to undergo treatment would be a clear violation of medical ethics, if in fact Biden and Harris were physicians, which of course they are not.

Competent medical professionals do not issue blanket prescriptions to be followed uniformly and mindlessly by all possible patients. The particular circumstances of particular patients call for particular treatments to be undertaken—or not. Sound medical advice derives from a licensed professional who is familiar with the condition and circumstances of the patient in question. There is no prescription applicable simultaneously to infants, toddlers, adolescents, young adults, pregnant women, middle-aged persons, and nonagenarians, because their bodily conditions are completely different. Moreover, even within each partitioned category, a wide range of variation exists. Some people (whatever their age) are obese, while others are not. Some people have smoked or continue to smoke, while others do not. Some persons suffer allergies, while others do not. It is nothing short of incompetent to suggest that any treatment should be applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion, as is being done in the propaganda campaigns for the COVID-19 vaccines. Far worse than offering people incompetent (because ill-informed) medical advice, however, would be to force them to comply with mandatory edicts derived from incompetent medical advice.

An overzealous judge (Richard Frye) in Ohio recently sentenced three persons convicted in his court of law to COVID-19 vaccination, which would seem to be a flagrant violation of civil rights. Certainly the punishment cannot possibly be said to fit the crime, because it is completely irrelevant to it—to any crime, as a matter of fact. The judge explained his decision in the following terms, “It occurred to me that some of these folks needed to be encouraged not to procrastinate,” demonstrating only that he has no business residing over any court of law, for he has decided to use the courtroom as his personal pulpit, legislating from the bench in the most obnoxious of ways. One of the criminals, Sylvaun Latham, was offered the choice of COVID-19 vaccination plus a one-year term of probation or else a five-year term of probation. In other words, his liberty to conduct himself as he pleases was tethered by the judge to his willingness to serve now as a subject in an ongoing experimental trial of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is not scheduled to end until 2023.

To require convicts to serve as subjects in experimental trials for drug treatments for which they may or may not have any need (see The Imitation Game for the tragic story of Alan Turing in Britain) is tantamount to making them the property of the state and their lives the prerogative of the state to risk and even sacrifice. This is a very different scenario from voluntary conscription, whereby fully informed persons agree in exchange for remuneration to risk their own lives and well-being. But soldiers who volunteer to fight for their country do not simultaneously agree to serve as pharmaceutical company guinea pigs, which is why forced experimentation on soldiers, too, is wrong. As difficult as it may be to believe, we have now entered an era in which so-called public health experts who support mandatory vaccination are galvanizing judges to conduct themselves in the manner of the officials of the Third Reich. During that deplorable episode of history, judges regularly sentenced persons to sterilization, and many persons were used in human experimentation against their own will.

The most important conclusion of the Nuremberg court regarding human experimentation was this:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Extorting convicts to undergo experimental vaccination in exchange for shorter prison or probation sentences clearly violates this Nuremberg court finding. Indeed, every case of “force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion” to undergo medical treatment is also a violation.

Going even farther than the Ohio judge who imposed vaccine sentences upon convicted criminals, the government of France is effectively criminalizing those who refuse to participate in the vaccine trials. On July 12, 2021 (ironically two days before Bastille Day), President Emmanuel Macron announced that proof of vaccination will be required in social venues, on public transport, and in some cases to remain gainfully employed. By denying persons the right to use public transportation, or even to work, the French government is especially targeting poor people, for wealthy people have private cars and do not need to work. But all “non-compliant” French citizens are being punished as though they committed crimes when in fact they have every right in the world to decide which medical treatments to undergo and which to decline. These measures effectively transform French society into an everted prison in which everyone who refuses to offer his body for use in an experimental trial has his liberties curtailed as though he were an incarcerated criminal who has been convicted of a crime. In effect, everyone who declines the experimental vaccine is being put under house arrest.

In the United States, some businesses are requiring vaccination of their employees, and quite a few universities are requiring vaccination of both employees and students, even though the chance of deleterious, life-changing or even deadly, vaccine side effects may for some cohorts (such as young males) be greater than the chance of death should they become infected with COVID-19. It is nothing short of extortion to threaten people with extremely negative consequences should they not volunteer to serve in an experimental trial for a drug/device of which they have no need. You want to finish your college degree? You want to remain gainfully employed? Then roll up your sleeve! And yet a disturbing number of otherwise apparently rational people support these initiatives, at least judging by their comportment on social media. (Note that there are many bot farms operating on this front as well, and whether they are being paid for by governments or the companies who stand to profit is unclear.)

On July 6, 2021, President Biden announced his administration’s intention to send vaccine promoters door-to-door to persuade those who have not already complied to change their mind. The assumption behind this “folksy” approach of “community outreach” is that anyone who declines vaccination is ill-informed, and with the appropriate amount of friendly banter they will recognize the error in their ways. The problem, however, is that, pace Anthony Fauci, “The Science” has not spoken yet. Information censored and dismissed as disinformation by the media and those who parrot its every proclamation includes hypotheses, theories and bald facts which do not support the reigning narrative and suggest that it may well be false. While appealing to a “community outreach” spirit, Biden also likened this initiative to a “war-time” effort and called willingness to be vaccinated “patriotic”, the insinuation being that declining vaccination is unpatriotic.

Preposterously, given the thousands of breakthrough cases of persons fully vaccinated but who contract COVID-19 anyway, the so-called vaccines may not effectively prevent transmission but only mitigate symptoms—which is what they were designed to do. The shots offer a very slim risk reduction (ARR or absolute risk reduction of ~1%) to most people, because most people are not vulnerable to COVID-19, making it far from obvious that there is any reason for them to undergo an experimental treatment. Yet facts appear incapable of slowing the propaganda machine set in motion more than a year ago, and vaccine proselytzers persist in haranguing even the millions of already recovered persons to roll up their sleeves.

The global propaganda campaign has been so relentless and vast that those who decline vaccination, as in France, stand to have their liberties severely curtailed by government bureaucrats the world over who cling tenaciously to disinformation about the supposed superiority of vaccine immunity over natural immunity, despite numerous studies demonstrating the robustness of the latter and mountains of evidence that social mitigation measures have no effect on outcomes from place to place. Strikingly, if the vaccines do not prevent infection but only diminish symptoms, then millions of vaccinated persons should be expected to fall into the supposed class of “asymptomatic carriers” and considered more likely to transmit the virus to other people once they stop wearing masks and practicing social distancing—at least according to the religious tenets of the Branch Covidians.

As in every other case when quasi-utilitarian rationalizations have been trotted out in support of policies which will destroy some persons’ lives, no one has any idea what the longer term effects of the vaccination programs will be. To pretend otherwise is to lie and, in Kant’s view, to deceive and thereby treat the persons in question merely as means, not as ends in themselves. To treat people as moral persons is to grant them the dignity of being able to inform themselves, assess the facts, and come to their own conclusions about how best to conduct their own lives, up to and including which medical procedures to undertake. Anyone who agrees that it is wrong to use people solely as a means should be wary of pseudo-utilitarian propaganda, above all when the self-styled utilitarians have nothing to lose and something to gain. That there exist today people who are rallying for forced vaccination by the government of the very people whom the government supposedly serves reveals, once again, as many historical episodes attest, how frightened people can be persuaded to support objectively abhorrent policies, sacrifice their fellow human beings and even renounce their very own rights.

When Biden’s Pfizer minions show up at your doorstep, let us hope that they do not in their missionary fervor undertake to vaccinate you without your consent. Just as the cases of President Macron and Judge Frye illustrate, for fanatics convinced of their intellectual superiority and moral righteousness, the end always justifies the means. The danger of this political climate for free people cannot be overestimated. Given the length and range of the COVID-19 vaccine propaganda campaigns, which have completely saturated the mainstream media, there is some reason for suspecting that readily available forms of forced vaccination may be nearer than we think, given the willingness of state authorities such as judges and presidents to criminalize the refusal to serve as a subject in a pharmaceutical product trial.

That Biden has claimed to be on a “wartime” footing vis-à-vis COVID-19, and the Pentagon itself recently held a “war game” specifically addressing the COVID-19 crisis certainly does not bode well for the future of free people. The technology already exists to be able to vaccinate the unwilling using aerosol sprays which could be delivered by automated drone swarms. As horrifyingly dystopic as that possibility may sound, we already know from their many military misadventures abroad that government officials are ready and willing to use any and all of the implements in their arsenal in achieving their aims, and they have no problem ignoring altogether the moral personhood of their victims.

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.