One of our readers pointed out to us, below, this very telling piece of information from the trenches of the “Covid death”grounds. This is not about statistics or abstract numbers.
Listen to a UK funeral director speaking of his experiences over the last 20 months and what he sees as the coming future. He takes major personal risks in order to expose the government’s COVID-19 death fraud since 2019.
The man is spot on.
by Thierry Meyssan via Voltairenet
We all have the word “Democracy” in our mouths and our media warn us against the authoritarian drifts of illiberal countries. However, some of us refuse to organize contradictory debates on the attacks of September 11 as well as on the reaction to the Covid-19 epidemic.
The three monkeys at the Toshogu Shinto temple. They illustrate the precept of a Chinese sage: “Say nothing wrong, see nothing wrong, hear nothing wrong. They could also illustrate Western cowardice: “Say nothing of the Truth, see nothing of the Truth, hear nothing of the Truth.”
The celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 give rise to two absolutely contradictory narratives, depending on whether one refers to the written and audio-visual press or to the digital press. For some, Al Qaeda declared war on the West by plotting a high-profile crime, while for others the same crime masked a domestic coup d’état in the US.
Any debate is impossible between the supporters of these two versions. Not because both sides refuse it, but because the supporters of the official version -and only they- refuse it. They consider their opponents as “conspiracy theorists”, that is to say, in their mind, at best fools, at worst evil people, accomplices -willing or not- of terrorists.
From now on, this disagreement applies to any major political event. And the worldview of the two camps keeps distancing itself from each other.
How could such a fracture between fellow citizens occur in societies that aspire to democracy? Especially since, not this fracture, but the reaction to this fracture makes any democracy impossible.
The continuous news channels prioritizes speed over event. They do not have the time to contextualize it and even less to analyze it; functions which are the proper of journalism. The viewer becomes a voyeur of things he does not understand.
We are assured today that the role of journalists is to report faithfully what they have seen. Yet when we are interviewed by a local media outlet about a story we know about and see how they have handled it, we are often disappointed. We feel that we have not been understood. Some of us lament that we have come across the wrong journalist and retain our trust in the mainstream media. Others feel that while a little distortion is possible on small issues, a lot more must be done on more complex ones.
In 1989, a crowd attending one of his speeches heard the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, accuse the fascists of having invented the Timișoara massacre attributed to his regime’s torturers. Revulsed by this denial, the crowd revolted, chanting “Ti-mi-șoa-ra! Ti-mi-șoa-ra!” and overthrew him. The local television station in Atlanta (USA), CNN, broadcast live the few days of this revolution. It thus became the first live news channel and turned into an international channel. However, we know today that this massacre never existed. It was only a staged event using corpses taken from a morgue. It was later learned that a propaganda unit of the US Army had an office adjacent to the CNN newsroom.
The Timișoara manipulation only worked because it was live. Viewers had no time to check or even think. Professionally, no journalist ever drew any conclusions from the event. On the contrary, CNN became the model for the live news channels that have sprung up everywhere.
During the Kosovo war, in 1999, I was producing a daily bulletin summarizing the information from NATO and the regional news agencies (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Albania, etc.) to which I had subscribed [1]. From the beginning, what Nato was telling us in Brussels was not confirmed by the regional agencies. On the contrary, they described a completely different conflict. It was strange to see that the regional journalists, from all countries except Albania, formed a block, writing texts that were compatible with each other, but not with those of NATO. Week after week, the two versions were moving away from each other.
I n response to this situation, NATO put Jamie Shea in charge of its communications. He told a new story every day from the battlefield. The international press soon had eyes only for him. His story became the media story and the regional news agencies were no longer covered except by me. In my mind, both sides were lying and the truth had to be somewhere in between.
When the war was over, humanitarians, diplomats and UN soldiers rushed to Kosovo. To their surprise – and mine – they found that the local journalists had accurately reported the truth. Jamie Shea’s words had been nothing but war propaganda. They had been the only “reliable” source for the international media for three months.
Western journalists who went to Kosovo also found that they had trusted people who had lied to them with aplomb. Yet few of them changed their tune. And even fewer managed to convince their editors that NATO had deceived them. The narrative imposed by the Atlantic Alliance had become the Truth that the history books would repeat despite the facts.
In ancient Greece, plays caused strong emotions in the audience. Some feared that the gods would drag them into dark destinies. So gradually the chorus, which narrated the story, also began to explain that one must not be fooled by what one saw, but to understand that it was only a staged show.
This distancing from appearances, which is paralyzed by the myth of live information, is called in psychology the “symbolic function”. Small children are incapable of this, they take everything seriously. However, at the “age of reason”, at 7 years old, we can all make the difference between what is true and what is only a representation.
Reason here is opposed to rationality. To be rational is to believe only in things that are proven. To be reasonable is not to believe in impossible things. This is a very big difference. Because we don’t find the Truth with beliefs, but with facts.
When we see airplanes hitting the World Trade Center in New York and people jumping out of windows to escape the fire, we are all very moved. When the Towers collapse, we are ready to weep. But that should not stop us from thinking [2].
We can always be told that 19 hijackers hijacked four airplanes, but since these people were not on the airline’s lists of passengers on board, they could not hijack these planes.
One can always tell us that the fuel from the two burning planes slipped onto the pillars of the buildings and melted them, which would explain why the Twin Towers collapsed, but not on themselves, and not the collapse of the third tower. For a building to collapse, not on one side, but on itself, you have to blow up its foundations, then blow it up from top to bottom to destroy the floors on themselves.
One can always tell us that panic-stricken passengers phoned their relatives before dying, but since the telephone companies have no record of these calls, they did not exist.
One can always tell us that a Boeing destroyed the Pentagon, but it could not have entered through a porte cochere without damaging the doorframe.
The testimonies contradict each other. But only some are contradicted by the facts.
There remains a big problem: why do we accept to be deceived? Usually because the Truth is harder for us to accept than the lie.
For example, when for years the son of the president of the National Political Science Foundation denounced the rapes he was subjected to by the president, everyone pitied the poor delusional boy and praised his father for enduring his madness without saying a word. When the victim’s sister published a book of testimonies, everyone realized who was telling the truth. The president was forced to resign. The rapist owes his escape from justice only to his status: former European deputy, president of the emblematic institution of the entire French political-media class and president of the Siècle, the most exclusive private club in France.
Why do we believe that Al Qaeda is responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Because the Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, came before the United Nations Security Council and swore it. It doesn’t matter that he lied years earlier when he validated the story of the incubators stolen from Kuwait by the Iraqis and the babies left to die. Or that he lied later about President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is a Secretary of State and we must believe him.
On the contrary, if we question his word, we should not only ask why we invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and so on. But also and above all why he lied.
The irremovable Anthony Fauci has managed every major epidemic in the US. He does not work as a doctor, but as a senior civil servant. He does not care about the Hippocratic oath. He has not hesitated to embezzle public money to sponsor illegal and dangerous research in a distant country. Or to promote the compulsory confinement of healthy people.
The enigma of 9/11 is not a question of the past. Our understanding of the last twenty years depends on how it is answered. As long as we do not have contradictory debates between the two versions, we will reproduce this fracture on all global issues.
We are currently experiencing another catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic. We have all seen a large laboratory, Gilead Science, bribe the editors of the medical journal The Lancet to denigrate a drug, hydroxychloroquine. Gilead Science is the company formerly headed by the 9/11 Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It is also the company that produces a drug against Covid-19, Remdesivir. In any case, no one dared to look for drugs to treat Covid anymore. Everyone turned to the hope of vaccines.
Donald Rumsfeld had instructed his staff to develop protocols in case of a bioterrorist attack on US military bases abroad. Then he asked one of them, Dr. Richard Hachett, who was a member of the US National Security Council, to extend this protocol to an attack on the US civilian population. It was this man who proposed the compulsory confinement of healthy populations, provoking an outcry from American doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of John Hopkins University [3]. For them, Rumsfeld, Hatchett and their advisor, the senior civil servant Anthony Fauci, were enemies of the Hippocratic oath and of humanity.
When the Covid-19 epidemic occurred, Dr. Richard Hatchett had become the director of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations); an association created at the Davos Forum and funded by Bill Gates. It was Hatchett who first used the expression “We are at war”, which was taken up by his friend President Emmanuel Macron. It was he who advised confining healthy populations as he had imagined 15 years earlier in the “war on terror.” Anthony Fauci, on the other hand, was still at his post. He had embezzled federal money to finance illegal research in the United States. The research was conducted for him at the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.
Normally, the medical professions would have risen up again against the compulsory confinement of healthy people. This did not happen. They overwhelmingly considered that the situation required violating the Hippocratic oath.
Today, the Western countries that followed Dr. Hatchett’s advice and believed Gilead Science’s lies have a terrifying record of this pandemic. The United States has 26 times more deaths per million people than China. And its economy is devastated.
This would deserve some debate and explanation, but no. We prefer to see our societies fractured again between supporters of Anthony Fauci or Professor Didier Raoult.
Instead of talking to each other, of confronting our arguments, we organize false debates between the supporters of the dominant doxa and those of the most grotesque opinions possible.
It is useless to aspire to live in a democracy, if we refuse to really discuss the most important subjects.
Translation
Roger Lagassé
[1] Le Journal de la guerre en Europe.
[2] On the political significance of the September 11 attacks, read: “20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today“, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, August 31, 2021.
[3] “Covid-19 and The Red Dawn Emails”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 28 April 2020.
By Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.
Parents were once thought to know what’s best for their children. That now seems to be the state’s role, after a couple were described as “abusive and neglectful” by a magistrate for trying to stop their daughter transitioning.
An extremely interesting and important case came before the Western Australia (WA) Supreme Court this week, involving an appeal by parents opposing the wishes of their child, who identifies as transgender and sought to undergo a sex-change procedure.
The child is female and, aged 15, sought to transition to a transgender male – a standard procedure offered by the Perth Children’s Hospital. When her parents refused to agree to this, she threatened to commit suicide and was taken into care by the WA Department of Communities. Legal proceedings then commenced against the parents, and they were found by a Children’s Court magistrate to have acted in an “abusive and neglectful” manner towards their daughter.
In one sense, the appeal is moot, because, once the child turns 18, she will be able to avail herself of the transitioning procedure irrespective of her parents’ views. The parents, however, brought the appeal as a matter of principle because they believe they have been treated unjustly.
The Western Australia government – which funds and promotes a Child and Adolescent Gender Diversity Service – is defending the magistrate’s decision, and the appeal is to be heard by Western Australia’s Chief Justice, Peter Quinlan. Justice Quinlan is noted for his so-called ‘progressive’ views, which he regularly expounds in lengthy extrajudicial speeches – a fashionable pastime engaged in by many judges in Western societies these days. Last month, for example, he delivered a speech on what he described as the “pervasive and insidious current of sexual harassment and gendered discrimination in our culture and in our workplaces”.
It even included a personal mea culpa. “In the decades in which I have been part of the legal profession, there have been countless examples in which I witnessed or heard about harassment or discrimination but was too ignorant, wilfully blind or simply afraid to stick my head above the parapet to call out what, as a lawyer, I should have been ethically bound to name and condemn,” said the judge.
In the United States, for example, one of the first acts of the Biden administration was to introduce comprehensive legislation dealing with ‘transgender rights’. And there is currently legislation before the Victorian state parliament in Australia that makes it a criminal offence for parents to counsel their children against gender reassignment.
Three key aspects of the Western Australian parents’ situation are particularly noteworthy. First, their fate is possible only in a society in which the family has been destroyed as an autonomous institution – a process that has been proceeding apace since the early 20th century. The family was a core institution of bourgeois society in the 19th century – and it operated independently, governed by values very different from those of the marketplace and dominant political ideologies. The historian Christopher Lasch detailed the decline of the bourgeois family in his book ‘Haven in a Heartless World’ – a very apt description of its original role and function.
In the 19th-century family, parents had sole responsibility for the care, education and upbringing of their children, and the law gave them virtually unlimited authority to perform these tasks. With the decline of the traditional family, the state and its ever-expanding army of social workers, health professionals and counsellors have now taken over the functions formerly performed by parents, and parental authority has, in effect, been abolished. This is precisely the situation the Western Australian parents find themselves in. Not only have they been denied the right to care for and protect their daughter – as they see it, and according to their personal values – but their child has been taken away from them by the state.
Second, as with many other formerly autonomous institutions – universities, the courts, churches and cultural institutions – the family and children have been dragged into the realm of the marketplace, where they are compelled to comply with the political ideologies of the globalised elites that now govern most Western societies. This process – mistakenly described by conservative intellectuals as ‘the culture wars’ and mischaracterised by them as a left-wing phenomenon – has intensified over the past 40 years to a degree that it is now probably irreversible.
So, why have the parents in Western Australia been branded as “abusive and neglectful”? Because they had the audacity to challenge a fashionable, state-sponsored dominant ideology: that of so-called ‘transgender rights’. And for this transgression they have suffered the obligatory punishment meted out to those who act in such a manner: they have been parentally ‘cancelled’.
The third aspect of what has occurred is perhaps the most troubling. It would be bad enough if the fashionable ideology under which these parents have been persecuted was reasonable and rational. But it is not – it is patently unreasonable and frankly irrational. The fact is that most of the ideologies of the globalised elites – including catastrophic climate change, critical race theory and #MeToo feminism – are inherently irrational. They are nothing more than self-indulgent forms of moral posturing that are intrinsically incapable of solving the problems that they purport to cure. (If anyone doubts that proposition, they should ask themselves whether critical race theory has improved race relations in America recently, or whether #MeToo feminism has improved relations between the sexes).
These ideologies developed progressively and ever more irrationally from the late 1960s onwards in order to protect a Western globalised economic order that refused to meaningfully reform itself. Posing falsely as radical doctrines, they are deeply conservative at their core, replacing class and social categories with biological categories according to which privileges and ersatz ‘freedoms’ are handed out to favoured groups, while leaving economic inequalities and real social problems untouched. Progress is defined biologically rather than socially and economically. The irrationality of these doctrines is, of course, intensified by the categorical refusal of their adherents to permit any criticism of them to be made.
It isn’t easy for individuals to challenge state-sanctioned dominant ideologies, even at the best of times – and it is particularly difficult to do so in most Western societies these days. Being ‘cancelled’ is not a pleasant experience. Nevertheless, it is important that such challenges are made – and the parents in Western Australia are to be commended for the courageous stand they have taken against the formidable array of ideological and institutional forces confronting them.
Injectable vaccines could be a thing of the past, with University of California Riverside (UCR) researchers investigating turning edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories and make edible vaccines, which could have significant implications in combating COVID-19.
Backed by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the project works by showing how DNA with mRNA vaccines can be delivered into plant cells in a way that lets them replicate. If this works, it could mean that plants could produce as much mRNA as a traditional vaccine injection.
“Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person,” UNCR’s Department of Botany and Plant Science’s Prof. Juan Pablo Giraldo said in a statement.
“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” added Giraldo, who is leading the research and working in collaboration with researchers from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”
But how do mRNA vaccines replicate inside plants?
The key, it turns out, are chloroplasts. These small organelles exist exclusively in plant cells, and cannot be found in non-plant life forms, save for the amoeboid known as Paulinella chromatophora.
The amount of chloroplasts per cell varies heavily depending on the plant. Inside the cell, they behave dynamically and serve a wide variety of functions such as synthesizing fatty acids, amino acids and helping the plant’s immune response.
But its most famous and crucial function is to conduct photosynthesis, where chlorophyll captures energy from the light of the Sun and turning it into energy stored in ATP and NADPH molecules. This process allows it to free oxygen from water in the cells. It also then conducts what is known as the Calvin cycle, using ATP and NADPH to convert carbon dioxide into glucose.
These processes are vital to maintaining the life of a plant, as well as maintaining life on Earth. This is because through photosynthesis, plants essentially “breathe” carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen as a waste product, which is not only the opposite of most life forms, which breathe oxygen and release carbon dioxide, but is also responsible for producing and maintaining Earth’s oxygen as a whole.
But the ability of chloroplasts to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into glucose and other molecules has other implications, with Giraldo saying that they are an “untapped source for making desirable molecules.”
And he has evidence to back this up. His prior research has shown that chloroplasts can express genes not naturally part of the plant if foreign genetic material is properly sent into the plant cell. Of course, this could only be done if the material was encased in the proper protective material, and figuring out which material would be used can be especially tricky. However, it is exactly this that Giraldo’s laboratory specializes in.
But to get it in, one needs nanotechnology. That is why Giraldo has partnered with UC San Diego nanoengineering specialist Prof. Nicole Steinmetz to deliver the mRNA material into the chloroplasts.
“Our idea is to repurpose naturally occurring nanoparticles, namely plant viruses, for gene delivery to plants,” Steinmetz said. “Some engineering goes into this to make the nanoparticles go to the chloroplasts and also to render them non-infectious toward the plants.”
If successful, these findings could revolutionize how vaccines are administered into the human body. This is especially relevant, as vaccine hesitancy is strong in many places throughout the world [yeah I don’t think Frankenstein lettuce is going to help with that], something that in the COVID-19 pandemic, the most widely-used vaccines for which are mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, can contribute to rising cases.
But this method could see vaccine hesitancy take a significant cut. This is because a significant amount of all vaccine hesitancy isn’t simply rooted in doubts over the vaccine’s effectiveness or misunderstandings about the virus and the vaccine’s properties, but due to a simple fear of needles. [LOL. Absurd.]
This was revealed in a study released in June 2021 by the University of Oxford, which suggested that treating fear of needles could reduce vaccine hesitancy by over 10%.
This may be a small number, but as noted by Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry’s Prof. Daniel Freeman, “When it comes to controlling COVID-19, every vaccination counts.
by Brian Shilhavy via Health Impact News
The FDA held a Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting yesterday (September 17, 2021) to discuss authorizing a third Pfizer COVID-19 “booster shot.”
There were signs heading into the meeting this week that there could be some fireworks at this hearing, as two top vaccine research scientists at the FDA, Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Phillip Kause, the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, recently resigned.
This followed a report published in The Lancet from 18 officials at the FDA opposing the Biden Administration’s plan to start distributing Pfizer “booster shots” later this month (September, 2021) before the FDA had even approved them.
To say that there were fireworks at the Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting yesterday might be a gross understatement. The 18 member committee voted 16 to 2 AGAINST approving the booster shots, although later they did give their endorsement on approving them for people 65 and older.
During the “open session” part of the meeting, dissenting doctors questioning the Pfizer shots were given a chance to address the public with their concerns, and they presented to the public REAL data about the shots that up until now has been heavily censored.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room physician from New Orleans who did his studies at Cornell Medical School, stated that there are no trials large enough yet to prove that the COVID-19 vaccines reduce hospitalization without causing serious harm.
He lamented the fact that the “vaccine hesitant” coming into his emergency room were more educated on the risks of the COVID-19 vaccine than those vaccinated.
I know many think that vaccine hesitants are dumb, or just misinformed. That’s not at all what I’ve seen.
In fact typically, independent of education level, the vaccine hesitant I’ve met in the ER are more familiar with vaccine studies, and more aware of their own COVID risks than the vaccinated.
For example, many of my nurses have refused the vaccine despite seeing COVID-19 cause more death and devastation than most people have.
I ask them why refuse the vaccine?
They tell me while they’ve seen the first hand dangers of COVID, the elderly, the obese, diabetics; they think their risk is low.
They’re not wrong. A 30-year-old female has about a 1 in 7000 chance of catching COVID and being hospitalized over it.
He pointed out that a recent study showed that the risk of vaccine-induced Myocarditis (heart disease) in young males is higher than their risk from hospitalization from COVID.
He called for larger studies to be conducted.
We the medical establishment cannot confidently call out anti-COVID-19 activists who publicly claim the vaccines harm more than they save, especially in the young and healthy, the fact that we do not have the clinical evidence to say these activists are wrong, should terrify us all.
Steve Kirsch, the Executive Director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, also gave testimony, and he began his comments with:
I am going to focus my remarks today with the elephant in the room that nobody likes to talk about, that the vaccines kill more people than they save.
He presented data to prove that the belief that these vaccines are “safe” simply isn’t true. He gives several facts to show this, most all of which we have previously covered here at Health Impact News.
For example, people have 71 times more risk of heart attack following COVID-19 vaccines than any other vaccine.
Kirsch claims that expert analysis of existing data, including the 6-month Pfizer trials and VAERS data, prove that the shots kill more people than they allegedly save.
About 411 deaths per million doses. That translates into about 150,000 people have died (from the Pfizer shots).
He then presented some data from the Israel Ministry of Health.
The real numbers confirm that we kill more than we save. And I would love to look at the Israel ministry of health data on the 90+ year olds where we went from a 94.4% vaccinated group to 82.9% vaccinated in the last 4 months.
In the most optimistic scenario it means that 50% of the vaccinated people died and 0% of unvaccinated people died. Unless you can explain that to the public you cannot approve the boosters.
Dr. Jessica Rose, PhD, MSc, BSc, whom we have featured previously here on Health Impact News and has done extensive studies on the VAERS data, also gave a presentation where she showed that we have had a 1000% percent increase in adverse events following COVID vaccines, as compared to all previous vaccines in prior years, something we have covered extensively here at Health Impact News.
Listen to the presentations of these three doctors. This is from our Bitchute channel, and it is also on our Rumble channel.
It is important to understand that this was an “Advisory” committee meeting, and they do not set policy. The FDA could still approve the 3rd Pfizer COVID-19 shot against the recommendation of the Advisory Committee.
Also, these three doctors who shared the truth about the data are not part of that committee, but testified during the “open comments” section of the meeting.
But the fact that the FDA allowed their comments is very significant, as they are now in the public record.
There is obviously some infighting going on at the FDA regarding the Pfizer COVID-19 shots. What could be the reasons for this?
I see two potential reasons why this could be happening.
First, this could be a “drug war,” where Pfizer’s competitors are upset that Pfizer is getting so much of the market share on the COVID-19 vaccines, and they are applying pressure through their contacts at the FDA to start discrediting Pfizer and slow down their rapid race to dominate this market.
Or, secondly, people are starting to abandon ship on the Biden Administration as the current COVID-19 vaccine narrative is now falling apart very quickly, as hundreds of thousands of people are now screaming to have their voices heard regarding their negative experiences with the COVID-19 shots, and the FDA and others are trying to cover their butts in the event that there is a regime change and people start getting arrested for crimes against humanity.
I hope for the second scenario, but fear it is probably the first one.
If the Biden Administration and their handlers on Wall Street believe they are still firmly in control of this mass vaccination campaign that is really an act of genocide and crimes against humanity, then they will just go ahead and approve Pfizer’s third shot anyway, without the approval of this committee.
They will basically tell the American people and their business rivals that they know we are on to them, and that they don’t care because they believe that nobody is going to do anything to stop them.
We know what side the corporate media is on, as they continue to publish the lies that the unvaccinated are filling up hospitals and responsible for spreading COVID-19 variants, and of course they gave no press coverage to the dissenting doctors who testified at the Committee meeting yesterday (at least I did not find anything after doing a corporate media news search.)
Will America do what is necessary to fight these medical tyrants, who are the minority and could be easily overpowered if enough people resisted, or will the nation continue to stand aside and let them press on with their mass eugenics program to reduce the world’s population?
This is most certainly a turning point in human history, not just for the United States, but for the entire world.
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet, these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.
More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication, based on the pro-mandate crowd’s own mainstream data.
As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,
The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.
The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater. Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.
Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.
So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.
And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated” who are in grave danger thanks to the unvaccinated.
The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.
It must also be remembered that vaccination does not stop the spread of covid.
Fellner continues:
But as [the CDC’s] Dr. Walensky explained last month, while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as unvaccinated people.
The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.
Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of covid when they are re-infected, which means they often spread the disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:
While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus to those who are unvaccinated.
Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now,
[T]his has been thrown into doubt and raises questions about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.
Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.
At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.
There is a secondary fallback position the mandate pushers also use: that the unvaccinated are taking up all the intensive care beds and therefore denying people with other conditions the hospital beds that are allegedly more deserved by others.
As I pointed out here, this is also an inconsistent argument since this arguments rests on the idea that people who make unhealthy choices (like not taking a vaccine) ought to be treated as pariahs.
This only applies to one single “unhealthy choice.” These mandate pushers are apparently perfectly fine with drug abusers, smokers, and morbidly obese victims of Type-2 diabetes—the numbers of whom have been multiplying— filling up all the ICU beds. No, those people deserve their hospital beds even though they made the choice to destroy their own health. In fact if one suggests people lay off the meth pipe, the Big Gulps, or the Marlboros—in an effort to improve health—one is an intolerable “fat shamer” or someone who blames the victims.
In any case, recent data has also emerged questioning whether or not the data on hospitalizations is very useful in identifying the load imposed on ICUs by covid patients.
A recent study showed that nearly half (i.e., 48 percent) of covid hospitalizations in 2020 were mild cases. According to The Atlantic (not exactly a hotbed of anti-vaccine rhetoric):
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
And why are there fewer severe cases now? It may be because “unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.”
But no matter! All that matters is getting people vaccinated, and it’s all for your own good, and governments ought to be able to force medications on you. The cynical refrain of the pro-abortion Left, “get your laws off my body” only applies to one single case. In every other case, the state owns you.
This drive for vaccination no matter what can also be seen in the effort to vaccinate even those who have already recovered from covid. The claim here is that those who natural immunity should get jabbed because they have a higher incidence of reinfection—although it is admitted cases of reinfection tend to be far milder than the initial case.
Specifically, those pushing vaccination in this case may point to a study suggesting the unvaccinated are 2.34 times more likely to be reinfected than the vaccinated.
Yet, according to the pro-mandate crowd, this is 2.34 times larger than an extremely small number. After all, we’re frequently told that cases of reinfection for the vaccinated are “extremely rare” and inconsequential. So, that means for the unvaccinated, the odds of reinfection are a little more than double an inconsequential number. Now, I don’t have a degree in mathematics, but I have taken enough calculus and statistics classes to know that 2.3 times “basically zero” is also “basically zero.”
But that is the math being used by those who insist that the risk of reinfection for the vaccinated is negligible, while the risk of reinfection for the already-recovered is an enormous public health crisis.
According to the mandate pushers’ own data, the drive to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated makes no sense at all. But I suspect they’ll stick with the slogan, or even double down on it.
by via : Brownstone Institute
On matters epidemiological, I’m a dedicated follower of Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, scientist and novelist. It was she who granted me a broad understanding of the relationship between society, freedom, and infectious disease.
She explained the urgency to get this right lest we recreate and institutionalize a caste system that delineates one group from another based on perceived cleanliness and thus harms everyone while setting back human rights and freedoms.
Looking at data only gets one so far. We all need deeper understanding. She gave me that.
Also, she is a wonderful person.
So of course I wanted to bring Sunetra to the United States for a Brownstone Institute event. She is a hero among many in the United States, and people deserve to meet her and get her thoughts. She lives in London. It’s a nice flight from there to here. Why not?
It cannot happen, at least not now. Since March 2020, UK citizens cannot travel to the US unless they have some special exemption granted by the US government. I’m not even sure I would know how to obtain that. I’m guessing that the Biden administration is not likely to grant an exception for her.
So we are stuck. She is stuck. Here is the map of the world from the point of view of UK travelers. Only Mexico and Columbia are fully open. The states in orange are restricted. The states in red are closed.
Hundreds of millions of people are stuck. Billions. We are all prisoners at some level and in some ways. We cannot have guests visit us from Europe. In retaliation, Europe is mostly closed to the US. The US has loosened restrictions for Australians but Australians are not allowed out. Or have a look at Sweden, one of the few states in the world that did not lock down. They are not allowed to travel much at all outside their own borders due to restrictions from other nations.
Why some nations are open, and others are not, is a mystery. There does not seem to be any rational reason except for vague claims of the need to be safe from Covid. Our governments did this to us. They intervened in a world of happy world travelers and smashed it, in the name of controlling a virus that is absolutely everywhere and has been for two years.
There is no precedent in modern history for such restrictions. There is also very little debate about this, which is shocking. The world spent decades in outrage about the closures between East and West Germany. Tear down this wall! When the Berlin Wall fell, the whole world celebrated. Now the world is filled with walls, not just to migration (though it’s bizarre that the US actually has huge immigration inflows from the Southern border) but even to normal travelers.
Much of this began January 31, 2020, when Trump banned travel for non-US citizens from China. It was a controversial decision within the administration, even among public-health experts, because it had long been conventional wisdom that such travel bans are harmful.
The virus was already here and spreading, though in those days the US had very little testing and so Trump believed that he could perhaps keep the virus out. He was wrong about that. Even so, I recall some people on the left objecting but the travel ban connected with many people’s intuition that the way to deal with a virus is to force some kind of separation.
That travel ban unleashed two habits of thought that ended up driving the rest of the lockdowns.
The first habit was to believe that the virus is over there but not here. It doesn’t matter where the “there” and the “here” is; it’s just a reflection of a primitive belief that “they” are dirty and “we” are clean, or that the virus is some kind of miasmic fog floating somewhere where we are not. If you live in the miasmic zone, some of the bad air might stick to you. This later came to be the driving impulse behind state-level quarantines and restrictions.
You probably noticed this yourself. No matter where you live, the people there always imagined that they were in some kind of disease-free bubble that could be easily penetrated by invaders. This attitude still persists. In the Northeast of the US, vast numbers of people are somehow convinced that Texas and the South are full of disease, such that if you travel there and come back, you are likely carrying this virus. And this isn’t just about the vaccination rates; this habit of mind was there from the beginning.
That connects directly with the second habit of mind: the belief that the way to control the virus was via human separation. One you start to think this way, the logic becomes unstoppable. It’s not just about the Chinese. It’s about everyone outside the border. Outside the state. Outside the county. Outside the neighborhood. Outside the home. Outside this room.
The implications of this view are profound. It impacts directly on the possibility of human freedom itself.
On March 12, 2020, Trump announced the next step, which shocked me but should not have. He blocked all travel from Europe. He said this would reduce the threat and ultimately defeat the virus – a statement that embodies his highly confused views on this matter from the beginning. He also garbled a sentence that ended up having a devastating economic result. He meant to say that the ban would exempt goods. Instead he said the following: “These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.” The stock market immediately tanked.
I had no idea that the US president even had such power. I certainly never imagined he would use it. On the other hand, it made sense in a crazy way. If he could stop travel from China to keep the virus out, he could stop travel from anywhere. As a result of one man’s decision, world travel and vast amounts of normal commerce came to a halt.
The virus circulated anyway, not only in the US but everywhere in the world.These days the world makes fun of places like Australia and New Zealand where they imagined that they could somehow keep the virus out by controlling people’s movements in and out of the country. But that is precisely what Trump was doing too!
As a result of his edict, millions of Americans living abroad desperately bought tickets to get back to the US before the ban went into effect. They arrived at international airports that were wildly crowded at all the immigration and customs chokepoints. The waits in Los Angeles and Chicago were many hours, even up to 8 hours, standing shoulder to shoulder with people who had flown in from all over the world. This was happening the same day that Drs. Fauci and Birx were lecturing Americans to “socially distance” and stay away from other people in order to control the virus. The whole scene was emblematic of two years of policy chaos, with leaders ordering people around in ways that made the chaos worse rather than better.
During the remainder of the Trump term, between March and January, people inside the administration were trying their best to stop these preposterous rules. But there was always a problem. The danger was that opening up travel again could somehow be associated with increased cases and deaths from Covid, and that contract tracing would be deployed to show it. In that case, whomever was responsible for reopening would catch the blame. No one inside the Trump administration was willing to take the risk. So everything stayed shut.
The Biden administration could have opened also but the same problem presented itself. The borders were shut to the world, and no one wanted to take the risk of reopening, even though the virus was already here, there, and everywhere. Opening would not have made any difference. Would it have increased the “spread” of the virus or its prevalence? Not any more than was already the case.
Further, we know for sure that being exposed to the virus is the best means to obtain immunities from it, from which we get the counterintuitive conclusion that it would actually be safer for everyone to have people travel here from countries that had already dealt with the virus. After the vaccine came along, one might have supposed that there would be opening at least to those who took the jab, but there was another problem: the gradual realization that the vaccine doesn’t actually stop infection or spread. Thus are the borders still closed to this day.
There was no consensus in public health for the travel bans. On March 2, 2020, 800 public health experts signed a letter that recommended against them. “Travel restrictions also cause known harms, such as the disruption of supply chains for essential commodities,” they wrote, while citing a piece in Science Daily that reviewed thousands of studies on travel bans that was unable to come up with any conclusive evidence that they accomplish anything in terms of disease containment.
Already back in 2006, Donald Henderson had echoed the conventional wisdom, not only of his colleagues but also of the World Health Organization.
Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective. The World Health Organization Writing Group concluded that “screening and quarantining entering travelers at international borders did not substantially delay virus introduction in past pandemics . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.”
Similar conclusions were reached by public health authorities involved in the international efforts to control SARS. Canadian health authorities report that “available screening measures for SARS were limited in their effectiveness in detecting SARS among inbound or outbound passengers from SARS-affected areas.” A review by a WHO Working Group on SARS also concluded that “entry screening of travelers through health declarations or thermal scanning at international borders had little documented effect on detecting SARS cases.”…
It is reasonable to assume that the economic costs of shutting down air or train travel would be very high, and the societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme.
The longer these restrictions exist to travelers from other countries, the more resentment that foreign nations feel. They are retaliating. Indeed, states all over Europe have removed the US from the list of countries to which it is considered safe to travel. Even Sweden is in on the act, banning nonessential travelers from the US. The restrictions are getting worse, not better.
The US could end this escalation of restrictions that have shut down the beautiful world of travel simply by reopening to the world, same as was true before the Trump administration embarked on this wild experiment. The emergence of global travel in the 20th century – its universal availability and practice – was one of the great triumphs of liberalism and modernity.
We rejected the isolation, parochialism, and local stagnation of the past and sought out knowledge and adventures all over the globe. We encountered new people, new places, new experiences. The world became open to all, thanks to commercialized flight. This also generated an incredible positive externality for public health. More exposure to the world improved immune systems for individuals the world over – a point first made to me by Professor Gupta.
Then in an instant it was closed. International tourist arrivals are down by 85% from 2019. A third of the world’s borders are shut. There seems to be no movement in the direction of reversing this disaster and reinstituting the wonderful world of 2019. In fact, there seems to be very little awareness that this has happened to us much less of the terrible consequences. Forget the freedom of movement; the Biden administration has only promised to open up “when it is safe to do so.”
Why is there so little controversy about this and no real political pressure from anyone to do something about it other than a handful of business lobbyists? It’s like many other aspects of lockdowns. Both parties and ideologies are implicated in them. If everyone’s hands are dirty, there is no one available to clean up.
Sunetra Gupta is one person among billions who cannot come to the United States by virtue of having the wrong citizenship identity and passport. She is locked out, in the name of virus control. There should be outrage, and would be if the restrictions on travel did not compete with so many other policies worthy of outrage.
by Brian Shilhavy via Health impact News
The corporate media narrative that unvaccinated people are filling up the hospitals and dying from COVID is quickly falling apart, perhaps faster than they even expected.
WXYZ TV Channel 7 in Detroit asked their viewers on their Facebook Page last Friday to direct message them if they lost a loved one due to COVID-19 if they refused to get one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
This is a clear indication that they are getting desperate to find these stories, and are having a difficult time finding them.
I don’t know if they got any such stories through direct messaging, but the post on their Facebook Page, as of the time of publication today, had received over 182,000 comments, and they seem to be all comments of those who have lost loved ones after receiving a COVID shot, and comments asking them why they are not covering that story.
I paged through many dozens of the comments, and did not see a single one stating that they lost someone to COVID after refusing a COVID-19 shot.
People who have been silenced and censored on Facebook and other Big Tech platforms took advantage of the opportunity to share their stories instead. It is amazing that Facebook left these up, but after so many had commented, it would probably have been an even bigger story if they had taken down the post and comments.
I wonder what WXYZ will do now? Will they do what most corporate media companies do, fueled by almost unlimited resources from their billionaire Wall Street owners who are almost all connected to the pharmaceutical industry, and just go out and hire actors instead to do the story and make them up?
Here are a few screen shots of the comments that are representative of what people are posting, in case they do take this down.
by via: The Brownstone Institue
How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.
The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts– and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.
What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.
From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.
The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.
All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.
At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.
Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory,just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.
At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.
The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.
That did not happen.
Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.
That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.
The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.
Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.
The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like to to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.
These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.
This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.
The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.
Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.
The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.
The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.
The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)
Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”
From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.
The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months.
Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.
In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable.They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.
by Brett Sinclair Author, artist, historian, op-ed writer and blogger who has worked for several national magazines in Canada and international media.
LGBTQ Pride march in Paris © AP
Covid is not the only virus sweeping the West, obsessively woke politics is running rampant with the most virulent variants emerging in newsrooms and colleges. As an acquaintance of mine slowly succumbed, here’s what I observed.
There are certain traits that appear to be extremely common among people who are ‘woke’. Woke being now a common term for those among us who become righteously incensed with progressive social justice issues (typical of mainstream Western media imbibers or recent university graduates). Often, we can see this obsession manifesting in the form of aggressive protest activism – not just as a hobby, but at every social, private, and professional level of their lives. That is a ‘woke’ personality.
While there are well-known physical markers indicating a woke person (blue or purple hair, obesity, androgyny, wispy beards in men, annoying spectacles) I have for some time been a curious student of their habits and psychological mannerisms, which I have also noted, along with the physical traits, to have universal qualities.
I had until recently assumed that these universal personality traits were evidence of a condition existing in the person first (i.e smug over-confidence) which left them susceptible to ‘woke ideas’. But more and more anecdotal experience is teaching me that becoming woke, or contracting the ‘woke virus’, creates its own type of human psyche in the unsuspecting host, which is recognizable across many observable cases. It is my opinion that this psyche is the result of the mind-virus, and not necessarily a pre-existing quality. Thus, if true, this means wokeness itself reshapes the mind.
These qualities are:
A recent experience with an acquaintance, a middle-aged woman who, through a new circle of friends, went from normal and apolitical to fully woke, permitted me to study changes (with a detached horror) as they occurred. Firstly, she began to exhibit extreme self-centeredness, as this new social peer group became important to her (I believe it was a ‘book club’). It began with her seemingly becoming incapable of talking about anything but herself. I had noticed that quality in other woke friends, and in many I could recall they were not previously like that, but this was the first adult person to transition slowly before my eyes, so I got out my clipboard and took notes.
She became somewhat manic, high-anxiety, more worrisome, and less healthy-seeming. Along with this came casual smug political remarks in polite conversation. It goes without saying there were constant, needy Facebook posts about woke politics, or herself, or the ideal combination: posts about herself woke-crusading. Now none of this was part of her personality previously, at all, despite woke politics being with us many years now. It began for her with a new circle of peers that she obviously wished to impress and is culminating currently in her friends and family seriously considering an intervention of psychological help, not because of the constant virtue-signaling, but for the other more self-destructive personality changes.
It reminds me of the science of psychopathy. I was very interested to learn in my youth, not just that psychopaths essentially have little or no emotional feeling, and certainly no empathy, but that they exist among us in high numbers. They don’t all become serial killers, but there are people you know who are psychopaths that you would never have guessed because they learn to mimic human behavior. Severe trauma in youth can appear to create psychopathy, so it can be an environmental condition.
I’m not saying woke people are psychos (though they both share the narcissism), I am saying psychological conditions can be created, and that the modern world, with its rampant materialist consumerism, dogmatic atheism and self-hating education system, is perhaps manufacturing a new human psyche, one both frail and fraught and in its own perverse way, merciless.
Watch as the virus spreads, watch and study and hope you have immunity.