To allow your body to be pierced by a needle is an act of trust. Intelligent trust. (Disclosure: I myself am strongly pro-vaccine for myself but fiercely anti-mandate as I will not impose my evaluation on the body of another.) Suspicion of this vaccine is not irrational or moronic, but intelligent. Consider the following.
- Our long history of releasing medical treatments which are later withdrawn as they are found to be toxic and even fatal.
- This vaccine was rushed through research so that we will not know for years with any certainty the harmful side effects.
- Blacks are more prone to refuse the vaccine, for valid historic reasons, not for defective intelligence.
- With the omicron the science is clear: the vaccine greatly decreases the severity of the illness, but does not prevent reception and passing on of the virus. The non-vaxed hurt themselves, not others. The indignant, moralistic accusation of "you are selfish because you endanger the vulnerable" was applicable to earlier variants but not the current one.
- Regarding the origin of the virus: with time the probability of a natural evolution has decreased and the lab theory has become almost certain. We now know that in early 2020 many prominent scientists argued that it must have been engineered. That view was cancelled, repressed in Orwellian fashion, by the Fauci network, media, the internet and the powers that be. This was done in the most unscientific fashion, in imitation of their Chinese friends, for the most unscientific of reasons. These include: they themselves were financing dangerous and morally-suspect "gain of function" research with the Wuhan lab, fear that science be perceived in its Frankesteinian dimension, hatred of Trump who was advocating the lab theory, and fear of jeopardizing the immense funding, power and status of the gargantuan network of foundations, grants, journals and organizations.
- "Follow the science" is the sacred mantra. But the science about this baffling virus has been entirely uncertain, tentative and confusing. Decisions, many of them defensible, had to be made and were made for prudential reasons. They were NOT scientific. Many were hysterical. Johns Hopkins just released a study of studies that determined that the improvement in mortality due to all the lockdowns was .2%. Amost nothing! Clearly the cure (with consequent mental health, social, economic consequences) is worse than the sickness.
- Public health decisions are always guided by moral and political judgements. Fauci closed down our Churches but gave a pass to the BLM demonstrations. The secular, leftist bias of the public health field was clearly unveiled.The unvaxed have every reason to be suspicious!
Consider Fauci, "high priest of science," with his blatant secular, leftist biases, as he declared that those critical of him are "anti-science." The self-delusion, the hypocricy, the arrogance, the condescension...breathtaking! His sophisticated moral decadence far surpasses the crude, infantile egotism of a Donald Trump!
Recently, a resident from our Magnificat Home passed away. She had not left our building in over two years since she couldn't get down the stairs. Diabetic, arthritic, hypertense, obese, depressed, often vicious...she stayed in her room except to eat. Her diet was terrible. She used a commode in her room...against regulations! She desperately wanted to stay in our home even as she needed nursing care. I finally got her to the doctor but she couldn't get down the stairs at the doctor's office so went in the ambulance to the hospital. About a week later she got covid; later (from bed sores?) she developed a staff infection which killed her. Iatrogenesis: harm done by a medical intervention. This is well known. But Ivan Illich 50 years ago identified a deeper, broader, more insidious Cultural Iatrogenesis: a dependency upon high technology to the degree that we lose our own ability to heal, to live wholesomely, to suffer and die with dignity. The covid reaponse has been cultural iatrogensis on steroids: the hysteria, the defensiveness, the shut downs, the closing of the Churches and the schools, the abuse of our children, the mandates!
The anti-vax reaction, the anti-madate protests by truck drivers in Canada...all of this is an act of resistance to the Orwellian totalitarianism of the emergent techno-bio-medical-state order imposed by a liberal elite that is secular, highly educated, affluent, techno-idolatrous, careerist, state-ist, dismissive of the moral order, hostile to the powerless-innocent, and contemptuous of traditions around family, gender, sexuality. It is a resistance by the unvaxxed, the deplorables, the Trumpians, the poor in status and finances, the underclass, the reactionaires. It is not entirely coherent or articulate; it is not uncontaminated by crude impulses. I disagree with them on many levels. But they are my kind of people. I love them. They are NOT morons!
Postscript: The vaccination of the young (under 30) is, in my view, unneccesary (they are largely immune) and imprudent (we don't know the long-term consequences.) I see that my grandchidren, even the little ones and those who had the covid, are being vaccinated. It is a parental decision and I do not offer my view (except in this blog which hardly any of them read LOL!). What do I know? I am just a cave man! I get it: they are forced into it: junior cannot go to track practice if not vaxxed. It is coercion. But it is also that they are swept along by irresistable social currents...mimetic, herd-like hysteria, peer pressure, and gullible adulation of (often unscientific) "science." As a father, I may not have adequately immunized my own children against pervasive bourgeois pressures and assumptions. Of my seven children and their six spouses six are (or had been) in education, three in psychology/social services, and two in medicine. (Outliers: a lawyer and a businessman.) They are all successful professionals and I am immensely proud of them. But they are products of their education, their profession and their work world. They are (like all of us) brainwashed into unquestioned assumptions. Of course they could not function fruitfully without being compliant. But my hope is that they retain a distance, a resentment, a reserve about the coercion and manipulation into imprudent behavior. Early in my own happy career in UPS supervision a priest warned me: "Do not sell your soul to the company." I threw myself into my work but always retained an interior reserve, an awareness of the inhumanity intrinsic to a profit-driven, meritocratic, hyper-efficient, techno-manic order. Similar dysfunctions are operative in medicine and education! I hope my offspring similarly retain an intelligent and balanced moral ambivalence, an interior freedom by virtue of an awareness of the coercive forces with which they may nevertheless decide to comply.
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