The Administration Is Stockpiling Billions In Pfizer Jabs To Reboot The Jackpot This Fall

thehill |  The Biden administration announced Wednesday that is paying $3.2 billion for 105 million doses of an updated Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for a fall campaign, pending Food and Drug Administration signoff on the new formula.  

The order is a major step in the administration’s efforts to move forward with a new vaccination push this fall, in a bid to blunt a renewed COVID-19 surge when the weather turns colder in much of the country.  

The updated vaccine is expected to target the omicron variant, with the goal of providing improved protection.  

The new doses are expected to begin to be delivered “as soon as late summer 2022 and continue into the fourth quarter of this year,” Pfizer said in a news release.  

The Biden administration is using money that it was forced to cut from other areas of its COVID-19 response after Congress did not act on the administration’s request for new funds.  

The administration warns that it has had to cut money from important areas like maintaining testing capacity and doing research on improved vaccines, such as “pan-coronavirus” shots that work on multiple variants.  

The White House is still pushing for more money from Congress, but prospects on Capitol Hill are not looking particularly hopeful amid a continued stalemate. Republicans have pushed back on the urgency for the funds.  

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said that “despite months of warnings from the Administration on the consequences of a lack of funding,” due to Congress’s lack of action, Wednesday’s order “will not purchase enough vaccines to offer one of these new booster shots to every adult and unfortunately, comes at the expense of continued funding for other critical pandemic response needs like testing manufacturing and domestic vaccine manufacturing.”

The order placed on Wednesday, though, will ensure the country is not completely lacking in updated vaccines for the fall.  

“We look forward to taking delivery of these new variant-specific vaccines and working with state and local health departments, pharmacies, health care providers, federally qualified health centers, and other partners to make them available in communities around the country this fall,” said Dawn O’Connell, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.  

A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Thursday gave the green light to updating vaccines for omicron, though there are still more steps in the approval process. 

Uptake of even a first booster dose, which is recommended for everyone aged 5 and older, has been lagging, an indication that not everyone will want an updated booster this fall.  

About 105 million people have received their first booster dose, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures. 

 

Karens - How's That Vaccine Mandate Political Payback Working Out For You?

amidwesterndoctor  |  One of the tremendously frustrating experiences I have had during my lifetime has been watching an amazing candidate run for president, be widely liked by the voting base because of their excellent track record in standing up for the working class, and then watch the media systematically torpedo each and every one of their campaigns. 

The only person I have ever seen who was able to address this dilemma was Donald Trump, as he took a rather unorthodox approach where he campaigned on the basis of the media being evil.  As a result, each time the media gave him negative attention it helped rather than hindered his campaign, and before long he was able to pull the mass media into a symbiotic relationship where it could not help but continually provide oxygen to Trump’s campaign.  

The upside of this approach was that it provided Trump with the freedom to advance populist positions that went against the vested interests of the financiers of the corporate media, something very few other presidents have done.  The downside of this approach was that it was incredibly polarizing, and divided the country to the point that the left was willing to force through vaccine mandates as a way of getting back at the right.  While it is important to advance populist positions that go against entrenched interests (and to expose the systemic corruption within the media), there was a tremendous cost to the political polarization this approach created we will likely be stuck with for years to come.

Something that is often not appreciated about the media is that their business model is based upon getting as much viewership as possible and to provide content that appeases their advertisers. For this reason, content that is critical of any sponsor is never allowed to air.  As a result most media programming is meaningless stories that do not challenge any vested interest and are emotionally hyped up as much as possible to antagonize the audience so that the audience is drawn into caring about them.

Given that the largest sponsor of the mainstream media is the pharmaceutical industry, it is not surprising that all news content aggressively promotes the pharmaceutical party line (the only occasional exceptions I know of are Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham).  One of the ethical journalists who has spoken out the most on this issue is Sharyl Atkinson, who in one interview specifically noted that she observed a variety of major changes occur in the media that coincided with her suddenly being forbidden from ever discussing vaccine safety concerns on air.

It is difficult to assign blame for the botched pandemic response to any single party. However, if I have to identify the key culprit, I would argue that the rigid censorship by the mainstream media, big tech and the academic publishing institutions was what allowed the insane pandemic policy is to march forward despite being clearly in opposition to most existing scientific evidence. In the same way that pharmaceutical corruption has gradually taken over the legacy media (the Gates Foundation for example frequently gives media grants to ensure their massages dominate the airwaves), these other media venues are likewise highly susceptible to pernicious influence, which is why independent media platforms are so critical moving forward.

If They Don't Charge You For The Product (mRNA Therapeutics) YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!

 

Study from Senior Editor of the British Medical Journal Peter Doshi, et al, finds the absolute risk of serious AE from mRNA vaccines exceeds the absolute risk reduction of serious covid-19 infection.https://t.co/6JxOyIZVEH pic.twitter.com/PHhODa2dYt

— PLC (@Humble_Analysis) June 22, 2022

The Panicdemic Separated Nudgeable Softheaded Sheep From Rational Hardheaded Goats...,

naomiwolf  |  On driveway after driveway of the ex-Brooklynites, of the former weekend people — (and I confess that I too was once a weekend person, but something has happened to me in the last two years that has changed me even more than my change of home address) there were now Ukrainian flags. Not American flags. No one cared or even asked about the town halls being closed for the past two years. Tyranny overseas was more pressing than the rights that had been suspended just up the road.

Otherwise most things were almost back to normal! Almost pre-2020 normal!

The masks had recently come off. Hudson, New York, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the two cities nearest us, and also, by chance, both left-leaning, had also been two of the maskiest and most coercive of places when it came to pandemic policies and pandemic cultures. Now businesses were being allowed to reopen.

(I’d been fired from my Great Barrington synagogue because I’d dared to invite people over to my house at the depth of the pandemic — if they had wanted, as adults, affirmatively, to join me — to watch the Zoom Friday Evening Shabbat service together. Shocking behavior on my part, I know.)

As if a switch had been flicked, now the cruel moral judgments, the two-tier society, the mandates, the coercions, the nasty looks, the desperate masked children with their laboring breath, the loneliness, the desolate centrally-planned economies — had evaporated and were no more.

A memo from a political consultancy had gone out to the DNC, warning about how these policies spelled defeat in the midterms, and Pouf! — a whole retinue of “mandates” messaged as if they had been matters of life and death, a raft of Board of Health demands, a plethora of social strictures, and baroque instructions on how and when to discriminate against one’s fellow Americans — vanished, like the smoke from an unwelcome cigarette on a breezy veranda. An MSNBC commentator said, in a logical non sequitur, that now that vaccines were available for kids, in-person office life would resume.

Overnight, a new concern, a new moral signifier, was presented, wholly formed: and it involved a conflict area half a world away. Now, war is always bad and invasions are always cruel; but I could not help noticing that there are wars, refugees, invasions and conflict areas around the world, and that only this one — this one one — demanded the attentions of my irksomely cultish and uncritical former tribe. I could not help noticing that the dozens of devastated conflict areas and war zones being totally ignored by the ex-Brooklynites — from Ethiopia, where there have been 50,000 deaths since September, to Sri Lanka, with its catastrophic food shortages, to Mexico’s drug war, which has led to 300,000 deaths, to Afghanistan, where women are being rounded up and people are being shot in the street — do not involve white people who look like the ex-Brooklynites; and for various other reasons, are not attracting a lot of television cameras.

You’d think the ex-Brooklynites, with their expensive educations, would bear those complexities in mind.

But no; the ex-Brooklynites are so easily led, when it comes to anyone invoking their particular moral high ground.

When they are directed to pay attention to one conflict out of dozens, and ignore the rest, no matter how dire the rest may be, they do so. Just like, when they were instructed to present their bodies uncritically to an untried MRNA injection and to offer up the bodies of their minor children, they did so. When they were asked to shun and to discriminate against their blameless neighbors, they did so.

So the great apparatus of messaging about COVID was switched off, almost overnight, as the politics clearly soured and as Republicans consolidated an increasingly popular, multiracially inclusive, transpartisan-ly appealing freedom message; and the comms apparatus simply replaced the COVID drama with a new, equally gripping European-conflict drama.

If Not Monkeys, Then Birds GottDammit!!!

wired |   In the first days of the new year, on the marshy coastal edge of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, a hunter shot an American widgeon, a rusty-fronted duck with a pale beak and a brilliant green stripe. This was not a big deal; the state’s duck hunting season runs from Thanksgiving through the end of January. Neither was what happened next: Before taking it home, the hunter let a wildlife biologist affiliated with a government program swab the carcass for lab analysis.

But what happened after that was a big deal indeed. After the sample went through its routine check at Clemson University, it made an unusual second stop at a federal lab halfway across the country, in Iowa. The news of what was in the sample percolated through a pyramid of agencies, and on January 14 the US Department of Agriculture revealed why it had attracted so much scrutiny: The South Carolina duck was carrying the Asian strain of H5N1 avian influenza, the first sighting of that pathogen in the continental US in years.

But not the last. Just a few days later, the USDA disclosed that two more birds shot by hunters also carried the same pathogen: a teal, shot in the same South Carolina county, and a northern shoveler shot in the far northeast corner of North Carolina, about 400 miles away. The virus in all three was what is known as highly pathogenic—meaning it could cause fast-moving, fatal disease in other bird species, such as poultry, though it was not making the ducks ill.

Three birds out of the millions that American hunters shoot each year might seem like nothing—but the findings have sent a ripple of disquiet through the community of scientists who monitor animal diseases. In 2015, that same strain of flu landed in the Midwest’s turkey industry and caused the largest animal-disease outbreak ever seen in the US, killing or causing the destruction of more than 50 million birds and costing the US economy more than $3 billion. Human-health experts are uneasy as well. Since 2003, that flu has sickened at least 863 people across the world and killed more than half of them. Other avian flu strains have made hundreds more people ill. Before Covid arrived, avian flu was considered the disease most likely to cause a transnational outbreak.

It is far too soon to say whether the arrival of this virus in the US is a blip, an imminent danger to agriculture, or a zoonotic pathogen probing for a path to attack humanity. But it is a reminder that Covid is not the only disease with pandemic potential, and of how easy it is to lose focus when it comes to other possible threats. The possibility of a human- or animal-origin strain of flu swamping the world once seemed so imminent that back in 2005 the White House wrote a national strategy for it. But researchers say the surveillance schemes that would pick up its movement have since been allowed to drift.

“In wildlife disease surveillance, we’re always chasing a crisis,” says David Stallknecht, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, a research institute housed at the University of Georgia. “And as soon as the crisis is over, the interest goes down. It’s difficult to keep going long-term. People are here to do the work, but the money isn't there to support it.”

Omicron: The Atlantic Tirelessly Speculating And Making Shit Up

theatlantic |  Here’s the upshot: Each fully vaccinated person might still be at minimal risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID this winter, but the vestiges of normalcy around them could start to buckle or even break. In the worst-case scenario, highly vaccinated areas could also see “the kind of overwhelmed hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase in Boston and New York City,” Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, told me. If only a small percentage of Omicron infections lead to hospitalization, the variant is still spreading with such ferocity that millions of people could need a bed.

Such a scenario would be especially dangerous if those millions of people all needed a bed at the same time. Omicron is so transmissible that cases could peak across the country more or less in tandem, Schiffer and Scarpino both said, which would make it harder for the U.S. to shuffle personnel and ventilators to particularly hard-hit regions. ICU capacities in some states are already stretched thin and health-care workers are resigning en masse, so the harms could be even worse. “If we don’t get serious, if we don’t get the masks on, if we don’t get testing up, we’re going to be back into lockdown again because people will be dying in the hallways of hospitals,” Scarpino said. The prospect of such a surge in hospitalizations is “keeping me up nights, to be honest,” Schiffer told me.

This all would be mitigated if Omicron turns out to cause significantly milder disease than Delta—still a possibility, but far from confirmed—and if the vaccines’ protection against severe disease holds strong. But even in that sunnier version of the future, cases are almost certain to increase in highly vaccinated areas and undervaccinated ones alike, and bring with them a host of disruptions to daily life. Schiffer suggested that in areas with sufficient political will—mostly highly vaccinated ones—high case rates could spur local leaders to institute new shutdowns. In any event, fully vaccinated people are still required to isolate for at least 10 days after a positive test, and anyone they’ve been in contact with might have to stay home from school or work. A positive test in a classroom could send dozens of kids into quarantine, and keep their parents out of work to care for them. Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that massive disruptions caused by surging Omicron cases this winter could force Americans to reconsider these sorts of procedures.

Read: The new pandemic division tearing Europe apart

Whatever the effects on vaccinated Americans, the Omicron fallout is going to be much more severe for everyone else. In places with low vaccine coverage and strong anti-shutdown politics, inconvenience could be replaced by mass death and even greater grief. And the devastation will almost certainly be greater, on average, in rural communities, poor communities, and communities of color. “It’s unvaccinated people who are going to be at the worst risk for the worst outcomes. And it’s also going to be the folks who don’t have the ability or the luxury to quarantine or just kind of hide out when it looks like the numbers are getting too high,” Zelner said. People working multiple jobs might not have time to get a booster or sick days to use while recovering from side effects. People who live in areas that are underserved by hospital systems will have more trouble finding a bed and receive worse care if they do get sick.

None of these futures are yet written in stone. The scope of the coming hardship will depend on how capable Omicron is of causing severe disease and death. And though Omicron seems likely to overtake Delta, “cases are still low enough with Omicron that we can have a big effect if [we] act early,” Scarpino said—though “acting early was last week.” A month ago, one could still pretend that burden fell on those who lived in some other place, far away from vaccinated people in vaccinated communities. Now that delusion looks shakier than ever.

 

Dr. Scott Gottlieb: Next Panicdemic, We'll Have To Involve Our Instruments Of National Security

nakedcapitalism |  “We’ll have to involve our instruments of National Security.” This is mere question begging. Surely the intelligence agencies are not the only state organs capable of prediction and analysis? (To be fair, I can understand why one might wish to fall back on one of the few institutions in our sclerotic state that actually does function, rather like calling in the Army to handle nursing home staffing or container jams.)

One obvious reason run screaming from the room if anybody proposes Gottlieb’s idea is this episode. From Scientific American, “How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All“:

In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.

It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.

The deadly consequences have already begun. Villagers along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers, accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio vaccinations in parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden ruse as justification. Then, last December, nine vaccine workers were murdered in Pakistan, eventually prompting the United Nations to withdraw its vaccination teams. Two months later gunmen killed 10 polio workers in Nigeria—a sign that the violence against vaccinators may be spreading.

Such attacks could not come at a worse time. The global polio campaign has entered what should be its final stages. The number of cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 650 in 2011. The disease spreads naturally in only three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria—down from more than 125 countries a quarter of a century ago. Disrupting or postponing vaccination efforts could fan a resurgence of polio around the world.

The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred, says Leslie F. Roberts of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Forevermore, people would say this disease, this crippled child is because the U.S. was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden,” he argues.

100,000 crippled children because CIA operatives hijacked a public health effort, good job. Gottlieb is, of course, aware of this episode. His idea is that if the public health people are “at the table” good things will happen. Perhaps the Norms Fairy will intervene, I don’t know. Page 370:

Degradation Of The Public Health System Wasn't Caused By The Evil Ineptitude Of Fauci And Walensky

authorea |  In most Western countries, and in the majority of Canadian provinces, the COVID response symbiotically produced by political actors and public health institutions caused multiple disconnects: between the scientific evidence on COVID transmission and the public health sanctioned advice; between public health and governmental discourses prioritizing the wellbeing of the population and containment strategies focused mostly on economic indicators; and between inclusive discourses putting forward collective sacrifices for a common good and deeply inequitable interventions. 

At the time of writing this commentary, those disconnects have grown too deep to be hidden. More efforts seem to go in controlling the political spin and rationing the information made available than in trying to correct documented deficiencies (Daflos, 2021; Thomas & Gervais, 2021). This is not to say that there is no push back by some public health officials and it could be that fierce debates are taking place behind closed doors. But, in most jurisdictions there have been little to no place for open dissension (Deep Singh, 2021).

 

Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).

 

In the following months and years, we should expect the COVID pandemic to be used to support calls for increased budgets by public health state bureaucracies. And many valid arguments can be made in support of stronger public health. However, it would be a huge mistake to ignore what the discipline lost in the pandemic, and the causes explaining the disconnects discussed here. The pandemic caused public health to turn back to its medical roots instead of leveraging the interdisciplinarity it long preached (Greenhalgh et al., 2021). It pushed many public health state bureaucracies to become tools for governments instead of being carriers for evidence-based information. And more generally it caused the discipline to renege most of its principles.

Americans Need To Pay Close Attention To What Happened In Melbourne This Week

CTH  |  An inflection point has been reached in Australia with the government COVID-19 lockdowns, forced vaccinations and now, vaccine passports. What is happening today in the state of Victoria, specifically the Melbourne metropolitan area, is an outcome of more than a year of heavy-handed government rules and regulations deaf to the voices of the average man, woman or family. There is a middle class & blue-collar backlash taking place, and Americans would be wise to pay attention.

Things recently came to a head when the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, began outlining the rules and regulations for opening society back up after almost a year of total lockdown. The always futile attempt to block the COVID-19 virus through a policy known as “COVID-ZERO” was abandoned. The new approach is to open up society and the economy by forcing everyone to take the vaccine, and then allowing only the vaccinated to participate in the economy as varying percentages of the population are double-vaxxed, and admittedly, later, booster-vaxxed.

BREAKING: Victoria police have opened fire at the Shrine #Australia pic.twitter.com/x84sWVqiVM

— SoulJar 🗣 (@slyfox__) September 22, 2021

Vaccination passports will be required to work, shop, attend events and essentially live in the New World Order Premier Andrews has created for the citizens of Victoria. The day after Andrews outlined the new rules – the working class, who have been locked down and compliant to this point, finally had enough.

Do not be naive to the fact that U.S. and Canadian government officials; those in direct ideological alignment with the leftist perspectives of government in Australia; are not paying close attention to what is happening there in preparation for when both the U.S. and Canada move to block the unvaccinated from participating in society.

The vaccination passport methods, processes and procedures being tested right now in Australia are soon to arrive in the United States. Electronic check-ins and QR codes deployed to track the movements of vaxxed and unvaxxed are being tested right now in almost all states in Australia. We The People in America are only a few weeks or months away from having to make the same decisions that middle-class Victorian workers are faced with right now. This is why you should pay attention to what is happening there.

The population of Australia (26 million) is small by comparison to the U.S. (350+ million), and as a result, the dynamic will be exponentially more explosive when it arrives here.

Socially, Americans are more geographically spread out than Australia, as most of their major population centers circle the coastline. Factually, the population of Florida or Texas is essentially equivalent to the entire population of Australia. The economy of the U.S. is also substantially larger and more diverse than down-under. However, those points only emphasize how significantly more explosive the same scenarios may become when the Biden regime attempts to follow the oppressive process now being witnessed in the Melbourne region.

Do not anticipate any support from CONservative Republican politicians.  As we have witnessed in the past two decades, there is only one overarching ideology in the Washington DC UniParty.  They too are more than comfortable with a class society where the elites are disconnected from the laws, rules and regulations they force upon the underclass.

The rust-belt of America was created by both Democrat and Republican administrations.  The globalist worldview favorable to the multinational corporations and Wall Street run through both political parties in the United States.

 

The UnVaccinated Didn't Cause This Surge Cornpop's Retarded Public Health Strategy Did....,

neuberger |  But all this public panic, anger and shaming of the unvaccinated by the vaccinated — what the Sun-Times calls “the pandemic of the unvaccinated”, for example — hides another fact. The Covid vaccines, as good as they are, were not designed to prevent infection in the first place, only symptoms.

Let that sink in. The current Covid vaccines were not designed to prevent infection. That's a major reason why "breakthrough infections" occur. In addition, because the vaccines do prevent severe symptoms and a vast majority of cases, the number of breakthrough infections must, by definition, be under-counted.

When the virus is circulating in a vaccinated population, variants that are more rapidly transmitting are selected for --- those are vaccine evading variants.

By vaccinating without shutting down transmission we are promoting vaccine evading variants.

— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) September 9, 2021

This, from September 2020, was written by Dr. William Haseltine, formerly of the Harvard Medical School and a hero in the fight to genetically characterize AIDS (bio here and here):

Prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint. Any vaccine trial should include regularantien testing every three days to test contagiousness to pick up early signs of infection and PCR testing once a week to confirm infection by SARS-CoV-2 test the ability of the vaccines to stave off infection. Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected.

We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease[,] only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache. [emphasis added]

It may well be true that these vaccines, to some degree, do protect against infection, but (to use a club brandished against those who recommend studying ivermectin) no clinical studies, to my knowledge, have established that, or have established the degree of that protection.

It's certainly true that the world wanted these vaccines on the market on the fastest schedule possible. And it's also true that they have saved a great many lives. Just look at the ratio of infections-to-deaths prior to the vaccine rollout, and the same ratio afterward (chart above).

But it is also true that it's not just the unvaccinated who are infecting the vaccinated, since both vaccinated and unvaccinated can be Covid carriers and spreaders.

Which means that, even if the world were 100% vaccinated with these vaccines, the vaccinated who host the virus would provide ample breeding ground for variants.

Politics A Piss-Poor Substitute For Science-Driven Public Health Policy...,

NYTimes |   Top federal health officials have told the White House to scale back a plan to offer coronavirus booster shots to the general public this month, saying that regulators need more time to collect and review all the necessary data, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned the White House on Thursday that their agencies may be able to determine in the coming weeks whether to recommend boosters only for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — and possibly just some of them to start.

The two health leaders made their argument in a meeting with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator. Several people who heard about the session said it was unclear how Mr. Zients responded. But he has insisted for months that the White House will always follow the advice of government scientists, wherever it leads.

Asked about the meeting, a White House spokesman said on Friday, “We always said we would follow the science, and this is all part of a process that is now underway,” adding that the administration was awaiting a “full review and approval” of booster shots by the F.D.A. as well as a recommendation from the C.D.C.

“When that approval and recommendation are made,” the spokesman, Chris Meagher, said, “we will be ready to implement the plan our nation’s top doctors developed so that we are staying ahead of this virus.”

Less than three weeks ago, Mr. Biden said that contingent on F.D.A. approval, the government planned to start offering boosters the week of Sept. 20 to adults who had received their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least eight months ago. That would include many health care workers and nursing home residents, as well as some people older than 65, who were generally the first to be vaccinated. Administration officials have said that recipients of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine would probably be offered an additional shot soon as well.

Mr. Biden cast the strategy as another tool that the nation needed to battle the highly contagious Delta variant, which has driven up infection rates, swamped hospitals with Covid-19 patients and led to an average of more than 1,500 deaths a day for the past week, according to a New York Times database. “The plan is for every adult to get a booster shot eight months after you got your second shot,” he said on Aug. 18, adding: “It will make you safer, and for longer. And it will help us end the pandemic faster.”

But the announcement of a late September target date for starting the booster campaign set off alarm bells inside the F.D.A. — apparently playing a role in decisions by two of its top vaccine regulators, announced this week, to leave the agency this fall.

Is There Really Any Doubt That The Controlaspecies Panic-demic Was Just A Trial Run?

NYTimes |  The coronavirus was a shock, but a pandemic was long predicted. There is every reason to think that this one will not be a one-off. Whether the disease originated in zoonotic mutation or in a lab, there is more and worse where it came from. And it is not just viruses that we have to worry about, but also the mounting destabilization of the climate, collapsing biodiversity, large-scale desertification and pollution across the globe.

Looking back before 2020, it seemed that 2008 was the beginning of a new era of successive and interconnected disruptions, such as the global financial crisis, Mr. Trump’s election, and the trade and tech war with China. It all had a familiar ring to it. Great-power competition, nationalism and banking crises all harked back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Then came 2020. It has given us a glimpse of something radically new: the old tensions of politics, finance and geopolitics intersecting with a natural shock on a global scale.

The Biden administration declares that “America is back.” But to what is it returning? As recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, President Biden is determined to clear the decks, brutally if necessary. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, at the top of the agenda is great-power competition with China — a 19th century writ large. But what of the interconnected global crises of the 21st century that cannot be attributed to a national antagonist? For those, the one model that we have is central bank financial market intervention — a form of crisis-fighting based on technical networks, rooted in existing hierarchies of power and backed by powerful self-interest. It is conservative, ad hoc and lacking in explicit political legitimacy. It tends to reinforce existing hierarchy and privilege.

The challenge for a progressive globalism fit for the next decades is both to multiply those crisis-fighting networks — into the fields of medical research and vaccine development, renewable energy and so on — and to make them more democratic, transparent and egalitarian.

mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids A "Solution" In Search Of A Problem For Some Time Now...,

cepi  |  As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, in a world characterised by increasing population density, human mobility, and ecological change, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a real and growing threat to global health security.

Epidemic diseases affect us all. They do not respect borders.

The costs of EIDs are vast, in both human and economic terms. As well as the devastating death toll and disruption to societies, COVID-19 could cost the global economy $4.1 trillion, or almost 5% of global gross domestic product. Even small epidemics can cause tremendous economic disruption.

Vaccines are one of our most powerful tools in the fight to outsmart epidemics. The development of vaccines can help save lives, protect societies and restabilise economies.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’ (CEPI’s) mission is to stimulate and accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.

Historically, vaccine development has been a long, risky, and costly endeavour. Planning for emerging infectious diseases is especially challenging: the market potential for vaccines against these diseases is limited and testing such vaccines is difficult.

We need a better system to speed the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.

Events like the devastating 2014/15 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa—which killed more than 11,000 people and had an economic and social burden of over $53 billion—showed us that very few vaccines are ready to be used against these threats.

The world’s response to this crisis fell tragically short.  A vaccine that had been under development for more than a decade was not deployed until over a year into the epidemic. That vaccine was shown to be 100% effective, suggesting that much of the epidemic could have been prevented.

The creation of CEPI

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched at Davos 2017 as the result of a consensus that a coordinated, international, and intergovernmental plan was needed to develop and deploy new vaccines to prevent future epidemics.

We are an innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations working to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable equitable access to these vaccines for affected populations during outbreaks.

Close collaboration with global partners are crucial to ensure the success of our work. Therefore, we will support coordinating activities to improve our collective response to epidemics, strengthening capacity in countries at risk, and advancing the regulatory science that governs product development.

CEPI 2017 Presentation to the WHO

 

Representatives Of Pollution And The Hurricane Of Sacrificial Violence

charleseisenstein |  Aside from criminals, who today serves as the representative of Smith’s “disorder,” “social chaos,” and “breakdown of values” that seem to be overtaking the world? For most of my life external enemies and a story-of-the-nation served to unify society: communism and the Soviet Union, Islamic terrorism, the mission to the moon, and the mythology of progress. Today the Soviet Union is long dead, terrorism has ceased to terrify, the moon is boring, and the mythology of progress is in terminal decline. Civil strife burns ever hotter, without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into unifying violence. For the right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the left it is the Proud Boys, right wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of “domestic extremists.” And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating.

It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”). All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.

Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society. I know people in the alternative health field who are considered so unclean that if I so much as mention their names in a Tweet or Facebook post, the post may be deleted. Deletion is a certainty if I link to an article or interview with them. The public’s ready acceptance of such blatant censorship cannot be explained solely in terms of its believing the pretext of “controlling misinformation.” Unconsciously, the public recognizes and conforms to the age-old program of investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.

This program is well underway toward the Covid-unvaxxed, who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the Sanctified Brethren (the vaccinated). My wife perused an acupuncture Facebook page today (which one would expect to be skeptical of mainstream medicine) where someone asked, “What is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?” The responses were things like “filth,” “assholes,” and “death-eaters.” This is precisely the dehumanization necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.

The science behind this portrayal is dubious. Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. (Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.) This phenomenon has been studied for decades, as this article in my favorite math & science website, Quanta, describes. The mutated variants evade the vaccine-induced antibodies, in contrast to the robust immunity that, according to some scientists, those who have already been sick with Covid have to all variants (See this and this, more analysis here, compare to Dr. Fauci’s viewpoint.)

It is not my purpose here, however, to present a scientific case. My point is that those in the scientific and medical community who dissent from the demonization of the unvaxxed contend not only with opposing scientific views, but with ancient, powerful psycho-social forces. They can debate the science all they want, but they are up against something much bigger. Rwandan scientists could just as well have debated the precepts of Hutu Power for all the good that would have done. Perhaps the Nazi example is more apposite here, since the Nazis did invoke science in their extermination campaigns. Then as now, science was a cloak for something more primal. The hurricane of sacrificial violence easily swept aside the minority of German scientists who contested the science of eugenics, and it wasn’t because the dissidents were wrong.

Worse Than Horse Deworming Paste - CDC And Media Again Caught Prevaricating And Propagandizing

nakedcapitalism  |  Last Friday, the CDC published “Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant in an Elementary School — Marin County, California, May–June 2021” (“Outbreak”). This got a lot of play in the Northern California press, with a good deal of reporting done (or at least original stories written), because the study was led by Marin County Public Health, and they with other California epidemiologists and experts wrote the study up and then submitted it to the CDC, which accepted it. Good for them! However, there is a question “Outbreak” does not ask, and that the press did not ask. Carefully avoiding spoilers — though few NC readers will be surprised at the plot twist — I will first quote the “Outbreak” on the incident. Then I will switch into media critique mode, and present the headlines from Northern Califonia. After that, I will present the implications drawn from the outbreak by the press (which are more broad spectrum than the headlines). Finally, I will give the unasked question from “Outbreak” a thorough airing, and conclude.

Here is what “Outbreak” says in the “Investigation and Findings” section:

The outbreak location was an elementary school in Marin County, California… Each grade includes 20 to 25 students in single classrooms. Other than two teachers, one of whom was the index patient, all school staff members were vaccinated (verified in California’s Immunization Registry). The index patient became symptomatic on May 19 with nasal congestion and fatigue. This teacher reported attending social events during May 13–16 but did not report any known COVID-19 exposures and attributed symptoms to allergies. The teacher continued working during May 17–21, subsequently experiencing cough, subjective fever, and headache. The school required teachers and students to mask while indoors; interviews with parents of infected students suggested that students’ adherence to masking and distancing guidelines in line with CDC recommendations (3) was high in class. However, the teacher was reportedly unmasked on occasions when reading aloud in class. On May 23, the teacher notified the school that they received a positive result for a SARS-CoV-2 test performed on May 21 and self-isolated until May 30. The teacher did not receive a second COVID-19 test, but reported fully recovering during isolation.

The index patient’s students began experiencing symptoms on May 22. During May 23–26, among 24 students in this grade, 22 were tested…. Twelve (55%) of the 22 students received a positive test result, including eight who experienced symptom onset during May 22–26. Throughout this period, all desks were separated by 6 ft. Students were seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the three back rows…

On May 22, students in a another classroom, who differed in age by 3 years from the students in the class with the index case and who were also ineligible for vaccination began to experience symptoms. The two classrooms were separated by a large outdoor courtyard with lunch tables that were blocked off from use with yellow tape. All classrooms had portable high-efficiency particulate air filters and doors and windows were left open. Fourteen of 18 students in this separate grade received testing; six tests had positive results. Investigation revealed that one student in this grade hosted a sleepover on May 21 with two classmates from the same grade. All three of these students experienced symptoms after the sleepover and received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. Among infected students in this class, test dates ranged from May 24 to June 1; symptom onset occurred during May 22–31.

So that’s the outbreak. Here are the headlines:

• CDC: Unvaccinated Marin County teacher caused big COVID-19 outbreak in school San Francisco Chronicle
• CDC study finds unvaccinated Marin Co. teacher infected 22 elementary school students with COVID ABC7
• CDC report confirms unvaccinated Marin County teacher was source of Delta variant outbreak KTVU
• CDC study shows unvaccinated teacher started Delta COVID outbreak at Marin school KSBW
• One Unvaccinated Teacher In Marin School Seeded COVID Outbreak That Infected Over a Dozen Students, Their Siblings, and Parents SFist
• How 1 unvaccinated Marin County teacher started a delta variant outbreak: CDC study KRON4

There is a unanimity of opinion by the headline-writing editors that the source of the problem was the index case: the unvaccinated teacher. Indeed, that’s without justification — that is, is not only a matter of aghastitude — given the “Implications for Public Health Practice” in the Summary section of “Outbreak”:

Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant, but transmission risk remains elevated among unvaccinated persons in schools. In addition to vaccination, strict adherence to multiple nonpharmaceutical prevention strategies, including masking, are important to ensure safe school instruction.

(I presume the Summary is tacked on to the submitted study by CDC.) Now let’s turn to the bodies of the stories, where there is a broader spectrum of opinion than in the headlines.

Ohhh SNAP!!! These Are NPR People Breaking With The Official Public Health Narrative!

peoplespharmacy |  What Does the Delta COVID Variant Mean for You?

First, let me be absolutely clear. I believe the vaccines help prevent serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And I am not just implying that a few people are protected. The data that I have reviewed suggest that the vaccines are still around 90% effective in preventing bad things from happening even if people catch COVID.

That’s the very good news. Here’s the very bad news. I suspect that a lot of vaccinated people are behaving as if they are fully protected against the coronavirus. They have given up their masks and are shopping in grocery stores, big box discount emporiums and hardware and garden retailers, to name just a few locales. They are getting their hair cut, going to banks and bars and trying to get back to a normal existence.

I suspect that a great many of these folks are going to catch the Delta COVID variant. They might not get very sick. They might not end up in the hospital. They probably won’t die. But they will catch COVID. They will spread COVID. And they could end up with Long COVID!

Why Long COVID Matters:

You have heard of “long haulers.” These are people who recover from COVID-19. Some had mild symptoms. Others were asymptomatic. Some were pretty darn sick. What they all have in common is continuing symptoms. And those symptoms can be life changing!

We now know that people who were fully vaccinated and caught COVID anyway can have persistent symptoms after they recover (New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2021). No one yet knows how many vaccinated people who catch COVID-19 will go on to develop long COVID (aka post COVID syndrome [PCS], Post-acute sequelae of SARS-COV-2 [PASC], chronic COVID, etc.). It could be a small number or it could go as high as 30% to 40%. That is the estimate of how many people develop this condition if they catch the virus without being vaccinated.

How Bad Is Long COVID?

Bad! Symptoms can include unrelenting fatigue, breathing difficulties and/or shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, muscle aches and joint pain, brain fog, insomnia, head pain, loss of taste or smell, dizziness upon standing, rapid heart rate, etc. You can read more about other symptoms and the prognosis at this link. 

If you want to learn what it’s like to have this condition, here is a link to our podcast with two health professionals who themselves have experienced Long COVID. 

The Bottom Line:

If you have been vaccinated, you are not guaranteed protection against the Delta COVID variant! You probably won’t get terribly ill and you probably won’t die if you get sick, but if you develop long COVID you will be sorry. That is why you need to be careful. I do not like wearing a tight-fitting N95 mask when I am out and about, but I do!

 

Team "Live My Life In Peace" vs Team "Can't Mind My Own Business"

consentfactory  |  People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …

“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”

I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.

We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.

I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.

Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.

That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.

The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.

Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.

Kenneth Copeland Got More Credibility Than The Covid "Science Authori-TEHS"...,

WaPo  |  The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.”

The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

⚠️Holy Mother—the worst CDC #DeltaVariant report ever:

📌MORE CONTAGIOUS than Smallpox*

📌DOUBLE transmission of Wuhan 1.0*

📌MORE SEVERE than ever*

📌 Vaccinated can transmit* & breakthrough viral loads ~ unvaxxed.

➡️*Ever item I have warned before🧵https://t.co/dN6abWQp1W pic.twitter.com/Xf01KdQKes

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) July 30, 2021

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.

CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public.

The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone — vaccinated or not — to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said. That official told The Post that the data will be published in full on Friday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky privately briefed members of Congress on Thursday, drawing on much of the material in the document.

One of the slides states that there is a higher risk among older age groups for hospitalization and death relative to younger people, regardless of vaccination status. Another estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.

The document outlines “communication challenges” fueled by cases in vaccinated people, including concerns from local health departments about whether coronavirus vaccines remain effective and a “public convinced vaccines no longer work/booster doses needed.”

The presentation highlights the daunting task the CDC faces. It must continue to emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines at preventing severe illness and death while acknowledging milder breakthrough infections may not be so rare after all, and that vaccinated individuals are transmitting the virus. The agency must move the goal posts of success in full public view.

 

Covid19 Competing Narratives - You Got Me Going In Circles....,

TAE  |  The Mainstream Narrative

– It is not known where Covid 19 originated but the most likely origin is the transmission from an animal to humans

– Covid 19 has killed 600K people in the US

– Trump botched the Covid 19 response costing many lives

– Many deaths were preventable if we’d tested, masked, tracked and locked down better

– Vaccines are good and have eradicated polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases

– Vaccines against Covid 19 are safe and effective and have saved many lives with only minor, acceptable adverse reactions

– There are no effective treatments for Covid 19 besides the vaccines

– Covid is spread by droplets and aerosols from infected people, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, and can be spread through momentarycasual contact both indoors and outdoors

– Children and young adults are at risk form Covid 19 and can spread the disease and should take the same precautions and measures as adults

– We need to do whatever it takes to defeat Covid 19 including frequent testing, mass vaccination, continued lockdowns and wearing masks

– The best information comes from the CDC, FDA and NIH

– The mainstream media warns us of the dangers of Covid 19 but unfortunately many do not take these warnings seriously

– As usual, conspiracy theorists and nut-jobs abound

– Antivaxxers are against all vaccines and now also against the Covid 19 mRNA therapeutic neo-vaccinoids

– Antivaxxers have believed phony information disseminated by scurrilous, right wing charlatans

– These people cost many lives and are the reason Covid still spreads and mutates

– They are responsible for continued lockdowns and the further decimation of the economy

– They are selfish, evil and anti-science

– The Covid 19 response is all about trying to get us back to normal as quickly as possible

 

The Counter Narrative

– Covid 19 was most likely created in a lab in China or the US

– Covid 19 kills the elderly and the obese but far fewer people in general than the official count

– Almost all officials in government have botched the Covid 19 response, costing many lives

– Most deaths were preventable if we had investigated and deployed early treatments including vitamin D, zinc, iodine solution gargle and ivermectin

– Vaccines are good and have eradicated polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases

– The Covid 19 vaccines however are not actually vaccines but gene therapy and have not been adequately tested

– The Covid 19 mRNA therapeutic neo-vaccinoids are not legitimate vaccines and have proven serious side effects including death and other as yet poorly documented consequences which are not being investigated and are suppressed by the media

– We need to defeat Covid 19 and the best way to do this is through early outpatient treatment with known, effective drugs and known drug protocols for hospitalized patients

– Covid 19 is primarily spread by <b>aerosols</b> from symptomatic and pre-symptomatic people, mostly in indoor situations with poor ventilation where people spend a long time together - and in which no serious remedial investment has been made

– Children and young adults are at low risk from Covid 19 and need take fewer precautions and measures but should be treated with drug protocols if infected

– Masks, distancing and lockdowns are mostly ineffective because of the demonstrated but suppressed fact of aerosol transmission

– The best information comes from front line doctors who actually treat patients and experienced researchers who have no financial interest in big pharma https://covid19criticalcare.com/

– The CDC, FDA and NIH are largely compromised because of their association with and funding by drug companies

– The mainstream media is also compromised by their association with big pharma and the government

– The truth about Covid 19 is suppressed and labeled conspiracy theory in order to support the mainstream narrative

– People who insist that the vaccines are the only way to fight Covid19 have believed lies told to them by the MSM from big pharma and a corrupt medical establishment

– The vaccine narrative has cost many lives and ineffective vaccines are responsible for the continued spread and mutation of Covid 19

– The fallacious mainstream narrative is responsible for all lock downs and the decimation of the economy

– The people who push the mainstream narrative are evil and anti-science; The people who believe this narrative are naive, dogmatic and anti-science

– The Covid 19 response is all about money, power and control

Weaponization Of Fear: The Unvaccinated Are Unclean, Unsafe, Worthy Of Ridicule And Exclusion

spectatorworld  |  A more concerning tactic has been the application of negative pressure to achieve social conformity. The vaccine-resistant have been called ‘Covidiots’, ‘granny killers’ and, lately, ‘refuseniks’. Tony Blair said recently that it was ‘time to distinguish’ between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated: substitute race or another protected characteristic and this is an ugly look. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s vaccination rules as ‘COVID insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ in starkly obvious bio-political language.

The implications are obvious: the vaccinated are clean and safe; the unvaccinated are unclean, unsafe, worthy of ridicule and exclusion. The writer Nick Cohen predicts a period of ‘class and racial strife’ and observes ‘it is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’. Such a narrative of dehumanization is a serious threat to weigh against encouraging vaccines and adherence to lockdowns.

‘Behavioral psychologists focus on what you can get people to do, on short-term issues of behavior, not long-term issues of trust,’ says Dr Jackie Cassell. In the haste to bring a speedy resolution to a pandemic, to fast forward to a happy ending, what might happen to long-term confidence in public health messaging, including future vaccination programs? Emergency recourse to oversimplified pressure might not be the best solution for the unsure, who may be more likely to benefit from an in-depth conversation with a healthcare provider than from a cash prize.

Fear has created a morality play where heavy-handed get-the-shot tactics are privileged over the development of long-term trust. While the current pandemic may necessitate a quick-fix approach, the long-term objectives of improving vaccine confidence and overall trust in medical science must not be lost. More threatening still, dehumanizing tactics to deter anti-vax sentiment will divide us.

Some will rush, arms outstretched and sleeves rolled up, toward syringes and sweets. Some will hang back, deterred by an eerily hard sell. In the desperate desire to end the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic, are we rushing toward a conclusion without being certain of our priorities?