FT | Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public
backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President
Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or
frequently tested. Street protests are real
but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The
governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for
school children….
If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of
mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless
predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash
of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates
(just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is
pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data
does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists.
It is also an important basis of government policy.
If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what
people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted
governance.
Another conclusion is that partisanship has its
uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even
their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also
means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating
those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation
of America can empower as well as curb a leader.
Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive
backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years
of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels
transgressive to express this thought: in the end,
people want to be led.
A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:
The public has already supplied an example of what
we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in
four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime
precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert
class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are
laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase
in a greased hand across a stone floor.
No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook:
(1) Degrade public health
by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public
test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can
go directly to coercion!
ENR | New guidance from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health
Administration is causing contractors to change their COVID-19 vaccine
requirements, and many of them criticize the guidance as diametrically
opposed to the Biden administration's stated desire to increase
vaccinations.
On April 20, OSHA released the new guidance in thefrequently asked questions section of its website for COVID-19 safety compliance.
The
question asks whether an employer should record adverse reactions to
COVID-19 vaccination if the employer requires the vaccine. OSHA states
that if a vaccine is required, then any adverse reaction is considered
work-related and therefore it must be recorded. Under OSHA rules, most
employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of
serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Recorded injuries and
illnesses become part of a contractors safety record.
This is the actual text of the new question and answer on the OSHA website:
"If
I require my employees to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of
their employment, are adverse reactions to the vaccine recordable?
"If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of
employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction
to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is
recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more
of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7."
In response,
several large contractors said they have changed or will change their
vaccination policy to only recommend—not require—a vaccine.
"We,
sadly, had to back off our (employee vaccination) mandate because OSHA
did something I don't understand at all," said Bob Clark, founder and
executive chairman of Clayco in a recent ENR Critical Path podcast.
"I side with OSHA frequently, we're in its VIP program, but on this
they're just wrong. It's a terrible decision they've made and I think
it'll be overturned."
Clark said Clayco, which participated in
crafting the initial Centers for Disease Control guidance on
construction site safety during the pandemic, would be communicating
with OSHA through members of congress to seek changes to the guidance. A
spokeswoman for OSHA did not immediately return messages asking for
clarification of the new guidance. Construction industry groups
universally panned the guidance and said it would hurt their efforts to
encourage employees to get vaccinated.
"What they put forward
could potentially discourage employers from supporting their workers
getting the vaccine," said Kevin Cannon, senior director of safety and
health services at the Associated General Contractors of America. "AGC
is not in support of any mandate, however we participated, April 19th
through 23rd, in vaccine awareness week. We had a lot of members who
were in chapters that supported the event. We even had some who hosted
vaccine clinics on an active job site or in their offices."
Cannon
said some member contractors may have changed their approach to those
events had they known, at the time, they could potentially "be on the
hook for recording these potential adverse reactions."
caitlinjohnstone | “Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize
psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing
one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article
for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics.
Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”
“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing
that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD,
depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind,
enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity
for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for
synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the
active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew
ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”
LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar
psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure
necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of
Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions
and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the
last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.
And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:
“Shah
welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the
interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the
financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis
model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail
purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed
drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”
That
“with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called
psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the
FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in
the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma
it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate
through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching
with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even
richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the
pharmaceutical industry.
quora | I thought I was a man of the world when I joined the police. I was 31,
served ten years in the army, a couple of years on the news desks and a few more in drama production all over the world. A few weeks into my first beat I realised most of my assumptions of police work were Hollywood. I had a better idea of the ground situation in the Balkans than I did my own city.
This was my first beat in 2002. To the south were celeb and banker heavy clubs, bohemians and bright young things flaunting their success in the drinking squares. The remnants of the Curtain Theatre where Shakespeare learnt his trade sits squarely in the middle. It was a veneer factory when I attended it after a burglary and got to stand on the last 3ft of original stage.
When I first walked it the Prime Minister’s home address was just off the top left corner of this map in Islington. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony video was still popular and was filmed on Hoxton Street along the eastern boundary.
The Provost estate sits in the top right corner of the beat. I entered my first crack den there: Two toms (prostitutes), a street artist (beggar) and a small business owner (distribution of car tyres) all cooking up while a half mummified dog was still chained to the radiator in the back room. The floor had been used as a toilet and newspaper put down to cover the mess, a four inch duvet of human waste.
You could see the back yard of the Police Station from the window.
At the end of my first year I had to turn in a file on my beat - an intelligence and ground picture of: prom nom sightings (prominent nominals - the bigger players in crime); PYOs (persistent young offenders - much the same but under 18); gang nominals; street dealers; drug prices; robbery hotspots; burglary trends; vehicle crime methods; drug dens and stairwells. The names of homeless and street drinkers; bouncers; shop keepers; prostitutes the lot.
It was a record of what you had been up to and what you’d taken notice of.
One important aspect was to build a map of your ground: active crack houses / drug dens were a big part of this picture, my bosses loved closing them down and getting pictures in the papers. Wherever they sprung up anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, robbery, theft from vehicles, snatches and begging would spread out like ink blots on a map.
So drugs are bad - whole estates reduced to stinking derelicts as the locust-zombies meander your patch devouring goodwill and community relations. So we closed them down on a regular basis. We’d push them onto the next beat and three months later they got pushed back to us and you started collecting the evidence again.
The most common venues for drugs dens were the homes of vulnerable adults. Long ago it was decided that people with severe learning disabilities or chronic mental health issues would get more from life if they got their care in the community. The officials running this policy swiftly became inundated and the locusts descended in lieu.
Nice little cash cows are folk on disability benefit. You can trash their house and the council will get them a new one. You can get a free car lease and insurance thru motability finance if you just claim to be the carer of the vulnerable disabled person you’re using as a cash cow and shell company for the low-level fraud you fund your habit with.
In my annual report I had found evidence of maybe thirty drug addled locusts in four squats. I may have missed some but they are not covert. Let’s say those addicts are using twice a day (the upper scale of use) thats 30 x £40 a day = £1,200 a day - £438,000 a year to be made supplying crack and heroin to the locusts in this small square of London.
alt-market | There are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions when it comes to
the notion of a second civil war within the US. What I see most often is
the argument that the political left has “already won” the war without
firing a shot and that a rebellion would be crushed under the heel of a
newly a-wokened military industrial complex and a leftist controlled
federal government. The problem is, this argument is extremely naive and
ignores the bigger picture.
I think there are a couple of reasons why certain people press the
leftist supremacy theory: First, they greatly fear the idea of a kinetic
war breaking out and find the idea of combat repellent. So, they act as
if a shooting war cannot ever be won. They hide their fear behind a
veil of “rationalism” and thin hopes of a completely passive resistance.
They figure that if they can’t fight and win, then no one else can
fight and win.
Second, the motives of some of these people are more nefarious than fearful. One of the primary functions of 4th
Generation (psychological) warfare is to convince a target population
that “resistance is futile.” If you can make them believe that winning
is impossible then they may not fight at all, and thus the prophecy is
self fulfilling.
Luckily this method of propaganda does not seem to be working on a
large number of Americans. That said, there are many layers to the
scenario of civil war. While the extreme cultism of leftists is
relegated to a small percentage of the population, they are supported by
almost every major institution in our nation. The federal government
supports and protects them. Some state and local governments support and
protect them. The mainstream media avidly sings their praises. Most
corporations and Big Tech platforms support them and spread social
justice doctrine along with them. And, all globalist foundations
support, organize and even fund them.
All the people that the political left used to consider evil are now
on their side. This gives their small cult unprecedented social power
and a number of political weapons to use when they desire to threaten or
harm people who disagree with them. For now, most of this power is
actually used to terrify other people on the left.
There are many moderate democrats that have a distaste for the lunacy
of social justice warriors, but they are so afraid of being labeled
heretics, racists, fascists, etc. that they keep their mouths shut or
support draconian policies because they think they have to in order to
defend their political team. Limp-wristed moderates and old school
democrats that go along to get along are almost as big a problem as
hardcore leftists because they don’t have the guts to stand up to the
bullies in their own political circles.
This is how we end up with around half the country
in support of vaccine passport mandates, a totalitarian agenda which
would give government complete control over the health decisions of
individual Americans, complete control over how businesses operate and
who they are allowed to hire, not to mention complete control over the
economic participation of the average citizen. Vaccine passports are the
ULTIMATE POWER in the hands of government to decide the life and death
of individuals and their families. And, not surprisingly, the political
left and democrats are by far the biggest group backing the government
and the globalists on this agenda.
This places our nation in a difficult position; the political left
desperately wants to control the lives of others while conservatives and
some moderates just want to be left alone. We are at an impasse. We
cannot share the same spaces, we cannot share the same government and we
may not even be able to share the same land mass.
Our ideals are mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom and individual responsibility and they simply do not.
Make no mistake, an outright conflict is coming in the US and the
people in alternative media circles that fear it need to come to terms
with that fear and accept the inevitability of war. The sooner they do
this the sooner they can take action to mitigate the damage to their
families and communities. There will come a day very soon when you will
have to defend your freedoms and the freedoms of future generations with
your life. Embrace the suck and move on.
theatlantic | “Let me start big. The mission
of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan
Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a
crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s
founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual
home of America’s Trumpist right.
As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture
why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a
political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are
on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that
America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not
least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty
unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is
really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible
that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams
told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to
avoid almost at all costs.”
That almost
is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment
of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for
a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least
for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in
American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and
lightly edited for clarity.
Emma Green: What do you see as the threats to Western civilization?
RyanWilliams:
The one we have focused on at the Claremont Institute is the
progressive movement. [Progressives think that] limited government, in
the Founders’ sense—checks and balances, robust federalism, a fairly
fixed view of human nature and the rights attendant to it—all has to
give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.
The biggest institutional part
of [the progressive movement] is this large bureaucracy or
administrative state, which is insulated from control by the executive
or even, increasingly, by Congress.
I
would say the leading edge of progressivism now is this kind of woke,
social-justice anti-racism. It’s a threat to limited government because
it seems to take its lead from scholars like Ibram Kendi, who has proposed
a Department of Anti-racism that would basically have carte blanche
control over local and state governments. His definition of racism is
any policy that results in disparate outcomes for different groups. And
we take issue with that. You always have different outcomes between
different groups. Human nature is varied. We all have different talents.
The pursuit of equal results is only going to be successful in a new
woke totalitarianism. I realize that sounds a little hyperbolic, but
that seems to be the road we’re on.
Green:
We’re going to unpack “woke totalitarianism” in a second, but I want to
make sure I’m understanding your starting point correctly. When you say
Western civilization, it sounds like you’re not necessarily
describing people situated in geography or time but rather a set of
ideas that you believe are falling out of fashion or are being actively
destroyed by various forces in society. Am I getting you right?
Williams:
You can never really divorce a set of ideas and principles from the
people in which it grew up. America is an idea, but it’s not just that.
It’s the people who settled it, founded it, and made it flourish.
Green: Just to ask the question directly, do you mean white people?
Williams:
No, not necessarily. I mean, Western civilization happens to be where a
lot of white people are, historically, but I don’t think there’s any
necessary connection between the two. The ability to believe in natural
rights and a regime of limited government the way the Founders did is
not reserved only to white people.
centerforpolitics | To achieve understanding that can empower
effective compromise, deeper insights into the political and
social-psychological motivations that animate each side of the political
spectrum are needed. Toward those ends, this Center for
Politics/Project Home Fire study aims to:
— Provide a deeper understanding of the
dangerous divide that threatens America’s pursuit of universally
representative democracy.
— Uncover the politically and psychologically
motivated “compromise receptive” subgroups that exist among Biden and
Trump voters.
— Identify compromise corridors (the policy
and issue areas both Biden and Trump voters care about) and compromise
clusters (those groups of compromise receptive Biden and Trump voters
who both care about a particular policy or issue area and express less
dissimilar opinions).
— Reveal the specific pathways to persuade
Americans on both sides of the divide to open their minds to mutually
beneficial compromise that accrues to the bigger goal of preserving,
protecting, and expanding America’s universally representative
democracy.
“Our hope is that, by employing the tools of
modern behavioral science, Project Home Fire can develop a deep,
data-driven understanding of the fears and concerns animating the
increasingly dangerous political and cultural divide in America. The
first step toward effectively solving a problem is to accurately
understand its causes and we believe Project Home Fire can provide such
understanding,” said Robert “Mick” McWilliams of Project Home Fire.
“The logical conclusion then, is that it is in
the long-term interest of the country to pursue a series of strategies
and tactics that encourage bridge-building and constructive dialogue and
re-affirm America’s reputation as the world’s leading representative
democracy. Simply put — we need a real plan to heal our fractured
democracy. In our research, we have uncovered some pathways to help do
that,” said Project Home Fire’s Larry Schack.
desertreview | Now is the right moment to notice the onslaught of United States
poison control articles attempting to smear Ivermectin, a drug proven
safe and effective in the Uttar Pradesh test-and-treat program
administered under the auspices of both the WHO and CDC.
It is
appropriate to remind the reader that the WHO and CDC possess direct and
recent knowledge of Ivermectin use for COVID-19 in India. Moreover,
they know better than anyone the colossal effectiveness and overwhelming
safety of Ivermectin used in those millions of Uttar Pradesh test and
treat kits.
Perhaps it is also time to ask why exactly Dr. Tess
Lawrie’s peer-reviewed meta-analysis was given an Altimetric score of
26,697, making it number eight out of some 18 million publications.
This
rank is far better than the top 1%, which would only need a ranking of
180,000 for it to rank in the top 1%. It would only need 18,000 for it
to rank in the top .1%. Ranking in the top .001% would mean #180.
Therefore, at number eight, it is 8/180 of the top .001% or roughly the
top 4.4% of the top .001%. This article ranks in the top 5% of the top
.001%!
In other words, only seven articles in the world out of those 18 million are ranked higher.
This
peer-reviewed paper is one of the most cited of medical references of
all time – period. That should alert any reader – immediately - to its
historical significance. Dr. Tess Lawrie is a 30-year veteran WHO
evidence synthesis expert. Her conclusion is every bit as meaningful as
the article's rank. Here are those words,
“Moderate-certainty
evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible
using Ivermectin. Using Ivermectin early in the clinical course may
reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and
low cost suggest that Ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact
on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
Maybe
it is time to ask why Dr. Pierre Kory’s peer-reviewed narrative review
of Ivermectin ranks #38 out of the same 18 million publications.
He
concludes, “Finally, the many examples of Ivermectin distribution
campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and
mortality reduction indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases
of COVID-19 has been identified.”
If
Dr. Lawrie’s paper is ranked in the top 5% of the top .001% of all such
published medical articles of all time, then Dr. Kory’s is not far
behind. His is 38/180 of the top .001% or the top 21% of the top .001%
Thus, both articles would rank in the rarified atmosphere of nearly one in a million.
Therefore,
the reader must now ask why two magnificent independent reviews from
two different continents, coming to the same conclusion, are both
ignored by our world’s medical leaders?
Uttar
Pradesh is one such population that experienced a considerable drop in
COVID-19 morbidity and mortality months AFTER Dr. Kory’s article was
published on April 22, 2021. Therefore, one must ask that if Ivermectin
so predictably and safely eradicates COVID-19, then why is it not being
systematically deployed over all the world, as Dr. Kory and Dr. Lawrie
suggest?
Perhaps every reader needs to ask themselves this
question - Why is it that BOTH Dr. Lawrie’s and Dr. Kory’s
supremely-rated expert review articles, published in the medical
literature on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, are BANNED from
Wikipedia?
Although
India’s Ivermectin victory over COVID may have been lost on
bent-on-vaccinating-everyone Big Pharma and Big Regulators, the message
seems to have gotten through to the man on the street. If Google Trends
is any indicator, interest in Ivermectin is exploding, and for good
reason. We are all being systematically deceived by influential
organizations in the name of profits.
Interest
in Ivermectin and India is only increasing and has now reached an
all-time high. India’s conquest of COVID-19 is concealed no longer. The
secret is out. And perhaps, at long last, that much-anticipated WHO
Final Report detailing the most successful Pandemic campaign of any
place on earth will be published.
NYTimes | Newer
variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious,
infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies
offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more
efficiently through air.
The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors
transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery
debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.
Most
researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted
through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much
smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances
indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most
harmful.
The new studies don’t
fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for
better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing
in ways that make it more formidable.
“This
is not an Armageddon scenario,” said Vincent Munster, a virologist at
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one
of the new studies. “It is like a modification of the virus to more
efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of
expected, and we now see it happening in real time.”
The
studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other
older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant
is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.
“It
really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at
transmitting through the air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne
viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. “I
wouldn’t be surprised if, with Delta, that factor were even higher.”
rutherford | It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is what we know: the government has the means,
the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its
orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons,
detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer
dollars.
It’s just a matter of time.
It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine
mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage,
healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results,
etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.
The groundwork has already been laid.
Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and
imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the
courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.
So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.
After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore,
especially given that the government likes to use the words
“anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines
extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are
mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or
local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the
Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely,
associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views,
criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being
questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially
anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and
law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and
other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result
in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential
danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police
but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up
for perceived wrongs.
It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.
Human sacrifice is back with a vengeance, and this time we’re not throwing virgins into a volcano to stop an eruption or cutting the hearts out of prisoners-of-war to feed the gods and maintain cosmic balance. Instead, we’re calculating how many humans, along with other living creatures, must be sacrificed to keep economic growth going.
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).
The neoliberal nations of the world are as much in thrall to religion as medieval Europe, but YHWH and the rest of the Trinity have been replaced by the Invisible Hand and monotheistic theology by the myths of growth and money. Where human sacrifice was practiced on victims numbered in the dozens or less in times past, now millions, and before long perhaps billions, will be sacrificed - justified by ungrounded speculation and willful blindness to alternatives.
slatestarcodex |4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure
theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced
onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an
idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art
(you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them
have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island
has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s
not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each
new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten
thousand.
A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their
time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this
sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat
composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back
will go extinct within a few generations.
In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner,
and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If
one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two
per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out,
swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of
rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage
over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.
If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut
stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be
exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut
consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by
their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most
of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of
rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the
ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other
things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy
to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From
within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic
imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.
5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry.
He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at
minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give
them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise
the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper
rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who
would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of
ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting
their prices they can’t do it.
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition
are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else
be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can
sell the same service at a lower price.
(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of
analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those
that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and
inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one
wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where
every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system,
there’s no way to enact it.
(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)
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.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
wikipedia | In chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large
scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle
"order-from-disorder." As an example he mentions diffusion,
which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is caused
by random movement of atoms or molecules. If the number of atoms is
reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes more and more random. He
states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may
assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a
large number of atoms.
In chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at this time
about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates the
important role mutations play in evolution.
He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both
small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's
expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.
In chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules,
which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as
the solution. Even though molecules were known before, their stability
could not be explained by classical physics, but is due to the discrete
nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.
He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are crystals.
The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles
and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand,
an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity.
Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which
unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic
crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite
number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally
compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance
with them.
In chapter VI Schrödinger states:
...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of
physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of
physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed,
will form just as integral a part of science as the former.
He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to
clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is
the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe). Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
In chapter VII, he maintains that "order-from-order" is not
absolutely new to physics; in fact, it is even simpler and more
plausible. But nature follows "order-from-disorder", with some
exceptions as the movement of the celestial bodies
and the behaviour of mechanical devices such as clocks. But even those
are influenced by thermal and frictional forces. The degree to which a
system functions mechanically or statistically depends on the
temperature. If heated, a clock ceases to function, because it melts.
Conversely, if the temperature approaches absolute zero,
any system behaves more and more mechanically. Some systems approach
this mechanical behaviour rather fast with room temperature already
being practically equivalent to absolute zero.
Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness.
He attempts to "see whether we cannot draw the correct
non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My
body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2)
Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing
its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and
all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for
them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that
I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every
conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any,
who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature".
Schrödinger then states that this insight is not new and that Upanishads
considered this insight of "ATHMAN = BRAHMAN" to "represent
quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world."
Schrödinger rejects the idea that the source of consciousness should
perish with the body because he finds the idea "distasteful". He also
rejects the idea that there are multiple immortal souls that can exist
without the body because he believes that consciousness is nevertheless
highly dependent on the body. Schrödinger writes that, to reconcile the
two premises,
The only possible alternative is simply
to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of
which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what
seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this
one thing…
Any intuitions that consciousness is plural, he says, are illusions. Schrödinger is sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe
— which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God. Schrödinger concludes
that "...'I' am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the
atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." However, he also qualifies the
conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical
implications". In the final paragraph, he points out that what is meant
by "I" is not the collection of experienced events but "namely the
canvas upon which they are collected." If a hypnotist succeeds in
blotting out all earlier reminiscences, he writes, there would be no
loss of personal existence — "Nor will there ever be."[8]
cnbc | EISEN: Dr. Fauci, you guys have been pushing the vaccine and I
obviously understand why. I’m vaccinated but I also have COVID and it
spread through my entire family in the past few weeks. That’s why I’m
doing the show from home today and I just wonder about the public
messaging around vaccinations. Three vaccinated people got COVID in my
house, two unvaccinated children got it. Are you too casual about the
limitations of the vaccine because it does feel to me that these
breakthroughs are happening, they’re happening regularly, and we haven’t
really seen the government pay that much attention to them or warn
about them too much. The bottom line is we were still able to get it and
transmit it. Thank god we’re not in the hospital, I get it, I’m
vaccinated, but you can get it and transmit it and the government hasn’t
been warning about that.
FAUCI: Oh yes I am, we have. And we’ve
said that and let me just give you the science and the facts. If you are
an unvaccinated person, you have five times the likelihood of getting
infected, 11 times the likelihood of being hospitalized and 11 times the
likelihood of dying, compared to someone who’s been vaccinated. So, the
data showing the benefit of vaccines is incontrovertible. If you look
at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90 plus
percent of them are unvaccinated. Vaccination protects you against
severe disease and even when you get breakthrough infections because
remember no vaccine is 100%, protected, but what we do know is that if
you get vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection, you are much less
likely of getting a severe outcome. It is much more likely that you in
fact would either be without symptoms or be mildly symptomatic so you
should not confuse the very important data that we now have a drug that
can diminish hospitalization and death by 50%. You should not confuse
that with the overwhelming benefits of the protection of vaccines. Those
should not be confused.
"If you look at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90% of them are unvaccinated," says Dr. Fauci. "If you get vaccinated and get a break through infection, you are much less likely of having a severe outcome and much more likely you would be without symptoms." pic.twitter.com/gEFsIjTNWj
EISEN: 100%. But it says on the CDC
website, Dr. Fauci, that infections happen in only a small proportion of
people who are fully vaccinated and when these infections occur among
the vaccinated, they tend to be mild, but the CDC doesn’t even track the
breakthrough infections. So how do we know that they’re happening to a
small proportion and how do we know that they are tending to be mild?
It’s not a question of whether hospitalizations and death, we know that
benefit, it’s just public messaging and being transparent about the risk
for vaccinated people.
FAUCI: Well, in the past, the CDC has not,
you’re quite correct, tracked all real and potential asymptomatic
infections. They are modifying that right now in the studies that are
being done that would give the kind of information that you’re talking
about. Also, it’s very important to know that with the booster rollout
that we’ve been talking about, we are anticipating that we will get an
extra added boost in the sense of clinical effect. The Israelis
themselves are now showing very, very clearly, that when you give a
person who’s received two doses of an mRNA in this case, Pfizer, when
you give that person a boost, you dramatically diminish the infection,
you dramatically diminish the likelihood of getting a severe outcome,
and importantly, there are early data that are now showing that you
actually begin to show a diminution in the transmission itself. So, in
answer to your very appropriate question about if you get vaccinated and
you get infected, is there less of a chance that you will be
transmitting it to someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is
vulnerable, the chances of doing that are diminished by being vaccinated
and even further diminished, according to preliminary data we’ll wait
to see the real fundamental core of the data, but it looks like that
extra added of protection from a boost will be very valuable. Again,
we’re talking about data that’s being rolled out in real time and that’s
why when I’m using terminology that we’re having strong suggestions, we
want to wait until we get a lot of data to be able to say that with a
degree of confidence.
Forbes | President Joe Biden didn’t just announce a Covid-19 vaccine mandate
on companies employing 100 or more people, he plans to enforce it.
On Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House quietly tucked an
enforcement mechanism into their $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill,
passed it out of the Budget Committee, and sent it to the House floor.
Buried on page 168 of the House Democrats’ 2,465-page mega bill is a tenfold increase in fines
for employers that “willfully,” “repeatedly,” or even seriously violate
a section of labor law that deals with hazards, death, or serious
physical harm to their employees.
The increased fines on employers could run as high as $70,000 for
serious infractions, and $700,000 for willful or repeated
violations—almost three-quarters of a million dollars for each fine. If enacted into law, vax enforcement could bankrupt non-compliant companies even more quickly than the $14,000 OSHA fine anticipated under Biden’s announced mandate.
sanfrancisco | In addition to checking your ID and bags at the ticket counter, you
could soon have your COVID-19 vaccine record checked for domestic
flights.
The proposal coming from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) would
require travelers on U.S. flights to present either a COVID-19
vaccination record, a negative PCR test or proof they have recovered
from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. As currently written, these checks wouldn’t
be administered by federal authorities but by airline agents.
“It does require that all of the attestation to be done by the
airline and for the airline to provide confirmation of it,” says Marc
Casto, president of Leisure Americas for Flight Centre Travel Group.
spectatorworld | The mainstream media has spent months dancing on the graves
of political personalities and normal people alike who refused a
COVID-19 vaccine and then succumbed to the virus itself. They’ve created
a totem of who these unwashed masses of zombie-horde anti-vaxxers are:
MAGA hat-wearing, Boomer hicks more interested in their ‘free-dumb’ than
their health.
But as basketball season approaches, that caricature is about to
vanish. According to NBC Sports, about 90 percent of all NBA players are
vaccinated. But a small number of players are speaking out against
vaccine mandates, offering nuanced opinions on the vaccine as it
pertains to natural antibodies in those who have contracted COVID
already.
It’s a conversation the Biden administration isn’t interested in
having with the public. Neither is the NBA, which is seeking to impose a
penalty on any player who refuses the COVID vaccine. But that has not
stopped a vocal minority of players from challenging the press on the
history of African Americans, vaccinations and born immunity.
Andrew Wiggins of the Golden State Warriors is one holdout. Brooklyn
Nets star Kyrie Irving is another. But it was the Orlando Magic’s
Jonathan Isaac that most mystified the sports media. They seem confused
that NBA players are speaking out at all, let alone, as we are starting
to see in New York City, Black Lives Matter protesters, who are taking
up the mantle of opposition to vaccine mandates.
Isaac’s stance
is not that of the ranting, raving Facebook loon. ‘I would say I’m
hesitant at this time but at the end of the day I don’t feel that it is
anyone’s reason to come out and say “well this is why” or “this is not
why”, it should just be their decision,’ he said at a press conference
earlier this week. ‘Loving your neighbor is not just loving those who
agree with you or look like you or move in the same way that you do.
It’s loving those who don’t.’
The rest of his comments are worth quoting at length:
‘I understand that the vaccine would
help if you have COVID, you’ll be able to have less symptoms from
contracting it. But with me having COVID in the past and having
antibodies, with my current age group and physical fitness level, it’s
not necessarily a fear of mine. Taking the vaccine, like I said, it
would decrease my chances of having a severe reaction, but it does open
me up to the albeit rare chance but the possibility of me having an
adverse reaction to the vaccine itself. I don’t believe that being
unvaccinated means infected or being vaccinated means uninfected. You
can still catch COVID with or with not having the vaccine. I would say
honestly the craziness of it all in terms of not being able to say that
it should be everybody’s fair choice without being demeaned or talked
crazy to doesn’t make one comfortable to do what said person is telling
them to do.’
I don’t personally agree with his vaccine stance. I myself contracted
COVID last year and still chose to get vaccinated. However there is a
deeper meaning to what he’s saying that goes beyond ‘Bill Gates is
trying to microchip everyone.’ It stands against what the media and the
Biden administration are attempting to do by shaming and other-ing
anyone who opts not to get vaccinated or can’t because of medical
reasons. And that’s before we even get into the dark history African
Americans and vaccinations, which has no doubt played a role in lower
vaccination rates among that demographic.
Isaac is rejecting the atmosphere of division, the idea that anyone
who’s unvaccinated is deserving of scorn from the desks at CNN, as well
as ostracization from polite society by employers, friends and family.
Division is the lingua franca of the national media — and Isaac
isn’t speaking it. Legitimate medical diagnoses are being lumped in with
QAnon Facebook conspiracists. That leads nowhere good.
Jonathan Isaac seems to understand this. It’s worth asking why our media and political leaders choose to ignore it.
Slate |S1: Today on the show, will the NBA find its season
reshaped by COVID again? I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next?
Stick around. During the last two seasons, it seemed like the NBA was
handling the pandemic pretty well. The 2020 season got cut short, but it
finished up inside the Disney bubble. The 2021 season had a pretty
stringent testing regimen and pretty much went off without a hitch. But
when negotiations happened over this season, the players union said a
vaccine mandate was unequivocally off the table, even though referees
and other NBA employees had agreed to one. When did you first hear that
vaccination could be an issue with some of the players?
S2:
I didn’t actually hear that it could be an issue, but I figured that it
might cause is an issue for everybody else. Like, there was no reason
for me to expect this particular group of people to be more or less
enlightened than anybody else is on this matter. There are some things
that a union is going to push back on, particularly in an industry like
this one. And in this industry, you have to put this in your body is
something that is never, ever going to be able to fly. It really is a
slippery slope. I think for them in particular, because so much of their
job does involve putting things in your body, you got at least had the
option to say no if you want to do that. And so this is somewhere where
as much as people can talk about the weakness of the National Basketball
Players Association in different negotiations, this is one that they
had to stand on and they stood on it. And I think that the owners
ultimately understood that it was necessary that the players are going
to stand on it because they didn’t try to bring them to the ground,
right?
S1:
Because your body is your livelihood. Right, right. What are the rules
exactly for NBA players at this point? I mean, I recognize it’s
different in different places because of the regional differences. But
what did they eventually agree to after this tense negotiation with the
players union?
S2:
It’s increased testing. If you were not vaccinated, your locker, for
example, has to be. I think it is literally as far as possible away from
the rest of the team if you were not going to be vaccinated. I think
there’s increased masking requirements if you’re not going to be
vaccinated. I mean, they make it sound really inconvenient if there’s
going to be the case now of what’s happened with the travel in the legs.
And this is I actually think people are paying enough attention to
this. So in New York City and in San Francisco, there have been local
ordinances passed that basically you can’t come inside to a large indoor
event. If you have not been vaccinated in New York, it requires one
shot in San Francisco. I believe you have to be fully vaccinated in
order to do that. Now we talk about this strictly in the context of
those two places, but I don’t know why we’re assuming that that won’t be
adopted by other places. If the delta or whatever else starts raging
even more. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if you saw those places
then make the same calls as these other cities have. And then when that
happens, it’s going to be a lot to do is caught flat footed.
S1:
That’s because whatever rules the NBA’s got in place, players are also
going to be bound by the laws of whatever state they happen to be
playing in. For some unvaccinated stars like Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn,
restrictions in their home states mean they could be barred from home
games. Let’s talk about some of the reasons people are giving, because I
think it’s useful to just kind of listen to the players a little bit
here. We’ve got Jonathan Isaac from Orlando Magic. He’s talking about
natural immunity. He’s had COVID and he actually, I listen to this press
conference he gave. He was incredibly clear and straightforward, and he
was very angry at being misrepresented by some journalists he felt in
this process.
S5:
I would just I would start by saying that that I was pretty badly
misrepresented. I’m not anti-vax, I’m not anti medicine, I’m not anti
science.
S1: But he was basically saying, I have the utmost respect for health care workers. I’m not anti-vax, I’m making a choice for me.
S5: With that being said, it is my belief that the vaccine status of every person should be their own choice.
S1: And by the way, I already had COVID, and so I’m protected a little bit. What did you make of that?
S2:
Well, the I already had it unprotected, like that’s that that begs
follow up questions, right? Like how protected are you? When did it
happen? Is not like, this is a it’s not like the chicken pox, right?
You’re not about to be like, I’m good from here on out. Yeah, you can’t
get it twice. Yeah, I mean, Lamar Jackson to tell you that, like, that’s
not really how that one works. I. As someone who has heard Jonathan
Isaac taught before and found him to sound ridiculous, I did not think
that he necessarily sounded ridiculous on this one, even though he is
taking an approach that I do not agree with. Where where I look at him
and I’m like, OK, I get that you’re not worried about you. But this
isn’t just about you. And I think that the the libertarian streak of a
lot of the non the not even anti-vax broadly, but anti this particular
vaccine right here is purely looking at it through the prism of
themselves and not thinking about anybody else, like when we were doing
the super hardcore social distancing thing, when the test was short and
everything else reason was everyone was supposed to assume that they
were an asymptomatic carrier and that to stop the spread is by not
interacting any more than you absolutely had. Two people instead looked
at that is, stay inside so you don’t catch it as opposed to stay inside
so you don’t spread it. So you get guys like him who are only thinking
about this in the context of catching it, not in the context of
transmitting it.
thehill | Two service members filed a potential class action lawsuit against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to attempt to block him from requiring all troops receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Army
Staff Sgt. Dan Robert and Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Hollie Mulvihill, who
filed the complaint Aug. 17 in the U.S. District Court of Colorado,
also want the Pentagon to create a vaccine exemption for those
previously infected with the coronavirus as they already have “natural
immunity.”
The two, who are both based in North Carolina, argue
that the Defense Department’s vaccine mandate “is in open violation” of
the rights of service members and is unconstitutional.
ADVERTISEMENT
Austin is named as a defendant in the lawsuit as are Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The
Pentagon chief in late August ordered service members to “immediately
begin” receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, with the military services
setting the deadlines for the requirement.
The Pentagon has also
made clear it would only require a COVID-19 vaccine that had full FDA
approval, which the Pfizer shot received on Aug. 23.
But Robert
and Mulvihill, who filed their complaint days prior to the FDA decision,
base their argument on the Pfizer vaccine’s previous emergency-use
authorization standing.
They also say they should be exempt from the mandate because they already caught and recovered from COVID-19.
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