Elderly female Australian anti-lockdown protester pepper sprayed by police
This is an open letter, in three parts, to those not yet opposed to vaccine passports. On the assumption that your support for or indifference to vaccine passports is rooted in the official Covid narrative, I will in Part I of this letter try to explain that this narrative is delusionary and that our society, along with most of the world, is in the grip of a mass delusional psychosis. Unless we wake up and see things as they really are, the endpoint of this mass psychosis will be totalitarianism.
Part II tackles the dilemma of how to expose the series of delusions gripping the nation without heavy-handed recourse to science and data, integral as they are in the search for truth. The approach taken here is to point out confessions or blatant criminal action, hidden in plain sight, by the authorities driving the official fear-fuelled narrative. These confessions tell us that they do not believe their own official narrative. The question then is, why should you?
Part III warns of the consequences of the current attempts to scapegoat the unvaccinated and discusses the immorality of vaccine passports. Ultimately, if there are no moral grounds for a policy, the science is irrelevant. The whole Covid debate has understandably become rooted in medical science, but we should all be saddened by the lack of emphasis on values-based decision making. The ‘following The Science’ paradigm must be turned on its head if we are to emerge from this crisis stronger – science must not supersede our values.
Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports – Part I – Totalitarianism here we come!
Preaching to the converted is satisfying for obvious reasons but, if you’re trying to change opinions, you ought really to address those with whom you disagree. So, this is an open letter to those who are either indifferent to or in support of vaccine passports.
On Sunday 12 September the government announced that it had ditched plans for vaccine passports, only to announce the very next day that vaccine passports remained a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of Covid. Given the number of times the government has u-turned on this and other Covid issues, the aim seems to be to make u-turns a normal state of affairs rather than something which used to bring shame and embarrassment on a ruling party. There are few things in life of which I am certain, but the imminent return of vaccine passports is one of them.
Putting aside the dizzying u-turns, in a country where more than 80% of people over age 16 are vaccinated, we have to ask why the vaccines themselves are no longer being relied on as the “first-line defence”. If the vaccines themselves are not the defence, how will an app on a phone provide immune protection?
Dissenters from the official narrative have watched with disbelief the mass hysteria over a virus from which 99.85% of the population recover (most suffering only mild symptoms) and for which the average age of the person unfortunate enough to die from is around 82 years old. The violently disproportionate government response to it, the media censorship and propaganda employed to ram home the official narrative and, the proposed introduction of a biometric ID system granting access to society based on medical status, are all signposts to a totalitarian dystopia.
Voluntary informed consent to medical treatment is a fundamental human right that was recognised and codified into law to prevent a repeat of grave abuses committed by the Nazis during World War II. For those who seek to question the safety profile of the Covid vaccines and value their bodily autonomy, it is obvious that this human right is being obliterated. My body, my choice? Not when it concerns injections of Big Pharma’s latest offerings.
The power of totalitarianism to take root and flourish lies in its ability to delude the vast majority of people into thinking it is a necessary, even healthy, state of affairs. It is a cruel seduction, rather than a sudden imposition. It wouldn’t work otherwise. The Covid crisis has paved the way for a series of delusions, fuelled by fear, confusion, panic and anxiety, inducing what can only be termed a mass psychosis in which citizens en masse are prepared to accept a loss of freedom that would never be entertained under normal circumstances.
So here I am, barely a minute into the piece, getting off on the wrong foot by saying, “You’ve been had. You’re detached from reality.” But how else are we to explain the impending submission of the citizens of a liberal democracy to forced medical treatment (which won’t stop there) in exchange for basic freedoms that only 18 months ago were treated in the same unconscious manner as the air we breathe?
It’s a stunning coup, and for those professing not to understand what the fuss is all about, let’s be clear – this is a massive rupture in the fabric of the nation. I’d like to suggest that the main reason you can’t see this is that it doesn’t feel like you’re being forced to do anything if having a vaccine is something you intended to do anyway. If so, then with all due respect, I think you’re missing the point. The point being – are we free to choose? The debate about enforced medical treatment to keep your job is not just something on which we can agree to disagree. You’re either on the right or wrong side of history on this. Period.
How we got here
The erosion of individual human rights and removal of basic freedoms is typically predicated on a crisis in which a state of maximum threat is induced to produce a torrent of the negative emotions of fear and anxiety in the population. This prolonged state of heightened fear and anxiety is unsustainable for our mental and physical health, and relief has become imperative even if it means detaching from reality and agreeing to measures that don’t make sense in addressing the perceived threat.
When we are unable to think calmly and rationally, it is all too easy for delusions to take hold in the scramble to make sense of confusing and fast-moving events. After successive waves of fear, people are now only too happy to strike a bargain with the government they have entrusted with managing the crisis, even if the bargain is a sham.
The totalitarian threat, unlike the virus threat, is not vastly exaggerated. We really are in the grip of a collective psychosis in which freedom, reason and common decency are being severely eroded. We are now transitioning from the terror phase in which the media and the government fuelled a pervasive atmosphere of fear, falsely projecting the coronavirus as an apocalyptic threat, into the totalitarian grand bargain phase. A deal is being presented in which freedom must be handed over in return for the false promise of a return to normality.
Having rolled out its miracle cure of the vaccine, the government is hell bent on locking in vaccine passports and yet also indifferent to the fact that the vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission. The clue to understanding this indifference lies in the fact that the vaccine passport in and of itself was always the government’s primary goal. But one group in particular is a barrier to that goal. That group is The Unvaccinated and they are now being maliciously projected onto society as the new threat.
The fly in the ointment of the government’s passport plan is dissent, enough of which would see the deal off. The most cynical (and therefore predictable) way for the government to squash this dissent is to let the crowd do it, with the government playing the role of a Pontius Pilate. It is highly likely that another crisis point will serve as an opportunity to present vaccine passports, our passports to slavery, as the only way out. The public or its proxies will then give the thumbs up or down to the execution of freedom.
Society is in grave danger of turning on itself, urged on by the media and the government. With the government setting its sights on a biomedical security state, it’s hardly surprising that the dissenters are the ones who refuse to shut up and take their medicine – literally. People raising valid questions about the vaccines are being silenced and demonised because their narrative threatens the biomedical security state which depends on maximal and unquestioning take-up of the vaccines.
Whatever delusions have taken hold to provide facile explanations of the crisis and the measures employed to manage it, whatever devices are used to maximise control over the population, they are all underpinned by the control of information through censorship and propaganda. Truth is more powerful than the fictions peddled by our aspiring totalitarian rulers, and their success is contingent on their ability to censor the free flow of information.
Censorship is in fact now normal and Big Tech is forming censorship alliances across all media. Scientific debate, which is how science moves forward, is being stifled as the censorship is focussed primarily on medical content – controlling medical information is obviously a prerequisite for running a successful biosecurity state. The very people you elected to protect democracy – here in the UK, in the US and in the EU – are dismantling it. Doctors are being muzzled and the mainstream media have been actively supressing the other side of the story. If you think that this will get better in a society which punishes people for making a personal medical choice, then you are only adding to the stock of delusions already constructed.
What we stand to lose
The totalitarianism on the horizon is nothing short of a sick transformation of society that will see a ruling elite deified through the granting of excessive power while we are infantilised into obeying whatever decrees are issued regardless of their intrusiveness or impact on personal liberty. The ultimate delusion is that security and a peaceful life will ensue from the surrender of power and freedom to the government. The linked video sums up the true nature of the totalitarian bargain:
“The order of a totalitarian world is a pathological order. Insisting on strict conformity and blind obedience to the system, totalitarianism rids the world of the spontaneity that produces many of life’s joys and the creativity that drives societies forward. Stagnation, destruction and death on a mass scale are the consequences”.
In an open letter to the Prime Minister, this is the stark warning from a group of Christian leaders about what we are about to embrace:
“this scheme [vaccine passports] would be the thin end of the wedge leading to a permanent state of affairs in which COVID vaccine status could be expanded to encompass other forms of medical treatment and perhaps even other criteria beyond that. This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.” [bold emphasis added]
They are right, not because they are Christian leaders (there are plenty of Christian fascists out there), but because they are demonstrating spiritual leadership in recognising and calling out the threat to us all.
We are at the point now where the government has taken a decisive step towards the biosecurity state. Not only is the promise of a return to a safer world a false one, but it will come with a heavy price tag. We are being asked to relinquish control over the final frontier of human freedom – our own bodies. We are being asked to give up basic freedoms and forego our capacity to be self-reliant individuals responsible for our own lives, bodies and health, in order to become submissive and obedient subjects.
Yet many of those who regard these vaccines as an essential lifesaving intervention are allowing their view to cloud the fact that we are not being given a free choice in the matter. If we cannot freely reject government and Big Pharma supplied medical treatment without fear of punishment, then we are not free. Everything about our democracy and our so-called ‘free society’ is being exposed as a complete sham.
How can I persuade you?
So how should one attempt to puncture a hole in the delusions that are feeding the mass psychosis? Political science, also known as ‘following The Science’, is a major but by no means the only, contributor to the mess we’re in. So, do we start with science? Pursuing truth with uncorrupted science is vital to setting the record straight but I want to approach the debate by exploring two other avenues.
- Can you smell a rat?
If the official narrative is starting to crumble, it is because people smell a rat and not because the road to Damascus is paved with 25 peer reviewed science papers. In part II I will try to demonstrate that the people behind the wheel – the senior public health experts and government ministers – don’t believe in any of the pillars of their propaganda. They’ve said as much, and their admissions are hidden in plain sight if you are prepared to inhabit an information universe outside the mainstream media.
2. Moral compass – placing values above science
In Part III, I will outline why vaccine passports deserve only moral revulsion. With no health benefits to offer, they guarantee loss of freedom, medical apartheid and scapegoating with all the horrors that accompany it. Here is a painful glimpse into our future. Societies are being torn up right now in the name of medical discrimination. Ultimately how we choose to live as a society is not about science and data. It’s about values like trust, compassion, freedom, and love. Science must never supersede these values. It must serve them. An assault on these values is an assault on humanity itself. At stake right now are the very morals and values that many of us thought were the bedrock of our free societies and which we had taken for granted. We can fix science if it breaks but who will fix us if we break humanity?
Source: A Plague on Both Houses
Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports – Part II – The dominoes of delusion
Part I of this letter warns that the Covid crisis has induced a mass delusional psychosis in which all the conditions for totalitarianism are being rapidly fulfilled. In part II I attempt to expose the delusions society is operating under through the age-old expedient humans have relied on for survival – being able to smell a rat.
Science is a method that, when applied transparently, brings us closer to the truth. Covid, however, seems to have reduced it to a crude battle between kung-fu styles, with the advocates of each proclaiming theirs to be the best. Both sides can’t be right, and the truth will gradually out through a combination of real-world evidence and a scientific process restored to its original depoliticised aim.
That process is well underway and can be accelerated by puncturing the delusions that have induced a mass psychosis with a simple truth: the peddlers of the apocalyptic narrative don’t believe their own story and nor do they have any faith in the measures they advocate. If you were more receptive to this possibility, wouldn’t you also begin to question the wisdom of cleaving to a narrative sold to you by people who don’t believe it themselves?
Science will be mentioned mainly in reference to the abandonment of widely held scientific principles or to point out how it has been used in a contradictory way by the authorities. Real-world data will be referred to only to highlight the disconnect between the authorities’ true beliefs and the official terror inducing narrative – a narrative that has allowed them to pass decrees that, in any other circumstances, would have had the country asking whether ministers were reading from the script of a South Park episode satirising the most inept form of tin pot dictatorship.
The main dominoes of delusion are:
- The Covid apocalypse is nigh
- We had to lock down
- We must wear masks to control transmission and infection
- We must mass screen the population by testing healthy people
- Vaccines and vaccine passports are the only way out
The Covid apocalypse
On 19 March 2020, three days before the UK’s first lockdown, the government, through Public Health England, downgraded the assessment of Covid’s threat by removing it from the list of High Consequence Infectious Diseases (HCID). It stated that Covid was “no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK” and cited as the main reason “more information … about mortality rates (low overall)”. If that downgrade was an error, they’ve had 18 months to correct it and haven’t. So, we must assume they still believe Covid is not an HCID.
When you look at the government’s definition of an HCID and then realise that Covid’s removal from that list means that it doesn’t measure up to any of the HCID criteria – such as acute infectiousness, high case fatality rate, no effective prevention or treatment, requires individual and population system response – you’ve got to ask why we pressed pause on civilisation.
The government’s assessment before lockdown wasn’t wrong because it is now backed up by the real-world evidence, which tells us that the average age of a Covid-labelled death is 81 for men and 84 for women, the same as the average age of death in the UK – in other words, when you’ve reached the age at which the actuaries expect you to die, then Covid, along with flu and pneumonia, is just one of many illnesses likely to kill you. I’m not denying younger people have died of Covid but the overall survival rate across all age groups is 99.85% and rises to 99.997% for the 0-19yr age group. I’d like to think that most elderly people would be the first to ask whether we should have found some way to protect them without punishing everyone else.
The UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser stated at a press conference on 11 May 2020 (at the height of the first wave) that a significant proportion of people will not get this virus at all, at any point in the epidemic. He added that, “of those that get symptoms, the great majority, probably 80%, will have a mild or moderate disease which might be bad enough for them to have to go to bed for a few days but not bad enough for them to have to go to the doctor. An unfortunate minority will have to go to hospital but the majority of those will just need oxygen and will then leave hospital and then a minority of those [that go to hospital] will end up having to go to severe and critical care and some of those sadly will die. But that’s a minority. It’s possibly 1% or even less than one percent overall and even in the highest risk group this is significantly less than 20%. The great majority of people even the highest risk groups if they catch this virus, they will not die.”
Unfathomably, the question that didn’t get asked at the briefing after hearing this statement was, “Why, then, are we burning down the house?”
A year later in April 2021, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer expressed the view that Coronavirus should now be treated like flu.
To quote Lionel Shriver, never in the history of viruses has a virus been so oversold.
Neither before, during or after any of the Covid waves did the government think the apocalypse was nigh. Nor does the precautionary principle justify trashing the livelihoods of thousands of business owners, stopping children from going to school and creating a 5.6m NHS waiting list, to name only a few of the disastrous consequences. Oh, but lockdowns prevented a far worse outcome than the one which unfolded, I hear you say. See next delusion below.
So why did the government enact and follow through so doggedly on such disastrous policies? You don’t have to answer that question in the next five minutes. But simply acknowledging that it is a valid question to ask means you can smell a rat. And if the people driving the Covid apocalypse narrative never believed it and still don’t believe it, why do you?
We had to lock down
The decision to lock down was criminally negligent and had to have been known to be from the outset.
To appreciate how deranged the lockdown experiment is, imagine the following scenario. On returning from a holiday in an exotic land, you begin to feel unwell and visit your doctor complaining of flu-like symptoms. On hearing the location of your holiday, your doctor assumes the worst – that you have contracted an illness unlike any seen before and for which there is no cure, even though the virus causing the illness falls within the family of coronaviruses long familiar to modern medicine.
Your doctor, in a state of panic (the last thing you want or expect from a doctor), prescribes a drug, found through a google search, that was invented by a 14-year old during a high school science project. The drug has never been subjected to clinical trials and has never been considered for use by any respectable medical licensing authority let alone approved by the national drug licencing authority or by the professional body that governs the doctor’s conduct.
Everyone understands that, even if you were lucky enough not to suffer harmful side effects from your doctor’s reckless experiment, he would be liable to sanctions from his professional body. If you were to suffer harm, criminal proceedings against the doctor would almost certainly be a forgone conclusion.
Not only does the above analogy align with the recklessness of the worldwide lockdown experiments but it is naïve to assume that highly qualified public health professionals at the WHO and here in the UK did not understand the significance of advocating population-wide interventions without the slightest grounding in science.
The lawyers and qualified experts who wrote this letter to leading intelligence agencies understand this only too well because they understand that the WHO along with national public health agencies are societies’ collective doctors. I’m not asking you to read the copious studies that condemn lockdowns as purely destructive tools with no benefits to show. I am asking you to adopt a degree of scepticism based on an understanding that lockdowns were never part of the national pandemic preparedness plans for infectious respiratory illnesses because there was no scientific basis for even considering them. Resorting to an intervention for which there was no medical or scientific evidence was an unmistakable act of gross negligence.
The opinion of the legal and medical professionals who wrote this letter to leading intelligence agencies is:
“The conclusion [to lock down] by the world’s foremost public health body was, at best, criminally negligent.”
In October 2020, the WHO backtracked on its criminally negligent advice when Dr David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, publicly urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns stating:
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
Too little, too late. Having understood that it should not have been opened, the WHO could not shut Pandora’s lockdown box. If there is any justice left in the world, public health ‘experts’ should be put in the dock to account for the prolific harms unleashed.
Compounding the recklessness of launching into lockdowns in the manner of a drunk driver veering off the road is the dogged avoidance of a serious cost/benefit analysis discussion, both before and after the fact. The absurdity of refusing to engage in a discussion of cost/benefit is eloquently dealt with by Glenn Greenwald but, with hundreds of billions spent on various Covid measures, NHS waiting lists in the millions, lost livelihoods for thousands of small and medium sized business owners, mental health spiralling downward, increased drug addiction, damage to school children’s development and education – to mention just a few of the costs – it’s understandable why a government keen to avoid discussions about negligence and liability would want to avoid the subject of cost/benefit.
And no, things would not have been far worse without lockdowns, as the government has half-heartedly tried to claim. The lockdown placebo controls of countries/regions which didn’t lock down – Sweden, Belarus, Tanzania, and Florida from September 2020 – had mortality outcomes no worse (and in many cases better) than the UK. The efforts to diminish the findings of studies done on the significance of these sane approaches are both futile and desperate. Sweden happened and the humans living there aren’t that different to us. Sweden and the other lockdown non-compliers tell us that we knowingly veered away from the other fork in the road that was signposted ‘Sanity –> This Way’.
Why would you still believe that lockdowns work when they were, for good reason, excluded from the professional public health handbook of proper responses to infectious respiratory illnesses? Do you smell a rat?
We must wear masks
Like lockdowns, mask-wearing in the general population was understood by the WHO and national public health bodies to be, at best, ineffective in checking the spread of respiratory flu-like illnesses. And like lockdowns, that sadly didn’t stop governments from mandating a non-evidence-based intervention.
At the beginning of the saga the WHO believed there was no evidence that wearing a mask in the community prevented healthy people from picking up respiratory infections including Covid-19.
Three weeks before the UK’s first lockdown, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer advised that: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.” [bold emphasis added.]
Then, with absolutely no new hard evidence to change that assessment, politics trumped science when masks were legally mandated on public transport in England on 15 June last year and then on 24 July in shops.
However, long after masks had become de rigueur around the world, the WHO in December 2020 stated (download the pdf) as part of its guidance on masks in the community setting:
“At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial…found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review… concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness”. [bold emphasis added]
Having admitted that there is zero evidence for masking in the general population, the WHO then contradicted itself by proceeding to issue guidance for mask wearing in community settings:
“Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings, in addition to all other recommended preventive measures, the GDG advised mask wearing in the following settings…”. [bold emphasis added]
Again, as in the case of lockdowns, the idea that the world’s foremost authority on public health would say, “Well this doesn’t work but let’s do it anyway and to hell with the potential health downside”, should create a pile of negligence lawsuits to bury the WHO, and whoever blindly followed them, in paperwork for the next 50 years. And if that is the only way to stop the WHO from being a menace to humanity, we should all welcome it.
To reiterate: an individual may take whatever precautions he or she deems fit to protect themselves and be it on their head should things go wrong. But a professional public health authority (international or national) funded by taxpayers for the sole purpose of advocating public health policy may not advocate interventions that are not grounded in solid evidence since to do so amounts to playing fast and loose with the public’s health.
It is therefore non-controversial to brand this as criminal negligence in legal terms.
My point again is this: If the public health bodies have clearly stated that they don’t believe there is sound medical evidence for the use of masks in community settings, then masks are political props, not health aids. If masks are not health aids, there is certainly much we can say about their psychological impact. At a group level they act as reminders of how afraid the government would like us to be and our compliance signifies whether or not we agree with the government’s ‘nudge’ to be more afraid. If the government reintroduces stricter mask rules this autumn, they will be a ‘nudge’ to dial up the fear. If we comply, we are agreeing with the government’s instruction to be more afraid.
That agreement, which in reality has no health benefit attached, is a powerful unconscious signifier of how far the government can go in the roll-out of other restrictions. But if we acted in accordance with the WHO and national public health’s true beliefs about mask efficacy by not wearing them, the government would know that we know what they know. The game would be up. That is not to say we would be denying Covid. We would simply be sending a powerful message: we know what works and what doesn’t, so don’t treat us like fools. This is a powerful message to send if we still want to retain our freedom.
Mass screening of the population – testing healthy people
Never before in the history of respiratory illnesses have healthy people been seriously considered to be vectors for disease spread. Quarantining the sick, not the healthy, was the long-established core scientific principle in management of infection and transmission. And yet before it had been established that this virus was displaying any worrying new transmission mechanisms that had not been seen in previous coronaviruses, it was decided that asymptomatic spread was a threat. Fear, the lubricant applied to all Covid measures, was leveraged yet again to get healthy people to line up in droves to get tested.
The absurdity of accepting this unproven paradigm was illustrated at the height of testing mania when people were standing in long queues to be tested despite the government’s constant messaging that proximity to strangers was akin to dicing with death.
The WHO confirmed that asymptomatic spread was not a consideration when it stated in a media briefing in June 2020: ‘Based on our data, it seems unlikely that an asymptomatic carrier will transmit the infection to someone else. We have a number of reports from other countries. They monitor asymptomatic carriers, their contacts, and do not detect further transmission.’ It then inexplicably denied its own evidence backed statement by rowing back on this the next day, not on the basis of new evidence or the statement being incorrect but simply due to political pressure.
Asymptomatic spread was ruled out in an article in the British Medical Journal by Professor Allyson Pollock, where she wrote: ‘A city-wide prevalence study of almost ten million people in Wuhan found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission.’
The testing pillar of the official Covid narrative is so mired in dirt that even a brief overview of its murkiness should provide many reasons to view Covid as a casedemic not a pandemic.
The Corman-Drosten PCR Covid testing protocol was submitted to the medical journal, Eurosurveillance, on 21 January 2020 and published the next day on 22 January. Of all 1,595 publications at Eurosurveillance since 2015, not one other research paper was reviewed and accepted in fewer than 20 days. It could not have been subjected to any meaningful peer review and the paper’s many flaws were highlighted in a retraction request submitted by a team of experts led by molecular biologist Pieter Borger.
Drosten, one of the key authors of the paper failed to report his conflict of interest as the editor of the publishing journal. Another author, Olfert Landt, failed to disclose in the original publication that he was CEO of the company making the test kits. This was subsequently declared in revised papers.
Despite publication of the protocol on 23 January 2020, the first test kits were shipped on 10 January 2020. Even more mystifying is that a viral genome sequence was released for immediate public health support via the online community resource virological.org on 10 January, raising the obvious question: how could kits have been ready for shipping on the same day the genome sequence was made available?
On November 20, 2020 an appeals court in Portugal ruled that ‘the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful’. In evidence, the court cited a scientific paperwhich found that up to 97% of positive results could be false positives. To this day, this monumental ruling remains unreported in the UK mainstream media.
A stunning below-the-radar admission by the CDC in July 2021 was that the test in its current form was not based on a quantified virus isolate. In other words, the specificity of the test to the actual SARS-COV-2 virus is highly questionable. In the CDC’s own words: “no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed” (page 40 of the FDA link).
Putting aside for a moment the fact that the test was not based on a quantified virus isolate, PCR testing becomes increasingly unreliable when used as a general population screening tool. That’s because its accuracy relies on the prevalence of disease in the population. The more widely it is used as a screening tool in healthy people, the smaller the degree of disease prevalence in the population tested and the greater the number of false positives it generates. The inventor of the PCR test never intended it to be used as a diagnostic tool, let alone a mass screening tool.
The degree to which sample material is amplified in the test (the cycle thresholds used) also makes it highly manipulable or susceptible to error. The WHO admitted as much when it issued this warning about cycle thresholds in December 2020. There has been little or no transparency in the disclosure of cycle thresholds by government approved testing labs throughout most of the pandemic.
The key statistics used to dial up or down the never-ending cycle of restrictions and fear are cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, all obviously underpinned by this dubious PCR test. Once hospitalised, a sick person, regardless of the reason for admission, is tested for Covid – repeatedly until they leave. Increased severity of any condition correlates with a longer stay in hospital, which correlates with an increased number of tests thus increasing the likelihood that a false positive result will eventually be generated. Then add into that mix the criteria for classification of a Covid death as death from any cause that occurs within 28 days of a positive test result and you can see how any scientist with a sceptical bone in her body would question the degree to which case and death numbers are being falsely inflated.
Here in the UK an FOIA request to a hospital Trust in Birmingham forced that hospital to admit that, of the reported 81 deaths ‘with Covid’ that had occurred in that hospital, only 2 (2.47%) were attributable to Covid alone. 97.53% of victims had underlying conditions. The over-reporting of Covid deaths has been recognised in mainstream media sources. An October 2020 FOIA request to the UK’s ONS revealed less than 10% of the official “Covid death” count at that time had Covid as the sole cause of death.
Dr Kary Mullis, the biochemist who won the Nobel prize for inventing the PCR test, was openly critical of its abuse stating: ‘It’s just a process that is used to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.’ Are you prepared to overrule him in favour of the hapless buffoon Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary who decided that wasting billions on testing healthy people while leaving the sick to rot at home would be a prudent use of taxpayers’ money? Do you smell a rat?
Vaccines and vaccine passports are the only way out
Our enormously intelligent and complex immune systems have been evolving for somewhere in the region of a million of years. Every respiratory illness that has ever swept through a population has ended with something called herd immunity – enough of the hale and hearty getting ill, recovering, becoming immune to the pathogen and creating a wall of immunity too big to allow the virus to do any further significant damage. The virus inflicts just enough damage to spur our collective immune systems into action but not so much that it wipes us out leaving itself with no host in which to propagate. A duet that leads to each living with the other in endemicity.
And yet with the proverbial flick of a switch, the WHO re-wrote science without any evidence to back up its new position.
In around November 2020, herd immunity became something achievable only through mass vaccination, despite a vaccination campaign having never been part of ending any previous influenza-like epidemic in history. No explanation was given as to how humanity had avoided extinction prior to the advent of vaccines, but our million-year-old human immune system was unceremoniously sidelined in an overnight website update. To say that this is problematic for the integrity of science is an understatement.
But, if Big Pharma is going to replace the role of my immune system in beating a virus, the least I expect from them is a statement that their vaccines will do what my immune system used to do before it was unceremoniously usurped – namely, prevent infection and transmission of the pathogen after exposure to and recovery from the pathogen. It is important to understand that the Covid 19 vaccines were never intended to pass this basic test of a vaccine.
A kind of swindle was perpetrated in which the public hype ahead of the roll-out created the impression that the vaccines would do all the good things that the public expects of vaccines. But lost amid all the noise were some not very visible ‘small print’ warnings that should have lowered our expectations significantly.
Peter Doshi at the BMJ was not alone when he sounded an alarm bell in October 2020, pointing out that:
“None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.” [bold emphasis added]
He also pointed out that the trials were designed to evaluate only mild illness.
Before rolling out the vaccines, the NHS concurred with the manufacturers’ implied limitations of their products, declaring in its vaccine leaflet that “we do not yet know how much it will reduce the chance of you catching and passing on the virus”.
So, if Big Pharma and the government knew, before they were rolled out, that the vaccines didn’t stand much of a chance of preventing infection and transmission, the next question is: how have things panned out?
The BMJ’s senior editor (the October 2020 alarm bell ringer), citing a whole host of problems including waning immunity, remains unconvinced of the justification for the FDA’s full approval of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine on 23 August.
Public Health England’s real-world data on vaccine effectiveness shows that, in the over 40 age group, the vaccinated are disproportionately more likely to catch and therefore transmit Covid than the unvaccinated – in other words the vaccine is having a negative effect on infection, which isn’t just ineffective, it’s blowback. Let’s be clear that it is a fallacy to attack the significance of the PHE data on the grounds that the higher number of cases in the vaccinated is simply a reflection of the highly vaccinated population. This common lazy dismissal is not valid because, as I have stated by using the word ‘disproportionately’, the analysis of the data for purposes of effectiveness adjusts for the proportion of vaccinated versus unvaccinated and finds that the vaccinated are disproportionately over-represented in the case data.
The hysteria being whipped up over vaccine passports is ostensibly about protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, which is irrational in itself because if the vaccine works, those vaccinated don’t need protection from anything or anyone. But, based on PHE’s new data, it now appears that the unvaccinated need protection from the vaccinated.
Robert Peston, referring to this new PHE information, tweeted about his own personal experience of being vaccinated and subsequently getting Covid. For me, more interesting than Peston’s tweet were some of the replies from those who have had a similar experience. Many were along the lines of: “thank gawd you/we were jabbed because it would’ve been much worse otherwise.” We need to talk about this because this is an irrational and yet common response to the got-jabbed-and-still-got-Covid phenomenon.
Recall that the government acknowledged before lockdowns that Covid was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease, and this has been confirmed by the statements made by the Chief Medical Officer and the real-world evidence on Covid’s low mortality rate – 99.85% of people survive, with the vast majority of those developing only mild symptoms. On this basis alone, there is a very high probability that the illness would have been a relatively trivial and very temporary health set-back, without the vaccine. So, remaining rational and working within the paradigm of what vaccines generally purport to do, we should really be asking why so many people are catching and getting ill with Covid after the jab. Instead, we see a disturbing number of people celebrating the wonders of the jab despite suffering from the illness it’s supposed to prevent. This is not rational.
Mass vaccination as a public health policy strategy was intended to reduce the burden on the NHS and allow society to ‘get back to normal’. However, a few mainstream media reports are now warning that the vaccines have failed to deliver on this strategy. As if to underline this vaccine failure while simultaneously illustrating how the mainstream media amplifies insanity by making it seem normal, we have an Orwellian admission in a Reuters article that begins with a seemingly innocuous statement. It conveys a warning that “relying largely on vaccines without other measures could put unsustainable pressure on hospitals”. But at no point does it challenge the fact that vaccines were supposed to be the intervention that obviated the need for “other measures”.
Can’t score a goal? Just shift the goalposts! Vaccines have now become an additional measure to the two (masks and lockdowns) that should never have happened anyway because they were criminally negligent. The open admission of failure comes when the article admits that, despite 81.3% of people over 16 having received two vaccine doses, the chair of the British Medical Association is screaming out for “additional infection control measures”:
“With high rates of [Covid] infection, we need additional infection control measures if we’re to keep the health service afloat this winter.” [Emphasis added]
‘Additional infection control measures’ being code for lockdown, a societal grenade. To summarise: In locking down to protect the NHS, a backlog so huge has been created that the NHS cannot get through it concurrently with the normal winter respiratory illness season. It wants to keep locking down even though lockdowns are the surest way to worsen the waiting list and contribute to the premature deaths of people on it. In essence, the NHS has dug a hole for itself so deep that it can’t climb out. So, it has decided to just keep digging. And just in case all of this wasn’t irrational enough, vaccines, which haven’t provided much relief to the NHS covid burden, are going to be coerced through vaccine passports.
A brief note on Covid vaccine safety. Like all medical treatments, vaccines come with risks. A total of 1,183,600 suspected adverse reactions including 1,632 fatal events associated with the vaccine have been recorded by the UK government’s Yellow Card Scheme as of 1 September 2021. The MHRA itself estimates that only 10% of serious reactions and 2–4% of all reactions are reported using the Yellow Card Scheme (2nd page of the linked report). Where there is risk, there must be choice. Vaccine passports remove this choice. Being made to face the risk of serious injury and even death without a free choice is medical tyranny. Many liberals on the left have called for a zero Covid policy which has been proven to be a fool’s errand in places like New Zealand. How do they reconcile this aspiration with an explicit acceptance of deaths from a coerced vaccine?
My point again, to be deliberately tedious, is simply this: if the vaccine manufacturers never intended for them to prevent infection and transmission from the get-go and your government knew this, isn’t it time to wake up from the delusion that these vaccines were ever going to be the only way out? And if fully vaccinated people can get and transmit Covid, why are they being given a passport and privileges? With vaccine passports clearly serving the sole purpose of restricting freedom and punishing those who have made a choice that we once regarded as a basic human right, why would you walk blindly into them? Do you smell a rat?
Summing up all the delusions
Every stage in the crisis has been marked by massive contradictions between what the government believes would be a rational, calm and professional course of action and the actual course it has decided to take. And in the case of vaccines, there is a massive contradiction between what the public expects from an effective vaccine (stop infection and transmission) and what the vaccine manufacturers and the government knew and told us to expect, which is basically not much. Adding insult to injury, the government now wants to force you to show your vaccination status to gain rights of participation in society, rights previously taken for granted by every law-abiding citizen.
If you are starting to smell a rat, what should you do now?
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In Part III I’ll discuss the awful consequences of scapegoating and how far down that deadly road we have already travelled. I’ll present a case for why vaccine passports will detonate our free society and I will argue that the only way back from the brink is to unequivocally trash them.
Source: A Plague on Both Houses
Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports – PART III – “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire
As discussed in Part II, there has been a mass detachment from reality, and our failure to recognise this is not going to prevent it from catching up with us. It is now apparent that these delusions are serving as psychological enablers of a moral degeneracy that tends to accompany a mass psychosis – primarily the degeneracy of scapegoating.
Having constructed the Enemy Without (the Virus), the totalitarian animus is being turned on the Enemy Within – the dissenters, the ‘refuseniks’, the ‘deniers’, those who basically won’t shut up and take their medicine. If this group grows in strength and size, the Enemy Without shrinks and the totalitarian edifice crumbles.
The public cries of anguish directed at the Unvaccinated by the likes of the left libertarian icon Chomsky, Stephen Nolan at the BBC, Nick Cohen at the Guardian and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, are blood curdling to someone who refuses to shut up and take their medicine. The calls to action against the Unvaccinated are only getting more vociferous if this more recent spittle-flecked, unhinged diatribe published in The Mirror, is anything to go by. Its view is that people expressing their reasons for not wanting to be vaccinated are baby killers more dangerous to society than the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaeda. Ironically, this level of hatred directed at what The Mirror calls ‘anti-vaxxers’ puts this tabloid into the same camp as the Taliban, ISIS and al-Qaeda – the extremists it is trying to equate with ‘anti-vaxxers’. Blinded by irrational hatred, they just can’t see it.
It’s doubly ironic that, at the start of this episode in global insanity back in March 2020, the liberal lockdown left objected to the use of the scientifically accepted term ‘herd immunity’. Why? Because the use of this term by a Tory government opened it up to the accusation that it was about to treat the populace like animals…by refusing to lock them up like animals. Now the same liberal left is content to force inject the populace, giving us as much choice in the matter as…a herd of domesticated livestock being rounded up for periodic vaccinations. If this doesn’t capture the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal left, both before and after lockdown, then what does?
The stance adopted by the liberal left pre-lockdown was mindless political gesturing and the current pushing of forced vaccination is degenerate hypocrisy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Chomsky and the Guardian now look like proud fascists baying for the blood of people asking for nothing more than medical choice, something made sacrosanct to check fascism.
There is no question in my mind that, had we as a nation kept our heads back in March 2020 when all about us were losing theirs, the sentiments now expressed by these mob ringleaders would have been roundly condemned for what they are – depraved hate speech.
Which is not to suggest that Covid provides a moral get-out clause for them because rights and values cannot be abrogated to suit changing circumstances. They are non-negotiable and only work if we are fully prepared to afford them even to those we may claim to hate the most. That’s what guarantees their reciprocation when the tables are turned. Rights are not bargaining chips and, when honoured unequivocally and in all weather, they are the only things standing between us and savagery.
It’s almost impossible to be disappointed by the likes of Gove and Johnson because I expect nothing from these wooden-eyed, spiritless, and spineless hollow men who now represent the character of the entire political leadership of the country on both sides of the aisle. But seeing Chomsky, a man who has spent the best part of three quarters of a century preaching from the human rights pulpit, reduced to a decrepit, cruel prison guard calling for the segregation and isolation of the unvaccinated, was a stark reminder of just how thin the veneer of civilisation is.
Societal scapegoating could get very ugly and to those who care but say it couldn’t happen now or couldn’t happen here, think again. The human psyche does not appear to have evolved one iota since the unfolding of the horrors of WWII. The famous Milgram study (1961-63) powerfully demonstrated the overpowering effect of obedience to authority in the face of moral imperatives against hurting others. The key determinant for study participants in their decision to inflict harm on others was not a moral imperative but a simple assessment of whether they would be held personally accountable for the cruelty inflicted on strangers. Sadly, these studies demonstrated dramatically that if accountability for actions can be transferred to another person or institution with authority, individuals will readily commit harmful acts.
Societies have done nothing to mitigate against this sad reality. If anything, the rise of technocratic bureaucracy, stateism and national and supranational ‘just authorities’ have eroded personal accountability in decision making and fostered greater obedience to rules. Unthinking obedience and safetyism are now, more than ever, psychological allies of a voluntary submission to tyranny. The mass psychological conditions for totalitarianism have, in some ways, never been riper. Germany, of all places, is now home to graffiti that reads: ‘Gas the unvaccinated’. So, there are no grounds for complacency.
Zimbardo’s prison guard experiment dramatically demonstrated how conformity to social roles trumps reliance on the individual’s moral code when making decisions. Deindividuation is the term for how the demands of a situation can erode individual identity when making choices about doing the right thing. It results in a reduced capacity to inject our humanity into a specific situation or our jobs generally. Put another way, the decisions being made that may enslave us are being made by doctors, law enforcement officers and civil servants and not family, friends and lovers. Having lost the skill of being able to wear two hats in a situation that demands that human sensitivity should prevail, we are now, more than ever before, a nation of jobsworths. It is no coincidence that the loss of our personal human sensitivity is running parallel with the loss of our freedom.
In 2004, Zimbardo went on to study how situations can foster mass acts of depravity in his role as an expert witness for several of the U.S. soldiers who went on trial for abuses committed at the infamous Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq. Credit to Dr Tim Jennings for raising my awareness of the parallels between the process outlined by Zimbardo and what is unfolding now. Jennings is a US board-certified psychiatrist and MD and, as the president of Come and Reason Ministries, he also represents a convergence of science and spirituality.
Zimbardo concluded that:
“The line between good and evil is permeable. Any of us can move across it…I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil – to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.” [bold emphasis added.]
How does a majority come to regard a minority of their fellow citizens as less than human? The short answer is through the removal empathy. By slapping a label on the targeted group, it is transitioned from fellow humans to a collective entity that must be dealt with, a problem to be solved. Once downgraded to the status of a problem – the Unvaccinated – it’s a small step to cast the problem as a threat to the whole of society. The removal of the problem can now be cast as an act of compassion towards those who are not part of ‘the problem’– a bowing to the ‘greater good’. This is the twisted logic by which harming, even killing members of a group, can be perversely labelled as saving lives. This is the process of turning sound minds into sick minds.
No two situations are exactly the same but the parallels between the process observed by Zimbardo and what has been unfolding over the last 18 months are frightening:
- Providing the ideology to justify beliefs for actions
Served up with spadefuls of raw fear, the ideology is simple and powerful: we will die if we don’t take this action; the only way to stay safe is to do this; we must do this to save lives. Thus, the false apocalypse of Covid was always destined to be averted by an equally false miracle – the vaccine.
- Small steps – make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with minor, trivial actions which increase in severity
We will socially distance. We will limit family visits. We will wear masks. We will stop going to church. We will close small businesses. We will get an experimental injection. We will punish people who don’t get experimental injections.
- Make those in charge seem like a “just authority.”
The government understands only too well that its authority would have collapsed in a matter of weeks had senior ministers in cabinet not been fronted by the men in white coats, the ‘Scientists’, the ‘public health experts’. Ironic that this cabal went from being totally fed up of experts in 2016 to being totally reliant on them in 2020. Political expediency seamlessly turns yesterday’s enemy into today’s ally. Although not a single pillar of the public health response is underpinned by valid science – lockdowns, masks, the denial of herd immunity as the primary way in which all respiratory epidemics have ended, mass vaccination targeting groups at low risk of disease, the suppression of proven early treatments – the medical sorcery masquerading as science has the imprimatur of the highest medical authorities and this has largely blinded the public to the bankruptcy of the entire response.
- Transform once compassionate figures or leaders into dictatorial figures
Compassionate doctors who voice valid concerns about the potential dangers of an experimental vaccine are now accused of wanting to kill people. This extreme inversion of turning a trusted figure into a criminal is important because trusted figures have the authority to turn back the tide of insanity, but not if you can make them appear to be the opposite of their ‘former’ selves, aberrations of the ‘real’ doctors in the majority. Accompanying this demonisation of compassionate doctors is the censorship of their opinions and the ruining of their careers through professional debarment for the act of expressing a medical view contrary to the official line. Demonising and silencing trusted and compassionate voices is a bright red flag pointing to the bankruptcy of the official narrative and is essential to maintaining the momentum of the bankrupt narrative.
- Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules
Wear a mask. Don’t wear a mask. Fully vaccinated don’t need a mask. Fully vaccinated need a mask. Vaccination protects you from re-infection. Vaccination doesn’t protect you from re-infection. Vaccine passports are out. Vaccine passports are in. It’s messy and confusing, and that’s the whole point – to get you to stop caring about the truth and thinking critically. A population reduced to being a pile of discombobulated mush is ready to accept whatever decree comes next, including decrees that dehumanise, abuse and harm a labelled group – ‘the Unvaccinated’.
Many will say that the confusing rule changes and u-turns that have been a hallmark of this fiasco were not designed to get people to accept harm towards unvaccinated people. Rather, the flip-flops were the result of a failure to implement sound evidence-based policies. That may be true, but the effect is the same. Confusion and the scaling back of critical thinking are always part of a perfect storm of situational factors that accompany harmful scapegoating.
- Relabel the situations’ actors and their actions to legitimise their ideology
Much said already. Overturning well established medical knowledge about infection and transmission of respiratory illnesses, the vast majority of the people being asymptomatic (a.k.a. ‘healthy’) – ‘cases’– are now a threat. Now we have a divisive relabelling of society splitting us into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated – the ‘good’ people and the ‘bad’ people. The vaccinated claim that they are the ones who love life and want to protect life. They are being strongly ‘nudged’ into believing and claiming that the unvaccinated are selfish and want to kill people.
- Provide people with social models of compliance
If you get the shot, you can travel. You can go to work. You can socialise with your friends. You won’t need a mask everywhere. You can go out to eat. Compliance makes life easier. You can keep others safe. You can be a good and righteous citizen. The psychological effect of a social model of compliance is to instil the citizen with the glow of goodness. Compliance becomes a virtue, non-compliance a sin. Compliance has its rewards and sins must be punished.
In an economy in which most of us spend our working day either complying with rules, creating new rules, checking that others are complying with rules or assessing the risks of non-compliance with rules, it has never been easier for a government to achieve such a high level of compliance with rules-based insanity. It’s a depressing fact of modern life that, for most, a satisfying day’s work entails successful compliance with rules rather than creative production. With technology adding ease of compliance to the desire for compliance, people have been conditioned to comply with bogus health messaging couched in the language of civic duty as opposed to its proper framing as a private medical choice.
It goes some way to explaining how an educated medical doctor can boast about complying with a policy that is a nail in the coffin of voluntary informed consent, the very thing a medical professional should be fighting tooth and nail to uphold. It should come as no surprise that mind-numbing and soul-destroying technocratic bureaucracy is now an agent of mass human enslavement, making even doctors forget what their duty is.
- Make exiting the situation very difficult.
Providing a model of social compliance is the carrot part of the approach. The stick? If you don’t get your shot, opportunities for social interaction are severely curtailed. You can’t go to university. You lose your job and your livelihood.
There is a perfect storm brewing. Jennings can see it, viewing events through the lens of the Zimbardo checklist for situational carnage. The Unvaccinated sure as hell can see it. We are hurtling down a road to hell and it’s signposted ‘Vaccine Passports’.
Dismantling the case for vaccine passports
To avoid the toxic division of society into the clean and unclean we must resist vaccine passports. They do not serve any public health goals. Like all other pharmaceutical interventions, you take a vaccine to protect yourself, not others. If it works, it protects you. If it doesn’t work, forcing others to take it only multiplies the number of people for whom the vaccine will not work. Let me be blunt – it just isn’t rational to blame the ineffectiveness of a vaccine on those who haven’t taken it.
The authoritarian argument for vaccine passports as a justified coercive measure on the grounds that the vaccine is effective but there is insufficient take-up, falls flat on its face on basic science alone. That’s because an illness from which 99.85% recover fully and whose risk profile is heavily age dependent demands a vaccination campaign targeted at the most vulnerable groups comprising the frail elderly and those with comorbidities. Also factor in that the virus has had nearly 2 years (it was here at least three months before lockdown) to do its worst, so herd immunity from a combination of exposure and prior immunity has obviated the need for mass vaccination.
All of this is based on a hypothetical and unproven assumption that we have a vaccine that actually does what a vaccine is supposed to do. In reality, we don’t – see vaccine delusion, Part II. I am not alone in thinking that vaccine passports are unnecessary and that there is no justification for them in the science and certainly none in logic because a UK parliamentary committee concluded that vaccine passports are “unnecessary and there is no justification for them in the science and none in logic.”
If there is no logical and scientific basis for vaccine passports, public health needs would best be served by sticking with well-established and sensible principles such as quarantining the sick, not the healthy, and, if you really believe you have a vaccine that works, targeting vaccination at the most vulnerable based on voluntary informed consent.
That said, I am adamant that science should not be the final arbiter of whether we adopt vaccine passports. After all, science was used to make eugenics acceptable, indeed respectable, at the turn of the 20th century. Bogus race science drove the Nazi narrative that led to the horrific crimes against humanity committed during WWII. Scientists made the nuclear weapons that were dropped needlessly at the end of WWII on Japanese civilian populations. Black men suffering from syphilis were abused in the name of science in the infamous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” between 1932 and 1972.
My point is that the scientific hall of shame is vast and, as far back as 2005, the evidence for a crisis in science was apparent to scientists with integrity who made the stunning claim that most published research findings are wrong. Think about that for a second. Science is the new religion and most of its output is garbage.
Stating these facts is not an anti-science stance. It’s simply a recognition that how science is used is the primary determinant of whether it works for or against humanity. Science untamed by morals, ethics or values has morphed into Frankenstein’s monster. And yet science as religion is now replacing human spirituality. Rather than blindly following the science we need to embrace a new paradigm – if there is no moral basis for doing something, the science is irrelevant.
Vaccine passports should cause moral revulsion because they enable the demonisation of the unvaccinated and the entrenchment of medical apartheid. The whole discussion about the dangers of scapegoating – Milgram, Zimbardo, vaccinated zombies attacking us in the streets with pitchforks and machetes, the unvaccinated slowly starving to death for lack of food and jobs, government internment camps and so forth – it all falls away when we take vaccine passports off the table because vaccine passports are the passive form of the yellow badges that were used in 1930s Germany. Instead of marking the demonised, you mark the privileged with an access pass, leaving those without the pass to rot. Slightly more devious but achieves the same end.
But if, like Chomsky, Nolan at the BBC, The Guardian columnist Cohen, Gove and The Mirror, you’re comfortable with all that then this really has all been a waste of time and I’ll just start applying for asylum in Florida, Denmark or Texas, where the pass system of discrimination is not used and where that old fashioned notion of freedom is, for now, still valued.
If, however, you’re not comfortable with all that, then let’s move to a discussion of five possible reasons you’re being seduced by vaccine passports:
- For whatever reason, you have not acknowledged the true nature of the scheme.
- A blithe acceptance of coerced vaccination based on blind faith in vaccine safety.
- Failure to appreciate the immediate and future implications for loss of bodily autonomy.
- Sacrificing individual liberty for the ‘greater good’.
- You’ve allowed the authoritarian in all of us to get the better of you.
The true nature of the scheme
Let’s be honest – making basic access to society conditional upon acceptance of a vaccine is forced vaccination by other means. If that is abhorrent to you, then my work is done. Let’s tell the government to bin their passports and/or just not comply. There may, however, be other factors making it seem reasonable even if the coercion doesn’t sit right with you.
Blind faith in vaccine safety
It’s possible that many people are blithely accepting coerced vaccination because a blind faith in vaccines prevents them from viewing it as a medical treatment that comes with risk. Coerced vaccination leveraged by vaccine passports is founded on the combination of a medical and moral delusion that vaccines are safe for everyone (medical delusion) and that they should be a medical treatment exempt from choice (moral delusion).
In Part II of this letter I summarised the Covid vaccine injuries and deaths reported in the government’s Yellow Card Scheme and also highlighted that The MHRA itself estimates that only 10% of serious reactions and 2–4% of all reactions are reported using the Yellow Card Scheme. So it beggars belief that people might still not recognise that vaccination, like any medical treatment, must be assessed by the individual (in partnership with a medical professional if they so choose) to decide whether this particular vaccine is right for that particular individual. We are not professional soldiers being ordered into a combat zone. We are civilians living in an alleged democracy which requires that where there is risk, however small, there must be choice. And yet it is now heresy to state the simple fact that there has never been a one-size-fits-all medical treatment, and that includes vaccines.
Failure to appreciate the immediate and future implications for loss of bodily autonomy
Your body is the greatest instrument you will ever own. Whether it’s sugar water or polyethylene glycol that’s being injected into your body, if you don’t get a free choice in the matter (which means no threat of punishment for declining), then it’s no longer your body. Handing over the keys to your body to Big Pharma and the government just isn’t a great idea on so many levels. And ‘keys’ is an apt analogy in this situation because the new vaccine therapies use gene technology. Your genes are the keys to your individuality, and they are the keys to life. No-one has definitive answers about long-term consequences because there is no long-term data on these products. If you had asked the average scientist or doctor in 2019 whether it was a good idea to enrol all of humanity in a vaccine program using experimental technology with no long-term safety data, they would have called it insane. Human rights lawyers would have agreed. Yet here we are in 2021, flushing caution and rights down the toilet.
Your body is the only thing over which you and you alone have an absolute and inalienable right of sovereignty. It’s why the abolition of slavery, the condition under which human bodies were owned and controlled by other humans, is celebrated as a leap forward in the spiritual enlightenment of humanity.
If, by accepting vaccine passports, you demonstrate indifference about who controls your body, that indifference is an open invitation to the government to expand its biometric digital pass controls to other areas of your life, including financial and social control. But don’t take my word for it. The minister entrusted with reviewing the use of Covid certificates, Michael Gove, is on record saying, ‘Once powers are yielded to the state at moments of crisis or emergency, it’s very rarely the case that the state hands them back.’
Let’s face it, if the government can force you to take a vaccine that you don’t want or need, what can’t they do? If we lose this fight, we have lost the right to say, in a literal sense, “Don’t touch me.” You must draw the line at your own body because there is no further space left to invade. To state the obvious, your brain is inside your body, so control of your body is total control. It feels incredibly odd to have to state something so obvious and yet support or indifference to vaccine coercion clearly requires the statement of a self-evident truth in the hope that the penny will drop.
The delusion of sacrificing individual liberty for the ‘greater good’
Sacrificing individual liberty and autonomy at the altar of the collective greater good is a deluded trade-off because it is only a matter of time before you fall onto the wrong side of the ‘collective good’ ledger. Yes, there is such a thing as ‘society’ but it is the sum of its free individuals and the free citizen is the indivisible unit of society. Break him or her and you create a crack in the whole of society. It’s a fallacy to think you can sacrifice individual liberty at the altar of greater good and still end up with a healthier society. In a stroke of genius Julius Ruechel turns the fallacy on its head to reveal a fundamental truth – individual liberty is the greater good. I want to take it one small but important step further by adding: it is the greatest good. From this all else flows, including community spirit.
Individual liberty and a healthy society is not a binary either /or choice. They are inseparably intertwined and interdependent. Tyranny over some to benefit others is a victory for tyranny. And if the individuals making up the collective are not free to choose their own path, tyranny has poisoned the well. Once tyranny sets in, society and its members cannot claim to be free in any sense of the word because everyone is now looking over their shoulder wondering when they will be next. And the law of nature governing all life on the planet – diversity – guarantees that you will be next. Diversity of values is a constant but the universal value binding us all together is – don’t trample on me. That right, that value, does not preclude societal cohesion. It guarantees it.
The trampling of liberty for the sake of some greater good is why Benjamin Franklin got so het up about the false trade-off between liberty and safety. His articulation of that false trade-off is now in danger of being drained of meaning through overuse in the Covid crisis so I got to thinking about how I could reinvigorate it with meaning. And it dawned on me that many people across the country are surrendering control over their bodies in return for what was once their right to enjoy the simple pleasure of attending a football match with their fellow human beings. It’s true that many are doing this in the mistaken belief that they will be safer, but many have simply given in to coercion and bullying.
Either way, rather than being enraged at the government for enforcing this hideous trade-off in the first place, people are queuing outside theatres and smiling as they proudly display their new digital chain of slavery and symbols of societal segregation – the vaccine passport. I now understand, really understand, what Franklin meant when he said that those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
You’ve allowed the authoritarian in all of us to get the better of you
Authoritarianism, like all negative traits, isn’t something exhibited by other bad people. The need to be right and its corollary – the desire to force the other to see the error of their ways – is hardwired in all of us. The failure to manage the second bit of the equation, proving the other wrong, unleashes the authoritarian monster hiding in all of us. Unchecked, it unmoors us from reason, argument and empathy as insult and brute force take over.
The authoritarian argument on vaccines implies that a significantly large proportion of the population is too stupid to be convinced of the efficacy of the vaccine. If you truly believe the only way to get a significant portion of the population to get with the programme is through force, you are allowing yourself to become a throw-back to the early 1800s Victorian era in which a majority were ruled by their ‘betters’ – members of a propertied upper class who held their subjects in contempt.
Such paternalistic atavism was abandoned for good reason. It’s intellectually and morally bankrupt because no section of society is ‘better’ than the rest. We know this to be a self-evident truth. At least that’s the pretence we’ve maintained up until now. We either believe that and put our money where our mouths are, or we revert to feudalism without the doublespeak. Even if a huge number of your fellow citizens are just plain wrong, the problem with coercion is that most of us now express pride in living in a society which places treating people with dignity and compassion at or very near the top of our values system. Coercion isn’t (yet) at the top of the list of acceptable British values because coercion is bullying, which only ever leads to resentment and conflict.
When the authoritarian in you wins, you are no longer pursuing the truth. You are pursuing authority. Obeying the rules becomes far more emotionally rewarding than questioning whether the rules are legitimate. Authority and rule worship are not the values that enlightened societies thrive on. If we’re interested in reclaiming whatever vestiges of civilisation existed before March 2020, then the values that would need to be at the forefront of a policy to get people vaccinated are respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual and rational persuasion, in that order. The first is life enhancing and the second promotes intellectual growth and integrity.
So, you can trample on someone and tell them they’re wrong by punishing them. Or you can respect someone’s right to choose and persuade them with a better argument than theirs. These shouldn’t be difficult choices.
We are sick but it’s not the virus
“The greatest threat to civilisation lies not with the forces of nature nor with any physical disease but with our inability to deal the forces of our own psyche.” – Carl Jung
We now need to acknowledge that the nation is sick, but a virus is not the culprit. We are a nation of workplaces that claim to have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying, but the nation is ordering us to get jabbed or to suffer as outcasts from society, or even worse. A large minority of us, caught dazed in the headlights of this stunning hypocrisy, are in shock while the majority stands by in silence pretending that they don’t understand the ultimatum being delivered or that they can’t hear the incitements to violence blaring from the megaphones of the depraved ringleaders – The Mirror, Chomsky, Nolan, Cohen, Gove of course Johnson, to name a few.
In the arguments over science and data sets, we have lost sight of the fact that the most important decisions regarding the true long-term health of our society have very little to do with science and everything to do with values and basic decency. Science is not a value. It is a method for getting closer to the truth, for staying in touch with reality. It must be subordinated to our values of which we are in dire need of being reminded.
Will we be able to recognise that we are on the brink of the mass psychosis of totalitarianism fuelled by delusions? Will we dehumanise, demonise and scapegoat or will we allow free choice, compassion, unity and individual liberty to prevail? The answers to these questions are in your hands. This is a battle for our freedom – mine and yours. I hope you pick the right side.
Source: A Plague on Both Houses
