Two Paths.
1. The best way to beat the virus is to improve our general health and our health care systems.
2. The best way to destroy civilisations is to surrender our freedoms to authoritarian oligarchies.
We are on path 2
Not an Operating System
‘On its website, the pharmaceutical company Moderna, which has developed a COVID-19 vaccine, compares the mRNA science in its vaccine to an “operating system” (here). The phrase is used in a metaphorical sense, not a literal one.’
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-operating-system/fact-check-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-not-an-operating-system-designed-to-program-humans-idUSKBN2A913W
Read the article if you have time but just the phrase ‘the mRNA science in its vaccine’ is jarring. ‘Science’, an abstraction, cannot be ‘in’ a vaccine or anything else. Maybe what is meant is that ‘the mRNA science used to create the vaccine is comparable to an operating system in that it can be used in the development and deployment of different nRNA vaccines’.
This is important, not nitpicking, because to suggest that there is a ‘thing’ that acts like an operating system (whether it programs humans or not) in the vaccine is to suggest the co-installation of an enabling technology alongside a specific technology that creates a specific effect.
This fact checking article is incompetently written as it suggests exactly what it intends to deny.
The Moderna statement that it references is more coherent and makes it clear that the metaphor ‘operating system’ refers to the systems used to create mRNA vaccines and not to anything ‘in’ the vaccines.
HOWEVER … the Moderna statement also points out that:
“Using mRNA to create medicines is a complex undertaking and requires overcoming novel scientific and technical challenges. We need to get the mRNA into the targeted tissue and cells while evading the immune system. If the immune system is triggered, the resultant response may limit protein production and, thus, limit the therapeutic benefit of mRNA medicines. We also need ribosomes to think the mRNA was produced naturally, so they can accurately read the instructions to produce the right protein. And we need to ensure the cells express enough of the protein to have the desired therapeutic effect. “
Moderna statement
This does imply the installation of an enabling technology; a technology that inhibits the triggering of the immune system. Might that be deleterious to the general functioning of the natural immune system?
Uncomfortable Links
The article argues that COVID-19 VACCINES LEAD TO NEW INFECTIONS AND MORTALITY. I’ve not looked at it in detail but am struck by an early paragraph:
“Two months ago, we tried to alert people to the paradoxical results of the covid19 vaccines by publishing the pre- and post-vaccination mortality curves for Israel and Great Britain [1] which already showed that these vaccinations were followed by ‘a considerable increase in contamination and mortality lasting 6 to 8 weeks after the start of vaccination.”
This is consistent with an Israeli article‘s inference that in the about 6 week gap between the first and second does when protection is incomplete the partially vaccinated are more vulnerable than the unvaccinated. It is also consistent with concerns about ADE, antibody dependent enhancement, where a sub-optimal immune response can be hijacked by the coronavirus to support their attack on cells.
There are claims by the British government that people who are fully vaccinated are near invulnerable to infection and that vaccination has been driving the fall in morbidity and mortality. No real evidence can be given for this and it is likely that the current fall repeats that following the first wave and is a seasonal phenomenon. It seems clear that the reduction in morbidity is much the same with the unvaccinated as with the vaccinated and that recent numbers are daily deaths are too small to be of use in assessing the relative efficacy of the vaccines.
It would be comforting if we could conclude that the danger to the vaccinated lies only in the period between partial and full vaccination. This may not be the case. Microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi warns that the spike proteins that the vaccine induces our cells to produce remain in the body and that cells that produce these spike proteins may be attacked by the immune system if an immune response is triggered by a future encounter with a Covid-19 variant. Bhakdi argues that the immune system’s attack on cells hosting the spike protein leads to the formations of blood clots.
The issue of the spike protein induced blood disorder which includes clotting was raised in the open letter from Doctors for Covid Ethics. Dr Bhakdi is one of the authors.
The Fear Factor
Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”. I hope at least some people appreciate the significance of this admission reported in the Telegraph:
“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”.
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.
SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.
Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”
Mr Morgan spoke to author Laura Dodsworth, who has spent a year investigating the Government’s tactics for her book A State of Fear, published on Monday.
Ministers have faced repeated accusations that they ramped up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns and coerce the public into abiding by them – a claim that will be examined by the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic response.
SPI-B is one of the sub-committees that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), led by Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser.One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth:
“In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
Another SPI-B member said: “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do… clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.”
One warned that
“people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
Another said:
“Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon… Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Another member of SPI-B said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them”.
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said:
“If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.
“If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.”
The Telegraph
ADE and Covid-19
This article argues that the possibility of ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) was known by the developers who designed the vaccines to minimise this. I can’t follow these arguments in detail but it’s clear that the truth of the matter one way or other lies in whether there are or are not reported occurrences of ADE resulting from the vaccination programme. This article says that there have been no such reported occurrences:
“To date, there’s really no evidence of ADE with the COVID-19 vaccines. It’s all theoretical, … I think all the evidence so far is that ADE is not turning out to be a problem with any existing vaccines or viral variants.”
Others have argued, elsewhere, that people who have only had the first dose of the vaccine are empirically known to experience greater harm from Covid-19 than the unvaccinated. This would be consistent with the notion that the sub-optimal antibody response prompted by the first dose is can result in ADE.
The Fauci Manipulation
The person who is, effectively, at the head of the global effort to combat the pandemic is the person who is, at least arguably, most culpable for its creation.
Some people use the term ‘plandemic’ to imply that the pandemic and the global response to it were planned in order to achieve some covert objective. This is speculation but isn’t it strengthened by the continued employment of Fauci? Why would the US government continue to employ and ‘have confidence’ in a man who has screwed up so spectacularly and possibly illegally?
Fauci has admitted that he was involved in funding ‘gain of function’ research on coronaviruses in the Wuhan virology lab. The reason that he gives for doing the research there suggests that he believes that Chinese lives matter less than American lives:
“So, you don’t want to go to Hoboken, New Jersey or Fairfax Virginia to be studying the bat-human interface that might lead to an outbreak, so you go to China.”
Until recently the hypothesis that the pandemic originated in ‘gain of function’ research at the Wuhan laboratory was considered a ‘conspiracy theory’ but high level scientists including Robert Redfield, a former director of the US CDC, have argued that this is more likely than the natural origin hypothesis.
While Fauci now seems to be admitting that he was involved in funding research at Wuhan he had earlier denied such a connection and appears to have been instrumental in suppressing discussion that might expose his having such involvement. It is clear that Fauci has lied and has tried to hide his involvement.
Einstein on Socialism
The following is an excerpt from an article on socialism by Albert Einstein. It succinctly and simply outlines the meaning of and moral necessity of socialism. It provides a clear framework for discussion of the sociopolitical, geopolitical, existential, ecological and moral isuses that confront us. Einstein at least implies that a global and planned economy and centralised world government are necessities but he reminds us that this is not sufficient without the guarantee of individual rights. Please share your thoughts on this.
Why Socialism by Albert Einstein – May 1949Excerpt:
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.
A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?
More,
Writer’s Block – Pebbles
It’s difficult to know where to start because we don’t want to start from a place of confusion. But admitting that, accepting that, not apologising for it, or using it as an excuse, that is the only place from which to start and that in itself is the best response to the confusion.
I haven’t written on my blogs for almost a month but I have been writing, incessantly, on social media. Posts on Facebook or Twitter, the platforms I use most are very transient. Even if they on occasion express something profound, they are still expressions in and of the moment, immediate and in the context of a conversation, a mood or a particular event.
Sometimes I am pleased with what I have posted. Sometimes I wish I had not posted it. Others who see the posts will, similarly, like them or wish I had not posted them. But whether well constructed like a complex pebble sculpture or put together like a few stones laid together on the beach, they should be washed away naturally by the tides of time and attention. If there is an expression that I want to preserve, maybe to extend and expand on later, then like photographs of the pebbles, I should commit that expression on a blog. But then it will be something else because the context will be different apart from the conversation and the original moment and perhaps part of another conversation and moment.
To post a thing and then walk away from it. Time moves on and we move on. That’s how it should be.
My analogy is not perfect however and I have learned perhaps to my cost (though the cost may have been worth paying) that even if I keep nothing of my past expressions others may unearth them to use out of context and with malice.
I will keep arranging pebbles on the beach and urging others to do the same. This is freedom. Expressing a thing in the moment and then moving on, beyond the expression, beyond our own judgement, beyond the judgement of others.
Hari Om. It’s done.
Reservations
Friends and family with MAs and MSCs and MDs (I’ve not heard from any PhDs) have urged me to take the vaccine. It’s quite wearing. Younger ones, batchelors perhaps, have said they want me to be around to see their unborn children – as though the vaccine would make me immortal, invulnerable to every other ailment as well as Covid. These people are highly intelligent, capable, loving and hard working. I try to engage them in discussion. Most don’t really want to know but some have promised to come back to me when they have considered my objections.
Part of the problem may be that I can be unduly long-winded so here, as succintly as I can manage are the principal reasons for my reservations (I don’t say ‘hesitancy’):
1. The new vaccines have not been adequately trialled and assessments of safety and efficacy based on such trials that have taken place are of dubious validity. We should be appalled that essentially experimental vaccines are being rolled out on a global scale.
2. The record of some of the pharmaceutical companies making these vaccines, notably Pfizer, is one of proven corruption and does not inspire trust. Nor does the past and current performance of the British government in this crisis inspire trust.
3. There has been no public discussion of the relative merits of the vaccines and no discussion that takes objections to any or all of them into account.
4. Questions have been raised about suspected adverse reactions to vaccinations, in particular questions concerning blood clotting, found in a small number of recipients. Concern about this clotting has led some countries to temporarily suspend their rollout of the Oxford Astrazenica vaccine. Further, in an open letter to the European Medicines Agency a number of doctors and scientists “question whether cardinal issues regarding the safety of the vaccines were adequately addressed prior to their approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA)” and suggests a mechanism whereby the vaccines might cause the blood clots reported.
5. Besides concerns about adverse reactions in the short term we might be concerned about the long term implications and possibly effects of a possibly long term vaccination programme on the natural immune systems of populations as well as individuals.
6. I have seen no evidence that vaccinations administered during the past three months have resulted in a fall in mortality, morbidity or the rate of infections.
Latest Essay
I’m finally updating this blog but for now just referencing an essay about vaccination I finished writing earlier today.