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Mark Steyn and Naomi Wolf
Mark had an excellent interview with Naomi Wolf. You can see it here.
Mark made a comment I’ve thought about a lot recently: that politicians no longer seem to come from the countries or cities they supposedly represent. Trudeau, Macron, Cameron, etc., seem to represent a slick, bloodless, globalist empire.
The mayors of the 1960s-70s may have been uncouth and corrupt, but they loved their cities. Now they’re eager to lock down their cities and institute vaccine mandates. Perhaps it’s the corrupting effect of Big Pharma which has billions of dollars to buy off politicians and media.
Published in General
With even Fauci walking back the idea that he originally proposed that the vaccines were safe and 99% + effective, and then also his going on to state that the vaxxes no longer prevented transmission, it is hard to not ask why “Risk to Benefit” is not more widely understood as being the most important part of this conversation.
About the only benefit has been the psychological relief that those who got the product did receive, if they got the product willingly and without their employers or family members coercing them.
All the information that has come out regarding how the vaccines lower one’s immune system, as well as foster anti body dependent enhancement, which is a common feature of all flu vaccines, and how that enhancement then causes the variants to have a ready supply of vax recipients as hosts for the variants are among reasons to turn away from the vax program.
On top of this, we lost our thriving economy, have conditioned people to subliminally accept that people can “asymptomatically transmit an invisible harm,” watched suicide numbers sky rocket, and now realize that young people are twice as depressed as prior to the “pandemic” and more. (Prior to COVID, some 10% of HS students contemplated suicide – during the pandemic the numbers shot up to 25%, and now it around 20% of all young people.)
Sweden opted to leave their society mostly free to live normally. Although their COV death numbers were a bit higher per every 100,000 people, they had no boost in suicide rates. Here in the USA, in some counties & occupations, where lockdowns were strict, suicides outnumbered COV deaths by a factor of three hundred percent. (We saved some much older people at the expense of losing lives among our work force.)
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Here I must confess to be parroting Steven Kirsch. If he is in error, then I am in error. Going back and reviewing some of his broadsides, there is a disagreement on how to interpret data, with some implication that there is data that either the government has and won’t disclose or data that it won’t address publicly. For example —
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone in government was desiring plausible deniability. That is a classic bureaucratic trait. (Full disclose, I spent a career in bureaucracy, so I think I can vouch for the truth of that.) The best way to have plausible deniability is to not look for the embarrassing answer. If CDC is giving full and timely access to datasets from disinterested and ethical scientists, then I am pleased.
This is odd. She might have tried an Orthodox Synagogue (rather than a Catholic Church–which, to me, says something profound about her Jewishness); I was able to go to any one of many in NYC a year ago, all of which were open and without restrictions.
What an interesting conundrum. Do we squelch any attempts at early treatment, because that would “stop” the fast tracking of a vaccine, the effectiveness of which is unknown; definitely unknown at the time people were denied early treatment. How many people died so that people would not be denied a vaccine, at some later date when the virus has become bored and is no longer lethal? (And before you answer, you might be comfortable making the declarative that the C19 vaccines ” … actually have been shown to keep people alive and out of hospitals”; not all of us are convinced)
Having lived elsewhere, one of the things I have loved most about the USA is that when there’s a problem, you get millions of people trying to solve that problem. Sometimes they’re motivated by profit, sometimes they’re just people who love a challenge. Sometimes they’re people who just love their fellow man. I care little about motivations, but I care and appreciate greatly the benefits I have received.
What happened with C19 is that someone decided that vaccines had to be THE answer, therefore all other solutions/answers had to be rejected.
In a perfect (or even better world) we would have experienced thousands of doctors trying different treatments and sharing their successes and failures with their fellow doctors, while at the same time the pharmaceutical companies would have been burning the midnight oil trying to come up with … finally … that Holy Grail of vaccines. One that would work for a Corona virus.
Sucks that neither one of those things happened.
If you think that neither one of those things happened, then I haven’t the foggiest idea how your information processing unit operates.
I appreciate Wolf’s views but didn’t she support Bill Clinton – her reason for not supporting Trump would apply to Clinton.
An interesting point. In the case of Clinton she could vote for him because of the overall agenda. In the case of Trump she couldn’t vote for him in spite of the agenda. The suggestion is that she didn’t vote at all for president in 2020. We all have to confront our irrationalities.
I don’t think it’s about anybody’s processing unit.
I think that it’s about selection of information sources. There is a narrative that highly effective treatments were squelched and that an ineffective and dangerous vaccine was not just rushed to market, but oppressively mandated. This narrative is incorrect, as far as I can tell, though it’s based on partial truths. The vaccines were not perfectly effective, and had some side effects, and there was some evidence of promising treatments in the early period. It’s possible that HCQ or Ivermectin might be moderately useful, though I’ve seen mixed evidence on this. I haven’t investigated it in detail.
All of us seem inclined to accept factual allegations that fit our political and ideological biases.
This one is strange, to me, because the tendency that I see is for highly pro-Trump people to accept the terrible-vaccine narrative, even though Trump promoted the vaccines.
This doesn’t seem strange at all to me. Trump supporters are not connected to him at the hip. Trump supporters took him seriously, but not literally. Trump supporters appreciated his efforts to remove barriers to getting a vaccine option. (Robert Barnes’ analysis of the Trump contracts with Pfizer was that it said the right things and if it is proved Pfizer lied to the government in contravention of the contract the vaccine producer’s immunity will be removed.) Trump did not impose the mandates. Trump encouraged using the vaccine because he doesn’t back away from things for which he has taken credit. But his supporters don’t see vaccine hesitancy as some sort of rebuke of Trump. It is simply a rational reaction to government pressure and evolving information.
I think your view is close to the truth with respect to the vaccines and the various early treatments which might have had some benefits when used early and in appropriate combinations.
Where I think you go astray is in your perception of the narrative itself. I would suggest that most dissenters, those who are at odds with the official positions, are unhappy because of the lack of transparency and truthfulness by government and long-trusted institutions, the use of large financial influences to guide behaviors (not facts) and the cancelling of people’s lives when they disagreed.
The narrative that you describe is not my view. I am a Trump supporter who does not require that he be right about all things. I was ok that he pushed development of the vaccine and left general management of the pandemic’s community effects and spread to state authorities but not ok when the emergency use was implemented and I was outraged when the vaccine was mandated but Trump was out by then.
I would say this same thing to @thereticulator.
But that would describe me, too. The difference is I would like to do something about those problems, whereas the people who follow the “mRNA = bad” narrative would rather hug their precious narrative.
But that won’t happen unless there is a change in those who are in charge of the government processes.
Won’t change even then if people don’t give a little thought about what needs to change.
There is much work needed to clean up the education process as we have discussed in other threads. We don’t have just one problem.
If not even the people on Ricochet care, I doubt anyone else can be made to care.
If a law says the U.S. cannot fund gain-of-function research in a Chinese lab unless one of the NIH agency heads first says “Simon Says,” you can yell all you want for someone’s scalp, and you may get it, but that law remains on the books waiting for the next person to use it.
If the CDC was caught flatfooted by a pandemic because it was too busy diverting resources to gun control, you can complain all you want about contradictory messaging from the CDC early in the pandemic, but there is nothing to keep the same thing from happening again.
If Biden leans on the FDA to approve a booster for young children without even testing it on humans, and the FDA, headed by a former Pfizer exec, ignores the objections of advisory board scientists, and there is no public outcry, that tells other scientists that they probably should play along.
I think we see the same scene.
Here is link to the analysis of the qui tam case against Pfizer. Its a good read and Pfizer (and probably some FDA officials) “screwed the pooch” as they say. The immunity appears to be going down. Early days but it looks like the case will survive the motion to dismiss and discovery is going to be interesting.
Good article at the link.