THE UNVAXXED: WHY DON’T WE JUST KILL THE BASTARDS?

 

          As we saw throughout the 20^th Century, the segregation of dissenters is an essential piece of every totalitarian takeover.  This is because the propaganda and the fear campaign is never universally successful.  As long as the screws are tightened slowly and the pressure on the citizenry is unrelenting, a large majority will accept the new way of thinking.  But not all.  Even with opposing voices censored and silenced, there will be a small but significant number (10%?  25%?), who will look behind the curtain and see the contradictions.  As liberties disappear and the government enforcement apparatus grows more powerful, the dissenters may take to the streets, and become louder and more belligerent.

 

          The security apparatus cannot permit this to occur.  Whatever new reality the cult leaders or totalitarians wish to impose, it is never a worldview that can withstand much scrutiny.  The new ideology must simply be accepted without question and the dissenters must be made to disappear.

 

          One proven technique for doing this is to segregate them and make their lives miserable.  That is what is happening now, around the world.  In Paris, police walk through sidewalk cafes demanding proof of vaccination from the patrons.  If none is produced, the diners are arrested along with the owner of the café.  Unvaccinated people are also barred from concerts, malls, gyms, swimming pools, bars, supermarkets, and long-distance travel on trains, airplanes, and busses.  Restrictions on the unvaxxed in Italy and Germany are similar.  Those in San Francisco are worse.  The same type of program for vaccine passports is coming to New York City, though the enforcement mechanisms are not yet in place.

 

          Segregation serves several functions.  First, it creates powerful incentives to take the shots.  I can ride a bus!  I can go to a bar and meet girls!  I can visit my friend in the hospital!  The loneliness and isolation of being separated from society and being stigmatized as a “problem” can be very stressful.  Second, it isolates dissenters not merely from polite society (including friends and family), but also from each other, making any kind of organized protest more difficult.  And finally, the enforced difficulties in living their lives may induce the dissenters to resort to violence, and this would justify a brutal response from the government that would permit total suppression of the dissent.

 

          In addition to the discrimination now being visited upon the unvaxxed, they are constantly being vilified by the authorities.  Public debate used to be permitted in America, but the unvaxxed are supposedly doing something else.  They are spreading “misinformation” which endangers the lives of more sensible Americans.  Vaccines are “safe and effective,” we are told repeatedly (though there never seems to be much proof of this presented), so any questioning of vaccination must be coming from “conspiracy theorists” and Proud Boys and Q-anon-ers.  Forget that First Amendment you may have heard about.  It no longer applies to the unvaxxed.  They are a menace to public safety.

 

          And now, in addition to being wrong, and stupid, and Trump supporters, and white supremacists, and whatever else, they are dirty as well.  We are now experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” you see.  They are carrying disease, so we must shun them.  The same phrase is used by President Biden, CDC Director Walensky, Governors Newsom and Tate Reeves, and all the editorialists on TV and in the newspapers.  The unvaxxed must be separated from those of us good vaccinated people who have embraced the new reality.  Eventually, for the rulers of totalitarian systems, it’s not enough that the despised people can’t go to a Billy Eilish concert.  They must be identified as different, vile, and disgusting.  They must be taken away and put behind a wall.

 

          Except…except….  What exactly does public health have to do with it?  How does the separation of the vaxxed from the unvaxxed serve any function other than to punish a portion of society that the government doesn’t like?  Vaccinated people can still get COVID and they can still transmit it to others.  So can unvaccinated people.  If your vaccination rendered you immune to infection, well, good for you.  You need fear no one.  But if your vaccination didn’t work that well, and you are still vulnerable, it makes little difference who is sitting next to you at the bar, does it?

 

          The current argument of the segregationists is that, while vaccinated people can still get COVID, and transmit it to others, these cases are infrequent and relatively mild.  When the unvaxxed catch the bug, however, they are much more likely to be hospitalized, or even die.  If this were true, it still would not constitute a public health justification for segregating the unvaxxed, but fortunately, it is false.

 

          Looking at the history of this story, it seems to have grown out of an attempt to explain the embarrassing fact that a LOT of vaccinated people were getting COVID.  After telling us all how safe and effective the vaccines were, the CDC was forced to admit, on April 30, 2021, that there were over ten thousand “breakthrough cases” among people who had been fully vaccinated.  They also noted that this was “likely a substantial undercount of all SARS-CoV-2 infections among fully vaccinated persons.”  Oops!

 

          The CDC, once it discovered there were a lot of people still getting COVID even after taking the highly effective vaccines, decided it wasn’t all that interested in finding out how many such people there are.  Thus they announced that, as of May 1, they would no longer count breakthrough cases unless those victims became hospitalized or died.  If ever you wanted more proof of the politicization and corruption of the CDC, here it is.  CDC policy appears to be that if you don’t get the numbers you want in order to tell the tale you wish to tell, just stop counting.

 

          This is why, instead of data, we now get those anonymous “medical experts” telling us that most new cases in America are among the unvaccinated.  They cannot possibly know this since the CDC stopped counting COVID cases among the vaccinated almost four months ago.

 

          Other countries are reporting a very different story.

 

          In three of the most-highly vaccinated countries in the world, new cases are just as likely to appear in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated.  In Israel, for example, about 60% of the population has gotten their shots and, as the Washington Post reports, most of the new cases are vaccinated people. The UK, where about 61% of the people are fully vaxxed, is similar.  Though the numbers and percentages change from week to week, a majority of new cases occur in the vaccinated.  In Iceland, with 86% of the population vaccinated, one would not expect to see a surge in cases if the vaccines actually stopped transmissions.  However, the government re-imposed restrictions (masks, distancing, capacity limits, etc.), in July following an uptick in infections.

 

          One oddball bit of data comes from the voyage of the Carnival Vista out of Galveston on July 31.  Of 4336 passengers and crew, all but 101 were vaccinated.  Yet when everyone was tested in Belize City four days later, there were 27 COVID cases found, and every one of them had been vaccinated.  Again, these are small numbers and not definitive of anything, but when the only people getting the bug are vaxxed, it doesn’t exactly support the party line being pounded into us every day, does it?  

 

          Looking around the world, it is very hard to find any evidence for the claim that most cases are happening to the unvaccinated.  As for the other scare tactic---the idea that the most serious infections are reserved for the unvaxxed---there is little to support that idea either, partly because the sheer numbers of serious COVID cases are so small now.

 

          In Israel, as of August 14, there were 514 people hospitalized with serious COVID problems and 59% of them were vaccinated (in a country where 60% are vaxxed).  (Source: Science, August 16, 2021.)  Uri Shalit, from the Israel Institute of Technology, summarized his statistical findings as follows: “One of the big stories from Israel [is that] vaccines work, but not well enough.”

 

          The UK, again, is similarly inconclusive.  With a very small number of serious cases, the percentage of them that are vaxxed (61%), is about the same percentage as are vaxxed in the entire country.

 

          In Iceland, with its tiny population, there were only twenty people in the hospital with COVID on August 10, and no one had died in the recent “surge,” so no conclusions can fairly be drawn.

 

          In short, it is only possible to invent this “pandemic of the unvaccinated” theory if, like the CDC, you don’t have any data.  In other countries, where they actually count breakthrough cases, the question of who gets COVID and who gets the most serious infections are very much open questions.  At the moment, there is not much to support the idea that unvaccinated people are more likely to get COVID or, if they do, are more likely to get seriously ill.  In fact, the more data you examine, the easier it is to conclude the opposite is true.

 

          There is an additional problem with the data used to concoct the US government’s vicious “pandemic of the unvaxxed” story, and it’s one that is common to a number of different vaccines and attempts to prove their effectiveness.  This is the problem of “healthy user bias.”  It is rarely discussed because it is a favorite of the anti-vaxxer movement, so to give it any credence would be viewed as providing support to people who are widely derided as lunatics.  However, it might be the best argument the anti-vaxxers have.

 

          When researchers try to evaluate the effectiveness of a vaccine by comparing the results for those who took it versus those who refused, the same problem always emerges.  Everyone who gets counted is self-selected, and there is no control group.  This means that the people who choose to take the vaccine are probably different from the people who choose not to.

 

          Flu shots are an excellent example of what happens.  We have known for years that people who get flu shots (who choose to get flu shots), have much lower morbidity than people who do not get flu shots, and this is true even in the summertime when there is no flu to worry about.

 

          The obvious inference is that people who get flu shots are more health-conscious than people who don’t.  Maybe they don’t drink as much.  Maybe they don’t eat as many potato chips.  Maybe they are not as fat.  Maybe they work out a bit and don’t watch as much TV.  Whatever the differences are, it is clear that people who get the flu shot every year are generally healthier than the people who don’t.  And they are healthier not because they got a flu shot but because they are the sort of people who will choose to get a flu shot. 

 

          And this is a problem with COVID vaccines.  There are people that hunted on-line for a shot at a drug store in another city and then waited in line overnight, and there are people who will only take the damn shot if you tie them down and stick the needle in their arm---these are two very different kinds of people, and whether they have been vaccinated is the least of the differences. Therefore, even if it is true that unvaxxed people who get COVID fare worse than vaxxed people who get COVID, the differences cannot logically be attributed to the effect of the vaccines.

 

          Of course, none of this logic and none of this data and none of this science stops the architects of our biomedical security state from tightening the clamps, segregating the unvaccinated, and arresting those who object.  They are not interested in these arguments.  They do not even hear these arguments.

             They just want us to be safe.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki     

A NOTE FOR TIME TRAVELERS

 

“When the history books are written about the use of non-pharmacologic measures during this pandemic, we will look as pre-historic and barbaric and tribal as our ancestors during the plagues of the middle ages.”   ---Vinay Prasad

 

“People should not be walking around with masks.  There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”  ---Anthony Fauci on 60 Minutes, March 8, 2020

 

           As I review the COVID rants I publish on this blog, I sometimes try to imagine what someone ten years from now will think, reading this tale of mass psychosis that occurred in 2020, 2021, and beyond.  In particular, I wonder what some future reader will make of this or that government action or command.  Why did people think that way in 2021?  Why did the government do that?  Or say that?

 

          For example, I began the article “Line Up For Your Booster!” this way:

           On July 27, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced a new policy.  The agency now recommends that people vaccinated against COVID wear masks when indoors.  Over two-thirds of the American people have had at least one shot, but the vaccinated are apparently in danger.

 

            In 2031, will this news item make any sense at all?  Or will readers ask, “OK.  The vaccines didn’t work very well.  Got it.  But why would the authorities want anyone to wear masks?  Did they really think mask-wearing would stop people from transmitting viruses?”

 

          And here’s the answer for you 2031 readers.  Most government officials did not really believe masks would protect anyone from catching COVID (though some probably did believe that).  But early on, in April of 2020, government mask mandates were used to frighten and dehumanize the populace, and set the reshaping of society in motion.  There never was any scientific basis or public health rationale for the mask-wearing, and in fact, public health authorities all over the world told people NOT to wear masks because they presented health and respiratory dangers of their own.  These scientists even cited (correctly), peer-reviewed studies in medical journals demonstrating the ineffectiveness or hazard of mask-wearing.  Then, suddenly, in April 2020, they changed their tune.  There were no new studies, there was no new science---but governments everywhere started issuing rules and regulations ordering the populace to wear the things.

 

          One would expect that such an abrupt change could only take place following an argument in the community of scientists about the wearing of masks, but no such argument ever took place.  Instead, the rules were issued, the public health authorities fell into line, and opposing voices were silenced.  Once the program was implemented, those who offered any objection or criticism of the new rules were de-funded, banned from TV and radio, and had their postings on the internet erased.

 

          In America, this happened on one day.  On April 3, 2020, the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams all announced that not only were masks beneficial in slowing the transmission of respiratory viruses, but they should be mandatory across the country.  Up until the previous day, they had all held the opposite position, as had the World Health Organization.  The WHO actually maintained its anti-mask advice until June 2020, when it too finally fell into line.

 

          Now, with mandates in place for the last sixteen months, there have been dozens of studies on the results.  These are mostly not peer-reviewed or published in reputable journals, and one can find a wide variety of them, but you cannot review this literature (as I have), and conclude that this extraordinary public health experiment has been a success.  There was never any reason to think that mask-wearing would prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses, and there still isn’t.

 

          Still, the official position of governments around the world, and the public health bureaucracy, is that masks “work.”  No discussion is permitted on this false proposition.  And that is why, when the Director of the CDC announces that the COVID vaccines are not very effective, she urges vaccinated people to wear masks so they don’t get sick.  For her to offer some explanation of the mask recommendation would suggest there might be some possible doubt about the effectiveness of masking, and the CDC cannot allow that sort of thinking.  Masks stop the transmission of viral diseases, and that’s that, as far as the authorities are concerned. 

 

          Lockdowns, meaning the closing of schools and government services and small businesses (but not large ones), were another measure with no precedents, lots of reasons to think they would do a great deal of harm, and no support in scientific literature.  And again, no discussion occurred on the question of whether they would prevent infections, save lives, or do any good at all.  They had never been tried in previous pandemics, and therefore there was no way of justifying them.  The only experience of lockdowns had been in Wuhan Province, China, at the outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020, and there was no evidence from Wuhan that the lockdowns had been anything but a nightmare.

 

          The other worldwide public health experiment has been “social distancing,” another safety measure with no precedents and no scientific justification.  Of course it is true that if you are two miles away from some infected person, they will not be able to make you sick, so there is some measure of truth behind the idea.  The distances used in the “social distancing” guidelines are completely arbitrary, however, and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.  Three feet, six feet, one meter, two meters---take your pick.  And now, from studies done over the last eighteen months, it seems likely that the minimum effective distance for “social distancing” would be more like twenty feet, but since this would render any commerce or social interaction virtually impossible, these findings are never discussed.

 

          So my message to time travelers and historians revisiting this period and trying to understand what happened is this: we are not as pre-historic and barbaric and tribal as our actions might indicate.  Many of us, including many who are enforcing the restrictions imposed on us, 1) know that masks are ineffective in stopping the transmission of respiratory viruses, 2) know that lockdowns have no scientific justification as a disease-mitigation strategy, and 3) know that keeping people six feet apart when there’s a respiratory virus floating around is pointless.  But all of these societal interventions and rules have been imposed upon us from above, and any attempt to discuss the wisdom behind them is punished by the authorities.

 

          Masks work.  Lockdowns save lives.  Social distancing prevents infection.  All these assumptions are now treated as facts.  No dissent or debate is permitted.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki               

THE SEGREGATION BEGINS

         In my big-box store, I now see parents with bare faces walking around with masked little children.  The parents, I’m guessing, are vaccinated, and at the moment in Pennsylvania, a vaccinated person is not required to wear a mask in a store.  Their six-year-olds are not vaccinated, however, so the parents put masks on them.  I get it.  It’s what they are “supposed” to do.  They’re following the guidelines, and when the guidelines change, they then follow the new guidelines.  And then when the guidelines change again, well, guess what they do.

 

          It’s hard for me to forgive them for simply accepting whatever they are told, with no attempt to use their own reason and common sense.  In my mind, it is one thing to do what the authorities command you to do, but it’s another when you abandon responsibility for your own children’s welfare.  Beyond the truly heart-breaking sight of little kids being forced, for no reason, to wear the damn masks, these parents are also teaching their children to do whatever they are told on TV.  In the long run, that’s far worse.

 

          “No, Johnny.  Don’t read those scientist articles you found.  In our family, we just do what Anderson Cooper tells us.”

 

          My feelings about these cult members are complicated.  For the most part, I feel sorry for those who just believe what Fauci or Snoop Dog or Dr. Oz or Whoopie Goldberg tells them.  After 18 months of this, anyone could have found time to look half an inch beneath the layer of propaganda and manipulation that blankets us, but they have chosen not to try because…well, I don’t know why exactly, but it is certainly easier to be part of the 75% who have embraced the new reality than to endure the shunning, censorship, name-calling, and now even criminal prosecution that descends on those who refuse to be moved, like livestock, down the chute.

 

          I live in the world, and I want to have friends and acquaintances and people who will go to Murphy’s Tavern with me for burger night, so I don’t proselytize.  I don’t argue.  It would be pointless anyway since no argument has ever been permitted about masks and lockdowns and vaccines and vaccine passports and mandatory testing and everything else.  There have only been mandates or guidelines or regulations, usually issued by unelected bureaucrats, and the cultists have accepted them without question, while the rest of us have not.  What is taking place is not an argument because an argument is what happens in a representative democracy among free people.  This is something far more frightening. 

 

          But though I don’t try to antagonize people I know, I don’t lie about the madness either.  And people who know me will probe.  They need to know what I think so they will know whether they can trust me.  And then when they find out, they don’t anymore.

 

          The scary part right now in America is not the government, though that will come, as it has in other countries.  The scary part is the friends and neighbors and family members who silently decide to avoid you.  The process does not begin with the KGB or the SS or the East German Stasi.  It begins with the people who would stop by your house to chat and have a cup of tea, but now never find the time.  It begins with family members who, you suddenly realize, haven’t seen you or talked to you in over a year.  The process of segregation begins very quietly.  You wave to someone on the street and they pretend they didn’t see you, or they quickly wave back, then hurry off in the other direction.  As the cult reality takes hold, you come to understand you are the white supremacist or the anti-vaxxer or the climate change denier, though you may not really be any of those people.  It’s what they are thinking about you.  It’s what they are muttering about you to their spouses and their children.  And that’s how it starts.

 

          The train ride to the country comes later, much later.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki

LINE UP FOR YOUR BOOSTER!

 

          On July 27, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced a new policy.  The agency now recommends that people vaccinated against COVID wear masks when indoors.  Over two-thirds of the American people have had at least one shot, but the vaccinated are apparently in danger.

 

          There is only one explanation for this.  The vaccines don’t work that well.

 

          This is not really a surprise.  Many of us have been expecting it, mostly because of the relentless assurances that the vaccines were wondrously effective, since this blather could not possibly have been based on anything real.  It’s a seasonal respiratory affliction, and the late spring and summer means that cases and hospitalizations will go down to almost zero.  That’s what happened with COVID last summer, and it happened this year as well.  Yet we were told every day that this entirely natural process was caused by the vaccines.

 

          I’ve tried to keep an open mind on the effectiveness of the vaccines.  The problem has been that, as COVID cases disappear, vaccine effectiveness becomes almost impossible to demonstrate.  When you get to a stage where there are very few cases, how do you prove there would have been a couple more cases were it not for the vaccine?  Whether or not the vaccines work, you cannot prove it in the summertime.

 

          The other issue that is just beginning to surface is the long-term effectiveness of the vaccines, or rather the lack of it.  Stay tuned, but data is beginning to emerge that suggest the available vaccines will keep COVID at bay for only three or four months, and then rapidly become useless.

 

          In other words, there’s no very strong evidence the vaccines work, any protection they do provide may be getting weaker, and the CDC is now admitting it.

 

          And this is why you vaccinated people need to put your masks back on.  The vaccines didn’t really work that well, you see.  Sorry about the sore arms and the blood clots.  Sorry about the dizziness and the disorientation.  Sorry some of you died the next day.  Oh, well.  That’s “science” for you. 

 

          From the beginning, the entire point of this exercise has been to get as much of the Western world vaccinated as quickly as possible in order to lay the groundwork for vaccine passports.  The passports themselves have always been the goal, and not the vaccinations.

 

          After all the fake “science” and COVID terror we have been subjected to, it is easy to forget that vaccine passports have no public health function.  If you are vaccinated and safe from infection, it doesn’t matter who is sitting at the next table in the restaurant. If you are vaccinated but not safe from infection (because your protection faded or it didn’t work in the first place), you are in danger whether the person at the next table has been vaccinated or not.  It’s impossible to come up with any coherent justification for vaccine passports other than as the lynchpin of a larger plan to centralize government power in the hands of the new totalitarians.  There’s just no medical reason for vaccinated people to fear the unvaccinated, or vice versa, and there’s no reason the two groups should be kept apart.

 

          Vaccine passports, however, are essential to the perpetrators of this madness because they permit the segregation of dissenters, a Chinese-style social credit system, and the elimination of any effective resistance to the new world being imposed upon us by the forces who have unleashed this worldwide COVID propaganda campaign upon us for the last year and a half.

         

          Under a totalitarian system, dissent cannot be permitted, and a refusal to take the shot is dissent. Here, it is a particularly dangerous form of dissent because it is suggestive of other dissenting views that are also viewed as dangerous.  The unvaxxed, for example, tend to believe the 2020 election was stolen and the 2016 election was not.  The unvaxxed tend not to want their children taught that America’s founding principle was, and is, white supremacy.  The unvaxxed tend to think everybody should use the same damn pronouns we always have.  The unvaxxed tend to think Trump is not Hitler.  The unvaxxed tend not to be “woke.”  And that’s why they need to be segregated, so they can be silenced, fired from their jobs, impoverished, and re-educated.    

 

          The weakness of the entire scheme, it now appears, is that the vaccination part had to be accomplished very quickly, before we knew whether the vaccines worked and before people started asking whether taking the vaccines made any sense.  Hence,

1) the inescapable campaign promoting the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines (though there could be no reliable data on effectiveness for many months, and though the vaccines are quite a bit less safe than other vaccines),

2) government-directed censorship (worldwide) of negative information about COVID vaccines,

3) the promotion of vaccination through prizes, lotteries, tickets to sports events, and other perks, and

4) the shaming and demonization of the unvaxxed.

They were willing to do anything to push this through, and they still are, but the flaws in the vaccines are being exposed before the universal vaccination program has been completed.

 

          And now, the entire program could blow up.  With the CDC admitting the vaccines don’t work very well, and with the growing possibility that the vaccines, even if they do work to some extent, are only effective for a few months, there is a possibility that the “vaccine-hesitants” will become the “vaccine-no-frickin’-ways”.  Let me also take this opportunity to thank some of the left-wing groups, like teachers’ unions, who insisted that everybody had to be vaxxed but now have apparently decided that some of them want a choice after all.  Any pushback against the machine is welcome.  I’ll take any allies I can find in this battle against 1984.

 

          This is the most optimistic I have been in months.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki