As we saw throughout the 20th 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
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I wish you would just get the shot because I love you.
ReplyDeleteI'm not important. But freedom is.
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