Thread by @Tinkzorg

As Comrade Land rightly points out, the risk of this stuff for the baseline legitimacy of technocratic government is completely out of this world. I think this shows why as the data is becoming clear about the lack of efficacy for these vaccines, states are still doubling down.🧵

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1462323961748803592

They can't actually afford to back down from a policy that is increasingly becoming nonsensical. Everyone needs to get vaccinated to stop the spread, but the spread isn't stopping, and suddenly you're an anti-vaxxer if you "merely" got the two shots and no boosters.

And now, even if you've got three shots, it looks like the lockdowns aren't actually meant to end, basically ever. But even as these policies are being put into action, the rates of infection are... not actually dropping? So what is the off-ramp to this?

Like an insolvent bank, I think our politicians are basically stuck in a mode where they keep "borrowing" to cover up the insolvency: they have to keep this circus going, because once the music stops, there will quite likely be *hell* to pay for everyone involved.

Land isn't at all incorrect or hyperbolic in calling this a "regime-terminating" level of embarrassment. In the US, these mandates have been an incredibly volatile driver of polarization, and of dehumanization of red America. If it's revealed to all be based on a lie... wow.

Put aside the potential human cost (the risk of a faulty vaccine was always there, but groupthink made discussing this impossible), but just think about what it will do to ruling class legitimacy. There are already massive riots and protests in many European countries.

But these massive riots and protests are based on the assumption that the vaccine probably work (particular issues aside), but that the imposition of these mandates are tyrannical in and of themselves. What do you think will happen when people start believing they just kill you?

Note: the particular blog post cited by Land looks to be statistically flawed in pretty serious ways. But one should never be reliant on a single data point in any of this stuff. There's quite a lot of data to suggest that these mandates have serious problems.

The next year or so will be a period where we'll see whether the statistics - on the whole - point to weal or woe. But the lack of a policy "off-ramp", as well as the growing concern about stuff like myocarditis are issues that are not going to go away in the short term.