1/ The Covid pandemic has been used as an opportunity for elites with particular global economic and political interests to accelerate the process of arranging the infrastructure for a new biosecurity surveillance regime.
2/ This novel paradigm of governance will be directed and managed largely by unelected technocrats. This regime will increasingly demand ever more intrusive and burdensome interventions into the lives and bodies of individuals.
3/ Citizens will no longer conceived as persons with inherent dignity, but as fungible elements of an undifferentiated “mass” to be guided by supposedly benevolent health and security policies.
4/ The marriage of global public health with novel technologies of surveillance, personal data extraction, and control now makes possible novel forms of domination unimaginable in the totalitarian regimes of the past.
5/ In our present circumstances, resisting this regime will require critiquing and rejecting some of the most disastrous Covid policies of the past two years, including widespread lockdowns and vaccine mandates/passports.
6/ These efforts are necessary to slow the rapid acceptance of this new paradigm by demonstrating the limits to what can be required of citizens under the guise of a public health emergency. So we have delineated few to no limits.
7/ The means of surveillance and control will become ever more refined and invasive, with QR codes giving way to retinal scans, and climate change and other social issues overtaking Covid as the “public health crisis” of the day.
8/ The urgent task today is to help those around us see why we should, and how we can (1) recognize, (2) understand, and (3) reject and resist this new despotism.
Things are moving very fast, so the time to begin is now.
The feature common to all totalitarianisms is not concentration camps or jackbooted soldiers using force--though the deployment of coercion over consent is always a characteristic feature.
The most central feature is the silencing, the forbidding, of certain questions.
Dissent becomes impossible not because of physical constraints, but as a result of psychological habits induced by a steady stream of propaganda and psyops. Totalitarianism operates then no longer on the physical, but on the moral, level.
Conscience is thus silenced.
"A choice will be made, in the name of the greater prosperity made possible by science, which will lead to that 'ban of the questions' – even if they are rationally legitimate – & to that conscious & deliberate 'obstruction of reason' that are characteristic of totalitarianism."
1/ An AP fact checker reached out and inform me that this tweet is false: two cardiologists confirmed that 70% of myocarditis cases are mild or asymptomatic. But the term "mild myocarditis" is misleading to the lay public.
2/ Imagine a physician saying to a patient or parent that 70% of the heart attacks caused by a proposed medical intervention are mild or minimally symptomatic. The patient would still quite rightly be concerned: attaching "mild" to "heart attack" does not allay this concern.
3/ Another way to think about it: if a medication has a mild adverse-effect (e.g., dry mouth or even weight gain), a doctor might continue it if the benefits were significant. But no doctor would continue a medication that was causing myocarditis, even if mild or asymptomatic.
1/ The largest population-based study comparing the unvaccinated/naturally immune to the vaccinated found that vaccinated people were 6 to 13 times more likely to get infected, 27 times more likely to get symptomatic infections, and 8 times more likely to be hospitalized.
2/ These findings are not surprising, since infection with the virus allows our body to form an immune response to many parts (epitopes) on the virus, whereas the vaccines expose us only to one part, the spike protein.
3/ Data from Qatar found that only 0.02% of Covid recovered individuals experienced reinfection, with no waning over time, and with reinfections less severe than initial infections.
1/ Much of the debate on natural immunity focuses on questions about antibody levels, but these are of variable clinical relevance:
2/ antibody levels do not necessarily correlate with long-term immunity. Circulating antibodies always drop over time, whether after infection or vaccination.
3/ Long-term immunity relies also on memory B-cells (which quickly ramp up antibody production when re-exposed to the virus) and T-cells.
Ideas are not viruses. You won't expose yourself and "catch" something deadly by reading, talking to, or considering the viewpoints and perspectives of those with whom you have strong disagreements. Be open and willing to learn. Admit that you don't yet have all the answers.
I want to follow my own advice here. Engage me if you think my claims expressed here or elsewhere are mistaken. Give reasons, cite evidence, ask difficult questions. I will engage and try to respond in kind, so long as there are no bad faith arguments or ad hominem attacks.
I have faith that shared rationality, in which all of us can participate, is not yet dead (though it may be on life support these days). We cannot let propaganda and power games have the last word.
1/ @mdlizs and @DrSandman11 I have never encountered someone who is "advocating for 'natural immunity' over vaccination." I certainly have never done so. This is a straw-man argument, but a telling one. I advocate for those who have *already recovered* from Covid.
2/ I have never suggested anyone deliberately try to get infected with the virus. This mischaracterization is telling, for it reveals one of the key reasons that so many public health officials and physicians refuse to acknowledge what research shows about natural immunity.
3/ Scientific findings are ignored not because they are false, but because people worry that if the public knows, it might impede behavioral outcomes (getting vaccinated) that public health officials want. But this just reveals a condescending contempt for the intelligence...