For obvious reasons, I am a fan of Rand Paul. I actually have in my book collection a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”–which in my view should be required reading at least at the college level, and optimally that of high school–that was given to me as a gift by the founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, and which I later got Senator Paul to sign at a book signing.
Since I really think that specific book is what began the process of turning me from a generic college Democrat into a passionate conservative, it is significant for three reason. If you have not read it, I would encourage you to do so. It is not polemical in the slightest, in my view. It merely makes clear the assumptions upon which leftwing economics are based, and their logical consequences, which are less liberty, less wealth, and greater inequality.
Be all that as it may, Senator Paul has done by far the best job of anyone in our “System”, writ large, in asking Anthony Fauci obvious questions, and pointing out his inconsistencies, dissimulations, and outright lies.
The specific scientific question of the moment, which translates to a political question, is how much immunity having had the illness provides.
Now, as I pointed out multiple times over the past year, starting last spring or summer, “vaccines”, so called, work on the immune system. If no lasting immune response can be achieved, then no vaccine can work. Conversely, IF a vaccine, in the proper sense of the word, CAN work, then having had the illness will convey the same or better level of immunity.
This is more or less saying that if X=Y, then Y=X. It is common sense. It is obvious.
Politically, though, the whole of the lockdowns and coercive panic depended on the notion that Herd Immunity could not be achieved without “vaccines” (since I’ve discussed mRNA often and recently, I won’t here). The WHO in fact found itself compelled, for patently political reasons, to modify their definition of Herd Immunity–which was at that point scientific, historically based, and obviously accurate–from a condition where enough people had gotten the illness and recovered with immunity that the disease stopped spreading, to a condition in which engineered immunity through vaccination (sterilization? We don’t know yet, but they did that in Africa) was the prerequisite.
Before, it was “either recovered or vaccinated”. The new version was “vaccinated only”.
Why? Because WE COULD AND SHOULD HAVE ACHIEVED HERD IMMUNITY SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR AGO, if we had followed the “Focused Protection” articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, and most likely far fewer people would have died, far fewer lives would have been ruined, much less economic destruction would have happened, and the collective trauma would be much less.
So vaccinations and the abusive public policies of most of the worlds governments go hand in hand. If having had the illness conveys the same or better immunity, then that means the policies of the last year were pointless. It also puts back into play all of the better treatments which were NOT USED. We have to wonder why vitamins and mineral supplementation to eliminate Nutritional Immunodeficiency were not recommended. Why HCQ and Ivermectin were sidelined as “dangerous and unproven” while injections barely six months old using a technology new to the purpose were pushed as “absolutely safe”.
Science is politics, now. To argue the “science” is to dissent with the Church, and its priests. And to be branded a heretic is to risk political, personal and economic consequences. They cannot, yet, burn people at the stake, but they can engage in “high tech auto-da-fe‘s”, if I might offer a nod to Clarence Thomas (one of only two honest Supreme Court Justices).
So when Rand Paul and Fauci argue particularly about this topic, they are offering two solutions; two visions of the role of government; and effectively, between the Enlightenment, and the medieval Catholic Church; between actual science and reason, and purchased indulgences and all the corruption they imply.
I have not had to modify any of my views in the last year. That is saying that all the data needed was available last March. In point of fact, I proposed something like the Great Barrington Declaration last April or May or June. It was a logical deduction from really indisputable premises.
Millions of people will die unnecessarily from this massive crime. People will starve to death in the Poor World (I have been struggling for words to replace the Third World, and perhaps that is it) and die of diseases they would have survived had they not been chronically hungry and stressed.
They will die of cancers that would have been caught in time.
They will die deaths of despair over the next decade or two. Children, who were in 6th grade, will develop depressions in their twenties that lead to drug overdoses in their thirties, all because of this traumatic period.
They will die of stress and alcoholism brought on by being unemployed for two years, or forced to work a much worse job. Yes, there are plenty of jobs in the service industries, but they do not pay well. Middle aged men and women who lost good jobs in this thing may never get them back.
And as Martin Kulldorff particularly has pointed out, the blow struck to public faith in our systems–in the NIH and WHO and CDC particularly–is substantial and extremely damaging. I don’t trust those motherfuckers. No one who GETS what just happens does, or will for a very, very long time, at least, if they do not publicly engage in some Glasnost and purge their ranks of political pukes.
In nearly all ways, the past year has made most of our lives darker (I may be an exception, but I was ready for this), more fearful, less certain, less trusting, and less free.
All of this is pure evil. Almost none of this was ever necessary. As I put it to a guy in the front of this battle, we lost the war for the Present Narrative, but the battle for the future of the past is beginning now, and there is every chance that if we retain a critical mass of decent human beings in our government, universities, press corps, and citizenry generally, we might prevent the bastards from filling the history books with a bunch of fucking lies.