Playing Devil's Advocate for the Anti-Vax Resistance
by John Kendall Hawkins
I don't know. Something's fishy. Sumpin' ain't right. The inmates from the max prison for the criminally insane have taken over the circus and the high-wire girl in shocking pink tights (if she is a she) is mysteriously calling her new mid-air act Tossed Salad. I daydream a lot in my dotage, in my house, in my room, in my easy chair, living in a city some say is the most isolated one in the world, unvaxxed. Yep, ain't been jabbed with the jibby-doo. Bolshy? Militant? Poutificant? No. Just ain't been out much and until omicron snuck in over the border there was not much mask-wearing here in Perth. That's what happens when you live in an isolated city on an island continent. You can seem to have the luxury of not giving a sh*t.
But that's not what I'm on about. If I were to have a sudden craving for a Subway footlong BMT on dark rye (natch) with all the salads and (yes) blue cheese dressing, then I would probably seek out a vaccination and wear a mask in order to procure that delectable at a shop just few klicks away. Just so that's out there. I ain't no anti-vaxxer. When I got my schoolboy shots, back in the Hank Williams era, I may have gone back for seconds on the mumps vaccine, just in case, after seeing pictures of blowfish people (plus Mary Ann was there with her ponytail and bonny pinafore). On the other hand, I'm not really much for vaxxing either.
If public safety is a need, then I'm for it. But vaccines have risks, too. In the best of circumstances -- say, without the pressure of a pandemic to force you to take a jab to be safe in public -- fully vetted vaccines, years in the making, and only approved by the FDA after years of ironing out the kinks, carry risks to your health. The FDA's job is to be sure the vaccine is as safe as it can be through trials, which is win-win: Big Pharma lowers its liability for damages caused by the vaccine; and, people are more likely to have fewer problems with a fully vetted drug. Happy faces all around. Except for the so-called anti-vaxxers, who probably wouldn't be forcibly jabbed under any circumstances.
Many anti-vaxxers are driven by fear of side effects, but maybe the larger, related issue is trust. They don't trust their own representative government to tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines and their forced implementation. The corporate media, between sex scandals, covers up government misinformation routinely and turns on skeptics -- be they well-informed or MAGA heads -- and calls it conspiracy theory-spinning.
Aside from the pot calling the kettle black, it actually creates an atmosphere where no information or "narrative" the average citizen receives from "authorities," or their MSM spokespersons, can be trusted. This only benefits those in power; nobody else. Woody Allen, in his heyday, through his wise but nebbish character Alvie Singer (Annie Hall) said that politicians are one rung below child molesters. Not all of them, of course. But enough to gum up the works. We don't elect our MSM reporters, but we do have a right to expect adversarial pieces rather than stenography, or even sitting in the lap of uxury.
The Pandemic War Games before Covid-19 Struck
Let's play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Call it a thought experiment. You remember thought, dear reader, don't you? That thrill we received in the years before all the white noise arrived electronically and suggested 2+2=5 and we were, for a while, basking in the new freedom of the postmod era and its dire critical analyses. In the battle to understand the etiology of Covid-19, its beginnings and structure, and the way forward to contain it, the MSM has been miserably inept.
For instance, it is known that back in 2019 the Department of Defense -- specifically, DARPA -- was running a Pandemic War Games with university and partner synthetic biotechnology labs to be ready with solutions after any impending viral explosion. In Urban Outbreak 2019, the Naval War College's simulated pandemic produced top-down problems that echo those seen in the implementation of solutions today, according to a Military.com piece. The results of the war games seem to suggest that, yet again, despite heightened vigilance to target dangers, the government fails to act appropriately to data-driven facts. During Urban Outbreak 2019, in a report of the 16 major game's findings, we're told that resistance to mandates is likely:
4. Forced mass quarantine or other top down approaches to an outbreak that securitize the response with law enforcement and/or military enforcement may not be successful and could increase the spread of the disease.
and
11. A highly unusual mission and/or unprecedented response conditions such as pandemic response will meet with significant resistance, even among experienced professionals. This can directly inhibit effective planning and adaptation.
These were factors gamed out back in 2019, coincidentally the year the Covid-19 virus exploded into a pandemic. But despite this understanding of resistance, it's clear, from both the Left and the Right, the response to the pandemic became, in America, highly politicized to the degree that trained scientists were tossing aside the scientific method and prematurely declaring the origin of the virus in Wuhan as a spillover from the wild -- just to quash the Trumpian explanation of a Chinese plot to kill us all. The origin of the virus remains a mystery.
Urban Outbreak 2019 wasn't the only virus game in town that year (or others). The April 2020 edition of Foreign Policy magazine had a piece, "America's Pandemic War Games Don't End Well," that suggests that the American government is systemically incapable of an efficient and efficacious response to major disasters of any kind. In this piece, Mark Perry, cites previous war games designed to prepare for disaster, including "Dark Winter" and a few others. Citing Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security, we read:
"The response to COVID-19 was slowed by a lack of testing, which led to a lack of situational awareness," she said. "The truth of this, the lesson, is that we just didn't take the coronavirus reports coming out of China seriously enough soon enough. We just weren't quick enough, and now we're scrambling to catch up. We were too busy engrossing ourselves in the cartoon spectacle that was the Trump impeachment proceedings happening at exactly the same time as the spread of the disease out of Wuhan around the world.
The Covid Reporting Has Sucked
It's the reporting on the Covid-19 vaccines that remains problematic to me. In the summer of 2020 the MSM was reporting what was well-known at the time: No vaccine had ever been developed in less than four years, and none had been developed for a virus. The NYT, for instance, ran three pieces in 2020. On April 30, we get, "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?," a long, interactive piece that brings the reader through the vaccine development process and convinces one with evidence that a vaccine for anything is unlikely in lease that four years, and reminds the educated reader that no vaccine has ever been developed for coronavirus. One interactive graph shows, after research and development has been warp-speeded, the final step to approval of a drug's distribution:
Screenshot NYT, April 30, 2020 graph from "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?" by Stuart A. Thompson.
Deep in the piece is a relevant nugget about approval process and it's worth quoting a large chunk of the section:
"F.D.A. approvals are no mere formality. Approvals typically take a full year, during which time scientists and advisory committees review the studies to make sure that the vaccine is as safe and effective as drug makers say it is.
While some steps in the vaccine timeline can be fast-tracked or skipped entirely, approvals aren't one of them. There are horror stories from the past where vaccines were not properly tested. In the 1950s, for example, a poorly produced batch of a polio vaccine was approved in a few hours. It contained a version of the virus that wasn't quite dead, so patients who got it actually contracted polio. Several children died.
The same scenario playing out today could be devastating for Covid-19, with the anti-vaccination movement and online conspiracy theorists eager to disrupt the public health response. So while the F.D.A. might do this as fast as possible, expect months to pass before any vaccine gets a green light for mass public use.
So, even if you fast-track research and development, which you should not do, the NYT writer tells us that the approval process should never be fast-tracked. Vaccine producers are making scientific claims that need to be checked. That's why, Thompson adds, "For every scientist employed by the F.D.A., there are three lawyers. And all they care about is liability." The Covid-19 vaccine producers were given pre-approval by way of the Emergency Use Authorization which essentially wiped out liability. Janet Woodcock, the current FDA head, would seem to be a perfect overseer of a careless approval process having been involved in controversy before over allowing to market underdeveloped drugs, including oxycontin use to children, according to a Guardian piece, "Biden urged not to give top FDA job to official over her role in opioid crisis."
This leads to the next NYT piece in May 2020, "Profits and Pride at Stake, the Race for a Vaccine Intensifies." Around this time Operation Warp Speed has already been announced by the Trump Administration with its promise to have an Astra-Zeneca vaccine up-and-running by October (the traditional political surprise season before the national election). This green light no doubt led to envy and a general Big Pharma push to dust off previous initiatives for vaccine production in a kind of gold rush mentality that outweighed public interest. I've written about this profit motive extensively already -- here (includes my interview with a DARPA official), here and here -- so I won't bother the reader further with it. Clearly, an under-examined aspect of the DARPA partnership with synthetic biology labs and Big Pharma is the implicit promise of making money and -- seemingly coincidental -- knowing how it was going to go down ahead of time.
For instance, did Peter Thiel just get lucky investing in Abcellera, the Vancouver company that was the first to receive American Covid survivor antibodies in late February 2020, thereby gaining an advantage over competitors. (Thiel went on to be named to the board of directors later, in November 2020.) Working with DARPA (P3) and Eli Lilly, Abcellera developed a monoclonal solution to Covid-19 within 60 days as promised by the P3 program. In my interview with DARPA, the spokesperson indicated that, though it is temporary, "one advantage of the gene-based platform capability is that it can be re-administered (no vector-based immune response)." You can trick your body into producing immunity over and over until a true-and-tried vaccine arrives -- maybe years away. This approach may have assuaged some anti-vaxxer fears and tremblings.
However, the NYT piece above does make references to the way the vaccine development could be sped up, science in essence cheated, through the use of "Challenge Trials," which requires volunteers to put their lives on the line for science and Big Pharma profits -- you can even sign up to be a pro-vaxxer here, maybe make a few bucks. Woo-hoo! But the writes note that there are significant dangers associated with such tests:
Some scientists caution that truly informed consent, even by willing volunteers, may not be possible. Even medical experts do not yet know all the effects of the virus. Those who have appeared to recover might still face future problems.
Even without challenge trials, accelerated testing may run the risk of missing potential side effects. A vaccine for dengue fever, and one for SARS that never reached the market, were abandoned after making some people more susceptible to severe forms of the diseases, not less.
Exactly as common sense would suggest -- side effects (which can take years) and increased susceptibility.
It's fair to ask, as the NYT does, and without being name-called a conspiracy theorist for potentially affecting someone's profit margin with critica query, how can these quickened vaccines be justified along R&D lines? As the NYT piece implies, caution for taking vaccines developed out of such risky development is, like the NYT says, worth thinking twice about. The writers go to cite a cautionary tale involving The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which, the NYT says, was involved in a 2018 scandal "in which ineffective vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and other conditions were injected into hundreds of thousands of babies." Â ¡Ay, caramba! says the Times. And when you compare this scandal to the aforementioned Woodcock scandal involving children and Oxycontin. Jim Willerkers! I'm a vaxxer from way back, but this news makes me stand up and take notice like a startled conspiratorial meerkat at the zoo.
Criticism of a Vaccine's Development Is Not Wrong In Itself
No doubt, many anti-vaxxers are just plain ignorant. You can just smell it on 'em (synesthesia) when you look at their images. But the MSM is often, counterintuitively, in the keep 'em ignorant and barefoot in the kitschen game. There's not much reporting on how the miracle of simultaneous vaccines occurred, what R&D corners had to be cut, the use of Challenge Trials, the list of side effects associated with vaccines, and other more permanent features of risk. Quietly, a term has developed called "Long COVID," that's meant to express long-term health consequences of those who survive Covid but continue to be casualties of the war against the virus and shifty little variants. They're like al Qaeda all over again.
As I wrote in an anti-Super Bowl piece several days ago,
They're still working on the more precise figures for the number of people who survived Covid but still go around with bad attitudes brought on by the pimpy virus, tickers once fine now weakened and ready for heartbreak or cholesterol to finish them off, lungs that are a few layers thinner and maybe prone to collapse, pulmonary embolisms, limps, tics, and assorted retardations of limb and lifestyle, social media flubs they didn't have before, cancellations of friends. Anyway, the situation is so bad with the Long COVID that even the Social Security Administration has agreed that you might be able to claim a disability pension through them -- if it meets their usual basic criterion of being a malady that will prevent an applicant from working for at least two years.
But it can be years before you "get on social security: and collect. Let's hope you don't have Obamacare while you're waiting. (You might want to get the will in order.)
This piece is not to encourage anti-vaxxing. If we have viable, well-tested vaccines available, then we should be jabbing for public safety. 1,000,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 in America, and millions of others have survived but are Long COVID survivors who continue to suffer side effects of either the virus or the cure. But there's a bit of a scam here with the handling of information regarding the etiology and countermeasures surrounding Covid-19. Someone's lying and I mean to smoke 'em out, as our good buddy G. W. Bush used to say.
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