She makes some very serious charges, while evading responsibility for her central role in the egregiously botched response. Birx not only pushed Trump to enact lockdowns. She personally called health officials in every state and demanded that they do the same. And did this for months. They complied based on her position and authority.
Some politicians speak about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But fully vaccinated individuals can harbour high viral loads, spread SARS-CoV-2 and cause severe and fatal Covid-19, also among other fully vaccinated individuals. Social cohesion should not be jeopardized because of an erroneous and narrow view of the epidemiological situation.
Gigi Foster, economic professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is co-author of The Great Covid Panic (Brownstone Institute, 2021) and a fierce opponent of lockdowns and mandates that have caused so much damage to Australia’s economy and long-standing tradition of human rights. Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone interview her in this detailed interview, as her book is growing in influence in Australia and around the world.
What these studies show, are that vaccines are important to reduce severe disease and death, but unable to prevent the disease from spreading and eventually infect most of us. That is, while the vaccines provide individual benefits to the vaccinee, and especially to older high-risk people, the public benefit of universal vaccination is in grave doubt. As such, Covid vaccines should not be expected to contribute to eliminating the communal spread of the virus or the reaching of herd immunity. This unravels the rationale for vaccine mandates and passports.
To garner support for these radical infringements of our most fundamental rights, politicians and bureaucrats have engaged in shameless “othering,” telling us that certain groups of “bad” people put other groups of “good” people in mortal danger. These tactics have been used many times before in our country and others. “Ugly” doesn’t even begin to describe the results.
From a social perspective, lockdowns are like trying to get humans to act out a reprise of the hunter-gatherer period, isolated in small groups and interacting infrequently. The failures of lockdowns are all related to the impossibility of really trying to live that way again.
During the middle years of the 20th century, the social privilege, deference and power previously granted to clerics, and then to writers, was bequeathed to the science-based healers. While they have done much to improve our lives with the money and authority we have given them, they have—even though they seem largely unaware of it—now fallen into a grave state of moral decadence.
While politicians couldn’t ever create or legislate billions working together around the world, they could and can surely break voluntary economic arrangements. When you have guns, handcuffs, the power to quite literally shut off power sources to the productive, not to mention the wealth produced by the productive, you have the power to impose command-and-control.
What if, by depriving us of normal life, those who stand to gain from vaccines can forever cement themselves at the center of society by providing an artificial replacement for what our immune systems used to do to protect us against common respiratory viruses back when we were still allowed to live normal lives?
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