The Secret Cult of VSD

Many years ago, during my undergraduate years at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, someone pointed out to me the black dot which was on the spines of some of the older books in the stacks of our library. This black dot indicated that the book formerly had been held in closed stacks because it had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”), the Church’s official list of books which were judged to be dangerous to faith or morals. 

Arising out of the chaotic time of the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press, the Church felt the need to enforce the moral claim that one should not read things which endanger faith and morals by attaching legal censures to the possession or reading of certain books.

Note carefully that this prohibition was not absolute; those with a legitimate purpose for reading these books (e.g., Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Hume) could receive permission to possess and read these books and this permission was relatively easy to obtain from ecclesiastical authority if one were engaged in academic scholarship. 

Therefore, the college library didn’t lack the books in question; rather, the professor or student simply had to demonstrate a just reason. The black dot was there to ensure that the book was returned to the closed stacks after it was brought back. When the Index lost the force of ecclesiastical law in 1966, the books took their place for the first time in the open stacks.

This memory came to mind a few days ago at the Brownstone Conference and Gala as I discussed with Jeffrey Tucker his recent article about how nearly impossible it is to gain access to our own government’s Vaccine Safety Datalink. I immediately observed that it would have been child’s play to gain access to even the most perniciously heretical book on the Index compared to what was required to gain access to the VSD. 

“I’m a professor of philosophy looking to critique this thinker’s errors” was enough to take the book home with you, albeit after the delay involved in waiting for one’s letter to be answered. 

Instead, what Jeffrey describes is a massively expensive and time-consuming system where you have to explain the conclusions you plan on reaching ahead of time, pass through a gauntlet of reviews, sign off on restrictive promises to not leak the data, only to possibly be granted access to a workstation where they show you only what they want to show you after they take away all of your electronics. Jeffrey grimly observes:

Hence, as you can see, the science is settled even before the evidence is examined. In reality, no outside researcher has made it through this process for more than twenty years. Many have tried, hundreds of attempts, but they have never amounted to anything.

This restrictive process doesn’t resemble the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but rather resembles the restrictions that exist for access to the doctrines of a religion like Scientology. Despite the fact that many of these materials have been made available because of legal filings and internet leaks (amusingly summarized in the South Park episode “Trapped in the Closet”), the Church of Scientology considers these lessons to be protected by trade secret and copyright laws and will often aggressively attempt to pursue these claims.

Access to these doctrines is only available to members of the religion at official church locations. The first five of these “Operating Thetan” levels may only be delivered at a handful of locations throughout the world. The next two require being at their Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida. The final one is delivered most absurdly on their own private cruise ship.

Given that it is estimated that 4,000 individuals have completed this expensive process that involves accepting an incredible set of beliefs involving an alien warlord, I am forced to conclude that even this process is easier to complete than gaining access to the VSD. The religious fervor with which the contents of the Vaccine Safety Datalink are protected from outside eyes exceeds any religion that I have knowledge of.

As near as I can tell, this religious fervor can only be motivated by three possible rationales:

1. First, there could be a belief that the data contained therein is actually bad data. This bad data should be treated like an entry on the Index of Prohibited Books. In this scenario, the data is so prone to drawing false conclusions about reality that only an author thoroughly committed to shaping the narrative around the faulty data can be trusted to have access.
2. Second, there could be a belief that data contained therein is perfectly true and good (because they come from the blessed health systems that provide the data), but that normal people won’t be able to see it. Instead, they will reach precisely the opposite conclusion, just like the people watching South Park will invariably be mocking doctrines composed by a writer of science fiction. Only those who have proven their loyalty (and have spent a tremendous amount of money in the process) get to see what’s there.
3. Finally, maybe there is no data at all. Maybe it’s all a charade to maintain the believability of the narrative. Meanwhile, the sanctuary is empty.

Regardless of which of these is true, I am left convinced even more that the secular state has invented a more demanding Inquisition than the Church ever had. What does it say about our governmental public health apparatus that the data which underlies critical policy decisions is kept as a religious secret?