The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months.
They were assigned to the frontlines. They bore the burden, not only of doing the work but of being exposed to the virus and gaining natural immunities that the ruling class now tells them does not count for real immunity. Do they have reason to be resentful? The answer is clearly yes.
A health official said of the polio epidemic: “Nobody can shut down intercourse of people in communities.” Our rights survived. So did human liberty, free enterprise, the Bill of Rights, jobs, and the American way of life. And then polio was eventually beat.
It is a mark of a primitive society to attribute to political compliance or noncompliance what rational science shows is a feature of the natural world. Why? Ignorance, maybe. Power ambitions, more likely. Scapegoating is apparently an eternal feature of the human experience. Governments seem particularly good at it, even when it is less believable than ever.
The case against lockdowns and state medical mandates is the obverse of the case for freedom itself. It seems unconscionable for any liberal mind to be wrong on this point. That so many have gone silent or even shown sympathy for medical despotism reveals just how tremendously confusing these times have been.
Today, you won’t find people in polite society who have kind things to say about the eugenic theory of social organization, at least not in public. But as vaccine passports and their disparate impact reveal, it turns out to be strangely easy to manufacture a public health excuse – drawing on the primal fear of infection and disease – to recreate what amounts to the same structure with an excuse that is different only in its details but not in its impact on the social order.
In a 6-3 decision, the highest court has called out the out-of-control agency that has been imposing itself on all aspects of American life for this past year. The majority opinion makes for fascinating reading, if only because the author or authors (the opinion is unsigned) expresses genuine alarm at the same reality that has wrecked the lives of billions of people all over the world. Our basic rights and liberties have been trampled on by states presuming no limits on their powers, and there has heretofore been very little in the way of judicial resistance.
We’ve long misconstrued who precisely can be part of the intellectual battle. Everyone without exception can qualify as an intellectual provided he or she is willing to take ideas seriously. Anyone and everyone is entitled to be part of it. Those who feel the burden and the passion of ideas more intensely, in Mises’s view, have a greater obligation to thrust themselves into the battle, even when doing so can bring disdain and isolation from one’s fellows – and doing so most certainly will (which is why so many people who should have known better have fallen silent).
My overall impression is that the mask wearing and distancing are entirely performative at this point, just as the fighting in Afghanistan has been for the better part of 15 years – performative in the sense that no one really believes it is working but very real in terms of cost.
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