He or she writes under a pseudo and although makes some sound points the article’s conclusion would be radically reinforced if alternative treatments like ivermectin were mentioned.
( Mike Yeadon does mention alternatives in his comments on this subject see here:io
Dr. Mike Yeadon: RED ALERT: STARTING SEPTEMBER 6th All Children Ages 12 to 15 to be Injected with COVID-19 Shots in UK Schools With or Without Parental Consent )
cheers
There’s a certain logic to that though. No-one could ever be for vaccination if they know there are effective and safe remedies. All vaccine advocates must be unaware of, or have blocked the information about these remedies, or be lying, or a combination of these.
But even if there were no remedies, the covid so-called vaccines would still be a bad idea for children, as they aren’t at risk from covid.
They probably don’t want to risk too much opprobrium.
One creak at a time!? Cheers
Using a term like “double counting” to pretend to being oh so rigorous about entirely hypothetical benefits is weasel behaviour. A modeled number of “serious cases” is not a count, single or double. George is full of bs
“George is full of bs”
Indeed, he is…reminded me of this, from Comment is Moronic, again…posted in full for your delectation
ED
George Monbiot
It’s not just anti-vaxxers. The themes of resisting power and regaining control of our lives have been cynically repurposed
It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit, but in the countercultural movements where my sympathies lie, people are dropping like flies. Every few days I hear of another acquaintance who has become seriously ill with Covid, after proudly proclaiming the benefits of “natural immunity”, denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals. Some have been hospitalised. Within these circles, which have for so long sought to cultivate a good society, there are people actively threatening the lives of others.
It’s not just anti-vax beliefs that have been spreading through these movements. On an almost daily basis I see conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left. I hear right-on people mouthing the claims of white supremacists, apparently in total ignorance of their origins. I encounter hippies who once sought to build communities sharing the memes of extreme individualism. Something has gone badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene.
There has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas. The Nazis embraced astrology, pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship. They promoted homeopathy and “natural healing”, and tended to resist vaccination. We should be aware of this history, but without indulging what Simon Schama calls the “obscene syllogism”: the idea that because the Nazis promoted new age beliefs, alternative medicine and ecological protection, anyone who does so is a Nazi.
In the 1960s and 70s, European fascists sought to reinvent themselves, using themes developed by revolutionary anarchists. They found fertile ground in parts of the anarcho-primitivist and deep ecology movements, which they tried to steer towards notions of “ethnic separatism” and “indigenous” autonomy.
But much of what we are seeing at the moment is new. A few years ago, dreadlocked hippies spreading QAnon lies and muttering about a conspiracy against Donald Trump would have seemed unthinkable. Today, the old boundaries have broken down, and the most unlikely people have become susceptible to rightwing extremism.
The anti-vaccine movement is a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures. For several years, anti-vax has straddled the green left and the far right. Trump flirted with it, at one point inviting the anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr to chair a “commission on vaccination safety and scientific integrity”.
Anti-vax beliefs overlap strongly with a susceptibility to conspiracy theories. This tendency has been reinforced by Facebook algorithms directing vaccine-hesitant people towards far-right conspiracy groups. Ancient links between “wellness” movements and antisemitic paranoia have in some cases been re-established. The notion of the “sovereign body”, untainted by chemical contamination, has begun to fuse with the fear that a shadowy cabal is trying to deprive us of autonomy.
There’s a temptation to overthink this, and we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy. Some anti-vaxxers are now calling themselves “purebloods”, a term that should send a chill through anyone even vaguely acquainted with 20th-century history. In their defence, however, if they can’t even get Harry Potter right (purebloods is what the bad guys call themselves), we can’t expect them to detect an echo of the Nuremberg laws.
I believe this synthesis of left-alternative and rightwing cultures has been accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal. After left-ish political parties fell into line with corporate power, the right seized the language they had abandoned. Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings brilliantly repurposed the leftwing themes of resisting elite power and regaining control of our lives. Now there has been an almost perfect language swap. Parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt.
But I suspect it also has something to do with the issues we now face. A justified suspicion about the self-interest of big pharma clashes with the need for mass vaccination. The lockdowns and other measures required to prevent Covid-19 spreading are policies which, in other circumstances, would rightly be seen as coercive political control. Curtailing the pandemic, climate breakdown and the collapse of biodiversity means powerful agreements struck between governments – which can be hard to swallow for movements that have long fought multilateral power while emphasising the local and the homespun.
So how do we navigate this? How do we remain true to our countercultural roots while resisting the counterculture of the right? There’s a sound hippy principle that we should strive to apply: balance.
I don’t mean the compromised, submissive doctrine that calls itself centrism, which leads inexorably towards such extreme outcomes as the Iraq war, endless economic growth and ecological disaster. I mean the balance between competing values in which true radicalism is to be found: reason and warmth, empiricism and empathy, liberty and consideration. It is this balance that defends us from both co-option and extremism.
While we might seek simplicity, we need also to recognise that the human body, human society and the natural world are phenomenally complex, and cannot be easily understood. Life is messy. Bodily and spiritual sovereignty are illusions. There is no pure essence; we are all mudbloods.
Enlightenment of any kind is possible only through long and determined engagement with other people’s findings and other people’s ideas. Self-realisation requires constant self-questioning. True freedom emerges from respect for other people.
Striking, isn’t it, how George the Naive never strays into considering whether the scepticism about poisons-stabs and the supposed mass-killing virus might actually be based on sound facts and sound analysis of the situation. It’s all about silly people naively believing silly things with no adequate basis to them. Well, yes George. Look in the mirror…
Doesn’t seem to occur to him to apply this line to himself: “There’s a temptation to overthink this, and we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy.” Exactly! Those tripwires can overtake the brightest and best informed too, especially amongst the bourgeois unigrad technocracy, who in truth are not noticeably wiser or better informed than the average pleb, though they do love to believe that they are.
Witness the droves of such folk - the techies - who’ve fallen completely for the covid scam: limpid, unquestioning belief in a world-threatening Black Death, and all-saving ‘vaccines’, all built on the back of a slightly-nastier than usual flu. The notion of high-IQ utter bloody suckers comes to mind. In the end, it all seems to come down to how hypnotically-suggestible you happen to be. Nothing to do with facts and intelligence at all.
At least the last four paragraphs do edge back to some degree of savvy common sense, though. Late, but welcome. Apply it to the scamdemic and the poisons-stabs George. Wake up from your troobleevers’ trance!
Reverting back to George Santayana, I don’t see any query from him about where the JCVI gets its ‘estimates’ tables from. Computer modelling, is it? I can’t think of any other source of information about how the poison-stabs will pan out, since the process hasn’t finished yet, and hasn’t been subjected to the sober real evidence-analysis of hindsight.
He points out that he’s a long-time functionary in the pharma business, and that he believes faithfully in the crucial importance of vaccines. No hint of awareness of the fundamental questioning which - despite periods of eclipse - still hangs over the whole idea of vaccination as a benefit to health. That argument, despite the blind faith of the provaxers, still remains open and unsettled. The only thing that’s clear beyond doubt is that the vaccine trade is hugely profitable - in all three aspects of the WealthPowerStatus trinity - for the pharma crooks. And no, not all the people working in the pharmaceuticals business are crooks. But the psychos, who - like scum in boiling water - always seem to float up to the top-floor executive suites, surely give off that smell: Profit rools, OK!
Fair judgement: both Georges are carrying an overload of bs. Both superiority-assured unigrad technocrats, I suppose.
“Bodily and spiritual sovereignty are illusions.”
I mean, we should be aware of history without indulging what Simon Schama calls the “obscene syllogism”, but the Nazis…
Mind you, we gave up bodily integrity when we barely blinked in response to the state, by default, ‘owning’ your body unless you state otherwise. At the time, even on the LBN, I was astonished that so many seemed unconcerned by what must be the single biggest change in the relationship between the individual and the state for God knows how long.
I love his tone of lofty condescension, posing as the only man in the world, ever ever, who is capable of standing ‘outside’ ideology.
As one of the vanguard who weaponised antisemitism (did anyone in the Guardian stable not though?) it’s not even slightly surprising that Minionbot pushes the ‘pureblood’ trope, what a weak DisInfo plant that one is.
But let’s play along for a second: by his “logic” scepticism about vaxxxes is essentially White Supremacism…?
Bit of an own goal when anyone with two brain cells to rub together can drill down thru the (“official”) stats on vaxxx uptake to find that in the UK, at any rate, the pink skinned are comfortably the biggest adopters.
Are the pureblood fash a very very vocal tiny minority, or a dangerous and growing mob of ignorant contemptibles? In George’s world of DoubleThink both of these are perfectly feasible. He should stick to masturbating over Greta Thunberg perhaps.
I find that very hard to believe. Why is it that whoever I asked, especially during the various “waves” when hospitalizations and deaths were at their highest (so we were told), I could never find anyone who knew someone who died or was seriously ill from covid*. Plenty had been ill, the vast majority no worse than flu. A handful more serious, but definitely not hospital cases.
Also clear as Rhis points out, he never discusses the actual points raised by these “far right leftwing” critics. It’s all theorizing about motives, or what might have led them astray. Typical modern day Guardian drivel.
*Apart from one case in Romania, where the next of kin of the deceased was asked if they wanted Covid on the death certificate so they could share in the financial handout to the hospital.
The latest variant (oooer) on this theme comes from Deena Hinshaw, a mid-level Chris Whitty clone from Alberta, Canada:
All students in Alberta who call out sick with any respiratory illness will be counted as COVID-19 cases when schools decide whether to move lessons online. Schools are told to contact Alberta Health Services if more than 10 per cent of the student and staff population is absent with a respiratory illness, CBC reports. Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw said on Thursday that it is necessary for schools to assume anyone at home with respiratory illness is a positive case of COVID-19 because obtaining data on positive transmissions from pubic health agencies would violate the privacy of students and staff.
The typo near the end involved no tampering by yours truly, honest guv.
Source article from Male Online: