H/t Ian M at The Lifeboat News:
5 Likes
Given the article’s questioning content, ‘tinfoil hat wearers’ should have been in single inverts or qualified, but otherwise, good to see a significant voice on the left dipping his toe into Covid scepticism. Interesting to note that as of right now, it has had no responses over on the LH, as doesn’t the post relating to Chomsky’s apparent call for isolation of the unvaccinated, nor other uncomfortable or inconvenient posts; all very telling.
3 Likes
Jonathan finally managed to get his cynic’s hat on in his last para. Late, but welcome! What other conclusion but the cynical one makes as good sense?
Despite his plea for completely open debate, he too seems to have bought the canard that the ‘no-covid, no-pandemic’ people are - as he seems to imply - self-evidently wrong. Yet the evidence to back their position is by no means negligible. Er - surely they too deserve a seat at the actually-honest-debate, NO-viewpoint-excluded table…? So says the pure, true scientific method, which insists that all subjects, without any exceptions at all, are permanently open to question and revision.
1 Like
Yes despite starting from the position of believing the media, Cook is practising what he preaches and gradually adjusting. This is awkward for the LH loyalists, as he has high esteem there.
I also find the ‘tinfoil hat’ characterisation hilarious, given the reverse polarity on masks!
2 Likes
Agreed. Having seen this article lambasted, but distracted from reading it, thanks to @Twirlip for posting the link. I could sound plenty of caveats but very worthwhile article perfectly in keeping with JCs long and honourable track record.
1 Like
I didn’t know that there had been a fuss about the article in social media, but it’s not the first time Cook has got into hot water over COVID-19:
In writing last week’s article, I stepped into the Vitamin D minefield fully expecting to receive as much flak as I do when I report on Israel-Palestine. What I was not prepared for is that the flak would be much worse.
After decades of this psychopathic selfishness coursing through the veins of our societies, suddenly a liberal elite wants to talk about social responsibility. They want us to trust those very same corporate interests that destroyed everything we hold dear. To doubt, to hesitate, to be fearful based on long experience is evidence only that one is a crank, a conspiracy theorist, anti-science, a Trumpian populist.
Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
[…]
Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.
Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.
5 Likes
“Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course.” Ya think, Twirl? I suppose one of the unintended back-handed benefits of the covid scam has been that’s it’s blown wide open again the whole ‘Are vaccines any good AT ALL?’ question. As also the ‘deadly-invader germs’ versus terrain-health debate, both of which were languishing in dusty corners of neglect before 2020. Other than that caveat, though, thanks for a highly useful post.
2 Likes
I didn’t give my opinion, and I don’t intend to go into detail, but there is no harm in saying that I’m unvaccinated, and I’m 69 years old, and therefore quite vulnerable to the virus, of whose existence and of whose serious danger to myself and others I am in no doubt.
(Whether this makes me a Nazi - but one with no balls, like Goebbels - or a brain-dead eejit, or a security services infiltrator, or perhaps all three of these, is for RobG to decide.)
2 Likes
Say ‘pathogen’ rather than virus, T. It’s more non-committal. It may be a virus, or it may be a messenger exosome landing in a seriously depleted bodily terrain and making the owner feel ill with the vigorous urgency of its message.
Either way, there’s no doubt that nasty flus, like covid, appear ever year - and kill people. It’s just that the precise nature of this agent, and how it works, is finally up for discussion again.
I’m in the supposedly most-vulnerable age group too, but I’ve never lost the least amount of sleep over it. But then, even before the front-line doctors had tried and proven various genuinely-effective prophylactics/cures, I already knew that I had all the cure I needed, long tried and proven, immediately to hand; for peanuts… 
1 Like