In a recent e-mail to “Patriots” Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty hysterically claims that the legal basis for Covid vaccine mandates is a lie, a fraud, and an outrage.
"The so-called 'legal' basis for vaccine mandates," they claim, "always rested on one thing: stopping the transmission of the virus to others." But, horror of horrors, "the Covid vaccine was never designed to stop transmission of the virus, and it was never even tested to see whether it did."
This claim is followed with a by now familiar volley of indignation rooted in fantasy:
"Words cannot describe the evil that was done to America and the whole world by this fraud. Pfizer profited tens of billions of dollars selling its ill-tested and ineffective vaccine to the world, and it lied to use governments to force their vaccines upon people who rightly distrusted them."
This is all quite wrong, and even absurd. Initially, the vaccine makers were focused on whether or not the vaccines could prevent people from getting so sick they couldn't breathe, a natural and quite reasonable priority. Only after this hurdle was cleared did transmission to others become a concern. And when investigated it turned out that the vaccines did indeed reduce such transmission, though they did not eliminate it, which was not a surprise. This performance has persisted through the omicron era.
So there is no scandal.
Furthermore, the Covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which, from a strictly medical point of view, is sufficient justification to mandate that the public takes them.
The Campaign For Liberty rejects vaccine mandates, however, because they don't stop transmission in its tracks, a curious insistence on setting the success bar impossibly high. After all, no vaccine offers perfect protection. Polio vaccine, for example, doesn't guarantee you won't get polio, only that you won't be paralyzed by it. Ho hum. Medical science has learned how to prevent mass paralysis with vaccines, but the important thing is our "liberty" to prevent such miracles from being widely shared.
One might as well repeal drunk driving laws because they fail to prevent all car accidents.
Unsurprisingly, the Campaign For Liberty admired the Great Barrington Declaration, which urged an end to so-called lockdowns, with "focused protection" for the elderly. Its goal was to achieve "natural immunity" for the non-elderly population by converting the U.S. into one huge Covid party. Now that waning immunity is a well-established fact, it's easy to see how this plan would have worked out in real life. There would have been a tsunami of infection and re-infection, a collapse of the public health system, and general chaos.
It shouldn't be as difficult as it appears to be for libertarians to realize that if everybody catching Covid over a two year period has proven to be an extremely trying experience, as it has, then everybody getting it in a two month period would have been an outright disaster.
And the obvious political conclusion is that if governments can't mandate the prevention of millions of unnecessary deaths by avoidable disease, then no government of any kind can ever be legitimate.
Unfortunately, false libertarianism is almost as common on the political left as it is on the right. Consider Christian Parenti's long review of Covid policy: "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy," published by the Grayzone Project last year.
A prolific author and very savvy observer of politics and society, Parenti has previously authored a critical book on the U.S. prison industry called "Lockdown America," so he is in a good position to know the difference between real and imaginary repression. Unfortunately, he fails to maintain the distinction in his article.
A jarring resort to propagandistic terminology greets the reader from the start. Parenti refers to punitive vaccine mandates. Why punitive? By definition a mandate means there will be consequences for failing to adhere to it. So is Parenti opposed to all mandates? He doesn't say.
He criticizes invasive vaccine passports. What makes them invasive? Is it invasive to require we show a driver's license in order to legally operate a car? Parenti doesn't give an example of what he would consider a non-invasive passport.
He refers to socially destructive lockdowns, as though restricting human circulation during a pandemic were inherently evil. Though less important than other measures (contact tracing, N95 masking) restricting human movement (i.e., "lockdown") is a legitimate pandemic response measure. The most destructive aspect of its use in the U.S. was the failure to offer replacement income, as other developed countries routinely did. Parenti makes no mention of this, in preference for pretending that Covid-19 is no big deal.
But a million American dead speaks for itself.
Elsewhere, Parenti condemns unscientific and oppressive lockdowns. However, there was nothing unscientific about the idea that restricting human movement to flatten the curve of cases would help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Nor was there anything inherently oppressive about trying to lock down until an infection wave subsided. Again, the objectionable part was the lack of replacement income, which was unjust, and guaranteed that lockdowns wouldn't be strictly adhered to.
Parenti calls out radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. As opposed to what? Moderately accountable censorship? He gives the impression of trying to bolster a weak argument with meaningless adjectives.
He makes the familiar claim that the lockdowns and mandates constituted "unprecedented levels of repression," which is frankly absurd. Cell phone data show that lockdowns were at best haphazardly complied with in the U.S., and no legal consequences were imposed for the failure to obey. Repression consists of beatings, incarceration, torture, murder, and the like. It's laughable to include Covid policy on that list, especially the weak version practiced in the U.S., which is not to say that actual repression was called for.
Parenti smears dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, claiming that Chomsky advocated letting the unvaccinated go hungry, when in fact Chomsky stated the opposite: that if they ran out of resources while isolating themselves, then the state would have to step in and help them. Note that Chomsky claimed that they should be helped even though they were committed to harming others (by remaining unvaccinated and continuing to publicly circulate).
Parenti also chides Chomsky for allegedly taking at face value Covid data provided by "Big Pharma," but does not counter Chomsky's observation that an international network of scientists replicating each others' published results is the actual source of Covid data, not a faceless cabal of shills and sellouts dedicated to corrupt self-enrichment.
Pivoting away from the scientific community, Parenti refers to a Covid consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, and Berkeley as though these were immunological research centers responsible for our understanding of Covid. But they are not. However objectionable liberal attitudes may be in these cities, it is scientists around the world who are responsible for our knowledge of Covid, not affluent liberal ideologues.
Throughout his long critique, Parenti implicitly assumes that unvaccinated people have no obligation to help slow the spread of Covid-19 so as to relieve the pressure on nurses and doctors (workers!) and prevent a bad situation from becoming disastrous. What could possibly justify such a unique entitlement?
Only on censorship does Parenti offer a reasonable take. Censorship is wrong in principle and the state obviously has a large enough megaphone to be heard above the anti-vaxxer din, not to mention that it controls public education, which in a democracy should mean that the general population already knows how to separate propaganda from fact. Obviously, this is far from true, but only because the government fails to take its democratic responsibilities seriously. Censorship just makes the problem worse.
Parenti downplays masking while deploring the plight of delivery workers whose health and even survival was put at risk by the lack of a sound mask policy. N95 masks properly fitted work. They should have been stockpiled in the hundreds of millions long before Covid appeared on the scene. But they weren't, because "just in time" production refuses to maintain an inventory that does not contribute to short-term profit. Supposedly making a radical critique, Parenti misses this chance to criticize capitalist misallocation of resources.
Parenti says we "should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions," but arbitrarily opposes this to requiring masking, vaccines, and physical distancing," as though Covid posed no risk to working people. Has he not heard of Amazon union organizer Christian Small? Small successfully organized a union in an extremely hostile environment precisely because he criticized Amazon's not protecting workers against Covid while management protected itself.
Parenti claims that "Big Pharma has thoroughly captured our public health agencies." But this is not true. Far more Big Pharma applications are rejected than accepted by the FDA. Rejections carry with them substantial economic costs that Big Pharma would obviously prefer to avoid. So if Big Pharma is in full control, why doesn't it have a 100% approval rate on its applications?
Parenti claims Anthony Fauci has a "dangerous conflict of interest" in that he is allowed to receive royalties for patents on top of his salary. But this is a bad example. Fauci gets roughly $1800 a year in patent royalties, while his annual salary is $417,608. It's difficult to see how this is evidence of corruption. (Data from Dr. Dan Wilson, on his You Tube channel Debunk the Funk -"Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction.")
Parenti claims public health pronouncements have been contradictory, but the examples he offers are without context. Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The first statement was made at the start of the pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in extremely short supply for doctors and nurses and Fauci wanted the few masks that existed to go to them. (Which is not necessarily a justification for lying, however.) Do wear masks was said later, when the contagion had gathered momentum.
In any event, Parenti entirely misses the main point, which is that the quality of masks is what counts, not whether or not they should be worn. Obviously, they should be. Properly fitted N95s widely worn would have saved countless lives. (Unfortunately, these masks were unavailable until well into the pandemic because of decades of neo-liberal cutting of public health budgets.)
The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Scientists might quibble about Parenti's wording here, but that aside, the first message referred to the person taking the vaccine, not people with whom that person might come in contact; the second message referred to infections in general, and came after Delta appeared. But with all variants the vaccines have reduced transmissibility vis-a-vis remaining unvaccinated. Parenti makes no mention of this.
Parenti claims that "the young have very little to fear from this disease, while the old face very real risks." He seems not to have considered the fact that the young are related to the old, and killing Mom or Dad or Grandpa with Covid while one's own case remains asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic has very definitely been something to fear.
Furthermore, if only the old are at risk of severe illness, then why has life expectancy fallen by almost three years in the United States over the past two years? If U.S. life expectancy is 78 years (Parenti's figure), then Covid deaths of the very old cannot account for a decline in life expectancy. In order for there to have been such a decline many middle aged and younger people also had to have died of Covid.[1]
Parenti claims that "lockdowns also kill" and "have wreaked massive destruction," specifically that delayed medical care due to over-focus on Covid produced an increase in non-Covid deaths. Intuitively this seems reasonable, and fortunately we have solid data derived from investigating the possibility. According to Israeli statistician/economist Ariel Karlinsky, co-author of an international study of Covid and excess deaths, the graph of reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is almost identical to the graph of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, meaning that virtually all excess deaths in this period were Covid deaths, not deaths caused by lockdown or some other factor. Karlinsky also found no evidence that Covid deaths were misclassified deaths from other causes, as Parenti suggests may have been the case. Karlinski found evidence of under-reporting Covid deaths (Russia, Egypt, Byelorussia etc.), but not over-reporting.[2]
Parenti defends the fatalistic Great Barrington Declaration, which called for isolating the elderly while letting everyone else go about their business as though there were no pandemic, letting a large majority of the population quickly get infected, which inevitably would have produced much greater hospitalizations, deaths, and long Covid cases, even at a 1% death rate.
Such policy would have been justified, Parenti says, on grounds of cancer, heart attack, and stroke prevention, since overreaction to Covid prevented timely screenings and early medical interventions that in non-pandemic times are routinely carried out. But, as already noted, the expected increase in deaths from such causes was not confirmed by the study of excess deaths, the gold standard of mortality data. Furthermore, Parenti nowhere indicates how swamped hospitals could have simultaneously handled Covid surges and all of their other normal obligations as though no pandemic were occurring.
Parenti consistently minimizes the Covid threat by citing sources like Dr. John Ioannidis, who badly underestimated the infection fatality rate and the likely Covid death toll (he anticipated only ten thousand Covid deaths),* and in general by treating the disease as similar to the flu. But the flu accounts for 342,000 U.S. deaths in the past decade while Covid killed over a million in just two years.
Lost in all of his claims about what should not have been is any recognition of the fact that when huge numbers of people are getting severely ill at the same time the health care system cannot function properly, society cannot function properly, and people inevitably die who ordinarily might live. In other words, it is absolutely pointless to demand a return to normality in the midst of highly abnormal circumstances.
Parenti repeats propaganda that the Covid vaccines are "leaky," "non-sterilizing" vaccines, finding fault that once injected in the bloodstream they don't miraculously prevent virus from lodging in one's nose. But how could any vaccine do that? As noted before, polio vaccines don't make transmission impossible either, but they do prevent paralysis, a rather important achievement one would think. Amazingly, Parenti only grudgingly concedes that Covid vaccines "lower the probability of hospitalization and death," but declines to mention that they do so by 90%![3]
Instead, he worries about things like vaccine disruption of menstrual cycles (which has been demonstrated to be real, but slight), linking to anecdotal claims of such disruption including the passing of "golf ball" size blood clots. Seriously?
Parenti criticizes the granting of immune liability to pharmaceutical companies, but fails to mention the reason for doing so. Contrary to much mythology, Big Pharma does not like to produce vaccines, as pandemics last only a few years and lawsuits alleging vaccine harm are virtually guaranteed, whether valid or not. In a country like the U.S. this means being bogged down in expensive litigation for years, with scientifically illiterate lawyers trying to convince vaccine courts to award gargantuan judgments whether or not a complainant's injuries actually had anything to do with vaccines. Big Pharma prefers the more stable and profitable path of dedicating itself to producing approved medications that people will need more or less permanently. Who in their position wouldn't?
Parenti suggests that raw data entered into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is somehow a useful indication of vaccine injuries, though anyone can enter a false or mistaken report into the system, and many vaccine opponents do. Until the claims are investigated - a process that often lasts years - no valid conclusions can be drawn even about an individual report, much less about thousands. Parenti claims that "despite its limits, (VAERS) sends signals that are deserving of further investigation," without noting that that is exactly what they receive.
Parenti erroneously suggests a parallel between long Covid and long term adverse effects from the vaccines. But long Covid is a reality, whereas adverse effects from (non-live) virus in a vaccine occur in the short term or not at all. The short term effects have been noted, and are far less serious than the effects from catching the virus unvaccinated.
He draws another mistaken parallel between "bodily autonomy" in abortion rights and the right to refuse a vaccine. But the two cases are dramatically different. A woman's decision to have an abortion does not affect the public health. On the other hand, the decision to remain unvaccinated and continue circulating in public maximizes the infection rate, affecting countless others.
Parenti laments "the public health response to Covid and the left's inability to offer a critique of it," but in fact the Left has offered such a critique, just not the "populist" critique favored by Parenti. In Economics and the Left - Interviews with Progressive Economists, (Verso, 2021) editor C. J. Polychroniou presents an array of left economists critiquing public health response to Covid around the world.
The crucial elements of a proper policy response are an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace, quarantine, firmly enforced physical distancing, and high quality masking in public (N95s). And, of course, vaccines and treatments.
The importance of the first item on the above list can't be overstressed. Economist James K. Boyce (Amherst) claims that "99 out of every 100 lives lost could have been saved" had the U.S. had an effective infrastructure of test-and-trace in place when the pandemic broke out. "The (Covid) death toll has been exceptionally high in nations with extreme inequality," Boyce observes, which "in a society is much like blood pressure in an individual, "a pre-existing condition that raises the likelihood of severe outcomes."[4]
Though medically justified, mandates may or may not be used depending on tactical considerations, but there is no reason the term should take on an ominous meaning, as it has for too many people in the U.S. Mandates are a necessary part of modern life, and the principle underlying their legitimacy isn't particularly controversial. Nobody is too exercised about the mandate to use a seatbelt when driving a car, for example, or to pay bills in a required currency, or to go to school from age five to late teenage, or to pass a driving test in order to get a driver's license, or to take out a social security number (a federal ID) in order to be part of the public retirement system. These are simply sensible measures taken to facilitate living in complex societies. There is nothing inherently authoritarian about them. Yes, any mandate can be abused, but that does not mean that there should be no mandates.
Mandates that can lead to loss of employment are obviously more serious, but this is because of the required job more than the required jab. Decent societies would not require their members to prostitute themselves to monopoly interests (directly or indirectly) in the first place, which would take a lot of the sting out of vaccine mandates. However, the principle of restricting access to public space until people have verified they are doing everything possible to reduce the risk of infecting others with deadly disease is entirely reasonable. There is no "bodily autonomy" when every set of lungs is linked to every other set by virus-laden air.
*To be fair, early on there were many high-ball estimates that also proved to be wide of the mark, including Ioannidis's, whose point was that data, not widely-varying estimates, should drive policy.
[1] See Roni Caryn Rabin, “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback,” New York Times, August 31, 2022[1][1]
[1]
[2] See Karlinsky interviewed by molecular biologist Greg Tucker-Kellog on Biotech and Bioinformatics with Professor Greg, You Tube, May 14, 2022
[3] See “French study of over 22m people find vaccines cut severe Covid risk by 90%,” The Guardian, October 11, 2021
[4] Boyce cited in Economics and the Left – Interviews With Progressive Economists, (Verso, 2021) p. 56
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