JEBland
INGO's least subtle Alphabet agency taskforce spy
But that failed, miserably, right?
Why require vaccines in addition to PCR tests? I'm all for discouraging reckless behavior but the net of the policies are largely incoherent. Though there was a certain satisfaction hearing a socialist friend of mine say in a quiet voice "I just want things to return to normal."
I don't think we need a nefarious plot with 5G robots in vaccines that turn frogs hermaphroditic or whatever... Even if we assume that they were being disingenuous, it's easier to explain in terms of voter manipulation than any real large-scale conspiracy. Off the top of my head:
- Saying early on that Asians wearing masks were a cultural matter an not connected to prevention while 2-3 months later saying something to the effect of "we knew masks worked, but needed to preserve the masks for medical professionals", the manipulation of the message to garner more people for the voter base.
- The CDC maps that showed the "dangerous" areas were outside the cities when they adopted a changing color scheme to manipulate what looked dangerous, including a disagreement I had with the respectable HoughMade on this forum: https://www.indianagunowners.com/threads/cdc-mask-map-makes-no-sense.518428/page-2#post-9073041 (Just for clarity, respectable is not purple or intended to be purple-ized)
- We largely learned the lessons needed before America was faced with it... Europe (Italy) showed us that it was largely a concern for the elderly. India demonstrated that dry heat, wet heat, doesn't matter, summer wasn't going to kill it off. Even welding doors and martial law in China didn't stop it (though, I think we can all agree that we'll never get clear numbers from China).
- Indeed, it seems these policies seemed to separate the individualists from the collectivists. Because who doesn't want more political polarization?
- We know the CDC manipulated the age groups so that people in their 20s would feel more threatened and compelled to vaccinate against a vaccine that by-and-large posed no significant threat (co-morbidities aside, which again we knew about long before the vaccines were released for public use).
I expect the administrative state to push for more power of the administrative state. It's the natural evolution when you've slotted a role for people to try to expand their role - it's our job to push back on bull**** that doesn't make any dag-gone sense. And certainly to push back against things that paint the opposing side as "they don't care if you die." As a federalist, I'd add that we have a duty to push back against centralizers on most fronts as general principal.
How can vaccine passports make any sense if the vaccines don't prevent transmission? This is something we know for certain now for COVID-19, had good reason to suspect then, but was largely obscured under both Trump and Biden admins.
Maybe more to the point, we don't need a nefarious plot for there to be a conspiracy. Both major political parties are guilty of attempting to use social media to twist around how various topics are represented in the public sphere (though, one party has been far more successful than the other). For Covid, this proved to be woefully misaligned with reality. Even non-RFK Jr. progressives who are pro-vaccine admit that the Covid business was an utter failure:
Dr. Vinay Prasad: You're right not to trust public health
The outspoken critic of the CDC and FDA explains what went wrong—and what went right—with COVID policy.
reason.com
?
