Manufacturing Emergency
How epidemiologists redefine our politics and laws on a whim.
Vinay Prasad makes a well-written call for limits to who is considered part of the “Covid emergency.”
I argue that it has never been valid that there is an “emergency” in the first place.
Also of note:
Sasha Latypova has written a comprehensive and apparently authoritative review of the deficiencies in the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine development process. If there has been a comprehensive and authoritative review before now, I haven’t seen it, even though I’ve been eager to have one at hand.
Her excellent article was published last week at Solari Report:
https://home.solari.com/review-of-pfizers-non-clinical-program-by-sasha-latypova/
A coming post will offer a summary of her review.
All Quiet on the Covid Front
In a fantastic post at his substack, Vinay Prasad offers a from-10,000-feet review of the flawed extension of the logic of “emergency” into “all matters Covid”:
He calls out the emergency authorization of the Pfizer Covid vaccine for children, boosters for younger adults, and Paxlovid use among the Covid-vaccinated, as three instances where no “emergency” pertained: Children are not at risk from SARS-CoV-2, already-Covid-vaccinated adults likewise (no boosters should ever have been authorized, in my opinion1), and the Paxlovid trial excluded the Covid-vaccinated and therefor cannot be cited as demonstration of benefit in this group (and, in fact, may be making things worse2).
Assigning the status of “emergency” to these contexts - thereby eliding the stratospheric difference in risks faced by octogenarians vs. children and teenagers - is the explicit justification for the otherwise purportedly unthinkable step of allowing these groups to take experimental drugs with unknown long term effects and in advance of a proven or even reasonable-to-anticipate benefit.
Why, he asks, is it only with Covid-19 that no bar can be too low for throwing normal regulatory caution to the wind? Capitalization of the C-word removed:
[Regulatory experts and typical critics of accelerated review, who have been silent about the free-for-all in Covid-19-related EUA’s, may] think that it is a stronger argumentative position to press the issue in the world of non Covid-19 drugs than Covid-19 drugs. This is the great blunder of their thinking. When you push for the equal application of rational principles, you must push for the equal application of rational principles. If you think you can omit or make sacrosanct some category, then you are irrational. And your opponents can rightly argue that their categories should be exempted. Why should cancer have a higher standard than Covid?
Zero-Emergency
Personally, I do not concede that any emergency ever existed for any group. The “at-risk” from SARS-CoV-2 were already “at risk” from other common infections in general. In fact, it is not within the powers of human perception to even know if the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 on planet Earth itself altered the yearly mortality risk for any given individual, anywhere. At best, folks who base their understanding of reality on mathematical models that they construct to affirm what they already think (“experts”) can argue over it. And hospitals have always been “overwhelmed” somewhere at any given time. SARS-CoV-2 is not and has never been an “emergency,” only a media-hyped mass panic.3
“Emergency” is not a scientifically-discernible fact of reality, but a political construction used to justify unlimited state power. It thus can be politically legitimate, or not. This depends not on any objective determination but on the consensus of the polity at large.
If an earthquake levels the landscape, or Napoleon’s army strides to the capital, it is likely that there will be widespread consensus of an emergency - a justification for the state to act without regard to normal legal prerequisites on action. If property crime is rampant, or if homeless are overdosing in tents in front of apartment buildings daily, the same consensus in unlikely to emerge, even if state actors would like for it to do so, and even if the toll in economic terms or souls lost is higher than for an everyday tornado. If rioters are setting buildings on fire, the State may call in the National Guard, or it may declare solidarity with the causes being advanced.
It’s obvious there is no objective rubric here. And yet, in democracies, the public will often punish their elected representatives for not preventing emergencies, which necessitates the construction of objective rubrics to determine in advance when consensus-defined emergencies will occur. The algorithms of meteorologists, which divine what direction the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs will travel about as well as a coin-toss, being the most regularly and ritually employed of these rubrics. Here, it is the legitimate expectation of political backlash, based on precedent, that confers to meteorologists the role of rendering the subjective - whether citizens will, in the future, believe there is an “emergency” - into the objective - the model. And of course, there is a measure of backlash, and an expectation in advance of the same, for every time the model cries wolf.
For infectious disease, no obvious precedent for the “Covid-19 emergency” existed in modern times. No living American had ever voted out a politician for not preventing spread of a respiratory disease. (And depending on your opinion on the 2020 election, this is still the case.) There was therefor no legitimate political reason for any government within America to consult epidemiologists about the existence, or not, of an “emergency.”
So why is that exactly what occurred?
The natural interpretation of events might make reference to the legal groundwork. Most, if not all, State governments have explicit provisions for disease-based emergencies which hail from the eras where the American consensus was radically different than modern times, and draconian interventions based on infectious disease, with a special emphasis on foreign arrivals, was the norm. Further reference might be made to seemingly-anticipatory legal groundwork at the Federal level, in the years between the declaration of the War on Terror and 2019.
In a sense this is all redundant to the real issue. It is easy to imagine, for example, all of the relevant laws having been passed overnight, on both the State and Federal level, once the “emergency” had been declared. That is the nature of “emergencies” - they remove all limits on the state’s power (at the State level, in America, emergencies void normal constitutional restraints on the State’s Police Power), and are thus super-legal. All laws assigning legality to emergencies are paradoxes; and in practice emergency is always an act of arbitrary fiat which, again, can either be legitimate or not according to alignment with consensus.
When it comes to infectious disease, that consensus did not exist, before 2020. It hadn’t existed for over half a century.
A New Plague
In fact in The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes the case that this lack of a precedent was specifically recognized and acknowledged by the modelers of viral spread:4
As early as 1949, Congressional bills to abolish CDC because of the remarkable decline in infectious disease mortalities twice won by impressive majorities.22 From the mid-1970s, CDC was seeking to justify its existence by assisting state health departments to track down small outbreaks of rabies and a mouse disease called hantavirus, and by linking itself to the military’s bioweapons projects. Looking back from 1994, Red Cross officer Paul Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle that “The CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” to justify its existence.23 According to Peter Duesberg, author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, the HIV/AIDS theory was salvation for American epidemic authorities.24
James Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Diseases unit, described the desperation among the public health corps in the early 1980s: “There was double-digit inflation, very high unemployment, a rapid military buildup and a threat to decrease all domestic programs, and this led to workforce cuts at the Public Health Service, and particularly CDC.”25 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis similarly recalled the institutional desperation during the Reagan administration era. He said of the CDC: “They were hoping for a new plague. Polio was over. There were memos going around the agency saying, ‘We need to find the new plague’; ‘We need to find something to scare the American people so they will give us more money.’”26 NIH scientist Dr. Robert Gallo—who would become Dr. Fauci’s partner, coconspirator, and confidant—offered a similar assessment: “The CDC in Atlanta was under threat for reductions and even theoretically for closure.”27
Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976, during Dr. Fauci’s first year at the agency. Krause was a champion of what he called “The Return of the Microbes” strategy,28 which sought to reinstate microbes to their former status as the feared progenitors of deadly diseases.
From here, Kennedy Jr details how the first attempt to fabricate consensus of emergency was a flop: With the 1976 swine flu, it turned out that the experts cried wolf.
Notably, this attempt to save the NIAID via “a new plague” was after two declared flu pandemics (in 1957 and 1968) that were deemed to claim millions of lives globally, with no political backlash for a lack of government counter-action. The closest precedent might have been the ritual closures of pools in the Polio Panic era; but these were affairs carried out at the most local level. Polio vaccine research, treatment guidelines, and even the network of rehabilitation hospitals were all the work of the donation-funded March of Dimes (with Federal promotion elapsing after the Warm Springs / FDR-era, before the worst years of the epidemic).5 The same 1944 law invoked by the CDC to mandate masks in Ubers “because Covid-19” was never used to restrict interstate travel during Polio outbreaks.6 It was not part of the political fabric for the Federal government or its agencies to predict or declare disease-emergencies. Krause’s alleged campaign to “emergency-ify” the flu, in this telling, thus represented a radical attempt at political rearrangement; a cultural-political coup.
This account might be over-simplistic, but it nonetheless illustrates the important point that the swine flu was not a successful precedent for SARS-CoV-2, and thus neither for a (lack of) backlash. For example, Kennedy Jr alleges it was the aftermath of this failure of modeling magic, in part, that led to the resignation of Richard Krause and ascension of Fauci to leadership of the NIAID some years later. But this is nothing like true political backlash; two new Presidents had already been inaugurated before that event (though, David Sencer was deposed from his decade-long tenure as head of the CDC by the incoming Carter administration). Nor were the adverse events associated with the rushed vaccine quite the scandal they are remembered as; deployment of the vaccine was halted primarily in recognition of a lack of need.7 Media criticism of the flu vaccine rollout was at times scathing; but in the end “a vaccine roll-out,” preceded by a press conference by Ford, the Congressional appropriation of millions of dollars, and a questionable agreement to grant the vaccine manufacturers indemnity, is all that the Federal government’s response was.
Moreover, media focus was never directly trained upon the experts who provided the Ford administration advice. Even as the news might obviously quote public health experts for their predictions for this flu as with any other, to the extent that there was a “theatre of emergency” for the 1976 no-pandemic, it was centered on Ford himself. As the unrepentant David Sencer later wrote:8
In retrospect (and to some observers at the time), the president's highly visible convened meeting and subsequent press conference, which included pictures of his being immunized, were mistakes. These instances seemed to underline the suspicion that the program was politically motivated, rather than a public health response to a possible catastrophe. […]
Neither CDC nor the health agencies of the federal government had been in the habit of holding regular press conferences. CDC considered that its appropriate main line of communication was to states and local health departments, believing that they were best placed to communicate with the public. MMWR served both a professional and public audience and accounted for much of CDC's press coverage. In 1976, no all-news stations existed, only the nightly news. The decision to stop the NIIP on December 16, 1976, was announced by a press release from the office of the assistant secretary for health.
Even if it was the case that Ford paid a price for listening to the experts, the experts mostly came out unscathed: And a more likely contemporary interpretation of the backlash would attribute it to Ford’s lack of deference to the experts, not to the failure of their predictions to come through. This is because the advice of the experts was at no moment taken as a mandate for the government to reshape the lives of the public. Ford’s administration did not treat the swine flu as an “emergency” which assigned the government extraordinary powers. The basic relationship between citizens and their businesses and the state was not redefined overnight.
Whether the swine flu was a deliberate attempt re-train the public to consider diseases an existential threat or just an episode of sincere bureaucratic bungling, it did not establish a precedent either for declaring a disease to be an emergency or for the political consequences of doing so (my point here being, that it has proven to be the case that there are no negative political consequences, as long as the media is willing to provide cover during and after the act).
And so Fauci, starting with AIDS, had free rein to attempt the project of getting to that condition. The media further rewarded him for doing what Krause and Sencer had not: Getting in front of the camera. Whereas Ford was punished by the media for personifying the tepid response to the swine flu, for “politicizing” it, and whereas this charge would again be leveled at Trump, “the experts,” like Fauci, were treated as super-political gods, even as everything about their advice and the media’s presentation of that advice was intrinsically political.
This transformation began with the AIDS crisis, which Kennedy Jr argues was Fauci’s “Pandemic Template,” right up to the prioritization of a potentially toxic drug to allegedly drive up death counts. The AIDS crisis is not sufficient to provide precedent for a disease-emergency, but serves in every other sense as the “template” that Kennedy Jr calls it. Whereas he centers his critique on Fauci, I would assign the media, especially 24-hour news, a more central role. At all events, even if no sweeping redefinition of the relationship between citizens and the state ever came out of the government’s response to the crisis, AIDS established the way that the media would ask for that redefinition.
This template, itself, transformed epidemiologists into an element of the political landscape, in exactly the way that meteorologists are. They were no longer mere advisors, but figureheads; but no one had actually asked for them to be. Nor is there much evidence that, beyond Fauci, they were even aware of this change in their position, nor the illegitimacy of the same. Likewise, the American public at large was seemingly unaware that the AIDS panic had elevated epidemiology into a new political role. What was unnatural was taken as natural: Epidemiologists should always be in the governments’ wings, if not actively defining what the government can and can’t do today, then waiting for the media to tap them on the shoulder. And anyone who did point out this new and unnatural state of affairs was often cast by the media as mentally deranged, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer.
This slow internalization of the unnatural template continues to shape the perceptions of epidemiologists today. Of course they are supposed to have their hands at the button that suspends all constraints on the state’s power. March, 2020, in this way of seeing things, is just when society started conducting its affairs correctly. This deeply-seeped mental habit of political entitlement, rather than some naive unawareness of their essentially political nature, explains the myopic presumption of absolute authority among even the most lowly of twitter-resident epidemiologists during the emergent campaign to “flatten the curve” in 2020. For them to screech “Listen to us, or die!” in unison in 2020 only to still claim to be “superseding” (rather than embodying) politics two years later is mere, rote fascist propagandizing. “We can’t have politics, because we are in an emergency; therefor I, the declarer of the emergency, am not political, whereas your elected representatives, who would question my declarations, are politicizing the emergency.”
Again, the analogs here are common social ailments like crime, etc. It is never not the case that some political actor or other would like the public to consider these everyday problems an “emergency,” and they may employ rhetoric to that effect - but the consensus is not there. And so it was never not the case that the media, after the AIDS crisis, wished to fabricate this consensus anytime experts warned of an emergent threat, right up to the 2009 swine flu. But no consensus emerged, and so no “emergency” was ever declared; and so once again there was no appreciable backlash to the crying of wolf, because there was nothing to backlash against.9
What was achieved by all these not-quite-failures, nonetheless, was to preserve and perhaps expand the AIDS template, gradually normalizing of the idea that the government should, in practice, consult epidemiologists just as regularly as it consults meteorologists. In one case, there are regular precedents for consensus of emergency; in the other, before SARS-CoV-2, there were none. In one case, there is an intrinsic time-limit to the expert-declared “emergency;” in the other there are none. Infectious diseases do not always, or even usually, go away.
And so despite a lack of precedent, the Covid-19 emergency demonstrated that the AIDS-vintage Pandemic Template fabricated a potential “normal” out of ether. Through a series of what looked like failures, the media succeeded over four decades in fostering the impression that there was nothing abnormal about something completely unprecedented, revolutionary, and abnormal: Assigning disease experts this extraordinary political power, at all times, either in latent form or active, with their own judgement deeming when it should be one or the other!
Disease scientists, by accepting the political role the media constructed for them after the AIDS crisis, unconsciously but actively appointed themselves the sole arbiter of whether limits apply to state power in the West.
They may not wish to believe so, but this is not their job.
If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.
As argued in “Boostermania,” no evidence of a waning of severe efficacy existed at the time of the EUA for triple-dosing.
To this date, severe efficacy of the original course only appears to “wane” after boosters are authorized and distributed, likely due to artifacts of bias that distort the numbers, with boosters in effect repeating the trials’ elimination of the “control group” in infinite regression. The flimsy evidence cited for the EUA of 4th-dosing was reviewed in “Another Dose in America.”
As speculated in “Unfinished Business,” Covid-vaccination may be increasing the chance of post-Paxlovid “rebound” via suppression of innate immunity.
The question of whether it is reasonable to “bet” on novel viruses meeting the standard of “knowable impact on individual mortality risk” is separate. Above, I am pointing out that here the bet was incorrect. I would further assert that the bet should never be made, as to make the bet (to declare an “emergency” before it is clear that there is one, which would require allowing the “emergency” to play out in part) rescinds the compact at the core of ostensibly free societies. Rather than to “refresh the tree of liberty with blood,” it constitutes rooting up the tree to ensure in advance that no blood is shed. What is meant here is that whether the act of shedding blood is regarded as morally negative, neutral, or positive, the existence of liberty is, and must be, the product of a given society’s willingness to shed blood (including, naturally, its own).
A more general discussion of whether “emergency” can ever be consistent with a free society (even if legitimate according to public consensus) is provided by Giorgio Agamben in “The State of Emergency as a Paradigm of Government.” (2020, May 6.) Tablet.
Kennedy Jr, Robert F. The Real Anthony Fauci. (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021.) Chapter 3.
His citations:
22 Peter H. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Regnery Publishing 1996), 134
23 Ibid., 146
24 Ibid., 146
25 James Curran, MD, 00:08:15 - “House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic,” YouTube Video (2009)
26 Kary Mullis, PhD, 00:08:03 - “House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic,” YouTube Video (2009)
27 Robert C. Gallo, MD, 00:08:36 “House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic,” YouTube Video (2009)
28 Richard M. Krause MD, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Aug 13, 2019), https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/richard-m-krause-md
Oshinsky, David. Polio: An American Story. (Oxford University Press, 2005.) Chapter 3, RE the FDR birthday balls starting in 1934, to the original 1938 campaign soliciting the mailing of dimes to the White House; and Chapter 4, RE the transition to movie-theatre based fundraising and the establishment of treatment centers.
For more on the (il-) legal basis of the CDC mask mandate, see “Legal Trainwreck(!)”
See Sencer, D. Millar, D. (2006.) “Reflections on the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program.” Emerg Infect Dis. 2006 Jan; 12(1): 29–33.
Had H1N1 influenza been transmitted at that time, the small apparent risk of GBS from immunization would have been eclipsed by the obvious immediate benefit of vaccine-induced protection against swine flu. However, in December 1976, with >40 million persons immunized and no evidence of H1N1 transmission, federal health officials decided that the possibility of an association of GBS with the vaccine, however small, necessitated stopping immunization, at least until the issue could be explored. A moratorium on the use of the influenza vaccines was announced on December 16; it effectively ended NIIP of 1976.
This is likely a self-interested presentation, but it does seem a more plausible characterization of how things played out. It does not seem clear that American attitudes toward vaccines in general were affected by the incident, for example - despite the implication that 40 million Americans had been placed at risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. It should also be remembered that Salk’s Polio vaccine went back into circulation the year after the Cutter Incident, and went on to enjoy a spotless reputation in the public memory.
(Sencer, D. Millar, D.)
The 2009 flu scare likely did add some little iota of energy to the Tea Party movement, on the margins.
Holy cow, the easiest Unglossed read yet. A great deal of agreement here in Bedrock. The question remains. For how long can nonsense and non-science® persist? When will the already available tsunami of empirical data overwhelm the moronic psychosis?
The media was always the
virus.
Nice article Brian! I wish The Real Anthony Fauci was required reading for our current medical school students.