“Oh, I could give you an answer - but the only ones who’d understand it would be you and me.”1
I do not like prefaces. But an accounting of how this journal’s first post acquired its theme and purpose will provide the reader a useful epistemological vantage from which to grade the results - since the author possesses no accreditation or specialism that can operate as tokens for the same. I am neither insider nor expert on any subject that this journal will discuss. But if my presentation of the well-known, yet chaotically reported history of Covid mitigation and vaccine rollout thus-far convinces the reader, in some small part, either that I am capable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, or that I happen to possess interesting fantasies, then it will have fulfilled its purpose.
In early March of 2020, as a coherent mise-en-scène gradually constructed itself for the media theatre of the Covid crisis, I was in the mood to rant - and I was in no position to do so. It seemed to me, even before the first lockdowns, that the free world was flinging itself headlong into a (politically) irreversible suspension of elections and proliferation of surveillance totalitarianism, and that the left, within the media and without, was completely oblivious, if not eager for the result.
While the right was already gestating a counter-reaction by late March - the conservative media establishment was still pliant and pro-“mitigation” in the early days, but a handful of social media accounts exploded in forceful criticism of the new normal from the start, and these gained a quick following - I felt strongly in the beginning of the Covid era there was a desperate need for a staunch anti-mitigation advocate whose following leaned to the left2, and who might have at least 1 out of a 100 followers with whom the message would resonate, rather than prompt an allergic response leading promptly to a block. Who knows? Maybe even such a small post-attrition audience could have made a difference. So, I wanted to try.
And therein was the problem: I had no foothold from which to carve out such a left-leaning mitigation-skeptic audience of any size. I was almost entirely off of social media. I had long locked myself out, via a gibberish password and email reset, of my larger twitter account, which might have contained (by the math above) 40 such nuggets within the mud of lockdown-acolytes. And among the followers of my smaller, more private account, there was and still is, by the same math, no profit to be had. Were I to rave against lockdowns from a virgin account, it could now only become one of thousands of small voices in the ecosphere of “rightwing” Covid “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” - it would possess no immunity to the labels which so easily inhibited free (or even mildly intelligent) discourse within the left in 2020. A retreat from the internet was not even the only choice available: it was already the status quo. Besides several incoherent, alcoholic evening rants posted to my (similarly obscure) Instagram in March and April, featuring my back-of-the-envelope calculations of the staggering minimum potential harms of lockdowns compared with the relatively modest maximum potential harms of the disease itself, I devoted most of my time to private and productive affairs. I had accepted that the coming pivot toward autocracy was fait accompli.
The media’s adoption of a more nakedly performative, narcissistically catastrophizing tone of alarmism in early May - precisely as the first wave politely burned itself out in the Northeast and the arrival of waves in the South and West were not producing Northeast-scale “devastation” - briefly reignited my compulsion to engage in news-absorption and ranting, and my wish for a platform. But I was by now utterly sanguine on the question of suspended national elections, just as the progressive media establishment was reversing their initial dismissal of that same threat. To my eyes, President Trump had clearly signaled that his intentions were (and would remain) unclear. His prescient proclamation of the hazards of mitigation arrived on March 22, only 7 days after the broad adoption by states of lockdown:
The insinuated unambiguous policy pivot (toward or) away from mitigation never arrived: but Trump’s tweet did signal a stalling of narrative development, on the national level, within the theatre of the emergency. With Trump continually (though inconsistently) sounding a discordant note against the collective panics over surges! and ICUs! in April, the press conference warnings and official proclamations of the experts became perfunctory in tone and circular in logic. The national narrative of emergency was already characterized by stasis, not advancement: a pattern that would hold for over a year.
That left the problem of the near universal, state-imposed mandates; but governor Kemp had by the end of April already embarrassed the conspiracy of the grand, control-free experiment in authoritarianism by establishing his state as a low-mitigation negative; he would be joined in time by Florida and Texas. Meanwhile Sweden, in some place called “Yourup” (?), was likewise doing her part. I harbored no fear that the high-mitigation states would reap any benefit in Covid mortality over the brave-hearted low-mitigation states (nor any hope that the media would ever acknowledge the failure of their irrational predictions to the contrary3). Mitigation might still become the law of the land in perpetuity, I knew: but it now must necessarily do so in spite of the revelation of its impotence, as made visible by Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Sweden.
In fact, after May I would not have even cared if Trump did go on to declare an emergency suspension of the coming elections. Of course, the implications for civic violence or civil war were unpleasant, but even a mitigation-free, federalized monarchy in constitutional crisis was a less alarming prospect than an elite-run, bio-management autocracy in a permanent, epistemically unfalsifiable state of fake-emergency.
That individual states would be painstakingly slow to walk back their proclamations and policies of emergency once (despite the incredible, unproductive delays imparted by mitigation4) Covid had burned itself out, was also obvious and foreseeable from the beginning of lockdown. The coherent media mise-en-scène of the emergency had left absent, from the start, the wanted pathway to a logical resolution of the narrative played out within: in part precisely because the small scale of the problem of Covid was always so incompatible with disaster, the scale-of-problem descriptor adopted (as baseline) to describe it5. If normalcy is defined as emergency, how can the emergency ever end? That of course is the foundation of the alarm expressed by myself, as well as the foundation of the conspiracy theory narrative central to much of the anti-lockdown movement from the start, as well as the foundation of the fundamental danger behind any declaration of emergency: beyond the chiding of the courts, no authority exists among men that can wrest from the other two branches of the state the arbitrary power to define when the emergency is over.6 But I mention the problem here in more neutral terms. Even assuming that the various governors and county public health boards instituting lockdowns and related mandates were acting with sincere intentions (if we define “sincere” as: purely according to their political self-interest, in seeking reelection by appearing to “fix” a fake emergency that the media had foisted onto them; not as: acting out of a personal lust for power or at the behest of shadowy, conspiratorial puppet-masters), the problem facing these ministers at the end of the lockdown was the same. No real emergency had happened, so how do you declare an end to the emergency without 1) looking foolish and 2) risking media excoriation and political blowback from even the lowest-scale post-reopening rise in Covid “cases”? Since we must imagine any magical thinking among the ministers to be at least somewhat discouraged by the intelligence received from their advisors, most would have probably taken Scenario 2 to be unavoidable, and thus insensitive to timing: with regards to “preventing” a winter 2021 “surge”, if it is to happen, it does not matter whether one “reopens” in March or June. Therefore, Scenario 1 is the operative pace-setting variable - and it favors maximum lethargy.
Thus it was obvious by mid-May 2020 that, among those states not already having significantly “reopened,” the first attempted de jure end of the emergency would be Summer, 2021.
This brief history of the first spring of Covid suffices to account for why I paid almost no attention, afterward, to developments in the understanding of the disease - the pathology, the treatments, the origin, and developing of vaccines for the virus that causes it - so much so that on New Years Eve, reprising one last time my alcoholic Instagram anti-mitigation rants, I naïvely referred to the then just-rolling out vaccines as a “weakened forms of the virus” - i.e. a traditional vaccine (i.e. calibrated inoculation).7 Nothing that had I foreseen in the spring failed to come to pass, so I saw little need to quest for further granular lay-knowledge about the virus upon which the fake emergency was premised. This is particularly true given my great, ever-growing, and increasingly mystic skepticism of the capacity for human understanding to behold the true nature of biological things to begin with. Correspondingly, I did not imagine the emergent circumstances which would one day prompt me to pursue such amateur research to such lengths that would merit posting the results online.
I cannot now say when, amid my near-total fast on Covid news, I finally became aware that the vaccines employ gene therapy (repurposed for intracellular, but extra-nucleic protein production). I can say when I subsequently learned that the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) Covid vaccine is also not a “real” vaccine - that it consists of a different but analogous mechanism to the mRNA platform: It was while I was researching said platform mechanism, on a whim, to answer a question during an online comments-war over the ethics of vaccinating those who are not at risk from SARS-CoV-2 against SARS-CoV-2.
Up until that point I had been approaching the debate with a calibrated disinterest in the particularity of the novel platform - I was aware of the intrinsic theoretical hazard of the novelty of the mRNA vaccines; but to my eyes, the argument against vaccinating the not-at-risk did not depend on that hazard. Rather, we simply did not need to vaccinate the not-at-risk. First, the ethical claim that the at-risk, but willingly vaccinated population is “entitled” to any additional “sacrifices” in the name of a theoretical danger does not convince me on philosophical grounds. Second, the practical, epidemiological claim that vaccinating the not-at-risk lowers or, in fact, does not heighten, the possibility of Covid vaccine-escape (the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 to elude vaccine-induced s-protein antibodies) is, I find, patently nonsensical, as there are no historical precedents upon which to model or weigh the opposing possibilities (which doesn’t make the nonsensical claim false, but disfavors acting as if it were true, until later information emerges). We did not need to vaccinate the not-at-risk, and therefore should not have, even if the vaccines were perfectly safe.
Upon appraisal, however, with the mRNA vaccine mechanism, I became convinced that they are not “safe”, which is to say that knowable risks they present to young and healthy people are greater than zero. At that point - at the point of merely considering the mRNA mechanism in theory, for the purposes of explaining the technology in a marginal comments thread - I counted the knowable risks as one: The mRNA and vector Covid vaccine platforms appear almost designed to promote immune dysregulation. The mRNA Covid vaccines seek (in theory) to prompt an antigen-presenting-cell response to the notorious spike protein alone, as in: not accompanied by any other, natural contextual signals associated with an authentic viral encounter. This implies potential diminished natural immunity response to future coronavirus at the least, and potential IgE antibody-mediated hypersensitivity to future coronavirus at the worst, with a universe of other potential chaotic impacts-in between (that doesn’t make the implied potentialities true, but disfavors acting as if they were false, until later information emerges).
The Janssen vaccine, I discovered during the same research, does almost exactly the same thing: although the adenovirus shell - the vector - may provide some viral infection contextual signals, it may not provide others (which can be easily imagined: such as the full spectrum of infected cell metabolic refuse), and may cross-wire future immune pattern-recognition (by associating the s-protein with adenovirus shell proteins): the presence of and long-term effect of either of these changes, of course, we cannot possibly detect or understand without years of study.8 I would learn of many additional knowable risks soon, but the critical change had already occurred: I was now personally settled - on two orders of risk-evaluation magnitude - that I would not take the vaccines, and convinced that every not-at-risk person who was doing so was potentially turning themselves into a lifelong medical patient: into a member of that sacred, suffering, holy order of beings, the immunocompromised.
The story of how I came to believe that I, personally, should research and report further on the Covid vaccines should at that point be over. The plot is established: A year after ceasing to worry about the prospect of an all-out post-Covid dystopia based on a fabricated, but unfalsifiable threat, I became incredibly alarmed about the prospect of an all-out post-Covid dystopia based on the population-wide, overnight destruction of natural immunity to all coronaviruses. I had also - as serves the plot - several times in the most recent months broken my Covid research-fast, reading several late-”pandemic”-era studies directly. This was likewise prompted by a whimsical desire to correct winter-vintage media distortions as they appeared in comments threads online. But the result of these endeavors was that my confidence in being able to interpret research papers on my own had become quite high. And though several (apparently) brave and brilliant researchers and medical professionals have bucked the trend of silence to provide media-narrative-countering heavy data- and study-analysis since the beginning of the Covid era, I still thought there was space for an outsider and skeptic of medical science in general to offer his own (rather more lightly researched) interpretations. And my thoughts on all the other subjects this journal will be delving into, namely concerning my reactionary swing away from progressivism, had gestated to a sufficient degree, to warrant the commencement of concrete work. And now - at, once again, the moment where the story ought to be at a close - I had a theory9 about the risk of the Covid vaccines (not an entirely unique one, of course, but one I believed in strongly, and believed I could translate to common English), and I had already posted the theory in the aforementioned marginal comments thread: why not just dress it up and give it a URL? Meanwhile the myriad reasons why I shouldn’t start the journal - my lack of a current audience, my deficiencies in statistical understanding, and above all my chronic inability to explain what I view as common-sense conclusions either comprehensibly or convincingly - did not argue for delay, as none of those factors were going to improve with further wait.
Thus it serves no value to the plot to recount the further two intervening milestones, but here they are: I was alarmed, and frankly surprised, when on May 12 the Emergency Use Authorization for the Covid vaccines was extended to those between ages 12 and 15 - a population which was never at significant risk of even spreading SARS-CoV-2 (barring natural-immunity-escape, the possibility of which is questionable) - yet I did not act. I was soon after alarmed, but not surprised, by the 3+ hour interview between Dr. Bret Weinstein and guests Steve Kirsch and Dr. Robert Malone, now removed from Youtube and reposted on Odysee10, detailing several additional knowable risks inherent both Covid vaccine platforms - yet I did not act.
In the end it was my encounter in mid-June with the obscure, mysterious story of the Study from Singapore, which prompted me, at last, to enter the fray.
O’Brien, C. (Writer), Moore, R. (Director). (1993, January 14). Marge vs. the Monorail (Season 4, Episode 12) [TV series episode]. In J. L. Brooks, M. Groening, A. Jean, M. Reiss, S. Simon (Executive Producers), The Simpsons. Gracie Films; Twentieth Century Fox Film Production.
(As it happens, among all the TV episodes ever released, the current APA reference entry I found on the Scribbr page for how to cite a TV episode is the Simpsons episode aired eight weeks after this one.)
And that this voice must belong to someone who is not employed by any corporation or media entity, and therefore must be a non-expert (or retired expert), was my intuition at the time; this has been born out by the intervening months of broad, consistent viewpoint-suppression within mainstream media and the private sector at large.
See (if one must) Mull, A. (2020, April 29). Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice. The Atlantic. This will forever remain one of the most illuminating documents of the media’s campaign to make impossible a rational, politically-legitimate reaction to Covid.
The (non-) impact of mitigation on Covid (treatment and) mortality may be the subject of a later essay.
Defining and analyzing the “scale” of the disease of Covid itself may be the subject of a later, and more philosophically-expansive essay. Such an exercise could have formed a more appropriate inauguration of this journal, as it combines so many of the subjects just recounted with a standalone thesis: however, that thesis is not particularly novel. There are plenty of spaces online where other lockdown-skeptics have advanced roughly the same set of arguments, and by now almost everyone is likely convinced of their own view.
Here, obviously, I owe an acknowledgement to the political philosophical work of Giorgio Agamben.
On the two points preceding - treatment and origin - I did possess some sense of the general picture that had developed, thanks to the work of Norman Doidge at Tablet. The astounding “Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale,” (2020, August 13), detailing how HCQ’s efficacy became a scientific taboo, if not the subject of deliberate suppression, in the wake of Trump’s comments cheering the drug, is still good reading. However, it has been superseded and made narratively obsolete in some important respects by the revelation of the broad and ongoing systematic suppression of ivermectin, an even more effective treatment for Covid that was never significantly associated with Trump. See the now-essential “The Drug that Cracked Covid,” by Michael Capuzzo (2021, May), Mountain Home. My own awareness of the drama of ivermectin that exploded in late December did not occur until mid-May, and I was unaware of Capuzzo’s article until mid-June. Back at Tablet, Doidge’s “A Plague on Both Our Houses” (2021, February 17), similarly put him and any readers far ahead of the long-stifled acknowledgement by the mainstream media of the lab leak origin possibility.
That vaccine-induced antibody response is likely to be less full-spectrum than natural post-infection Covid immunity (and therefor that an antibody test calibrated to “natural immunity” may not positively identify “vaccine immunity,” though I would argue the reverse is more plausible) is already acknowledged by the CDC’s own current Interim Antibody Testing Guidelines:
“Since vaccines induce antibodies to specific viral protein targets, post-vaccination serologic test results will be negative in persons without history of previous natural infection if the test used does not detect antibodies induced by the vaccine.“
This suffices, for now, for a description of my concerns on the subject of immune dysregulation. But as “Antibody Dependent Enhancement” is developing into another of those clichéd scare-words for a novel medical hypotheses, the more balanced summarization of which never causes harm, I may revisit the point in a later essay.
This journal does not intend to be semantically rigorous with the use of the word “theory”; the general definition - any explanatory system of ideas - will obtain, unless it is proceeded by a modifier.
So what I had always thought of as an intimate beautiful genetic dance taking place in the creation of life is actually a whole ballroom.
When I first started to look into physics it contributed to the awe I always felt about life itself. I read an extensive article about the path scientists took to manipulate viruses that led to the current pandemic and was horrified anew. I have believed for eighteen months or so that we need a Nuremberg trial for those who stood before us as saviors and were in fact the monsters responsible, not only for the viral pandemic, but for everything that continued to destroy our humanity. Now I see the outraged (virtually everyone) clamoring for a nuclear war and a new company investing billions in crispr technology. I am feeling a little hopeless today. Whatever progress science makes seems to inevitably lead to destruction.
Thank you for answering me. I don't have a materialist/secular mindset and would love to understand what your "wilder" ideas are. (or at least to try) I realize your posts must take an enormous amount of time (and being retired now...(VA vax mandates and though I am old enough I resent this forced end to my career) I have lots of time, so if I ask you to clarify something don't feel compelled to respond. But if you have time, and are willing to indulge me as I try to keep my brain somewhat functional, what do you mean by 'upside down'?