Where Free Thought Dies
Where Free Thought Dies
Hyperbolic Brick-in-the-Wall Propaganda Replaces Heterodoxy at Quillette
A hundred civilians are stranded on the northern shore of an island, their ship having been hijacked by foreign privateers. Rescue is not expected. This is where they must live.
A wizened old man, the island’s lone inhabitant, emerges from the forest to warn them of a grave disease, which will strike all who stay the night. It will kill one of every twenty of them - the others will thereafter be immune. Or, for protection against the disease, the castaways must eat the small red fruits that grow from the shrubs on the outskirts of the forest. Because the fruits do not work if the eater is nearby someone who did not eat them, they must all eat the fruits.
What should they do?
A hundred civilians are stranded on the southern shore of an island, their ship having been hijacked by foreign privateers. Rescue is not expected. This is where they must live.
Along the shore is a strand of empty homes and shops - an abandoned village. Beside those is a field containing dozens of regularly-spaced stones, which has the appearance of a hasty and long-discarded burial ground. A wizened old man, the island’s lone inhabitant, emerges from the forest to warn them of a grave disease, which will strike all who stay the night. It will kill one of every twenty of them - the others will thereafter be immune. Or, for protection against the disease, the castaways must eat the small red fruits that grow from the shrubs on the outskirts of the forest. Because the fruits do not work if the eater is nearby someone who did not eat them, they must all eat the fruits.
What should they do?
Risk assessment for the Covid vaccines should be among the more enjoyable and interesting topics of discussion to have arrived in the modern era, along with lockdowns. But of course, the experience of 2020 - the penetration of every corner of establishment “thought” by hysteria and superstitious “stop-the-spread” prayers - tamped what hopes one could muster in advance for debate on the novel vaccines. Even with such lowered expectations, the outcome has been a disappointment.
The few mainstream-adjacent independent outlets which gradually found the nerve to question lockdowns have discarded whatever lessons might have been gleaned from their initial acceptance of the mistaken dogmas of 2020 - and, faced with the defection of a few mainstream-adjacent independent minds from the dogmas of 2021, have reprised and doubled down on their previous error. Three such outlets currently in the midst of redoubling the errors of 2020 may be mentioned specifically: Tablet, Commentary, and Quillette. Each has taken their own approach to resisting intelligent debate about the Covid vaccines: silence, squishy fallacious rationalizing, and legalistic propaganda, respectively.
1These are all three small, scrappy outlets whose contrarian output acquired at least a quiet luster of attraction amid the puritanical climate of Scientism and race-guilt-panic of 2020, if not a direct and substantial expansion of audience. Yet on the subject of Covid vaccines, they all three appear to be paralyzed by fears of being publicly tarred for the socially-unacceptable moral stain of questioning science before permission is granted from scientists to do so.
It is difficult to infer anything about what motivates Tablet’s lack of appetite for interrogating the mass rollout of an experimental medical intervention from a (politically diverse) Jewish perspective, given their near-silence on the topic. The editors at Commentary and Quillette, on the other hand, have been explicit about what has so recently agitated them to dive from complacency to evangelism on Covid vaccines: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s intelligent, well-reasoned evaluation of the facts, and the “platform” recently granted to their research and their concerns by Matt Taibbi.
The editors of Commentary - a magazine which only in June went all-in on the narrative that these experimental interventions have graciously delivered humanity from the fundamentally lethal natural disabilities of our bodies, in a cover story cringe-inducingly titled “Thank God for Big Pharma”2 - called out Weinstein and Heying by name on their podcast on Thursday, albeit gently. This soft pillorying was, however, merely one chunk of starch within the excruciating half-hour verbal soup of circularly-rationalized truisms about the sheer, self-evident impossibility of large-scale negative impacts from the Covid vaccines. At Quillette, the animating affront is more explicitly acknowledged: a still from Weinstein’s “How to Save the World” panel, with decades-long mRNA patent-holder Dr. Robert Malone and flamboyant Covid vaccine-truther Steve Kirsch, is the cover image to the anti-ivermectin, pro-vaccine manifesto published on July 6 titled, “Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines.”3 This piece, written by guest contributors Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin and published in the wake of founder Claire Lehmann’s public denouncement of Weinstein on twitter, presents itself as an actual risk-assessment discussion which takes the possibility of the validity of vaccine skepticism seriously.
Then it vomits out 3,000 words of meaningless evidentiary cherry-picking peppered with manipulative, 2020-vintage Covid catastrophizing, to posit (without saying so explicitly) that questioning the Covid vaccines at all is prima facie a moral wrong.
I will not engage in a fisking of the not-quite rigorous “conclusions” advanced by this essay about how we should evaluate the presently-available evidence regarding ivermectin and the Covid vaccines, which read oddly as though they were written by a discredited scientist “counter-discrediting” the discrediting of their work - in so doing, I could not exceed the clarity of several of the comments already posted by disappointed Quillette readers below the article - but I will offer two highlights of the essay’s manipulative alarmism about the “carnage” that SARS-CoV-2 will inflict upon the unvaccinated.
It is this feature of the essay, particularly, which demonstrates that the lessons of the crime of lockdowns have still not been learned, and still must be learned, if children are ever to be fully liberated from society’s mass-insanity.
My first highlight might seem to suggest that the authors felt that no study result could possibly be over-skewed for the purpose of supporting their alarmist narrative:
A retrospective cohort study published recently in Nature4 found that among 12,306 lab-confirmed pediatric COVID-19 patients in the United States, in the study cohort, the hospitalisation frequency was 5.3 percent, with 17.6 percent needing critical care services and 4.1 percent requiring mechanical ventilation. We don’t know how many cases go unconfirmed, so this study leaves important questions unanswered.
Critically, the reader is granted no contextualizing “among these” bridge between the 5.3% of children who are hospitalized and the outcomes experienced thereafter; only because the “critical care services” figure exceeds the hospitalization figure, is this intermediary subcategorization clear without clicking through to the Nature study itself. It turns out, however, that the results could be over-skewed even by the standards above, and were, as the corresponding correction appended to the essay reveals:
An earlier version of this article also stated that among children from a retrospective cohort study “almost 18 percent needed critical-care services, and 4.1 percent required mechanical ventilation.” The article has been amended to reflect that in the study cohort, the hospitalisation frequency was 5.3 percent, with 17.6 percent needing critical care services and 4.1 percent requiring mechanical ventilation. Quillette apologises for the error.
The deliberately misleading, semantically ambiguous presentation currently online in the article, turns out to be a correction of the deliberately misleading, semantically incorrect presentation originally employed. Quillette, where free thought lives™, apologizes for the “error” of not having initially misled their readers elegantly!
5But, what to make of the authors’ acknowledgement, in this passage, that the Nature study leaves “important questions unanswered” - one of many nods to epistemic humility that adorn the wanton epistemic absolutism at the core of their argument? It cannot really be described as satisfactory. First, the passage repeats the Nature study’s implicitly misleading reference to the children assessed within as “lab-confirmed pediatric COVID-19 patients.” “COVID-19,” however, is the disease experienced by only a minority of people who catch SARS-CoV-2.
What the Nature study actually assesses, is outcomes among individuals who are counted as testing positive for the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 within a certain date-range in the TriNetX network database. The TriNetX database pulls data from 44 healthcare organizations across the US, and is not limited to admitted patients (though it does characterize all test-takers as “patients”) - so it is a good proxy for individuals who receive positive PCR tests within a given population. It is simultaneously not a proxy for COVID-19, nor even for actually being infected with SARS-CoV-2: TriNetX themselves take occasional care to label this cohort in their database as “Potential COVID-19 cases;” at other times they use the inaccurate shorthand of “COVID-19 cases.” From the TriNetX COVID-19 Real-World Data Report USA:6
7Precisely how we ought to define an actual “case” of infection with SARS-CoV-2 for broader analysis is a complicated and subjective issue - and a necessarily political one, though mitigation advocates would (conveniently) insist otherwise. In Figure 2 of the Nature Study, it is shown that only 15% of pediatric “patients” in the TriNetX “Potential COVID-19” cohort had fever; only 12% cough. Depending on the overlap between these and the other symptoms, the other ~75% of “Potential pediatric COVID-19 patients” were either asymptomatic or never infected with SARS-CoV-2 at all.
This distinction, of course, cuts both ways: It implies that infection with SARS-CoV-2 is incredibly more rare (or more slow-spreading) than presented by PCR test results (duh), and that infection leads to hospitalization in more than 5% of true pediatric cases. But however many directions it cuts, it is the sword we’ve got. Any serious discussion of the risks to children ought to try to define the actual meaning of given risks clearly, and draw as well as can be done the distinction between what is known and unknown.
Any polity that is to restore legitimacy to the governmental and media responses to SARS-CoV-2 must accept that the definition of a “case” is inherently political. And because the definition is inherently political, any discussion of the risks of the virus that fails to question the prevailing inorganically determined, elite-delivered definition is masking politics as settled science: Including this Quillette essay.
This and other gestures toward epistemic humility peppered throughout the essay paint the color of rationality over what is essentially fear-mongering propaganda. All that can be admitted of, according to the essay’s central construct, is “That children can die from COVID-19” [italics in original]. The actual amount of future unvaccinated children that die is irrelevant to our authors, though they are happy to distort the figures to suggest disaster. The premise baked into their risk-assessment from the start is that “some” is implicitly “too many.”
But “some” children die from literally everything that humans do. Driving. Cooking. Jiu Jitsu. Riding bikes. Walking. Sleeping in concrete buildings. And, contact with the many viruses, bacteria, protozoa etc. swimming around in the great big biomass of humanity. We allow these things to happen, because “these things” are life itself.
Matters only take a turn for the worse in the next two paragraphs. First, the inconvenient matter of news reports affirming trends of increased (but still at the time ultra-rare) observations of clotting among AstraZeneca vaccine recipients is dealt with. This paragraph is sober enough, but elides one important point: Weinstein and Heying have not made the news reports about AstraZeneca instrumental in any of their arguments for concern about the Covid vaccines! Nor did Weinstein’s guests in the “Save the World” panel propose the AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson clotting scares as the foundation for their concerns. None of the more epistemically questionable signals of vaccine-adverse-events proposed by the duo and their guests were selected for the essay’s consideration; instead, a signal adjacent to their argument which has received mainstream media acknowledgement was offered as straw-man.8
Observing this decision on the part of the authors makes it difficult to believe that they are seriously interested in “debunking” any of the “harmful” concerns that Weinstein and co. have raised; either they have not even really listened to the arguments, or their intended audience is those readers who have not. Thus the AstraZeneca signal must be addressed, because it is the signal that this audience would be familiar with. The subsequent laziness of their repeated epistemically absolutist dismissals of the possible harms of the Covid vaccines, later in the essay, corresponds with this observation - and once again, several comments below the essay have done a good job at refuting their reasoning on the Covid vaccine risks.
9To return, however, to my core criticism: This acknowledgement of the AstraZeneca clotting concern merely serves as frame for an even more manipulative presentation of study results than the instance above:
Here is the key point: COVID-19 itself causes blood clots. Study upon study has confirmed this. A meta-analysis published in November concluded that one in five COVID-19 patients develop blood clots.10 This risk is orders of magnitude greater than any blood-clot risk associated with vaccination.
To spell out the problem with this construction of the study’s results is to reprise our previous point: The meaning of “COVID-19 patient” must be specifically defined if a genuine discussion, and not a one-way silencing of dissent, is to be achieved. Quillette bills itself as having been founded for the explicit purpose of housing discussion over views that have been silenced by progressive political taboos: Yet as soon as such a view arising on the threshold between taboo and mainstream meets its founder’s disapproval, Quillette behaves like any other organ of the press, and uses its power over the construction of reality-consensus to silence dissent.
In the “pediatric” example, the default to the inorganic, overly-broad definition of a “COVID-19 patient” was ambiguous, except in that it served to avoid pinning the authors down to concrete meaning. Here, as soon as a different, narrower definition advances the essay’s interests unambiguously, it is leveraged for all its worth. Because the phrase “COVID-19 patient” in the Lancet meta-analysis on venous thromboembolism, it is almost unnecessary to say, actually refers to “COVID-19 patients [who were already in the hospital for severe COVID-19 up until June 12, 202011].”
Shall we review the contents of the first seven of the “42 studies enrolling 8271 patients” cited for this meta-analysis?
“Prevalence of venous thromboembolism in patients with severe novel coronavirus pneumonia.”12 - April 09, 2020 - “In this study, 81 severe NCP patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Union Hospital (Wuhan, China) were enrolled.”
“Prevalence of venous thromboembolism in critically ill patients with COVID-19”13 - June 02, 2020 - “We performed a retrospective cohort study of… [107] adult patients (age ≥18 years old) who received ICU care.”
“Incidence of venous thromboembolism in [198] hospitalized patients with COVID-19”14 - May 05, 2020
“Confirmation of the high cumulative incidence of thrombotic complications in critically ill ICU patients with COVID-19”15 - April 30, 2020 - “We studied the same 184 ICU patients as reported on previously, of whom a total of 41 died.”
“High incidence of venous thromboembolic events in anticoagulated severe COVID-19 patients”16 - April 20, 2020 - “we performed a retrospective study in two French ICUs…”
Deep Vein Thrombosis in Hospitalized Patients With COVID-19 in Wuhan, China”17 - May 18, 2020 - “Of the 143 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 (age 63±14 years…”
“Incidence and consequences of systemic arterial thrombotic events in COVID-19 patients.”18 - June 9, 2020 - “In a large cohort of 1419 [hospitalized] COVID-19 patients we observed a 1% incidence of systemic arterial thrombotic events… Although SARS-CoV2 infection may favor arterial thrombotic events, with grave consequences, it does not seem to be a frequent enough phenomena to warrant the need for specific systematic preventive measures.”
Study upon study, indeed.
19The research from Spring 2020, even when it was first released, already had almost no value in helping us arrive at an organic consensus of what infection with SARS-CoV-2 is and does, any more than of what benefit early therapeutic treatments provide. The widespread national public health system policies, which discouraged admission of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 until they could barely breathe, fostered a distorting effect on early research - an effect which disappears entirely when the policy is also removed. Yet such flawed-by-design studies were actively weaponized by research publications in the late spring and summer to “own” Trump for being right about hydroxychloroquine as an early-stage therapeutic, to the cost of who knows how many unnecessary severe Covid-19 cases later.20
For these studies to still haunt our “free” discourse today is really too much. Now that therapeutics appear to have significantly rewritten the plot of how an infection with SARS-CoV-2 among at-risk individuals plays out, citing the research of spring 2020 in a debate about choices facing society today is as appropriate as a medieval treatise on catapults would be to a discussion of violent crime.
21Quillette’s anti-anti-Covid-vax hit job ironically shares the current front page with an essay published three days earlier, denouncing the still-ongoing perpetuation and mission creep of the state of emergency declared by the liberal West. I haven’t read the latter, but I will venture to engage in a bit of mind-reading about the minds that wrote and agreed to publish it: To these “free-thinking” minds, it is now ok to criticize the novel non-medical interventions of 2020, because they didn’t work.
This is inadequate. The lockdowns must be condemned not only because they did not and could not have worked, but because they were the wrong choice even if they could have worked.
“Temporarily” removing the categorical barriers separating the state from the prerogatives of individual subjects inherently risks that the barriers will never be reinstated. To anyone who is critical of the media’s ability to shape policy by scripting the narratives of the Theatre of Governance, and of the rise of Scientism as a device to remove political issues from the realm of organic debate critical to functional self-governance and into the ethereal pantheon of objective “facts,” it was obvious from the start that the barriers probably would not return - or that if they did, it would only be by the grace of pre-lockdown cultural inertia. Yet, an agreement on the degree of the risk that the state will not restore our rights is not necessary to avoid taking this risk: Merely an agreement that we should not trust our own estimation of the risk, because it is only by the willingness of our forbearers to agree to distrust their own judgement - even in their supposedly backward, “superstitious” era - that citizens of civically orderly societies have any rights today.
Having made the opposite choice, we must be uncompromising in our diagnosis of the causal link between risking authoritarianism and finding ourselves mired within it. Perpetuity and mission-creep are features of our political responses to the Pandemic™, not bugs. Continuing to affirm the legitimacy of the risk-assessment premises that led to the adoption of those responses for which efficacy has been discredited (or become permissible to question), in order to sustain and advance the responses not yet proven futile, only dooms the liberal West to its rapidly approaching fall.
The “facts” of SARS-CoV-2 and vaccines in general must be moved back out from the walled garden of Scientism. The mistakes of 2020 must be used to reframe our habitual, rosy view of the rash 20th-Century child-experiment of the “miracle” Polio vaccine. Merely because national and global disaster did not arrive when we tempted it, does not mean it should have been tempted. Medicine, like all science, is inherently political,22 and the so-easily propagandizable convention that it is not will be wielded as a weapon to silence speech again and again, until we refute and destroy the convention. And if the mainstream-adjacent publications ostensibly safeguarding free speech in the new era of censorship regard as tantamount to promoting “carnage,” the mere acknowledgement that a novel, untested vaccine platform by definition is not safe, they should retire their mastheads. Every day spent doing otherwise merely increases their operators’ would-be complicity in the grand disaster humanity has tempted, if indeed that disaster hears and answers our call.
The Genetic Age is here. There is no escaping it; it will be with us until it figures out how to kill us.
Humanity is and always will be the 100 souls arriving on the island, stranded by our technological privateers - and tempted to risk everything on an unknown cure, for a meager decrease in the risk we know.23
Meigs, J. “Thank God for Big Pharma.” (2021 June.) Commentary.
“Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines.” (2021 July 6.) Quillette.
Parcha, V. et. al. “A retrospective cohort study of 12,306 pediatric COVID-19 patients in the United States,” nature.com
(index link anchor)
(index link anchor)
Instead, they are dismissed as being too epistemically questionable to address seriously - which leaves the argument of Weinstein et.al. as essentially unaddressed, since it acknowledges its own epistemic questionability.
(index link anchor)
Malas, M. et. al. “Thromboembolism risk of COVID-19 is high and associated with a higher risk of mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” The Lancet.
The implications of the discovery of therapeutic regimes which improve results for every stage of SARS-CoV-2 infection on reevaluating early research when performing risk-benefit analysis for the Covid vaccines are an element of the calculus of Weinstein et. al.’s risk assessment. The Quillette essay purports to address the employment of this reassessment calculus in Weinstein et. al.’s argument, but the use of pre-therapeutic benchmarks to represent the current and future risk of SARS-CoV-2 shows, again, that they are not interested in rebutting the actual argument.
(index link anchor)
See, as always, Doidge, N. “Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale.” (2020 August 13.) Tablet.
(index link anchor)
If we have truly surrendered our right to natural death, we have lost as well our right to natural life.
Obviously, regardless of which side of the island the castaways arrive upon, not eating the fruit is the better strategy for survival.