A comically stage-managed president shuffles out to insult our intelligence
Shut up and submit, he explained.
Joe Biden’s tenure in office has had a surreal quality to it. It’s almost as if even those who represent and support him know his presidency is considered as illegitimate by half the public as his predecessor’s was by the other half. Efforts to portray him as some kind of savior thrust into office on a wave of personal support and revulsion at the Trump presidency all seem very ham-handed and tone deaf. One doesn’t get the impression that they believe most people really believe them or even that they care whether they do. The mood is a continuation of that which prevailed during the lifeless campaign that apparently swept him into office despite Trump’s picking up millions more votes than in 2016, increasing his share of minority votes, and having wildly enthusiastic and well-attended rallies across battleground states.
Biden, whose handlers have seemed particularly intent on shielding him from any unscripted interactions with the media, hasn’t had a single solo press conference since taking office. His 15 most recent predecessors each had at least one within the first 30 days or so. Admittedly, many would have preferred to have heard a lot less from his immediate predecessor. You at least got the feeling that Trump believed what he was saying, though, even if what he was saying often contained embellishments, a smattering of lies, and the occasional inconvenient truth that revealed more about the inner workings of the “permanent government” Trump pitifully tried to placate than many would have liked. With Biden, it’s all programming. And maybe that’s what many people want. It’s comforting when the words match the illusions we want to believe about the nature of our government and society, however hollow those words ring from a president owned by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.
Thursday night, between being trotted out to his teleprompter and back down a long hallway bedecked with flags (no questions from the peanut gallery), Biden marked the one-year anniversary of “fourteen days to slow the spread” with a solemn prime-time address. In it, he intoned about the more than 500,000 U.S. deaths that have been attributed to COVID-19, implied that Trump’s early inaction was the proximate cause of those deaths, lamented the economic fallout of the government’s decision to force whole swathes of the economy to shut down (although he blamed it on the virus), and acknowledged the educational and social impacts to millions of children at virtually no risk from the virus who were pushed out of school and in front of screens. And of course he decried resistance to wearing masks, “the easiest thing to do to save lives”, despite there being no real evidence they do that at all (the CDC’s about-face on mask guidance last year was based on pure supposition about potential viral transmission looking at droplet dispersal studies, not any actual trials on community spread of the virus, and a meta-analysis of influenza spread showed no benefit from masks).
President Biden promised by May 1 all Americans will be able to go to a clinic and get…you know, the thing.
Biden implied that the ending of pandemic restrictions by several states after a year in which disease trajectories were roughly the same in states with and without them was dangerous and that only if people kept wearing masks and generally acting like the end of the world was nigh could they possibly get together again in small groups by the Fourth of July. Small groups only. Listening to it I was reminded of the parade of TV ads in the Covid era that portray smiling families displaying their masked kids to grandparents from a street curb 30 yards away after having dropped off the advertised product, nicely giftwrapped. There’s probably a sizable subset of the public for whom that is a reality because they’ve chosen for it to be despite the actual statistical risk to individuals. It was a bizarre performance by a carefully stage-managed and senile man playing president.
But most importantly, his primary reason for conducting this grandfatherly touch-base, he heavily pushed the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, making a patriotic appeal to getting “the shots”. Biden told us to trust Anthony Fauci. Fauci said the vaccines were safe, so they must be safe. He didn’t say “trust the science” because Fauci doesn’t personify the science however much some want him to and they know the science isn’t advanced enough for the FDA to formally approve the totally unprecedented mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
How many people know that none of the three available vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, and now Johnson & Johnson) has been formally approved by the FDA? Instead, all three available in the U.S. are being distributed under Emergency Use Authorizations, basically legal cover for distributing a still-experimental product during a public health emergency after severely truncated testing that’s still ongoing. A responsible news organization would point that out and explain what it means, letting an informed public make their own decisions about what to do with the information. But not our news media. Ours are advocacy organizations working to shape public perceptions in the most beneficial way for the power structures they serve.
The goalpost shifting has been apparent from the start of this pandemic. At first it was “fourteen days to slow the spread”, in which efforts were focused on getting the healthcare system past the most dangerous part of the surge that in most parts of the country thankfully never materialized to the degree expected. After that we would return to normal, knowing the virus would still infect and kill as other viruses do to a lesser degree, but also knowing personal autonomy, freedom, and the functioning of society required we return to normal when the credible danger of health care system collapse had passed.
That notion didn’t even last the fourteen days. Since then “beating the virus”, and beating it completely, has been the price of freedom from paternalistic government. And the only method of beating it that can be countenanced is vaccination. No natural herd immunity for us, even though that's likely a major contributing factor in the current collapse in cases after a sharp peak in early January. Not nearly enough people had been vaccinated by that point for it to have made the difference — only a few tens of thousands had completed two doses nationwide.
And so, Biden said, “it is your duty as Americans to get vaccinated.” An odd thing to say given that the vaccine manufacturers, the CDC, and the World Health Organization all admit that there’s as yet no evidence that the vaccines prevent infection or transmission of the virus. The “95% effective” number you kept hearing was in terms of mitigating symptoms of COVID-19, not in creating immunity to the virus that causes the disease. With that being the case, how can it be a moral duty to get vaccinated with these experimental shots? There’s not yet any evidence that my injecting a substance that will cause my immune system to attack a virus-like structure on the surface of my own cells, which the vaccine programs my cells to produce (this is how mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna and viral vector vaccines like Johnson & Johnson work), will in any way protect you from me. But if you think I’m a threat to you, you can protect yourself by staying away from me and/or getting the vaccine yourself, which purportedly will mitigate your chances of getting severe disease if I infect you.
As a libertarian, I want people to be able to get the vaccines if they want them. I think it’s unwise to inject an experimental substance that genetically hijacks your cells’ mitochondrial protein manufacturing processes to create structures on the surface of your cells that cause your immune systems to target them. But if you think the risk of the virus is such that you need to do that, and I understand that having an elderly parent with underlying health conditions makes that decision difficult, I want you to be able to. My issue is with the propaganda, manipulation, censorship, and shame tactics being used by government and media to create excess fear of the statistical danger posed to individuals by the virus, limit access to facts necessary to informed consent, and drum up support for the vaccines.
Wall Street expects Pfizer and Moderna to make $32 billion off of their experimental mRNA shots in 2021 alone, all based on guaranteed government contracts for hundreds of millions of doses, and without any risk of liability whatsoever if something goes wrong. And they have no idea if these vaccines are safe in the medium- to long-term. The vast experiment being conducted now on tens of millions of people will determine that, although any ill effects that do materialize will likely be hidden from view. They’ll be denied as having any connection regardless of how quickly they follow vaccination and taken down from social media, while any deaths that occur within 30 days of a positive Covid test will continue to be presumed a Covid death.
I fully expect one day we’ll see internal pharmaceutical company emails that read more like 1960s tobacco company memos than they do the writings of fully transparent, diligent researchers trying to prevent death or serious injury from both COVID-19 and vaccines too hastily developed and approved as part of Trump’s “warp speed” initiative that Biden said didn’t move quickly enough. All that after we’d already turned the corner when the bulk of the vaccines were still largely collecting freezer burn. Call me a cynic, but natural herd immunity just doesn’t bring home the bacon.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.