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Launched on a Wing and a Prayer (For Billions of Dollars)

By Laurie Calhoun | Libertarian Institute | March 14, 2023

Way back in the spring of 2020, the provocative title of an article caught my eye. Upon reading it, I learned that researchers were rushing to create a vaccine before the COVID-19 virus mutated, which would render the vaccine nugatory and destroy all hopes of creating a blockbuster panacea. Curious at the time, such a warning can be viewed today as having been prophetic. (Note: That article, which offered a business slant on the historic vaccine competition, is no longer available through Google—“some results have been removed,” and are seemingly irretrievable—but here’s one with a similar title from April 2020: “Coronavirus mutation could threaten the race to develop vaccine.”)

Consider the stunning conclusion of a peer-reviewed scientific journal article published in January 2023:

“Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns. Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.”

Accustomed as everyone is by now to a relentless barrage of contradictory proclamations and retaliatory responses to them, the claim that mRNA was never fit to purpose for rapidly mutating coronaviruses might be written off by the usual suspects as the ravings of yet another antivaxxer conspiracy theorist. Except that this paper was co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible and persistent pusher of the newfangled COVID-19 vaccines throughout 2021 and 2022. So what happened?

Against all conventional wisdom on the ethical practice of medicine, Fauci did everything in his power to achieve maximal uptake of an experimental treatment by human beings across all cohorts, without regard to patient health, age, or any other identifying factor beyond their possession of an arm into which to inject a novel product granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) after an accelerated review by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Not only did Fauci ignore the vast disparities in vulnerability to severe illness and death between healthy infants and frail nonagenarians, but he also conducted himself for two years as though natural immunity through previous infection were somehow irrelevant to the question of whether a patient should roll up his sleeve.

Now, in the light of Fauci’s own published scientific findings, it would appear that he was right, in a sense, about natural immunity all along, albeit in an unexpectedly perverse way. First of all, as we already witnessed in real time, coronaviruses as a class, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), mutate rapidly in order to propagate themselves. This “discovery” served as the basis for the development of “boosters,” which, it was claimed, became necessary when “fully vaccinated” persons continued to become infected with COVID-19. Major outbreak-inducing strains such as Delta and Omicron, which arise through mutation, will always be one step ahead of last year’s vaccines, having survived precisely by evading the antibodies induced by injection into the body of the previous virus generation’s mRNA.

According to Fauci’s own findings, however, there is a second, even more compelling reason for denying that either vaccine or natural immunity to COVID-19 can ever be permanent. The primary difference between diseases such as measles, for which vaccines work, and the seasonal flu or SARS-CoV-2, for which they do not, is that the body’s natural immune response rises only to the level of the severity of the pathogen. Since most people can survive coronaviruses, the minimal response needed to defeat the invader is rather mild, which is why immunity dissipates rapidly over time and people can become reinfected again and again, even if they have recovered from natural infection, and whether or not they have undergone vaccination.

There are of course people who die of the flu or COVID-19, but they nearly always have comorbidities, infirmities or weaknesses, rendering them vulnerable to a pathogen which healthy bodies are capable of defeating. Notwithstanding the massive propaganda campaign for universal vaccination, most healthy young persons would have survived COVID-19, and would not have been hospitalized, with or without vaccination. Given the abundance of statistical evidence, there is simply no sense in which it can be truthfully asserted that healthy young persons with no comorbidities were “saved” by the shots. On the other hand, extremely frail and elderly persons can indeed be killed by the virus, regardless of how many “vaccines” they have taken. When it comes to the mercurial class of coronaviruses—instantiated by not only the common cold and the seasonal flu, but also COVID-19—so-called vaccines will never transcend their pedestrian identity as mere shots, for they are constitutionally incapable of offering longterm protection, not only because these viruses rapidly mutate, but also, and more fundamentally, because the body’s natural response to infection by such transitory viruses is never robust enough to be permanent. Just as having survived the flu one year has nearly no bearing on whether one will contract another case of the flu, from a different variant, in the future, no so-called vaccine solution to COVID-19 can confer longlasting protection.

Take as many boosters as you like, until the end of time, but having done so may or may not prevent you from contracting the latest iteration of the virus—or protect anyone else—since every booster or flu shot is the result of researchers’ “best guess” of what the specific properties of the next generation of viruses will be. It appears, then, that the widely celebrated and aggressively marketed, and in some cases mandated, COVID-19 vaccines, paid for thrice by the recipients of “free” shots, were in fact launched on a wing and a prayer. There was really no hope all along that the shots would or could offer longterm protection, although it was claimed for marketing purposes that they were highly effective and would save millions of lives. That those selling points were in fact lies may explain why they were supplemented all along the way with such eerily self-contradictory slogans as: “The vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated!”

Dr. Fauci’s surprising publication reveals that the abundant optimism exuded by him and others in attempting to maximize vaccine uptake was scientifically unfounded from the beginning. Neither the mRNA technology nor the traditional vaccines (which introduce a small amount of the live or dead pathogen into the body to elicit an immune response) can be effective for rapidly evolving pathogens such as coronaviruses to which the highly efficient human body mounts the weakest possible effective response. But this is hardly news, for we already knew long before 2020 that, despite assiduous efforts spanning decades, no one ever managed to develop a vaccine against the common cold. Likewise, the widely touted flu shots, marketed in very public ad campaigns only slightly less aggressive than those for the COVID-19 treatments, are in fact mediocre at best, as Fauci himself has averred.

If vaccine technology, whether vector- or mRNA-based, is simply a mismatch for the nature of rapidly mutating viruses, and this is a matter of common knowledge, readily accessible to anyone working in virology, then how are we to understand Fauci’s comportment throughout the Coronapocalypse? And why did he and his coauthors boldly reaffirm in January 2023 what many other researchers have been saying for years, including a few brave souls who were silenced when they tried to suggest the same from 2020 to 2022?

Fauci faces something of a “Charybdis or Scylla” dilemma here, for if he was ignorant of basic truths of immunology known by competent and knowledgeable scientists before 2020, then he had no business serving as the nation’s fount of public health wisdom. Double-masked Fauci devotees, in the aftermath of what was empirically indistinguishable from a full-scale psyop spanning more than two years, will no doubt remain reluctant to renounce their allegiance to the person who, they believe, “guided” us through the pandemic. Confronted with the revelations of Fauci et al.’s January 2023 publication, such followers may most charitably conclude that the object of their reverence did genuinely believe in the mRNA vaccines and continues to follow “The Science” where it leads, in this case, to finally acknowledge failure.

That Fauci honestly did not know that the mRNA shots would never work has also been the conclusion of a few of his most vociferous critics, including Alex Berenson, who somewhat ironically was spurned as “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by The Atlantic back in April 2021. (Morally speaking, that title surely belongs to Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, for the sheer brazenness with which he defied all known principles of medical ethics in pushing for universal vaccination across all cohorts.) Berenson was banned from social media under pressure by no less a power than the U.S. government itself when he dared to question the Fauci script at the height of the Coronapocalyptic hysteria. (Berenson’s lawsuit alleging the government’s violation of his First Amendment right to free speech is pending.)

Notwithstanding the superficial appeal (and attendant Schadenfreude) of the “Fauci was ignorant and is now eating crow” hypothesis, the Scylla horn of the interpretive dilemma would seem to cohere far better with the character of a man who remarkably responded to his critics on national television that “You’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.” Certainly such a person is not someone whom we would ordinarily regard as endowed with the humility needed to admit either ignorance or error. To my mind (and others, such as Dr. Robert Malone, agree) Fauci’s recent publication is yet another gambit perfectly consistent with his comportment throughout the pandemic. While Fauci’s admission that the mRNA technology is not fit to purpose for coronaviruses may on its face seem surprising, in fact, it is entirely true to form.

Yes, Fauci’s gambit is most plausibly interpreted as the latest chapter in his time-tested “fail forward” playbook: to use the outcome of the COVID-19 shot experiment to rally for yet more funding for the pharmaceutical industry. Like all good bureaucrats, Fauci uses government fiascos as a springboard to increase the reach and budget of his domain. In other words, Fauci, having quite effectively painted the COVID-19 virus as the most evil bogey man of them all, is simply continuing his efforts to impel politicians to dole out even more billions of dollars to the government-boosted industry which he has loyally supported throughout his entire career, as has been ably documented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In addition to being consistent with Fauci’s dismissive, smug, and seemingly shameless character, this interpretation coheres well with the general modus operandi of the pharmaceutical industry, which has displayed in recent decades an uncanny capacity to “fail forward” by pivoting and innovating so as to be able to reap massive profits even when their products generate consequences worse than the conditions which they were intended to address.

Note that slippery snake-oil salesmen such as Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, carefully calibrated their pitches from the beginning so as to protect themselves from future allegations of fraud by equivocating about the “efficacy” of their COVID-19 treatments. When directly questioned in December 2020 about the vaccine’s ability to limit transmission of the virus, Bourla offered casual, off-the-cuff replies such as, “I think that’s something that needs to be examined. We’re not certain about that right now.” His colleague, Ugur Sahin (co-founder and CEO of BioNTech), cagily couched his anticipatory optimism in these terms: “The first interim analysis of our global Phase 3 study provides evidence that a vaccine may effectively prevent COVID-19.” [my emphasis]  The rest is history. When it later emerged, to the surprise of everyone whose understanding of the crisis was shaped exclusively by the Pfizer-sponsored mainstream media, that the company never even tested the shots for their ability to prevent transmission, gaslighting fact-checkers rushed to the defense of the executives. Why in the world would anyone ever have believed that the new vaccines would prevent transmission and infection?

The government-subsidized pharma giants succeeded in profiting enormously from the politically amplified crisis by persistently touting the efficacy of their products against a virus which 99+% of people were perfectly capable of surviving on their own. The shot salesmen claimed victory when injected persons did not die, when in reality most of them would have survived even if they had declined the treatment or been injected with an inert placebo instead. But the scheme ultimately worked because marketers (including public health authorities such as Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky) unerringly referred to the shots as “vaccines,” a piece of sleight of hand made possible by the CDC’s own diluted redefinition of the term in 2021 to mean “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” This linguistic legerdemain worked wonders to promote the new shots, when in fact the new definition is so broad and open-ended as to make it possible to label as a vaccine anything that strengthens the immune system, including leafy green vegetables, vitamins C and D, etc.

In retrospect, there can be no doubt that the populace and the politicians crafting policy all assumed that the labeling of the mRNA treatment as vaccines implied that the shots stopped transmission and infection, even while the savviest of the snake-oil salesmen evinced ignorance from the start about the most important question of all: whether these “vaccines” were indeed like all of the other vaccines, capable not just of “stimulating” the immune system, but of producing dependable and durable immunity.

Given the statistics now available, even the more modest claim, continually chanted by pharma marketers and their lackeys in the media, that the mRNA treatment greatly diminished severe illness and hospitalization, may have been false. For the death toll of COVID-19 victims increased rather than decreased in the year after the “vaccine” launch, and the countries with the worst vaccine uptake had some of the best outcomes. On top of the virus deaths, thousands of people were diagnosed with post-vaccine injuries of a variety of sorts, believed by many of them, their families, and at least some of their doctors to have been caused by the shots. Some of the vaccine injured ended up dying long before their time, and excess deaths were also caused by the disastrous political response to the virus, with fatal drug overdoses reaching record levels. Millions of persons missed vital health screenings, having been terrorized into believing that they could not leave their homes (much less enter COVID-19–infested health facilities!) without contracting something akin to the Black Plague. Among those who sought help for their ailments, some were flat-out denied treatment for acute illnesses, either because they were not dying specifically of COVID-19, or because they had refused the experimental treatment.

In coming to terms with what transpired over the past three years, it is helpful to bear in mind pre-2020 history. When the pharmaceutical industry’s newfangled psychotropic medications did not work as advertised, they created and blitz-marketed “add-on” drugs to increase the efficacy of antidepressants now known to have exhibited success in clinical trials on a par with placebos, but with far worse longterm adverse effects, up to and including addiction and suicidal ideation. Similarly, the slick pivot of the industry in response to the opioid catastrophe (caused by itself) was to launch and market drugs which could help people in the throes of narcotics addiction.

The flu shots marketed in collaboration with and subsidized by governments have been demonstrated in clinical trials to succeed on a par with placebos, while post-flu shot deaths are invariably written off as “coincidental.” Nonetheless, the industry capitalizes on the fact that they are starting anew each year—the previous year’s flu shot results being irrelevant to the next year’s projected success. As a result, when heavily lobbied and propagandized authorities impose mandates in some places (such as the State of Massachusetts), this may lead others to follow suit. Crony capitalist windfall profits ensure the ever-augmenting marketing budget of pharma firms, with the result that each subsequent year’s sales will exceed the previous year’s tally.

Given such precedents, no one should be surprised if the failure of the COVID-19 shots to prevent infection and transmission, or even to diminish the number of persons who died from the virus, does indeed end up serving as the pretext for governments to infuse even more money into research and development of new and what are promised once again to be “miraculous” cures to be used in the future. Not long after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, auxiliary treatments such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s Lagevrio were developed to treat people who became infected with the virus despite having been “fully” vaccinated. As clear evidence that many people’s capacity for critical thought continues to be compromised by fear, when legislation to rescind the utterly illogical and unscientific COVID-19 vaccine mandate on foreigners entering the United States made it to the floor of the House of Representatives, 201 Democratic congresspersons voted to keep the executive order in place.

The ongoing support of the official government pro-pharma narrative by the president, the press secretary, the defense secretary, and most Democratic members of Congress, even in the face of ample evidence (including post-vaccination positive COVID-19 tests) demonstrating that the shots did not diminish the incidence of infection is best explained by the fact that policymakers prefer not to own up to their mistakes. Ordinarily, individuals base their future actions on what they have learned from past experience. The question arises in the present circumstance: Why is there still a push for vaccine passports when the COVID-19 vaccines do not in fact confer immunity? The assumptions funding the push for universal vaccination continue to be embraced, as though the vaccines worked resplendently, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary.

Now that Fauci himself has clearly explained why the mRNA technology will never offer a lasting solution to COVID-19, why would anyone, including Joe Biden and other advocates for the WHO (World Health Organization), still be in favor of implementing a universal health passport system regulating the movement of persons throughout the world? The current crop of shots do not offer longterm protection and do not moderate illness except in the case of persons in a very narrow cohort. Why require anyone to demonstrate that they participated in the experimental mRNA trial more than two years ago in order to be able to enter a country where the circulating variants bear little resemblance to the strain used to determine the formula of the first crop of vaccines?

There is no plausible health pretext available to explain why political leaders around the world would be keen to impose such a restrictive health passport program on free people, preventing them from traveling unless they first demonstrate their willingness to comply with future possible arbitrary orders decreed by public health authorities. That anyone not holding pharma stocks would support at this point the adoption of a health passport is best explained, again, by the politically induced trauma which appears to have psychologically scarred some persons for life. But just as the failure of the lockdowns to “stop the spread!” impelled leaders at every level of government—local, state, and federal—to prolong and intensify the lockdowns, those who pushed vaccine mandates will continue to press for universal vaccination passport requirements under the flatly false assumption that the reason why so many people died of COVID-19 was because of the evil antivaxxers who refused to comply.

What we are witnessing, the strangely intransigent push for vaccine passports, is entirely consistent with the comportment of the very persons who just succeeded in selling billions of shots. They will continue to insist that what we need to do is provide even more government funding to the pharmaceutical industry so that they can develop more and better cures for our ills. As disturbing as this may be, the most plausible explanation for the vigorous attempt to impose a health credential system on the people of the world is to provide the pharmaceutical industry with a limitless supply of not only customers, but also future experimental subjects.

As we have seen, the addition of the COVID-19 shot to the CDC’s immunization schedule for children—whose chances of dying from the virus are minuscule—serves only industry interests, by ensuring an endless crop of healthy young arms into which to inject the latest and greatest snake oils claimed to be panaceas (until it emerges that they are not). Likewise, the implementation of a universal health passport scheme restricting the motion of persons who opt not to undergo medical treatments of which they have no need would not only reap massive profits to the pharmaceutical industry but also represent the dawning of the pharma-techno state, in which citizens are subjects whose bodies are owned by their government.

The upshot here is that all of the pro-mRNA treatment propaganda and the incredibly vicious efforts to denounce and blame the noncompliant as the reason for the lengthy duration of the COVID-19 pandemic were nothing more than marketing ploys. That those who work behind the scenes of this well-oiled marketing machine were willing to destroy people’s relationships, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their very lives, reveals that their true motives were never to save the world from the virus but, instead, to profit from it. This is why we must resist any and all attempts by these same people and their toadies to foist upon us legal requirements to serve as guinea pigs in their future experimental trials, which is precisely what “health passports” would bring.

Laurie Calhoun is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters. Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023.

March 18, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States