A man on the street wouldn’t think to define a human being as three-fifths of a person, but this was the language that emerged when Southern slaveholding states and Northern abolitionists negotiated slave status for congressional representation. For politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows; it draws strange conclusions. Its scientific conclusions are no exception.
In deference to the strange bedfellow that is China, the World Health Organization once proclaimed that the coronavirus wasn’t transmissible person to person (you had to kiss a bat or something, I guess). The CDC was against masking before it was for it, and then briefly opposed it again, before resuming full mask-aholism a day or two later. Ditto for Dr. Anthony “Flip-flop” Fauci, who seems to have taken every COVID-19 (and COVID-1984) position imaginable, as he applies Orwellianism to disease remediation.
As for the medical establishment in general, it went from “a two-week lockdown to flatten the curve” to “can’t re-open until there are 14 days of declining infections” to “can’t return to normal until there’s a vaccine” to “Well, maybe not till 2022” to, essentially, “Viruses mutate! Deal with it! COVID Ritual forever!” Now you know why renowned epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski said, when explaining Fauci’s schizoid pronouncements early last year, “Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I’m entitled to actually do science.”
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Against this backdrop, Jeffrey Tucker at RealClearMarkets.com wonders if the CDC’s latest flip-flop — on the Delta China virus variant — “might be its final undoing.” That is, the agency is now recommending masks not just for the unvaccinated, but the vaccinated, too. Talk about a bait and switch.
The rationale is that Delta is doing an end run around the vaccines, which apparently shocks health authorities who ostensibly never heard of viral mutation.
Now, the “layperson’s understanding of a vaccine is that it protects a person against infection, like measles or smallpox,” writes Tucker. “In other words, you won’t get Covid, exactly as President Biden accidentally and apparently inaccurately said in a press conference last week.” (Or, to be precise, what his handlers said into his earpiece.)
“That is apparently untrue in this case,” Tucker continues. “That realization seemed to dawn on people only a few weeks ago, as reports from Israel revealed that half the new infections listed were with people who had been fully vaccinated.”
So the vaccines are meant to protect against the disease and especially against severe outcomes, but don’t actually do the former; moreover, we know that severe outcomes are generally only suffered by a certain population subset (elderly, obese, etc.). So “why is the policy priority near-universal vaccination?” wonders Tucker.
As for masks, Tucker suspects that the CDC was listening closely when Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) laid into a vaccinated and masked Fauci during a May Senate hearing. Why, Paul pointed out, should people get vaccinated if you still have to be masked?
Now, since the senator has great visibility and influence and because vaccination rates had flattened, Tucker theorizes that the CDC decided to act on his words. So it did an early May messaging flip-flop and stated that vaccinated people didn’t have to wear masks, a new position happily parroted by media-hound Fauci.
As a result, people, vaccinated or not, did remove their masks — all except for the kids (who aren’t even imperiled by the virus). “Hey, the CDC had to be consistent,” Tucker avers, “even when the results were cray cray, and therefore did not exempt children.” What didn’t occur was increased vaccination, “for the reason that everyone who wanted a vaccine already got it, while the rest possess natural immunity, are wary of the medicine, or were more than willing to accept the risks of exposure,” the writer explained.
This upset the Branch Covidians, says Tucker, who dogmatically aim for a 70 percent vaccination goal. Natural immunity they deem irrelevant and doesn’t even factor into their equation, even though vaccines simply mimic the naturally immunity process.
Then, Tucker points out, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post wrote the following on July 22:
So the CDC needs to state, as it should have in May, that unless there is a way to distinguish between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, indoor mask requirements should be reinstated…. The Biden administration has done many things right during the pandemic, but it made a grave error with its premature return to normalcy. It must hit reset and issue new guidance that addresses the escalating infections, waning interest in vaccination and unknowns of the delta variant. If it doesn’t, we could well be on our way to another national surge — and one that was entirely foreseen and entirely preventable.
“The CDC seems more easily led by op-eds in political newspapers than actual scientific papers on the topic, of which there are many thousands now,” Tucker then opined. So, influenced by politics, it reversed itself yet again.
The CDC, however, needed a pretext. Enter the Delta variant and the vaccines’ ineffectiveness against it. But, wonders Tucker, does the agency understand that it has further damaged public trust in the vaccines (and in itself)?
“The horns of the dilemma are obvious to anyone who is watching this clown show unfold,” he writes. “If the CDC removes the mask guidance, people don’t get vaccinated; if they add it back in, people have another excuse to avoid the jab. Masks in this case remain what they always were: a tool to prod the public into compliance with other mandates and dictates, purely a symbol of fear and its unrelenting trigger. And with fear comes obedediance [sic]. Maybe.”
This is why, the writer states, there’s now a push for vaccine mandates, something Biden once said he wouldn’t support. He will visit them on the entire federal workforce, while the Department of Justice has conveniently issued an opinion that such impositions are wholly lawful. More mayors and companies are signing on, too.
So remember “when only the ‘conspiracy theorists’ said that the real goal was a passport and eventually a China-style social credit score?” asks Tucker rhetorically. Anything now possible, your human rights are today “wholly contingent on what the pandemic planners desire, whether it is stay-at-home orders, school closures, mask mandates, or compulsory jabs,” he writes.
Tucker then theorizes that the saving grace, what may finally discredit the CDC, are the enraged parents again being told that their kids must don face diapers come fall. He’s hoping for an anti-COVID Ritual rebellion among the “American people.”
What may be more likely is that the risible COVID Ritual tyranny will further divide us — the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated. Left-wing states and perhaps most within them will comply with the feds, as it’s “easier to fool someone than to convince him he has been fooled.” More conservative states will likely resist. What’s for sure are two things:
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
And none of this has anything to do with science. All politics, the best we can hope for is three-fifths of a rational decision.
