“For centuries, people have been aware that being out in public carries
certain risks – among them, the risk that one might contract a disease from
another person. Never before have people widely asserted that they have the
right to demand that everyone around them take all possible precautions at
whatever cost to themselves to make this environment absolutely risk free. If,
as the mandatory vaccination proponents contend, we can demand that everyone
around us take every conceivable precaution against every communicable disease,
what else can we demand of them?
“What are some other risky practices Americans should no longer tolerate
from each other? Going out in public with a cold?”
First they Came for the Anti-Vaxxers, April 23
2015
I wrote this almost exactly five years ago. I was trying to come up with
extreme examples to illustrate the absurdity of the demands made by those who
would force vaccines on everyone, based on the premise that not taking every
possible precaution against being infected by a pathogen constitutes an
aggression against those around you.
It
turns out my attempts to outdo the absurdity of this argument did not go nearly
far enough. It turns out that probably nothing ever could. The past five weeks
have made this clear.
Just
to recap:
Vast
swathes of the world’s economy have been ordered to come to a standstill–the
impact of which will be devastating for millions of people around the globe who
stand to lose their jobs, their businesses and possibly their food supplies–all
because of modeling that warned of as many as 2.2 million deaths in the US and
500,000 in the UK if those governments did not impose drastic restrictions on
the people of those countries.
But when data scientists have
actually examined the results of the lockdowns
that were imposed, they have found no evidence that they have helped to contain
the spread of Covid-19, or indeed, to “flatten the curve”, while those places that did not imposelockdowns
are not faring any worse than the ones that
did.
In the US, with the exception
of a very few cities like New York City, hospitals are anything but
overwhelmed. Many are actually shutting down or furloughing staff because of the sudden
drop in elective procedures. China’s lockdowns have ended, and the government
of Iran is beginning to lift lockdowns there. But here in
California, instead of simply declaring the lockdown over, Governor Newsom has
assembled a task force to examine the question of how
best to end it.
Why?
Did he need a task force to implement the lockdown? No. Nor will he ever be
made to pay for the human and economic (are the two really separate?) costs of
these unprecedented authoritarian moves.
THE
AUTHORITARIAN PARADIGM:
But that is the nature of
political systems: The people making the decisions are not the ones who will
suffer their consequences. Government entities are–by design–not accountable
for their actions. And that is the whole problem. What we are facing right now
is not the threat of a deadly pandemic. We are facing
the threat of a deadly paradigm.
It is
a paradigm that tells us that the best way to deal with threats–especially big,
scary threats that could impact us all and potentially kill a lot of people–is
for a central authority to make decisions that are then imposed by force on
everyone else. (The pushers of this paradigm like to leave out the whole lack
of accountability thing.)
To a
panicked population, this might sound reasonable. “Freedom and individual
rights are all well and good when things are fine,” people may tell themselves,
“but this is an emergency! We need the parental figure of the state to step in
and do something!”
Don’t laugh. It’s how a lot
of people actually think. Or rather, it’s how they don’t think. Because if they were thinking, they
would notice the catastrophic results all around them of allowing central authorities to make decisions in crises like this.
They
might also remember that we all learned an important lesson about this in the
Twentieth Century. You remember: That was the century when a bunch of places
“experimented” with totalitarian regimes that did exactly this: Imposed by
force, decisions for everyone living under them about what they could buy, what
they could sell, what work they could do, how much they could be paid for it,
and on and on.
What humanity learned from
those experiments was precisely what economists such as Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek told us we would learn: That centralized
decision-making not only “doesn’t work”, it leads to disastrous and brutal
results in every imaginable way–and some unimaginable ones. Again: Results for
which the perpetrators never have to pay.
But there is another
paradigm. One that respects as inviolable the rights of individuals to make
their own decisions over their own lives and their interactions with others.
Both history and theory have demonstrated time and time again that this is not
just the best, but really the only way for
decisions to be made in a way that meets everyone’s (as opposed to a few people
at the top of everyone else) needs and wants.
“But
this is a pandemic!” The people who buy into the first paradigm will scream.
“Don’t you understand??? This is a terrifying pathogen that knows no national
boundaries, and no individual boundaries! This is a threat to all of us, and so
we must all respond as one!”
THE
PARADIGM’S COUNTERPART IN MEDICAL SCIENCE:
Not
only does this flawed thinking not hold up in the realm of political economy
(basic economic principles do not magically disappear during a crisis–if
anything, our adherence to them is even more critical in those times). It is
also not true that we need to “all respond as one” in the realm of infectious
disease.
To understand this, it is
helpful to go back more than a century to what was then a vigorous debate between two French scientists: Louis Pasteur, and
Antoine Bechamp.
Pasteur
is well known for his role in laying the scientific groundwork for “germ
theory”, the idea that it is pathogens–bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc.–that make
us sick, and that our efforts at wellness are best focused on combatting these
pathogens. Whether through drugs that kill them (antibiotics, etc.), protective
measures such as masks and disinfectant to prevent them from reaching us, or
vaccines to artificially stimulate the production of antibodies against them,
the focus is on the germs.
Bechamp
had a different view. He believed that it was not the presence or absence of a
particular pathogen that made a person ill or well, but the underlying
conditions of that person’s own body, or, as he put it “the terrain.” What was
then known as “terrain theory” we might today call a “holistic” approach to
medicine and healing. The focus is not so much on repelling outside invaders,
as it is on strengthening the body’s own systems for fighting off anything that
might be a threat.
How is this relevant to the
totalitarian nightmares of the Twentieth Century?
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One of these medical
paradigms aligns itself very nicely with the notion that a dangerous pathogen
is a matter of “public health” requiring government intervention. While germ
theory does not require an authoritarian
response to the perceived threat of pathogens, it is far more amenable to one
than is the world view that our own individual “terrain” is what matters most
for protecting our health.
If
every other person around us is seen as a threat, because any one of us could
be carrying a deadly germ over which we have no control, then it is that much
easier for governments to justify imposing sweeping restrictions on everyone’s
activities. All of a sudden, our most ordinary interactions are considered
fraught with danger because of this new and very scary germ against which not a
single one of us can possibly defend ourselves. We need someone to protect us,
and the state is very conveniently close at hand.
Bechamp
would see it quite differently. Focus your efforts on the terrain, he would
say. Build up your own individual underlying environment, and we will see that
we do indeed have tools to defend ourselves against the bacteria and viruses
that surround us in nature.
What are some of those tools?
For Covid-19, Vitamin C in particular has shown itself to be a powerful treatment when given intravenously in
high doses. It is part of the official protocol in Shanghai, along with both Western and Chinese
medicine, for treating Covid-19 patients in China and has been given to
Covid-19 patients there since February. Even some hospitals in the US are beginning to
use it.
That
traditional Chinese herbal medicine is part of that protocol is also
interesting because Chinese medicine tends to focus more upon supporting
different organs and elements within the body, rather than killing pathogens.
It also does not offer “one-size-fits-all” treatments to patients with the same
diagnosis, but tailors a combination of herbs to each individual, based on the
specific presentations of each individual.
There is also evidence
that Zinc, and Vitamin D may be helpful in strengthening our “terrain”
against threats from the outside world, including Covid-19 in particular. So
why don’t we hear about these treatments in the media? And why have US media outlets and social-media platforms
like FaceBook and YouTube been censoring information about Vitamin C in
particular for Covid-19?
Because
to acknowledge (as Chinese scientists have) that something as simple as Vitamin
C can be an effective treatment for the Scariest Pathogen of our Time is to
undermine the entire paradigm.
CRACKS
IN THE PARADIGM:
That paradigm is already
under assault. Doctors, and epidemiologists around the world are pointing out
that throughout our history, human beings have had a symbiotic relationships
with the pathogens in our environment, and that the way we cope with them is to
develop herd immunity to them. Says former head of the department of
biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller
University, Knut Wittkowski:
“With
all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd
immunity… so it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to
spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible. And then the elderly
people, who should be separated… can come back and meet their children and
grandchildren after about four weeks…”
Likewise, Professor Johan
Giesecke, former State Epidemiologist for Sweden (the position now held by
Anders Tegnell), and currently an advisor to the Swedish Government, says that most of the policies imposed by
other governments are not evidence based. And as two California doctors argue in a video
that has gone viral, the lockdowns go against the very nature of our
immune systems, which develop and become stronger by exposure to pathogens.
Meanwhile, plans to create a
vaccine for Covid-19 are fraught with problems–not least of which are the
serious safety problems that have arisen in past attempts to develop
SARS-related Coronavirus vaccines. These problems included lung pathologies in animal testing, which
mirrored similar, earlier, results with infants
given vaccines for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), who
experienced enhanced disease effects when exposed to
the virus.
“As a consequence,”
says a report published in Immunologic
Research, “there is currently no licensed RSV vaccine and
detailed studies directed towards prevention of vaccine-associated disease are
a critical first step in the development of a safe and effective vaccine.”
Some are alarmed by the fact
that manufacturers have been granted immunity from liability by the recently
enacted Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP
Act). Others, including the director-general of the International Vaccine
Institute, Jerome Kim, have expressed serious concern about the speed with which Covid-19 vaccines are
being developed.
Kim says that this speed is
“unprecedented.” Normally, he told CNBC earlier this month, the process takes
between five and ten years. “We don’t know that a vaccine that’s developed in
four months—or I guess 12 to 18 months, which is the current estimate—is really
safe.”
This all comes at a time when
the “vaccine safety” narrative is already showing significant cracks. Back in
December, leading vaccine scientists with the World Health Organization revealed that the evidence in support of
vaccine safety is not as solid as that organization publicly claims it is. And
in March, when the CDC was required by a Federal court to produce
evidence in support of its claim that “vaccines do not cause autism,” it was unable to do so.
PARADIGMS
HAVE CONSEQUENCES:
If we
can, in fact, strengthen and support our “terrain” such that it can withstand
assault from the germs we encounter as we go about our lives, then the whole
narrative starts to collapse. We need no longer be locked up in our homes; we
need no longer wear masks when we do dare to venture out; we need no longer
view our fellow human beings as existential threats.
More
than that: Maybe we do not in fact need the promised vaccine that the followers
of Pasteur tell us is our only possible hope for surviving this most deadly of
threats.
Germ theory lends itself very
easily to the authoritarian visions of Bill Gates, the World Health
Organization, and the petty dictators across my country who would destroy the
livelihoods of everyone beneath them in order to appear to be “doing something”
(and coincidentally expanding their own power.)
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Terrain
theory does not. It lends itself instead to a vision of humanity in which
people are free to make their own decisions about the risks they are willing to
take, about the activities they engage in, and the interactions they have with
others.
What we in the US are living through at this moment is the near-perfect
expression of germ theory taken to its extreme: Human beings driven away from
each other by fear of a pathogen; economic activity strictly controlled by the
state; normal human interaction outside of families practically forbidden. If
you believe wholeheartedly in germ theory, in the idea that the state of our
health is wholly at the mercy of the pathogens that surround us, then you might
even think it makes sense. While this belief does not by itself justify state intervention, it does make it a lot
easier to sell it to a frightened public.
It is of course also entirely possible to
imagine a purely private, free society, where individual property owners buy
into the idea of germ theory and impose restrictions on what people may do on
their property accordingly. Such a society might even end up looking very much
like the dystopia we are living in now, if enough people buy into the fear.
But it is difficult to imagine the
inverse. It is difficult to imagine a society that embraces terrain theory that
also imposes medical authoritarianism. Why? Because terrain theory is a
paradigm of individual empowerment, and individual sovereignty. To the extent
that I am responsible for the state of my own wellness, and you are responsible
for yours, it is that much harder for me to perceive you as a threat, and that
much harder for the state to rationalize intervening to protect me from you.
As our experience with Covid-19 plays
out, as we start to get a glimpse of the tremendous costs that
government-imposed lockdowns are going to have on all of us, and as we see
other countries ending their lockdowns, or indeed, never imposing them in the
first place, a lot of Americans are starting to question the paradigm of
top-down decision making that got us here.
As we look forward to what the
technocratic heirs of Louis Pasteur are dubbing “the new normal”, if we find
ourselves thinking that it is both unlivable and unnecessary, then perhaps we
will also find that it is time to start questioning that authoritarian
paradigm’s counterpart in the world of medicine.
Bretigne
Shaffer [send
her mail] was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is the author
of Annabel Pickering & the Sky Pirates,
and Urban Yogini (A Superhero Who Can’t Use Violence). She
blogs at www.bretigne.com.
