Start From the Premise that the Virus is REAL

 

Two people I tend to admire, Jimmy Dore (who steadfastly refuses to swallow the line that the Democratic Party USA is the only hope for progressives, or any hope at all for anyone not an oligarch) and Caitlin Johnstone, have been expressing sympathy for people who don't want to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Dore's obsession with this has caused me to unsubscribe from his YouTube channel. 

There are legitimate issues and principles behind their stances. I recognize this. I actually totally agree with Dore and Johnstone's opposition to establishment proposals to censor social media (or any media) in the form of deleting discussion of anti-vaccine, pro-vaccine alternatives, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, etc.,. These social media giants, the oligarchy in general and their politician hirelings are pro-censorship against opposition voices in general. Getting progressives and left-wingers to actually agree to allowing FaceBook to delete people's posts due to their being "disinformation" is a dream come true for the oligarchy. 

Dore is rightfully critical of Anthony Fauci (the Chief Medical Advisor to the President) for his calculated dishonesty early in the pandemic regarding the general public wearing masks. Fauci had said that people should NOT wear masks. They wouldn't help. But later he said that masks DO help. His earlier statements had been an attempt to prevent the public from trying to access N95 masks (and other suitable masks) that were in short supply for healthcare workers. Whatever short-term benefits Fauci hoped for were undeniably overwhelmed by the blow to his credibility. (Dore's YouTube comments section is infested with Trump-worshipping shitheads who get such a masturbatory rush from his evisceration of the Democratic Party that they follow him despite his support for immigrants' rights and for a greater welfare state. They wholeheartedly agree with Dore on Fauci saying that he's a liar who should never be believed again. What these shit-for-brains fuckwads don't admit is that their own bloated, orange spray-tanned, daughter-luster-after, yellow-haired combover, serial conman, Donald J. Trump is also an admitted liar. Trump told Bob Woodward that he knew COVID-19 was deadly serious, but was publicly downplaying because he didn't want to create a panic. Being right-wing imbeciles it is second-nature for these turds to hypocritically ignore Trump's admitted lying while pompously declaring Fauci as permanently shredded of credibility.)

Dore did a video on the subject of the medicine "ivermectin" that points out that besides being a horse de-wormer, it is also made in versions for human use. It's no secret that ivermectin is used to treat scabies, worm infections and acne. Continuing to insist that it is solely "horse de-wormer" is brazen, calculated dishonesty.  It's been a while since I watched that video, but I believe Dore says that ivermectin is officially being used in Japan. That appears to be untrue. They are conducting a largescale clinical study of it though. 

When I first heard about ivermectin (actually from Dore's comments section where it was celebrated as the latest right-wing, anti-vaxxer wonder drug) I decided to look it up. It was being promoted by some group called "Frontline Healthcare Experts" (or something) and that they'd had an article about its use for treating COVID-19 in a medical journal called CHEST (which I also looked up and it seemed legit). (The "Frontline Healthcare" ... or whatever ... people have been characterized as quacks and kooks by establishment media and healthcare experts, but these are the same people who insist that ivermectin is only ever used for horses. So make up your own mind.)

I'm going to provide one link in this quickly written post. It's a link to studies on the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 from the National Center for Biotechnology (which is part of a branch of the USA's National Institute of Health). From the Abstract of the study I was sorta looking for:

A 5-day course of ivermectin was found to be safe and effective in treating adult patients with mild COVID-19. Larger trials will be needed to confirm these preliminary findings.

This is part of what I said recently about how we shouldn't give right-wing douchebags ammunition. Obviously there are imbeciles out there obtaining veterninary-use ivermectin and self-medicating and getting sick. Just like some absolute idiots drank bleach when Trump blathered on about how that could clean out one's internal plumbing, with the result that those absolute idiots died.  But when these anti-vaxxers read these easily refuted criticisms of ivermectin in general it only adds fuel to their fire of stupidity and hypocrisy. 

But Dore is interviewing guests who are (or at least have some shred of legitimacy to claim they are) experts on vaccines or COVID-19 or SARS in general and he is giving them a respectful hearing when he simply isn't qualified to know if they're charlatans or not. And he doesn't get on alternative voices to help him to decide. And this is dangerous. I mean, he can do whatever he wants. (See my agreement with his anti-censorship views above.) But as a communicator, a public broadcaster, and as someone who has no real grasp of the medical science, to be giving a platform to medical rebels who could (for all he knows) be conmen or quacks spewing disinformation about a public health crisis, is highly irresponsible. 

I guess what I'm trying to lead up to is this: In a recent post (okay, one more link) from Caitlin Johnstone, condemning the hatred against vaccine-refusers, someone in the comments section writes this:

I’m afraid Keith Olbermann is right! I am personally afraid to put into my system the content of a syringe abusively called “vaccine” only authorized in case of an emergency artificially created by the overreaching western governmental denial of treatments proved remarkably effective in India, inter alia, and certainly better than nothing – which failed the honesty test bench from the get go. This experimental mRNA shit has already killed tens of thousands and harmed hundreds of thousands according to the CDC/FDA’s VAERS itself, which is why a sizeable number of nurses – who should know – won’t take the jab to protect themselves against a disease that’s nothing more than a strain of flu (like most coronavirus diseases) and that, in spite of PCR tests run at 40 CT grossly over-estimating its impact through overwhelming production of false positives, has still been officially survived in the first year, without a vaccine, by 99,97% of the world population (!)

Okay. First. Caitlin Johnstone argues the valid principle that giving governments the power to inject you with chemicals against your will is somewhat a denial of your bodily autonomy. Fine. But when it comes to vaccines, we have to consider the possibility that the things they're vaccinating us against (polio, measles for instance) are real. With regards to polio and measles we can also look to the historical results of immunization campaigns and see that they worked and that they were not actually a plot by Big Pharma to inject micro-chips into the population. The shithead commenter quoted above exposes themself as a shithead with their drivel about PCR "false positives" and "nothing more than a strain of the flu" garbage.

The virus is real. That should be our starting point. I know the virus is real. In my own life, my own experience, I know this is not a hoax.

In the factory where I recently worked for five years (I've since gotten another shit-paying job just to have a change of scenery) the past two years have been different from the previous three. As I said in another COVID-related post: In my experience, as long as they've been advertising annual flu vaccines in Ontario I have never gotten the vaccine, I have never gotten the flu, and I have never heard of anyone in my family, friends or co-worker circles of having gotten the flu either. But during this pandemic, three guys in my last department got it. Two of them (one in his mid-twenties, the other in his late-forties) said it was very bad. Another guy in the the department I'd worked in before that was hospitalised from COVID and was off work for months. A young man in another section who I joked around with caught it from his wife, and while she had only mild symptoms, he described it as "a motherfucker" that he never wants again. Another guy was hospitalized with it, came back to work after time-off but would routinely have to clock-out early, being too dragged-out to continue. One arrogant boor came in WITH the virus, knowing he was sick, and looking like death warmed-over. He was fired for his stupidity. Oh yeah, another guy in my old department had to go home to Mexico to help his parents deal with the death of his brother from COVID. And EVERYONE in the factory knew about a woman on the assemblyline whose elderly father (whom she lived with) died from COVID.

So, COVID-19 is real. All your local boards of health are telling the truth about hospitals being overwhelmed. That stupid woman who showed up at protests wearing an eye-mask (so clever!) and ranting about conspiracies until she herself was hospitalized and subsequently killed by the virus (with hordes of her shit-head allies calling the hospital and demanding they treat her with ivermectin) found out it was real. All the right-wing radio hosts who denied the virus and rejected the vaccines and then got infected with COVID-19, admitted they were wrong from their hospital beds, and died from it, were not creatures of Bilderberg, whose whole lives had been performative frauds designed for this one psy-op. 

Yes. It is an invasion of your bodily autonomy to have to get mandatory vaccines. But the COVID-19 virus IS REAL. It is highly contagious and highly deadly. And just as the cost of some small loss in bodily autonomy, and the pain of having to admit that sometimes modern medicine knows what it's doing, are very real, ... it has been agreed that the benefits of reducing deaths and disabilities caused by measles and polio from mandatory vaccines were worth the cause. We live in a society. The social benefit of your freedom to be a plague rat is less than the social benefit of masses of people not getting sick from your stupidity. The FACT that a lot of the anti-vaxx/COVID-deniers are right-wing shitheads, who are stupid hypocrites and deluded assholes is something else to remember.

To his credit, Jimmy Dore has been vaccinated and admits it. (Unlike Tucker Carlson who has been vaccinated but won't admit it while simultaneously telling his millions of viewers how dangerous the vaccines are.) There are genuine values and principles behind some of what he is saying. The way that the vile US political-economy won't give low-wage workers a day-off to get vaccinated and deal with the side-effects is another one of his valid criticisms.

But the virus is real. It's very dangerous. It could kill millions if these COVID-denying morons are treated with anything more than the tiny morsel of respect that they deserve.