By far the most polarizing issue at the moment is the Wuhan Red Death, a.k.a. COVID — and things got sharply hotter over the past few days, when (as I’m sure you’ve heard) Dr. Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA-vaccine technology and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccinations and disease outbreaks, was banned by Twitter for insubordination, and followed right up with a scathing interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. In the interview, Dr. Malone had plenty to say, including (but not limited to):
— That discussion of the health risks of currently available COVD vaccines is being systematically silenced;
— That such censorship is an assault upon informed consent;
— That half a million deaths might have been prevented if we had not prevented the use of effective treatments such as hydrochloroquine, famotidine, and ivermectin (and had we not persecuted and harassed those who advocated such treatments);
— That pharma companies have a strong incentive to kill these treatments, because they undercut the gigantic profits to be be made on vaccines as long as the hysteria continues;
— That natural immunity confers much better protection than vaccines;
— That taking the vaccine after you have had COVID can both increase your risk of adverse effects and reduce your natural protection against future infection;
— That scientists and physicians who backed the Great Barrington Declaration (which expressed concerns about government COVID policies) have been persecuted;
— That the vaccines appear to be causing a frightening variety of adverse effects, particularly in young people.
There is much, much more. In particular, Dr. Malone cautions that we seem to be falling victim to what he calls “mass-formation psychosis”, i.e. a collective, delusional, mass hysteria. (Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’ve been saying the same thing for a decade or more.) This refers to a coinage by Mattias Desmet, of Ghent University, describing a group-level phenomenon that occurs when certain conditions are met: social isolation and atomization, a decline in the “meaningfulness” of people’s lives, and an increase in general anxiety. In these circumstances, says Professor Desmet, it is easy for a crafty leader to offer a seed, a nucleus around which all this displaced energy can coalesce: a narrative that presents some common foe as the source of everyone’s problems. Such a leader, by focusing the society’s attention on this point, and convincing them that if they follow his guidance he will lead them to victory, can harness all of that anxiety and convert it to a fierce and unquestioning loyalty — a loyalty that, just as we’ve seen with COVID, “climate change”, Critical Race Theory, etc., can easily be turned against those in society who don’t enthusiastically join the cause.
The challenge, for those who benefit from these mass psychoses, is to keep enough believers on-side. This is why the narrative must be so aggressively policed and defended. But just as the immediacy of modern communication makes these mass psychotic formations easier to develop, it also means that it’s harder to keep dissent bottled up — and the attention that this Joe Rogan interview, and the banning of Dr. Malone from Twitter, has generated means that we are at a moment of extremely precarious balance. It will be very interesting to see what happens next.
You can see the Rogan interview here, and you should also watch Professor Desmet’s discussion of mass-formation psychosis, here.
Also, if you are even thinking of having any of your own children vaccinated, do not do so before you read this.
P.S., January 9th: YouTube has taken down the link I’d posted to the Joe Rogan interview, so I’ve replaced it with a link to Spotify. (You might have to create an account to watch it, but it’s free.)
15 Comments
I live in NYC, and have not seen this level of hysteria since the first weeks of the actual pandemic back in March and April of 2020.
The fully vaccinated here are literally beside themselves with fear over a mild variant that doesn’t even amount to a bad cold, symptom wise, in most people.
I am not vaxxed, having had Covid in February of 2021, and thus have natural immunity.
Despite having a high antibody count, according to LabCorp, I have been denied access to restaurants, bars, museums and gyms since September, and this doesn’t appear to bother anyone, including the still significant numbers of unvaxxed here.
Blue state mayors and governors are acting like the incompetent, petty tyrants that we always knew they were, and paving the way for a Chinese style digital social credit system under cover of this manufactured virus, now thankfully mutated into insignificance for most of the population.
God help us all.
Another Dave,
I am very glad to be out of NYC. I lived there for more than 40 years, married an Upper East Side native, built my career there, raised my kids there — and the place now gives me the fantods. I’ve been back a few times since we sold our house in Brooklyn last October, and whenever I’m there I can hardly wait to leave.
Remember all that fuss about health-information privacy? About disparate racial impact? “My Body, My Choice”? All of that is suddenly meaningless, subsumed in this pathological obsession with COVID. Professor Desmet has it exactly right: the crisis of meaning and isolation and free-floating anxiety just needed something around which to crystallize, the way seeding a cloud with silver iodide can precipitate a deluge.
We are in a very sick place right now — but I actually do have a faint little hope that perhaps these excesses will be just crazy enough that a critical fraction of the people will wake the hell up.
“We are in a very sick place right now — but I actually do have a faint little hope that perhaps these excesses will be just crazy enough that a critical fraction of the people will wake the hell up.”
Malcolm, that is the key. I have more than a “little hope”. It may be because I live in N.C. and have all my life. A world apart from metro NY.
As “the good & great” don’t take so kindly to heresy Malcolm, always always have a backup.
https://odysee.com/@NewsParadigm:f/Dr–Robert-Malone-and-Joe-Rogan–1757-FULL-Interview-(December-31,-2021):d?r=8cSGjqEoyncQGynLZgG9WAbC61LaBPpT&t=7578
(Too it might be helpful to “expect *glitches” if watching on, for example, Firefox. The same sorts of Greats & Goods who … Well their statements speak all that’s necessary:
https://www.philipmeade.com/culture/mozilla-and-brendan-eich-a-quick-reminder/
Here’s a doctor who debunks Robert Malone’s misinformation point by point.
Martin,
I’ll take a look, though I will once again object to your framing. Given Robert Malone’s C.V., he is obviously not a crank, but one of the world’s foremost experts on this enormously controversial topic (a topic, I might add, in which gigantic interests, corporate, financial, social, and political, are in play).
It isn’t surprising that you have been able to find “a doctor” to present a dissenting view from Malone’s; the fact that he has been all but driven from polite society for expressing heterodox opinions obviously means that there will be spokesmen to reinforce the orthodox ones.
If you were inclined to have a civil conversation about this, which you plainly aren’t, you might simply have said “Here’s someone with medical credentials who disagrees with Dr. Malone, and explains why.” Instead you left another one of your curt and tendentious comments, and the chip on your shoulder is as plain to see as it was before.
Have you the medical expertise to weigh these two contradictory voices? I doubt it. How would Dr. Malone himself respond to your “debunking”? Perhaps if, instead of his being silenced and excommunicated, he had been able simply to debate these points in public, on social media and elsewhere, we might have had a chance to find out.
I respond curtly because I’m passionate about this topic (misinformation in general, not just vaccines). I have been arguing with climate change deniers for over a decade, and the perniciousness of such misinformation cannot be understated.
There is a difference between:
* Someone offering a heterodox viewpoint
…and:
* Someone offering a completely false and indefensible contrarian “viewpoint”
The first is of course commendable, and should be supported and encouraged, and is in fact how science proceeds.
The latter is phony skepticism. It isn’t really offering a viewpoint that has any value. It is someone with a pre-determined conclusion who will NEVER relinquish their belief. EVER. A perfect example of the latter are believers in a flat earth. A scene from a recent documentary on flat-earthers illustrates the point: a group of believers devised an experiment that would indicate the Earth is a globe, and unsurprisingly it did just that. “Well, something must be wrong with the evidence, then.”
Needless to say, the flat-earthers would not give up their beliefs despite the clear evidence to the contrary. They are not arguing in good faith.
Should flat-earthers be silenced? No, but if they came into formidable political power, and started basing public policy on flat earth (let’s say they wanted to build a wall around the edge of the earth for $500 billion), what then? Private companies can at least kick them off of their platforms. What would you think when the flat-earthers began whining that they are being silenced? Hopefully, you’d agree that while they should be free to believe their nonsense, it can be a problem if it starts influencing public policy.
Obama Birtherism is the same. ANY attempt to meet the demands of the birthers was a black hole of moving the goal posts. He released his birth certificate. “That’s not the LONG FORM birth certificate! What is he hiding?!” So Obama released his long form certificate. “IT’S PHOTOSHOPPED!!! FAKE!!!” So a newspaper article from Hawaii was found that announced his birth. “FAKE NEWSPAPER!!”
There was never satisfaction. Birthers, flat-earthers, and climate deniers are not arguing in good faith.
I submit that Malone is no different. He supports the virologist Peter Duesberg! Duesberg denies that HIV causes AIDS! This has been conclusively proven, yet there he is.
The video I posted goes through Malone point by point and shows how he is either lying or being extremely misleading. For example, claiming that “natural immunity” is better than the vaccine is false. There have been studies that support that, and studies that show it isn’t. It’s unknown at this point if it’s true or not. Yet he proclaims it is true. This is a lie, or misleading.
I get passionate about this because I seriously doubt the human race will survive long when misinformation like this spreads like a virus and people refuse to relinquish beliefs even when shown to be false. Lots of table flip emojies.
Martin,
As much as it might bother you, there is actually live controversy about things that you imagine to be entirely settled (what we should believe, and attempt to do, about climate, for example).
You can either try to persuade people, or you can insult them, excommunicate them, rule their opinions out of bounds, and try to silence and crush them.
The urge to silence and crush dissenting voices has been in plain view since this pandemic began. (The lab-leak hypothesis, for example, was censored in all media, and anyone who defended it was pilloried and persecuted. Now it’s generally accepted.)
There are a great many highly credentialed doctors and scientists who think our response to COVID has been wrong from the start. For their dissent, they have been denounced and purged; many others have remained silent for fear of losing their licenses to practice medicine. This is not how “science” is supposed to work, and it is scurrilous of you to compare legitimate dissent by highly trained experts about climate and COVID with belief in a flat Earth.
Say what you will about Robert Malone, he has been one of the world’s foremost and most highly trusted vaccinologists for decades, and has played a leading role in guiding U.S. policy during many major disease outbreaks. I do not have the medical expertise to say whether he is right or wrong, and neither do you. What I’m saying is that his voice should, at the very least, be heard, and that there should be free and untrammeled debate. Instead, he has been ostracized and deplatformed – which you seem to support. (I’m sure that if you read my own entries under “global warming” at this blog — perhaps this post, for a summary of my views, or this one — you will conclude that I’m a climate “denier” whose voice should be suppressed.)
At this point in our public life no rational person should imagine that what we hear in the media, and from those in charge of running things generally, is simple truth, untainted by political, personal, corporate, or financial interests. (Indeed, nobody with the least understanding of history or human nature should ever imagine such a thing.)
So: the point is that you, and others like you, don’t get to decide for the rest of us what is or isn’t “settled”. I’m all for debate and discussion — and if you disagree with Robert Malone, well, that’s fine. What I’d hope for is to have all of this discussion out in the open, and for truth to prevail on its own merits. But to dismiss this expert as a crank to be gagged and shut away is something else altogether, and I will have nothing to do with it.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Jf1bApYAAAAJ&hl=en
Martin. The credentials of his many critics?
Oh deer:
https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2022/01/worrying-about-sunset.html
As should be clear from what I said above, here is the problem. Sure, it’s best to try to persuade people. Assume there is some debate about a topic, and we have two sides, and they rationally hack it out.
But in some situations you don’t have two sides. When a flat-earther sees the evidence with his own eyes that the earth is a globe, and just claims there is something wrong with the evidence, then what?
So if I say “I’m done with you” to flat-earthers, then am I trying to “crush” and “silence” them? Are they a “dissenting” voice that should be “heard?” Or have they abandoned reason?
Sure, things like climate change and vaccines are not necessarily as clear cut in all of their levels as the simple matter of whether the earth is a globe or is flat. There is plenty of debate to be had about what, if anything, to do about climate change. In fact, that is where the primary debate should be. But instead, the climate change “debate” ends up being in things that are largely (no, not 100%) settled: that we are digging up carbon from the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere, that all other climate forcings are largely weak or absent, that the earth will continue to warm because of this, and that certain effects will follow. These facts are at least as settled as whether the earth is flat or a globe. And continual disinformation about them is no different than flat-earth-believers denying the world is a globe.
And so in this debate, too, is it silencing dissenters to throw up your hands and give up with such people?
Martin,
With this grotesque, question-begging oversimplification of the climate debate, the blithe assertions and speculative predictions you present as “facts”, and your failure to mention any of the complex tradeoffs that proposals for climate “action” necessitate, you effectively make my case.
But by all means, sir: feel free to throw up your hands, if you like, and give up. That’s probably best. You are more than welcome to say “I’m done with you.” (Please do!)
But if you cannot bear even to tolerate the existence of opposing views — views that, in your opinion, are obviously mistaken — if, instead of simply rebutting them, or even just laughing at them, you insist instead that those who hold them should have no right to speak, then you should be prepared to meet some very stiff resistance.
It’s not that I cannot tolerate the existence of “opposing views.” It’s that mistaken views are damaging to public policy. Imagine if the flat-earthers gained significant political power, and then set about spending billions to build a wall around the edge of the earth. Billions wasted on something that cannot work. I suppose I’d have to begrudgingly accept that they can have those views….? But if they are causing damage, like this, isn’t there anything we can do…? Fighting flat-earthers with evidence is futile. Their beliefs are firmly in place and NOTHING will change them. It’s quite a conundrum.
The same situation holds for these anti-vaccine viewpoints. What’s astonishing is how the anti-covid vaccine arguments are exactly the same arguments that happen every time there is a new vaccine.
In the late nineteenth century, when there was push for smallpox vaccine mandates, there were also anti-vaxxers. See if this seems familiar:
* A doctor circulated a pamphlet that claimed smallpox is not that deadly
* Claimed that the vaccines cause horrible side effects and is ineffective against smallpox
* Claimed that vaccinations are just a way for to make money, and that the media was stirring up hysteria
* Said that vaccines are government tyranny
* Got other doctors to sign on to his information pamphlets and advertised their impressive credentials
I mean, you could take all of this and just do a find-and-replace to swap “smallpox” with “covid” and it would be the exact same thing: https://theconversation.com/covid-19-anti-vaxxers-use-the-same-arguments-from-135-years-ago-145592
Of course, thank god this doctor did not prevail because you and I no longer have to worry about smallpox thanks to vaccines. But how much more difficult was he making it for public health officials, and for what? As the article says, “Ross seized on the opportunity of increased health measures to gain authority, notoriety and personal fame. He painted himself the hero of his own story, the ‘only doctor’; who had dared to doubt the fetish’ of vaccination.”
If Malone really thought he had some evidence against vaccines, he would publish it in a peer-reviewed journal and gain acceptance that way, instead of giving interviews to rightwing media personalities. But I’m sure he has a ready excuse for that, in that there is some kind of big conspiracy keeping him down.
Why must we go through this exact same nonsense every time there is a vaccine?
On the other hand: if a vaccine of a radically new type suddenly comes into global use, with only the briefest of testing, and with powerful government mandates to coerce its acceptance, enormous financial and political incentives to promote its distribution, and is followed by an unprecedented rash of adverse effects, wouldn’t you like to be able to hear dissenting opinions from a renowned vaccinologist who also happened to be instrumental in developing the revolutionary technology upon which the vaccine was based?
Wouldn’t you be a little suspicious to see doctors fearing to speak out for fear of losing their licenses? Wouldn’t you be troubled to watch all debate being canceled and suppressed?
Smallpox notwithstanding, not all developments in science and technology, however eagerly adopted, turn out to have been beneficial or free of danger. Think of Thalidomide, which was considered a wonder drug. Think of the widespread use of radium. There is ample reason to be cautious about the use of this vaccine, and anyone who points this out is reviled as a pariah. The argument you give — “what if they’d said this about smallpox?” — falls apart as soon as one realizes that such worries might simply have been false about smallpox, but true about these entirely different vaccines. Only time, and perhaps bitter experience, will tell.
If someone of Dr Malone’s stature has something to say about this vaccine, especially given the alarming incidence of adverse effects (which tower, by orders of magnitude, over other vaccines), then I want to hear what he has to say. And the more that people like you argue that he should be kept out of the discussion, the more I want him to be heard. And yes, now that he has been all but completely deplatformed, it would be hard to argue with a straight face that there isn’t a “conspiracy to keep him down”: if not a centralized one, then a dynamically emergent one — in which you seem to be an eager participant. Let the man speak!
Finally, I have to say that your continuing comparison of well-informed dissent on this highly technical topic with flat-earthism is simply ridiculous, and you are, quite frankly, making a fool of yourself by repeating it. If you can’t do better than that, please take your griping elsewhere.
Of course! And that’s exactly what’s happened with actual adverse events such as the myocarditis that was found with J&J. They took it off the market for a bit, and now do not recommend it for young males for that very reason. If Dr. Malone thinks he knows something all the other medical professionals missed, he should do research and submit it for review. Not go around on rightwing sensationalist media and make a name for himself as a persecuted doctor. The very fact that we know his name at all is evidence that he’s interested in fame and notoriety, not actual evidence. Just like the doctor I linked above that argued against smallpox.
Of course, but again, there is a distinction between rational debate and examination of evidence on the one hand, and personalities going around lying (yes, lying; see the first video I linked above) about a topic to tabloid sensationalist clickbait media. The latter is done for fame and notoriety, not for real debate.
But it isn’t well informed. That’s my point. If it were, it would be fine. But as the video I linked above shows, with sources, Malone is either lying or severely misleading in all his points. This is not good faith debate.
Here, perhaps this person will be more palatable for you. He’s against vaccine mandates, thinks Omicron is the beginning of the end, but also agrees that Malone is full of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyV6trMPvs&ab_channel=ZDoggMD