In the days of ‘Me Too’ a common endorsement of anyone leveling an accusation was ‘Why would she lie?’
I’m almost at that point now with conspiracy theories, so many of them have turned out true. I’m almost at the point (but not quite) of saying that the burden of proof should be upon those denying them, not those asserting them, so awry has gone the doomed trial period of human self-rule.
Here is the doctor, Anthony Fauci, who directed the U.S. Covid-19 policy testifying before Congress at July’s end, 2026. One political party grills him relentlessly. The other party lauds his long tenure of public service. It was precisely the opposite from 30 years ago, during the AIDS epidemic, when the accusing and supporting parties were reversed!
After an opening statement in which he declares himself the victim of a witch hunt which threatens even science itself, he invokes his fifth amendment right over 100 times. It is the answer to every question asked of him. In a snafu that screams the absurdity of human government, the accusers holler that he cannot plead the fifth, since he has already been pardoned. However, if the pardon is invalid, as has been alleged due to its being signed by auto-pen and not the participating president, then he might be in hot water and pleading the fifth is exactly what he should do.
Thirty years ago, it was Democrats blasting him for stonewalling off-patent AIDS therapies in order to pave the way for a new one, AZT, a toxic antiviral that neither cured AIDS nor prevented transmission. This time, it was Republicans blasting him for stonewalling off-patent Covid-19 therapies in order to pave the way for a new one, remdesivir, which would be nicknamed by many nurses, “Run—death is near.”
Since he represented science—he repeatedly said that he did—a media with no use for religion but boundless enthusiasm for science, long ate up and heralded every utterance from his lips and shouted down as misinformation anything contrary. Heaven help you if you went against official narratives. Doctors lost hospital privileges and some their licenses. Individuals lost their social media accounts. Today, many of those dissident views, such as the very origin of the Covid 19 virus, are widely viewed as correct. It didn’t hop from one animal species to people. It was an accidental result of human tinkering, called gain-of-function research. As always (human government triggers so much mistrust these days) conspiracy theorists arise to charge that it was not accidental, but deliberate,for who knows what nefarious ends
And no, I have no ax to grind regarding Doc Fauci. My former post of ‘What if Moses spoke like Trump,’ from the pandemic’s onset, when he and the president were nightly on television, left unmolested the statement that he was the great doctor soon to save us all. Nor do I have any ax to grind with regard to vaccines. Dissing them has never been my cause. There is an ax to grind, however, in the unthinking adoration often entertained toward science, it being the human answer to God’s proposed ruling of the earth. Who needs the latter when science will deliver us? In order to properly address that misplaced adoration, one must shovel through the snow of vaccine lore clogging the path, but it is not an end in itself.
The boundless trust and enthusiasm in science is such that (U.S) society tolerates what they would never tolerate in any other area: the removal of liability should results go bad. The most common sense item in the world, instantly acknowledged in all other fields of activity, is that if you remove incentives for things to be safe, they soon won’t be. People will take shortcuts in research and manufacture. That’s why one has legal recourse in case they be harmed by—say—defective auto parts, or medical implants, or toys for your child, or household appliances, or power tools, or household chemicals or, or nearly anything—with one notable exception. If you are injured by a vaccine, you are out of luck. They alone are immune from liability. To attack them is to attack science itself—what crazy person would do such a thing? The author of ‘Vaccines, Amen’ likens the current reality to a customer asking a car salesman if his product is safe. “Prove to me it isn’t,” the salesperson retorts. It is an absurdity tolerated in only one area, probably enduring for only one reason: an over-devotion to science from people who have cast out God but not their instinct to worship one.
****** The bookstore
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