Jab-erwacky (or, Why Are People So Crazy about Being Guinea Pigs?)

Michael Lesher

Seek thou the Covid Jab, my son!
The genes that morph, the fraud that hypes!
Let Pfizer have its way, but shun
Those frivolous skeptic types!

(Big Brother has said, ‘Tis good, ‘tis good,
And so the sacrifice is just –
Submission now is hardihood,
In Big Pharma we all trust…)

And hast thou had thy Covid Jab?
Put on that mask, thou foolish lad!
Yes, you feel sick – that’s just the trick
That means we’ve all been had.

About twelve hours ago I passed a sort of personal milestone: I found, and read, an ecstatic Facebook post from the twentieth person I know who has received a dose of one of those experimental drugs the U.S. government, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars of our money, is trying to persuade us to turn loose on our immune systems.

Yes – I’ve been keeping count of those weird effusions of relief and self-congratulation from the latest dupes of the coronavirus coup. To be honest, they baffle me. And infuriate me.

At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone would boast of turning himself into a human guinea pig, without getting a cent in compensation, just to add to the profits of a corporate camorra. Then I couldn’t believe I’d find five such posts on Facebook. Then I bet myself that I’d never encounter ten of them.

Well, now I’ve seen twenty.

Twenty separate people bragging about handing themselves over to the biggest, and perhaps the most dangerous, medical scam of my lifetime.

So what’s next? Will people I know start making breathless Facebook posts each time they swallow arsenic or snort some airplane glue? Are they going to brag publicly about wading through chemical dumps? Am I supposed to applaud them if they do?

Or are these indiscreet posters trying to convince me – by lending their voices to the media hysteria about vaccines that aren’t vaccines, for an emergency that isn’t an emergency – that if we let a gang of drug pushers play with our cell structure, we’ll find ourselves somehow on the short road to paradise?

If that’s what they’re up to, they’re going to have to do a lot more convincing.

Because the whole thing is nuts.

To begin with, as of this writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have already recorded 1,909 American souls for whom these “vaccines” really were tickets to paradise – in more prosaic language, to the morgue. When glossing over this fact, my Facebook “friends” have a numerical paradox on their hands. Think back to March 9 of last year, when the national coronavirus death toll officially stood at twenty-six – that’s right, twenty-six – and the whole chorus of coronavirus propagandists was screaming “emergency” and demanding that we acquiesce in the quashing of the Bill of Rights and the suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states. Yet now, we’re supposed to shrug off a mortality figure more than seventy times that size – while Big Pharma is raking in billions from the indiscriminate use of scantily-tested experimental drugs?

And that’s not all. Even a cursory glance behind the curtain of vaccine propaganda reveals more than enough to give any rational person pause.

First, it’s an open secret that vaccines for respiratory viruses have never been a success; the United States is among the few countries where they are actively promoted, and this is largely due to the influence of the vaccine manufacturers, who successfully pressured the CDC to change its system for counting flu-related deaths in 2004 in order to raise public fears about respiratory viruses. (A CDC official virtually admitted this in a public interview ten years later.) Vaccines have never played more than a marginal role in stemming viral epidemics, and there’s no evidence that COVID19 will be any different.

Second, the mantra that COVID19 vaccines will hasten the development of “herd immunity” (a phrase the propagandists once reviled, but began to celebrate once they realized it could be used to turn bigger profits for drug makers) presupposes that the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. But they don’t; the Food and Drug Administration has specifically denied, with respect to each of the drugs in question, any “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” So these drugs will play no role in slowing the epidemic, let alone stopping it.

This fact also gives the lie to the propagandists’ virtue-signaling to the effect that a “vaccinated” person no longer poses a health risk to others. Since there’s no evidence that these drugs prevent transmission of the virus, the truth is that they’re of no public value whatsoever; if they work at all, they benefit only the person who has been vaccinated (allegedly by reducing the severity of his symptoms upon infection).

In a word, the whole COVID vaccine-promotion bandwagon is built on a lie; in fact, it’s misleading even to call these drugs “vaccines” in the first place. Unlike every one of the vaccinations governments have mandated for over a century, a COVID19 vaccination offers no public protection of any kind. There is no legitimate rationale for requiring it, nor for using public money to promote it.

You might want to bear this fact in mind whenever you hear the propagandists nattering about “vaccine passports” to separate the privileged vaccinated from the rest of us, or about restricting the liberties of people who decline to be guinea pigs. Such talk isn’t about health, and it certainly isn’t about “science.” It’s a police-state project, pure and simple – built out of public hysteria, stoked with lies – and has exactly the same moral legitimacy as those infamous yellow stars Jews were required to wear under Nazi rule.

And there’s still more. Calling these experimental drugs a cure for a public health hazard turns reality on its head. In fact, the drugs themselves constitute a public health hazard.

Mind you, that isn’t conjecture; it is a simple fact of regulatory procedure. The FDA (never known to be excessively conservative where Big Pharma is concerned) at least requires certain animal-testing protocols to be followed before it approves drugs for human use. But the COVID19 “vaccines” have been specifically exempted from such tests.

What is more, that departure from basic safety procedures was premised on the false assumption that COVID19 represents an “emergency.” In fact, as scientists like Denis Rancourt have been showing for months, all-cause mortality figures for the United States have seldom been outside ordinary parameters since at least last summer. That rules out the existence of a health “emergency” – you can’t have an “emergency” when mortality figures fall within normal ranges – and absent an emergency, there’s no excuse for cutting short the normal testing requirements. And yet that’s exactly what our government has done – with the approval of the so-called “health experts” you see quoted in the New York Times, a fact that tells you all you need to know about whom those “experts” really work for.

An additional word is in order here. The “gene therapy” technology used in two of the three vaccines now available in the U.S. has never before been licensed for human use; when tested in an earlier form, it ran into trouble when vaccinated animals that were afterwards exposed to a “wild virus” experienced exaggerated and potentially deadly reactions. Testing of that sort isn’t performed on human subjects, so the Pfizer and Moderna drugs – both of which rely on the identical principle (involving “messenger RNA”) – have never been cleared of the danger of causing similar severe reactions when humans, after vaccination, are exposed to the pathogen in “wild” form.

In other words, as far as FDA supervision is concerned, anyone who takes these drugs is playing medical Russian roulette.

In fact, our government isn’t just refusing to protect us – without even an arguable excuse. Our government is going out of its way to subject us to dangers it is obliged to minimize. Even before these experimental drugs had reached the market, U.S. officials had taken the unprecedented step of granting the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse effects the drugs may cause. Then they exempted the “vaccines” from crucial stages of pre-approval animal testing (as I’ve mentioned already). And now, they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to pressure people into taking the drugs – while concealing serious questions about their safety, let alone their public utility.

Got that? The government is using scads of public money to persuade people to subject themselves to a medical hazard that same government could have protected us from, but has instead done everything in its power to intensify.

That’s worse than negligence. That’s a crime.

The cynicism of the indoctrination campaign is instructive, too. “Much anticipated new research,” according to NBC News, shows that…

Americans trust their doctors and can be convinced with a positive message about the benefits and safety of the vaccines.

Yes, but which benefits? “The most impactful message,” claims the Republican pollster Frank Luntz,…

is how the vaccine will reduce the government’s restrictions on our lives and our freedoms…. Without widespread vaccination, mask mandates and personal lockdowns will continue.

So brace yourselves, folks: we’re about to witness a huge, government-funded marketing campaign in which doctors will tell us that if we ever hope to have some of the rights that were supposed to come with the U.S. Constitution, we’re going to have to get The Shot.

True, those of us who can’t help using the right names for things will call this crude jailhouse threat what it ought to be called: blackmail. (“Do what we want or we’ll keep those handcuffs on you, Buster.”) But Luntz calls it “unbiased, unpoliticized facts and data from doctors and medical professionals,” and you can bet your bottom dollar that’s what the news media will call it, too.

In a way, you’ve got to hand it to high-powered anti-democracy propagandists like Luntz. His strategy is a clever one. By putting political blackmail into the mouths of doctors, he (and they) can pretend the threat is “unpoliticized.” And when those promised freedoms don’t reappear – and they won’t (the propagandists are already suggesting that the “new normal” is “permanent,” with never-ending restrictions and two new mandatory vaccinations every year) – they can also say they weren’t really lying to us, since it was never in their power to guarantee what the politicians would do.

And they can say they weren’t violating federal law – even though it’s illegal to compel anyone in the United States to submit to a drug that has only been approved for emergency use, as is the case for all of the new “vaccines.” After all, they’ll say, they weren’t the government; they were just doctors giving us medical advice. Right?

But clever or not, let’s consider soberly what this taxpayer-funded indoctrination campaign – the one tacitly celebrated by all those Facebook posters who brag about their “COVID jabs” – really is.

It’s cruel, because it insists that you and I don’t deserve basic freedoms unless we agree to be guinea pigs for Big Brother. It’s deceitful, because it places the promise of even watered-down liberty in the mouths of people who can’t deliver it. It’s fraudulent, because the planners of the campaign have no real intention of letting us out of our cages in the first place. It’s unethical, because it relies on doctors who will cynically pressure people to take needless medical risks. It’s a form of robbery, because it does all this with public funds in conscious violation of the public interest.

And, in my opinion at least, it’s treasonous – because it swaps the Bill of Rights for a game of Russian roulette, forcing us to choose between our freedom and the integrity of our own bodies. A government that does that has compromised its constitutional legitimacy.

So my Facebook “friends” have a lot to answer for when they lend their grateful voices to the chorus of surrender-your-bodies-for-corporate-profit propaganda.

How many more deaths will result from this pharmacological frenzy? How many more people, after writhing in pain from the “vaccines,” will discover that their sacrifice hasn’t exempted them from muzzles or brought them even a step closer to freedom? How many more friends and family members will be driven apart by the hysterical fear of a moderately serious flu virus all this jab-erwackiness serves to intensify? How many more people will be demonized with the slander – a deliberate lie, as I’ve shown – that remaining unvaccinated makes one a public danger?

By bragging about getting your shot, you may be sparing yourself Big Brother’s wrath – for the moment. But you’re helping to ensure that many other innocent people won’t be so lucky.

Because that’s the ultimate purpose of all this, I’m afraid. It’s not just about feeding human bodies to Big Pharma for free medical experimentation – though that would be bad enough.

It’s really a first giant step toward the creation of a permanent, reviled underclass of dissenters, a way of classifying people who cling to freedom as public menaces who deserve to be punished, shamed or disregarded. Once people who don’t take an experimental drug can be falsely categorized as health risks, it’s no great trick to do the same thing to anyone who carries the wrong political message, offers the wrong example, or even thinks the wrong thoughts. And if we once reach that point, it’s all over with us.

“His mother’s memory tore at his heart,” wrote Orwell of 1984’s  protagonist, Winston Smith,…

because she had died loving him…and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, of deep complex sorrows.

Boast of your COVID19 jab if you must. But remember the sort of world you’re helping to promote when you do it. In the world the propagandists have in mind for us, we’ll be ruled by fear, hatred and pain – fear of a phantom “deadly” disease, pain from the consequences of official benevolence, hatred of those who preserve some notion of human self-respect.

But there won’t be much of anything else. Friendship and solidarity will be gone, replaced by “health” surveillance and loyalty to Big Brother. The arts will be a mere memory. Dissent will be evil; freedom will be called “selfishness”; human life will be valued not because of the spirit or the will or the creativity or the privacy at the core of it, but only as a number to be manipulated in the service of the state. (As in Auden’s dreadful prophecy:

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed…)

When major media openly muse about the virtue of permanent imprisonment, when “experts” tell us that life is about nothing but the constant fear of disease, when publicists insist that our most sacred duty is to sacrifice ourselves for the benefits of mega-corporations, it’s time to ask – seriously – whether our public messages help or hinder the cause of civilization.

Oppose the coronavirus coup and you’re doing something, at least, to identify with what is sacred in human life. Support it and you’re on the bandwagon for totalitarianism.

Think of that before you write a happy Facebook post about joining a human medical experiment designed to promote a grimmer future.

In times like these, there’s no such thing as neutrality.

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.