The Plague of the Poor
by Alex Gutentag, Tablet Magazine:
A dangerous COVID-era authoritarianism targets the most vulnerable—and threatens the foundation of democratic society.
When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?
[…] Meanwhile, the provision of COVID-19 vaccines, personal protective equipment, and testing created 40 new billionaires the world over. Moderna, a company that had never brought a product to market before, received a license from the government to produce a liability-free vaccine and one year later reached a valuation of $100 billion. Pfizer projects that it will make $33.5 billion in vaccine revenue this year, and the company’s CEO now says that we will need “annual vaccination” to protect against COVID-19.
Proponents of vaccine mandates and passports claim that such policies will get us “back to normal.” But the increasingly unequal world that these requirements are actually building is anything but normal. It is a world in which the most basic forms of participation in society are contingent on submitting to an often unwanted medical procedure for which there is no long-term data. It is a world in which fundamental human freedoms—starting with the freedom to ask questions and to choose what substances go into one’s body—are now being suspended and mocked by politicians, judges, and journalists whose jobs are ostensibly to safeguard those freedoms.
As the $1.3 trillion pharmaceutical industry increasingly captures the media, elected officials, and scientific institutions, the public health establishment that many people trusted to protect their well-being has become a tool of profit and control. If we fail to resist this establishment now, the harms caused by a medicalized “show your papers” regime will far exceed the threat posed by the virus itself.
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