How to think about Big Pharma, COVID, and the Vaccines
How to think about Big Pharma, COVID, and the Vaccines
an opinion
There is a common line of thought within the “red-pilled” content of the vax- and lockdown-skeptic community, which seems wrong and deserving of critique.
The thought is that liberals, leftists, and moderates who push mandatory vaccine policies are doing so as the dupes of Big Pharma (or the Establishment, etc.).
Let’s call this thought the Skeptic Narrative.
In the Skeptic Narrative, there is a grand, Matrix-level plot from Big Pharma and collaborators — maybe Big Government, or perhaps villains such as Bill Gates and Zuckerberg — to accrue money and coercive control.
The left-liberal vaccine mandators, in turn, serve the plot as witless pawns. Blindly swallowing propaganda, they are led like proverbial sheep to the slaughter.
Or paradoxically, they cunningly abet the scheme out of bloodthirst for power, dark money, getting dominated/controlled, Big Pharma internships, or something.
I want to vehemently reject this view.
To some extent, empirical evidence makes this choice necessary. The fact is, most people who support mandates do not care at all that vaccines are far less effective — at least at stopping COVID spread — than initially claimed.
The truth has not been hidden from the mandators, by Big Pharma or anyone. It is better to say it simply does not matter what truths they see.
Often, quantitative facts won’t update the mandators’ viewpoint; facts incite what Slavoj Žižek calls “kettle logic,” a scenario wherein someone cites multiple inconsistent reasons for their position.
For instance, someone might say mandates are necessary because
They slow down/stop the spread of COVID.
They don’t slow down the spread, but they keep people from using up hospital beds.
Only those who misunderstand health care/science are unvaccinated.
The argument will usually start off with reason 1, the directly stated reasoning behind vaccine mandates: to stop the spread. As Joe Biden pronounced when he instated his mandates last September, the rationale is to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.
When one objects there has been no real-world example of vaccine introduction stopping spread, and that spread increases everywhere in waves regardless of vaccine density; when one points to the multiple controlled studies showing vaccine impact on spread is negligible (here, here, and here); and when one describes how we are now reintroducing COVID-positive workers, even health-care workers, to public-facing jobs; the argument typically moves to reason 2, preserving hospital beds.
One can object that vaccine mandates are expected to cause the firing of thousands of health-care workers during critical staff shortages; that mandates have just resulted in 700 firings from the Mayo clinic; and that all of this lowers the functional amount of hospital staff, hospital beds, and emergency departments available for patients.
One can point out that governments could invest in increasing staffed hospital beds and the production of early treatments that dramatically reduce hospitalization — instead of investing in the enforcement of mandates.
One can show an actual decrease in ICU bed admissions from COVID since the summer of this year, with Ontario statistics showing a 0.004 percent to 0.014 percent incidence of ICU admission for its unvaccinated population.
And one can object, again, that vaccine mandates have resulted in COVID-positive workers seeing patients, used explicitly to replace COVID-negative unvaccinated workers.
And the response from the interlocutor will move next to reason 3: being unvaccinated shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what health care is or means, such that no one should want to be seen by such an otherwise qualified health-care worker. And therefore, the mandates should stay in place.
“Kettle logic” really shows itself in the final move. When one inquires why the mere choice to be unvaccinated implies such a gross misunderstanding of health care and science, the interlocutor will inevitably start to pull from reasons 1 and 2, again discussing vaccine effects on slowing the spread and preserving hospital beds that have already been disputed.
The sequence shows that we are dealing with an unconscious sort of affinity with ideology. The conscious explanations are added post hoc.
Even the move from “vaccines stop the spread” to “vaccines don’t stop the spread but help hospitals” should result in a radical reappraisal of the initial pro-mandate position, but that’s precisely what didn’t happen for almost anyone. And that’s because the explanation for the policy has a secondary importance in one’s support for it.
But we can also rule out the idea that Big Pharma has set up a Matrix scenario: that somehow, it has programmed the unconscious of leftists and liberals who are otherwise skeptical of corporations.
There is no reason to think that Big Pharma could magically succeed in such programming, this one time, and fail during every other attempt.
We know this because most leftists openly denounce Big Pharma even as they announce their support for vaccine mandates.
And I imagine a lot of liberals are lukewarm toward certain taxes, police expansion, and other forms of Big Government — retaining nonetheless an enthusiasm toward mandates.
Indeed, views on “control” become downright paradoxical when, for instance, a leftist supports police abolition but cheerleads police removal of unvaccinated persons from restaurants and shopping centers.
What causes this jumbling on policy?
There are, I think, unconscious beliefs we might hold which happen to be coincident with the desires of Big Pharma, Big Government, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, etc. And there is far more evidence for such beliefs than for any fine-tuned programming or conspiracy that has duped huge amounts of left-liberal Americans.
One such unconscious belief is a desire for predictability. A remarkable outcome of the 2016 election was a quantum leap in a realignment on desire for predictability within the major political parties. As Žižek says, the U.S. Republicans have become the truly postmodern party.
“I voted for Trump because fuck everything!” is a common refrain from GOP voters since 2016, as documented by Matt Taibbi and others.
Many Donald Trump voters really do want to drain the swamp; they want to burn down the system, because what emerges then will have to be better than the current regime of hyper-corruption.
Meanwhile, the Democrats grew into the party of hating Trumpian unpredictability.
Remember how every wild and off-kilter tweet and remark from Trump — likely fired off during Tucker Carlson commercial breaks — caused a mass media convulsion?
The ritualistic hair-pulling and lamentation filled countless op-eds, as liberal commentators solemnly called Trump “America’s id” and compared him to a squalling baby.
Although he was often called authoritarian, little of what Trump actually did was more authoritarian than the Bush and Obama administrations (though much of it was dumb). He hardly used COVID to claim any emergency powers at all.
Much more often, the real complaint was that Trump simply didn’t do what people in power expected him to do. Trump failed to listen to his generals, just as he didn’t listen to science on things such as the climate.
The number one complaint from USA Today, when it broke its longstanding no-endorsement policy on presidential races to do a grave anti-endorsement of Donald Trump, was “He is erratic.”
The pandemic has also been very unpredictable. It is something just like Trump in some ways — unanticipated, disruptive — and a whole cohort of liberals and anti-Trump leftists learned to link Trump with the pandemic itself. Trump was there when it began, made awful mistakes, and didn’t listen to science, to Reason.
Amid this fresh chaos, a seeming Trumpian hell, a new message emerged for fighting — even ending — the pandemic. Get vaccinated.
The leftists and liberals who had just been ravaged by unpredictability heard the message loud and clear. Now we can listen to science! All we have to do is to be predictable, to do the mandated things, and we can be in the clear.
The message spoke to a deeply held and basically unvoiced belief on the U.S. liberal-left — that predictability, conformity are Good Things whose absence prevents the acquisition of a better world. It is a very modernist belief.
(We can see elsewhere how phenomena such as wokeness tie into the same impulse. They are really about the imposition of rules to induce predictability: predictable speech, predictable views. Hence why the rise of wokeness leads to a collapse in popularity for “free speech.”)
Next came months of language about how postmodern, unpredictable Trumpers were prolonging and worsening COVID-19. They were not getting vaccinated. The unvaxxed became the symbols of a basically Trumpian unpredictability: which is why it is so easy for all anti-vax and anti-mandate logic to be deciphered simply as Trumpism.
And this symbolism explains why there is an almost inarticulable feeling — even after vaccination rates decoupled from COVID spread, against the official rationale for mandates — that getting vaccinated is simply the right thing to do for everyone. It is the only rational choice for normal, good people.
The reasoning is tautological but persuasive.
As a sort of proof of this thesis, we can look at the American Civil Liberties Union. This group shows all too vividly how, for many, vaccination has become a duty too sacred to be profaned by “mere” politics.
The ACLU’s purpose is to defend the concept of Civil Liberty (or “freedom”), specifically without regard to partisan or traditionally “political” concerns. But the organization now ties civil liberty to predictability.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, the ACLU as recently as 2008 officially argued that “Pandemic Preparedness” called for “A Public Health — Not a Law Enforcement/National Security — Approach.” The group expressed belief that mandates and coercion were typically the “worst possible way to respond to a deadly pandemic.”
Explicitly, the ACLU rejected a model that “assumes that we must ‘trade liberty for security.’”
The group used page after page to reject “coercive health measures” and emphasized the superior medical and political consequences of avoiding “forcible vaccination and quarantine measures” and “punitive, police-state tactics, such as forced examinations, vaccination and treatment.”
To say the ACLU did an about-face is almost an understatement: now, a regime of mandatory vaccination entails an enhancement of Civil Liberty and Freedom for the organization.
“Far from compromising them,” the ACLU’s Twitter profile announced last year, “vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties.”
Two spokespeople explained further in The New York Times:
At the A.C.L.U., we are not shy about defending civil liberties, even when they are very unpopular. But we see no civil liberties problem with requiring Covid-19 vaccines in most circumstances. …
We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.
Notice that the stance has not become “we support mandates even though they compromise civil liberties as we’ve defined them;” it has literally turned into “mandatory vaccinations = civil liberty.” How could anyone with a heart object?
It is no coincidence that the ACLU has not only embraced mandates; it has also modified, officially, its free speech position to include “woke” caveats. The group may now decline to defend speech cases based on the speech’s “potential effect on marginalized communities” and “the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.”
COVID vaccines convey predictability. And so they are freedom, are patriotism, are nationality, are rationality. In other words, vaccination is now taken to be pre- or post-political, rejected only by rank partisans, deplorable human trash, and the literally insane.
Joe Biden has now called getting the COVID vaccine every American’s “patriotic duty.”
Howard Stern’s response to a soap opera star’s firing over vaccine status was “Is he crazy? … It's insanity.”
And Emmanuel Macron topped them all when he said that unvaccinated people simply were not “citizens” of the French state. People staying unvaccinated stands as an irresponsibility so complete that Macron “really want[s] to piss them off.”
Of course, the desire of big companies (Big Pharma) and The Liberal Establishment is also to produce predictability. Predictable markets are exploited more easily for the reproduction of class power. They produce rent, and the regime of mandated, endless boosters is a good source of rent-style income.
And that is where The Establishment intersects with left-liberal mandators — wokeness provides virtually the same intersection. The two groups line up here already, without any need for a plot.
That is, a form of desire, and not an information conspiracy, creates the nexus for this conjunction.
And quite frankly, Big Pharma doesn’t stand to make enough money to produce a real conspiracy. Income from these vaccines is just a drop in the bucket of what the U.S. funnels otherwise to Big Pharma entities. The risk of an exposed plot far outweighs the reward: even if vaccination stays voluntary, most of the cash still flows. The pedestrian incentives remain, to keep health care privatized and to block competition from making similar vaccines.
Similarly, Biden can enhance his social control without a vaccine conspiracy. He can get far more mileage from pressure exerted on Big Tech and from his ever-growing surveillance and military budgets — from things already done in the open. Why imperil his flagging credibility with something so fraught as vaccines? Why not just take advantage of the media friendliness and public apathy he can already count on?
In short, I believe that everything adds up: we who oppose mandates should drop appeals to conspiracy narratives. Let’s not be the ones who look duped in the end.
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