What Does the Absurd Tell Us About the Pandemic? Part 2
What Does the Absurd Tell Us About the Pandemic? Part 2
The Chloroquine Wars Part LIX
Continued from Part 1.
Everything in Medicine Got Redefined (Absurdity Score: 9.6/10)
I must admit to never having attended medical school or written a dictionary, but my affinity for consistency as an anchor for using language to convey meaning led me to some troubling observations during the Pandemonium.
Let's start with disease. A disease is a collection of symptoms that collectively imply impairment of a (usually biological) system. A disease often has multiple etiologies (causes). When COVID-19 was immediately named in connection with the understood viral cause, SARS-CoV-2, somehow the whole world of medicine and medical science just kinda missed the implicit bias in terms of etiological descriptions. So, nobody ever bothered to suggest that adverse event profiles resulting from vaccination that might very well be the result of the spike protein (which varies widely: here, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere)...are also COVID-19 (I call it Type II COVID-19). It is interesting to be in email threads with vaccine partisans (public health officials, some doctors, academics, etc.) who have no idea what to do with the term because they meander through the conversation pretending I never brought up the question. They either cannot get over the cognitive dissonance of the branching of the definition, or they're simply corrupt to the point they'll commit murder through deliberate negligence.
Here is a smattering of other terms absurdly redefined during the Pandemonium:
Anti-vaxxer (casual and pejorative) used to lump together anyone who thought most or all vaccines were harmful. Now anti-vaxxer includes people opposed to forced vaccination, which can apparently include experimental vaccinations. The pejorative has been used in practice in 2021 to mean anyone who points at any reason at all why the COVID-19 vaccines might not be the best option, even if that means pointing to scientific analysis.
Oddly, it turns out that the definition change did not really happen in 2021 or even 2020, but has been a part of Merriam-Webster since 2018. That should leave people scratching their heads.
The phrase "safe and effective" used to mean (legally) that deaths and adverse events following vaccinations/drugs were rigorously examined to exclude cases not caused by the vaccines, then a risk report was combined with efficacy statistics into a risk-benefit analysis. Now it means, "We're not examining the bodies, so there is no proof the vaccines caused any problems, and we're not publishing either a risk report or a risk-benefit analysis. Stop being a conspiracy theorist, you dirty Trump voter, or we'll take your job, your social media account, your medical license, or your ability to travel. If you're lucky we won't charge you with a crime or throw you in prison."
Somehow, inserting mRNA or DNA into people---which conceptually results in vaccination when effective---somehow became not genetic therapy. Now, after a great deal of Wikipedia editing, "gene therapy" gets defined according to gene modification. And that's an extremely weird definition unlike all other medical therapies because it means you don't actually know whether something qualifies as gene therapy...until you see the results.
"So, doc, is this technique you're recommending a genetic therapy?"
"Well, we'll just have to wait and see, now won't we?"
Also, you're not allowed to ask related questions about epigenetics. At all. You just have to pretend that you're not thinking about it in terms of results that modify genetics sometimes.
Somewhere during discussions of early treatment medicine, Fauci decided he needed "proof", which seemed to be some amorphous standard he never defined (even though he's great at talking in circles to make you think it might have been defined maybe somewhere in all that official-sounding speak). But statistical inference (of medical studies) has no such concept. Proof is where theorems (in mathematics and logic) are constructed from axioms. In science, judgment of repeated results is what matters, and the mathematics is only there to help us interpret results as best we can. These days "proof" seems to mean "impossible hurdle" if and only if the conjecture runs counter to whatever the WHO seems to think. I would like readers to understand that the IHO does not condone the WHO's double standard for examining the efficacy of medical treatments.
"Can you prove those deaths were caused by vaccines [while we make certain autopsies never take place]?"
"Wait, isn't that your job, Mrs. Health Official Person?"
"Can you prove those gene therapies are effective?"
"The manufacturer said so."
"So, you've seen their raw data to know what the exclusions are really about, and re-analyzed the results including Type II COVID-19 cases?"
The WHO changed the definition of herd immunity to require vaccination while most people were busy celebrating holidays.
The very notion of cause of death changed before our eyes last year. In a twist that nobody could have predicted or saw coming, falling off a ladder and dying while having a virus in your system means that a disease that is sometimes caused by progressive infection with that virus was the cause of death.
It used to be that applying reason and testing hypotheses in the face of authoritative assertions was science. Now that's called mental illness. No word yet as to how this will affect university degree programs. It is perhaps most worrying that, should this new definition stick, it won't.
Don't miss this one: while "variants" have long described genomic sequences that branched (for instance) from a progenitor [virus or otherwise], we now have "variants of interest" and we're supposed to believe that they're "interesting" in some way more primary than the antibody classes they escape (because that might point more people toward understanding immunity escape due to vaccination).
Now "well conducted study" means "It was an RCT (so duh), the typesetting looks fabulous, and 'no, you cannot check the raw data'". Unofficially, it also means billions of dollars of taxpayer funding backed the outcome of the intellectual property shared by the regulators.
The Fake News (Absurdity Score: 8.8/10)
Were it not for Operation Mockingbird paving the way, and also the entire Trump Era, in which fake news weirdly blurred boundaries to degrees none of us have fully absorbed and probably cannot without a full psychotic split and subsequent psychic reintegration (I'm just making that up), the fake news during the pandemic would surely achieve a higher absurdity score! But "almost 9" isn't bad. Had we not needed a more comprehensive scientific research category, we could have grouped some fake research here, and put it over the top. Still, we're pretty certain The Lancet will publish our brief study of pandemic news if we claim that machine learning did it for us.
As you can well observe, the news has been busy promoting a large portion of the absurdity we have already discussed. With that in mind, consider the irony of a scientific publication on counting fake news in the COVID-19 era being withdrawn.
A Corporate-Funded Civil Rights Movement That Disappeared After An Anxiety-Ridden Election Cycle (Absurdity Score: 9.2)
There's really nothing I can add to the title unless you don't know how to use a search engine, own a TV that remains on one news station, and don't know how to browse the Rags of Record in incognito mode. You either see it---in which case it cannot be unseen---or you probably didn't get this far into the reading [of this article]. So, congratulations on your decision. I hope we can party together on the other side.
The real essence of totalitarianism is subjecting those who have sense to the will of those who have none. (Paraphrasing Voltaire.)
We enter another Dark Ages without writers like you. When did science become a religion, and Fauci its Pope? Thank you for some much needed sanity.