MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘big pharmaceutical’

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

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

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.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/04/06/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…

See the rest here

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.

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Erie Times E-Edition Article-How some regulation can help markets function better

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2020

When there are information asymmetries, market participants need some minimum level of assurances – provided and enforced by a credibly independent arbiter, such as the government…

Credibility=government – Catherine Rampell is either delusional or someone’s hack. I suspect the latter.

The only reason companies demand government regulation is to make competition too complex and expensive for smaller companies, or labs in this case.

There is a reason car companies don’t complain about emissions requirements and multiple crash tests from every direction for new car designs.
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=0f7598765

Regulate us – please. That’s what big pharmaceutical companies are implicitly begging the Trump administration to do, because of a public crisis of confidence in any forthcoming COVID19 vaccine. The plea is surprising on its face. It also rebuts the GOP’s entire understanding of regulation – specifically, that regulation is necessarily bad for businesses, consumers and economic growth.

Since the spring, the administration has hyped miracle cures for COVID19, regardless of what’s known about their efficacy or risks: hydroxychloroquine, bleach, convalescent plasma, whatever that MyPillow guy is hawking lately. Recently, President Donald Trump suggested that a vaccine could, conveniently, come to market just before Election Day.

Meanwhile, his Food and Drug Administration commissioner said he was prepared to authorize a vaccine early.

Americans are understandably apprehensive.

Six in 10 Americans worry political pressure from the administration will lead the FDA to rush vaccine approval before confirming it’s safe and effective, the Kaiser Family Foundation has found. And only about four in 10 would get the vaccine, even if it were free, if the FDA approved it before the election.

Fearful that these suspicions might reduce the market for a drug tremendous resources have gone into developing, Big Pharma took an unusual step Tuesday.

The chief executives of nine drug companies publicly pledged to ‘make the safety and well-being of vaccinated individuals the top priority in development of the first COVID19 vaccines.’ Moreover, they vowed not to seek FDA approval before vaccine safety and efficacy had been established in Phase 3 trials – the industry standard – implying that they would do this even if the Trump administration allowed (or encouraged) them to cut corners.

This pledge reflects several notable developments.

One is how much damage Trump has inflicted upon the perceived credibility of public health institutions, as he has upon the National Weather Service, Census Bureau and other independent agencies.

Another is that drug companies – which historically have sought fewer restrictions and faster approval from the FDA – once complained that the bar for bringing new drugs to market was too high. Now they worry that bar appears too low.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has sought to lower the regulatory bar in the name of helping industry and boosting economic growth even when industry objected. See, for example, its rollback of rules regulating methane emissions, automotive fuel-efficiency standards and mercury pollution. These actions were opposed by companies the administration claimed to be helping.

Recent vaccine regulatory jockeying underscores the flaw in the GOP narrative that regulation and economic activity are inversely related – that is, less regulation always means more economic growth.

When there are information asymmetries, market participants need some minimum level of assurances – provided and enforced by a credibly independent arbiter, such as the government – for markets to function. If you don’t trust the party on the other side of a transaction not to cheat or otherwise harm you, you’ll be less likely to engage in the transaction. (This observation is not original to me; an economics Nobel was awarded for it two decades ago.) Regulation, in other words, can be pro-market. It can facilitate the trust necessary for more economic activity to occur. After all, it would be virtually impossible for consumers to independently assess whether the beef at their local grocery store is untainted; whether a used car is fatally defective; or whether their local bank will keep their deposits safe. Yelp stars alone are no substitute for capital requirements.

Alas, the administration’s response to the pandemic has included rolling back more rules and relaxing enforcement of rules still on the books – including those related to public health. Lax government oversight threatens to hold back not just the market for vaccines but other industries affected by the pandemic, too. For instance, airlines say they’re requiring masks aboard. But absent a governmentenforced mandate, customers who see, say, viral photos of disobedient passengers might question whether the policy is actually enforced. And they might just stay home.

There’s a libertarianfriendly alternative to this worldview, one that also happened to win a Nobel Prize: Rather than using strict regulations to ensure honorable behavior, strong property rights and the frictionless ability to sue over those rights could theoretically achieve the same end.

That is, if companies know consumers will win redress for fraud or injury, that threat should sufficiently incentivize quality and safety.

Presumably, Mitch McConnell and Trump believe such policies help the economy. But the fewer consumers who trust either government or corporations to ‘do the right thing,’ the longer it will take for public health – and the economy – to recover. Catherine Rampell is a Washington Post columnist. Email her at crampell@washpost.com.

Catherine Rampell

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