Does the Brownstone Institute produce reasoned arguments or propaganda? We report, you decide.
There is good money in libertarianism. The Brownstone Institute was recently founded by Jeffrey Tucker, a libertarian who most recently has spent his time criticizing covid lockdowns. He just published an article criticizing Biden’s support for a vaccine mandate. He lists five problems with Biden’s policy, but is it analysis or propaganda? Let’s take a look.
1. The Biden mandate pretends that the only immunity is injected, not natural. . . .
Nope. The rules ultimately issued by federal agencies may or may not include exemptions for people with prior covid infections, but you can make an argument for not including such an exemption without denying the existence of natural immunity. For example, you could cite administrative simplicity, or the added value of being vaccinated even if you have recovered from covid.
2. This natural immunity is long-lasting and broad, and we’ve known that since last year when the first studies revealed it. You can say that the addition of a vaccine provides even more but it’s new and untested relative to most drugs approved by regulators, and many people are concerned about possible side effects of this vaccine that was approved much faster than any drug in my lifetime – and there is not one living human being in a position to say with certainty that these skeptics are wrong.
There is not one living human being in a position to say with certainty that any skeptic is wrong about anything. He’s not making an argument, he’s just shifting the burden of justification onto those he disagrees with, and setting the standard of proof at an absurdly high level. In addition, it kind of sounds like he’s encouraging vaccine hesitancy, doesn’t it?
3. The mandate presumes that everyone is equally susceptible to severe outcomes from getting exposed to the virus, which we’ve known is not true since at least February 2020. . . .
Not so. The mandate assumes that the best way to move past the pandemic and resume pre-covid life is to get everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible. People can spread the virus even if they are at low risk for serious illness.
4. Biden seems still of the belief that vaccines stop infection (he claimed this many times) and spread but we know with certainty that this is not the case, and even the CDC admits it. . . .
The evidence is that vaccines reduce transmission of the virus. Reducing transmission could justify mandatory vaccination even if vaccines do not “stop” infection “with certainty”. Again, he’s not making a relevant argument, he’s just shifting the burden of proof.
5. Biden’s order flies in the face of basic human freedoms and rights. There is no other way to put it. And it is this fact that is the most prescient for the multitudes who are right now seething in anger that one man who happens to hold power can make health decisions for the whole population regardless of their perfectly rational judgements. When the needle filled with liquid is forced into the arms of people who either have natural immunities or do not fear exposure to the pathogen, it gets personal, and people get really mad, especially after they are still forced into masks and denied other essential rights.
I’d like to see Tucker’s evidence that people who reject vaccination are making perfectly rational judgments. Maybe he could start by interviewing some of the unvaccinated people choking to death in ICUs, so see how rational they think their judgment is.
And it is worth noting that no one is going to be tied down and injected against their will, though they will be pressured to get a vaccine, as we do with many other vaccines.
Decades ago my boss had a sign on his wall. It said something like “Stress is the natural reaction you feel when you are not allowed to strangle the life out of some a$$hole who desperately needs it”. Reading this brought it to mind.
Eric:
You argue everything which can be taken for granted in normal conversation, This is not normal and is someone who is using supposition, innuendo, conjecture, and is making sh*t up along the way to tire you. It really is not a discussion as much as mud slinging to wear the opposition out with BS.
“And it is worth noting that no one is going to be tied down and injected against their will . . .”
Yes, thanks for posting this. Nobody is advocating forced injections. Nobody.
What is their stand on abortion? What is their stand on the military draft during a time of war? What is their stand on dress codes? What is their stand on loitering laws? It may say “libertarian” on the label, but it’s rather obvious what’s in the bottle.
The freedom to infect is like the freedom to enslave, one of those freedoms which is explicitly about infringing on other people’s freedoms. We had a whole civil war about the right to enslave, and some people can’t get over it that they lost.
I’m not a lawyer, but … the “freedom” to live one’s life without regard to COVIS-19 vaccinations and other safeguards (social distancing, masks, etc) looks awfully akin to the rights to live without regard for smallpox innoculation, measles-mumps-rubella-and-chicken pox vaccination, and that all time favorite: polio shots.
I implore every libertarian reading this comment, go to Google and plug in “Iron lungs images.” There’s no more “inspiring” image than a football arena-size chamber filled with children with polio stuffed into iron lungs. Oh, the wonderfulness! That’s the grandeur conservatives want to bring back with their calls to American Greatness.
Let me suggest that liberals give up trying to influence their Covide-reluctant fellow citizens by stressing the ills of the SARS-COV-2 virus, and go for the jugular. Let’s have some lawsuits in Texas and Florida and other conservatively enlightened regions demanding that the auth0rities enrich our lives by bringing back massive caseloads of polio, and smallpox, and perhaps some obscure — but fatal or at least disfiguring — sexual diseases. Yeah, let’s insist conservatives take credit for all that old time American glory.
What is your expertise on the matter of lockdowns, masks, vax mandates? The Brownstone Institute has a very high ranking epidemiologist among their ranks, one who has objected to the mandates from the beginning because big data analysis shows they simply make no difference. His views are shared by Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, and MANY other epidemiologists and virologists, including Didier Raoult, the most famous virologist in the world. He has an incredible Google Scholar ranking of 187, meaning he is quoted by basically every virology study written. All these scientists, despite their rank and expertise, have been mocked and called “kooks” and “crazies.” If you look at PubMed yourself, just on masks, you will see that the data is far from clear. There is an argument on both sides, depending on whether you look at the data from a micro or macro level. However, half of this argument has been stifled. As libertarians, you should object to this. For right now, I will believe the actual experts rather than the extremely compromised FDA and CDC, or the Bill Gates-owned WHO.
Well Linda:
I doubt you have an expertise in lockdowns, masks, vaccines, social distances, etc. either.
– Leaping to a different and associated topic. Didier did use hydroxychloroquine in the proper manner as an ionophore to allow AZT and other meds or simply Zinc enter the cell. The zinc ion was meant to block Covid from replicating by attaching to the ACE2 Receptor thereby preventing Covid from doing so.
No one believed him and for the most part he was his own downfall for his quirkiness. Neither did all those experts use hydroxychloroquine as an ionophore and in a similar manner as Didier.
Henry Ford Hospitals (Detroit) did trial hydr0xychloroquine plus AZT utilizing ~2500 patients and did show relative success. You can google that trial yourself to read it. At least you will have some basis for making your claims rather than supposition, conjecture, and innuendo.
I am being mean to you purposely as you are amongst well educated people, one of which has worked researching mRNA for decades. We are not your average bumpkins :).
I am going to pull one sentence which Eric quoted of Jeffery’s reading. I want to see if you have looked beyond the tip of your nose or are just babbling. Did you follow the link to this?
________
“1. The Biden mandate pretends that the only immunity is injected, not natural.”
Jeffrey: None is more surprising than the false assertion made in the John Snow Memorandum – and signed by current CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky – that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”
The lasting protection? ” NIH: The immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.”
Or similar to the vaccines.
If you go to the bottom of the above NIH citation there is another NIH article/Citation; “Experimental coronavirus vaccine highly effective | National Institutes of Health (NIH)”
Do you think more people would survive Covid (any variety) if not inoculated? How about Long-Covid which goes into bodily organs and lasts for months?
As was discovered, both the Pfizer and the Moderna lessen the impact of Covid. And the damn virus keeps mutating . . .
Finally, if you called me a libertarian, it is the same as asking for a fight. I am no damn libertarian and neither is Eric or the others here.
One question, what is a paragraph ?