At Least the Tests Work

Years ago, though in living memory, a phrase was coined. “Too big to fail” meant an institution is of such significance that the government must bail it out no matter what amount of incompetence, mismanagement, or pure corruption has put it at risk.

In the intervening decade or two, the meaning of that phrase (along with the meaning of very nearly everything else) has softened. It’s now “too big to go against,” meaning anything whose shortcomings it would be inconvenient to mention.

We’re expected to ignore even the most blatant of falsehoods and failures. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was once a Hans Christian Andersen story. Now, it’s the national, nay international, pastime.

It would take weeks to list the evidence in support my assertion; no, not weeks of research but weeks merely writing it down. If it would accomplish anything, I’d do it, but it wouldn’t so I won’t.

But I will pick out one example, because it is the gem at the center of our national diet of deceit.

That example is the alleged COVID-19 vaccines. If there is any convincing evidence that any of the vaccines has prevented a single case of COVID-19 anywhere in the world, I have yet to see it. There is abundant evidence that the vaccines have done little or nothing. (Well, little or nothing to bring the virus under control; they’ve done much to enrich a few and lead incompetent politicians to trumpet it as proof that gutless ward heelers should be in charge of national health.) Instead, as was predicted, the coronavirus that China unleashed upon the world, perhaps accidentally, has become much more easily spread and much less deadly. (It can still kill you, but most everyone is vulnerable to something.) Evidence of the COVID-19 vaccines’ utility in preventing the disease is considerably more rare, to the point of nonexistence.

We, our parents, and our grandparents grew up with a high degree of respect for pharmaceutical immunizations, which boast a storied history of success: smallpox, for instance, was eradicated via inoculation. (Government’s role in the process was limited and not exactly noble — at the top of the list is the accidental release of the virus by a government lab in England in 1978, just as smallpox was being declared extinct.) The deadly scourge of much of the 20^th^ century, polio, was mostly eradicated via the brilliantly conceived and manufactured Salk vaccine and, soon after, the orally administered Sabin polio vaccine. (It still exists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, we learned last week, Rockland County, New York, where the first case since 2013 popped up.) Numerous other diseases have either been wiped out or reduced to the extent that potential hosts are too few for those pathogens to spread, all through safe, effective vaccinations.

But vaccinations cannot prevent everything. We remember the AIDS crisis of the late 20^th^ century. It resulted from injections of a different sort and, mostly, by putting things where they don’t belong. This was not stated at the time, at least not loudly. Now we have some concern about monkeypox, which it turns out is also spread by putting things where you shouldn’t. If promiscuous gay sex is so valuable to you that you’re willing to get AIDS or erupt in blisters, that’s your choice to make — as long as it’s my choice, then, to bear none of the cost of your misadventure. There is a vaccine against monkeypox. I do not know but strongly suspect that most of those who in a — cliché alert! — abundance of caution get inoculated against monkeypox have no risk of contracting it anyway.

I don’t know if the monkeypox vaccine works. I don’t really care if the monkeypox vaccine works. I wish well the sufferers of that disfiguring ailment while harboring little confidence that they’ll learn anything from the experience.

As to the various vaccines purported to protect us from SARS-CoV-2 infection, well, let’s quote that parody of virtue Joe “Bugout” Biden, a man who has worked to do for our country what he did for Afghanistan. “There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die,” the senile fabulist said on national television a year ago.

This afternoon, the fully vaccinated and carefully protected First Nursing Home Resident signed an executive order authorizing federal payment for the execution of babies in places where local law prohibits it. (Do the Democrats really want to be thought of as the party of dangerous sex? Apparently so. And I’m not talking about the old days when Sen. Teddy Kennedy and Sen. Chris Dodd made a hobby of rape simulation; that was a simpler time.) Bugout Joe signed the order via a computer teleconference. Why was this? No, not a scheduling issue — nothing, after all, is more important than the promotion of abortion — but because he’s home in the Barcalounger, enduring his second run-in with COVID-19 in two weeks. We’re told that the second round of the disease is a “rebound” infection, brought on by his having been given Paxlovid, a government-approved antiviral compound.

Here’s the score so far: Joe “Bugout” Biden, a Herod-wannabe scourge of infants and a friend to the Taliban, received the full course of vaccinations against COVID-19, for which the government waived the rules and on which it spent billions, and got COVID-19 anyway. He was given a big-pharma antiviral medicine, also given emergency approval by the government, and got COVID-19 again. We’re told that this happens but is very rare. Imagine, then, the sheer odds against the very same thing having happened to former-physician-now-political-operative Anthony Fauci! Yet it did. And, gee whiz, Fauci was fully vaccinated, too. (Both Fauci and Biden continue to thump the tub for the vaccinations that you’re paying for in more ways than one.)

Ah, they say, but while you can still get COVID-19 after vaccination, it won’t be as severe. That doesn’t seem to be true, either. Let me give you an example. It is not a study, because the sample size is small (n=2), and in this column that’s statistically insignificant. But it’s a useful illustration.

It involves two members of my family, both sell educated and reasonably healthy, with no insignificant underlying conditions. Both take efforts to remain well informed on health issues. One was vaccinated up one side and down the other, while the other one had no vaccinations but took vitamin D (and vitamin K2) and was careful about nutrition. Both contracted COVID-19. Both were miserably sick for a month. Both survived.

Both have complained of post-infection “brain fog.”

It will be interesting to see if this applies, too, to Bugout Joe, and it could lead to research to see if “brain fog” is more prevalent or less so among those who were already terminally stupid. On July 21, the following exchange took place at the White House news briefing:

Reporter: Has he [Biden] experienced any fever or brain fog or other symptoms of COVID?

Dr. Ashish Jah, CIVID-19 Response Coordinator: He’s had no —- no fever.

As I mentioned above, there’s not much visible evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines actually prevent COVID-19. Their usefulness has been in the form of political cover for the reprehensible lice we elect to public office — the deranged Trump’s characteristic suggestion of Clorox injections would have been 100 percent effective, but it would have killed those who received them along with the virus. The vaccines have enriched the favored pharmaceutical companies, known collectively as “big pharma,” who for all intents and purposes have aforementioned lice on their payrolls. That’s it.

Are effective COVID-19 vaccines even possible? A year ago today I wrote of a company, Vaxart, that had come up with what it said was an orally administered vaccine that overcame at least some of the shortcomings of the government-sponsored, big-pharma versions. We know more now than we did then about the big-pharma vaccines. Back then, we thought they worked. My thought at the time was that Vaxart’s pill might bring in many who don’t like injections. My thought now is that Vaxart’s vaccine might work.

The latest news, the company says, is that it does. If its findings bear out, taking a pill once or twice a year might protect you from catching COVID-19, its variants, and possibly other similarly transmitted viral diseases. We don’t know with certainty, and we won’t for a while because Vaxart isn’t one of the favored few and therefore doesn’t get to jump to the front of the line. I suspect that if Vaxart had been given only a small percentage of the federal money lavished on Pfizer and its ilk, with the same rapid testing and approval, COVID-19 would no longer be a problem and we’d be looking at Vaxart’s system to alleviate annual influenza and other diseases. (Who knows — a bespoke formulation might knock out monkeypox, too, if a suppository version were made.)

We desperately need an overhaul of our system of medical and pharmaceutical regulation and approval. But that won’t happen unless and until there’s substantial tort reform and civil service reform, neither of which is likely. It’s too easy to admire Bugout Joe’s new invisible house slippers and pretend that all is well.

Still, one can dream: we could test experimental drugs on lawyers, federal non-military employees, and lab rats, in that order.

Then, if the medicines seem to work, we could try them on people.