It just happens to disagree with the mainstream narrative
Yeah let’s get rid of vaccines, and antibiotics, and anesthetics, and medications, and clean water, and sewage processing, and clothes, and food, and oxygen. They’re all a conspiracy.
Steve Kirsch is a tech entrepreneur who made hundreds of millions of dollars after founding an early search engine and helping invent the optical computer mouse.
Recently, he stood before a gathering of more than 250 lawyers in Atlanta while wearing a custom black T-shirt designed like a dictionary entry for the phrase “misinformation superspreader.”
It’s like this, man. He’s a truth-teller, man, but the suits won’t listen, man, they’re too hooked on their mainstream narrative to listen, man.
“Our definition is it’s someone who’s basically pointing out the truth and it just happens to disagree with the mainstream narrative we’re known as misinformation spreaders, because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to control the narrative,” Kirsch told NPR.
By “they,” Kirsch means a network of pharmaceutical companies, governments, doctors and journalists that he argues are covering up a pandemic-driven plot to poison the world for profit.
That would be the Sacklers and opioids. It would not be vaccinations.
In recent years, Kirsch has become an increasingly vocal and generous funder of the anti-vaccine movement. He helped organize and fund the conference to map out strategies for anti-vaccine and COVID-19-focused litigation as the pandemic winds down.
As with the trans ideology, this mystifies me. Why do people do this? Are they nostalgic for polio and whooping cough and tuberculosis?
Jeffrey Morris has tried to engage with Kirsch for years. In his spare time, the professor of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania has gone line by line through some of Kirsch’s claims, providing answers, context and explanations. They once had a long conversation over Zoom.
“And it was an interesting discussion, you know, because he admitted that he was not a scientist and didn’t think like one. And so I was trying to connect with him and help him understand the leaps he was making in his arguments to get him to think more carefully. Because I could tell he was someone with a lot of energy and passion on the issue,” said Morris, who has watched Kirsch pull millions of views on some of his COVID vaccine content.
Which is a bad thing if he’s not willing to do the work. He’s not a scientist and he doesn’t think like one so he should stay out of it, because medicine is an applied science, not a branch of story-telling.
As government cover ups became a regular talking point for Kirsch, the researchers abandoned his early treatment project. Two years and $2 million later, he’s hoping to organize a sustained legal insurgency against public health agencies, drug manufacturers, hospitals and schools.
He’s hoping to cause a lot of extra disease and death.
How do people like him live with themselves?
It’s an argument I often have with the anti-vax brigade. I am a child of the 50s, and I can still recall the “clank clank” of the callipers as other boys tried to join our boisterous games. Some of them were quite fast. We were the lucky ones who didn’t contract polio and were the first to get the Salk vaccine.
One of my brothers-in-law had a permanent limp from a shortened leg due to polio. As a child in the Soviet invaded Lithuania, he had less medical care than we in Aus, but he survived when many of his cohort didn’t.
So yes please, we need more polio so my great grandchildren too can have the memory of the “clank clank” coming up behind them. Such a small price to pay to create childhood memories.
As an aside, whenever I have a new nurse to administer my C19, ‘Flu, or Pneumonia vaccines, I always tell them I don’t want the vaccine that causes autism (shocked look), I want the vaccine that confers super powers.
Vaccines are not the big money makers for BigPharma. There are other drugs that are much more profitable.
I remember when I was in my doctoral program in science – Biology – some of the people I was going to school with were shocked, just shocked, to find out I took medicine for my asthma. Should I really be putting chemicals in my body? (I will note here that most of the ones saying that were in the philosophy department, and while I have a great respect for philosophy when it is well done, that department at that school seemed to be mostly about hating on the modern world – but I didn’t see any of them giving up their cars, their cell phone, or anything else useful. But they wanted me to give up my asthma medicine and try herbals instead. You might recognize that I am still alive; I did not follow their advice).
It did always shock me that even in the biology department, there were a number of students who refused to recognize that we put chemicals in our mouth all the time – take a drink of water? Chemicals. Eat something, even a dandelion? Chemicals. We are chemicals. Our environment, the one they are so desperate to save, is chemicals all the way down.
They also thought we should live off the grid, each of us with a small plot of land, 5-10 acres, to support ourselves. They never did the math to figure out how many acres it would take to give 8 billion people (only 6.5 billion then) their own plot of ground. And they refused to accept that there is a point at which humanity will outstrip its carrying capacity. That point came somewhere around 1980 officially, but likely as early as 1960.
Yes, vaccines are obviously a nefarious plot by big pharma! Imagine coming up with something that you can take once or occasionally and it gives your body the power to fight disease on its own. How devious is that. I mean couldn’t they have come up with something like a herbal supplement that you have to take each day and it doesn’t actually do anything. Now that would be honest!
An English patent-agent friend of mine told me some years back that the reason drugs are so expensive to buy over the retail counter is because they have to be patented in every country in the world to ensure that their developers costs will be recouped and their businesses do well, ‘Big Pharma’ or otherwise.
I have no reason to doubt my friend the patent agent. But it seems to me that it would create a nice little ecological niche for the Patents and Copyright Arm of every dodgy regime and dictatorship on the planet.
A nice little earner indeed.
‘Freedom!’ is the cry and mantra of the antivaxxer and .global-warming-denialist mobs roaming about on the surface of the Earth like so many herds of ostriches; with occasional stops to bury their heads in the sand..
The thing that drives me mad are all the “alt cures” for things like allergies, and in iknklast’s case asthma, are to bolster the immune system. The ignorance of what asthma and allergies actually are astounds me, do they really not know that these are the products of an immune system that is overreacting to stimuli. I would watch as my mother would suffer attacks strong enough to put her in the hospital in oxygen tents, until she was prescribed prednisone, thinking that would be my fate since I had many of the same food allergies she did. (I was prescribed a series of shots at age ten that deboosted those allergies and I don’t suffer from them anymore. I still remember the first bite of chocolate that I ate without realizing I would get hives.)
I was at a farmer’s market in Phoenix and asked why a jar of honey was $15. The seller explained that it was pure and raw, and that it cured all sorts of ills caused by the poisons in commercial food products. Including allergies. How about that? Honey as the Elixir for $8 more than honey in the
grocerypoisoner’s store. Those cancer doctors are lying about needing expensive drugs that keep you dependent on them and make you sicker!People like Kirsch are what drives cities like Regina to stop fluoridating their water, leading to a startling increase in cavities among children within a brief time. When I first found the “Savage Minds” podcast I enjoyed the interviews, but soon got tired of Julian’s diversions into rants against neoliberals and how Joe Biden is “worse than Trump,” and how the the attempts to stop the spread of Covid during the height of the pandemic were actually the government taking control (as opposed to?) So, while she’s had some good guests lately, i just find I can’t listen to the podcast any more.
Science as a concept of formalized method of discovery of causes of natural phenomena is taking a beating, and most of the worst offenders are the ones who claim we need to be “trusting the science.” But guess what, when you claim that science backs transgender identities, don’t be surprised when you try to explain the science behind vaccines, or global warming, or any other of the sciences that really do need to be followed in our current environment.
Pharma doesn’t do itself any favors when previously open and available generic patents for low-cost drugs are bought up by venture capitalists who make those drugs unaffordable. Or when they rush drugs to market that prove to be addictive. Or claim that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, but just give kids a chance to pause and think about which puberty they want to go through.
[…] a comment by Mike Haubrich on It just happens to disagree with the mainstream […]
Ironically, some of the people who believe that Big Pharma is making big money off of vaccines, when they could (if they were the conspiratorial monolith the conspiracy theorists claim) suppress those vaccines and make billions more treating the resulting diseases, are the same people who claim that Big Pharma is hiding a cure for cancer because they make more money treating it than a one-dose cancer cure would make.
The obvious answer on cancer would be that ridiculously rich people still die from cancer so the cure cannot exist.
Ophelia ” That would be the Sacklers and opioids. It would not be vaccinations.”
What is the evidence you are basing that assumption on?
How do you know it’s not vaccinations too?
I spend a lot of time arguing with Pro-vaxxers on the internet. I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I think vaccines work. I get them. I got them for my children when they were young. But I was selective about them, occasionally declining or postponing some of them.
I don’t trust the recommendations because I don’t trust the public health system that funds and produces those recommendations. I have made my own decisions based on my individual risk perceptions for diseases and assuming the stated risks for vaccines are a low estimate given the methods and systems used to produce them. The hatred I get for stating that publicly in pro-vaccine forums is well – you know what it can be like to state an unpopular opinion on the internet. I only do so in moderated forums these days and it’s still pretty mean and derisive. What does it take to get a person like you to reconsider how public health recommendations come into being? To question if they had the health of individual citizens foremost in mind and priorities?
The published science supporting vaccine safety and the way the estimates of adverse effects are created is not as robust as most people assume. No one is “nostalgic for polio and whooping cough and tuberculosis” but, at least in the U.S., our regulatory agencies have been captured by the industries they regulate. We cannot trust our public officials to place the overall health and well being of Americans citizens above the needs of the corporate citizens that make up the industries that support them. This shift of funding/power was initiated by Reagan, who moved agencies into a mode of collecting funding from the industries they are inspecting. This has been an increasing trend over time.
The notorious anti-vaxxer, RFK, Jr. is now running for president. One of his main stated reasons is to reform public agencies, like the FDA and the EPA, to protect American citizens over Corporate citizens. He’s ‘anti-vaccine’ the same way I am. He doesn’t support our current intertwined corporate/governmental system producing vaccines and recommendations for those vaccines.
A word of agreement with Beth Clarkson here, for what it’s worth.
I get All The Vaccines. I have limited trust of pharmaceutical companies, though. I read about the attempts at patents, and the drive for exclusivity, and the push for fast approval, and it makes me wary, whether the drug is a vaccine or a medication for a different purpose like fighting obesity or Alzheimer’s. It does not surprise me when an intelligent and clear-thinking person reads far more on the topic than I can possibly stomach and decides to take a more cautious approach than mine. It is an unfortunate fact of reality that so many things we depend on, like medications, are developed by large corporations run by wealthy people with profit motives, and sometimes aided by lobbying the government.
Big Pharma is responsible for overprescription of antidepressants, and for producing cross-sex hormones and hormone blockers for “transition”. I don’t know that there’s a clear line. There doesn’t need to be a “nefarious plot” for there to be areas to question.
Sackbut, Big Pharma (is there Small Pharma?) doesn’t produce “cross sex hormones and hormone blockers for “transition”. They produce hormones and hormone blockers because they are used to treat numerous medical conditions. The FDA allows doctors to prescribe those drugs for off label use. But I am quite happy Big Pharma makes hormone blockers because they 1) kept my 8 year old from going through puberty and 2) will keep my father alive even though he has metastic prostate cancer. I have male friends who have taken testosterone when they hit middle age and started feeling depressed, lethargic, and foggy brained, and female friends who have taken estrogen to cope with menopause. I am tired of seeing these medications that in some circumstances, like prostate cancer, truly are life saving and in others life improving, being demonized because a portion of the medical community has decided to treat a mental health condition with body modification instead of therapy and, when necessary, psychotropic medications.
My intention was not to demonize medications, nor to assign blame specifically to pharmaceutical companies and leave the rest of the medical community out of the loop. My intent was only to recognize that large companies doing important things and run by wealthy people sometimes value profit, and sometimes do not work with the best interests of the public at heart, and so it doesn’t surprise me that people are sometimes wary and suspicious. Pharmaceutical companies produce and market drugs, influencing doctors and consumers, and doctors prescribe, sometimes inappropriately for a variety of reasons. Add insurance companies and advertising companies to the pile of Entities Of Concern if you want. I see far too many medication ads on the internet for me to think that these are truly helpful in making sound medical treatment decisions.
I don’t think large corporations run by wealthy people are, as rule, benevolent, but we depend on them, we have to, and trying to decide when we can trust them and when we can’t is not nearly as simple as identifying the Sacklers and the Shkrelis. It’s complicated. I generally trust the doctors I see and the medications I am prescribed, but I can’t really blame people for not quite having the level of trust I do. This is why we encourage people to get second opinions and to read up on their own diseases and treatments; sometimes they reach different conclusions (as Beth Clarkson did in #9), and I can respect that.