patrick.net

When someone declares "people will die" as a justification for curtailing liberty, the correct response is "what are you suggesting - that liberty isn't worth dying for? That those who sacrificed their lives for our freedoms made the wrong choice?
—OldMugwump, 2013

Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand…It is a very great blessing because it is the one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil.

-M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for the healing of Human Evil (1983)

As more and more people are awakening to the dangers of vaccines, they are gradually discovering a problem vaccine safety advocates have had to deal with for decades—talking to vaccine zealots is like speaking to a brick wall and regardless of the evidence you put forward, you can’t reach them (sometimes seeming as though you are speaking to a religious fanatic who is unwilling to even consider the “blasphemy you are spewing forth”).

For example, in 2009 after nephrologist Dr. Suzanne Humphries noticed patients (particularly hospitalized ones) kept on developing kidney failure after flu shots, she experienced significant pushback from trying to delay vaccinating until discharge:

In the past when I was consulted on kidney failure cases and said, “Oh that was the statin/antibiotic/diuretic that did that!” instantly the drug would be stopped—no questions asked. Now, however, a new standard was applied to vaccines. It didn’t matter that the internist’s notes in the charts said, “No obvious etiology of kidney failure found after thorough evaluation.”

The next time the medical chief of staff and I met in the corridor, an oncologist was present. At one point, I asked the chief, “Why doesn’t anyone else see the problem here? Why is it just me? How can you think all this is okay? Why is it now considered normal to vaccinate very sick people on their first hospital day?” The oncologist gave an answer that surprised me. She said, “Medical religion!” and turned and walked away. ...

Once people awaken to the vaccine issues, one of the most frequent questions which emerges is why the medical field has such a rigid ideological attachment to them. I would argue it is due to three interrelated reasons:

First, human society has always been defined by competing groups vying for status and wealth, and what many do not appreciate is that, historically, it is a very recent development that doctors attracted the prestige and salary the profession commands. This I would argue was ultimately a result of two things:

1. Market monopolization (via the American Medical Association) and technological developments birthing an incredibly profitable medical industry, which generated the funding to market a newfound faith in it to the entire country and required doctors (and faith in doctors) to serve as the keystone for the industry.

2. Medicine creating a mythology that it rescued us from the dark ages of disease, and hence deserves its supremacy in the current social hierarchy. As “vaccines ending infectious diseases” is a central part of that mythology, to maintain their existing prestige, those within the conventional medical system are essentially forced to double-down on the absolute supremacy of vaccines, regardless of the evidence against them, or the fact, as Secretary Kennedy brilliantly shows here, there is no actual evidence vaccines were responsible for the decline in infectious disease the medical industry falsely claimed credit for.

Secondly, there is a well-known phenomenon in psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that the less competence or knowledge individuals have in an area, the more they will overestimate their competency and knowledge...

Third, a strong argument can be made that societies cannot function without some type of unifying faith or spirituality (particularly since in the absence of one, people will frequently seek out one to adopt). In our culture, a rather peculiar situation emerged where religion was cast out by broad swaths of the society and replaced with science (under the belief it would create a fairer and more rational society) but the underlying need for a widespread faith was never addressed.

Because of this, much of science gradually morphed into the society’s religion, resulting in it claiming to be an objective arbiter of truth, but in reality, frequently being highly dogmatic and irrational as it seeks to establish its own monopoly over the truth (which has led to many labeling the current societal institution of science as “scientism”). As such, when science is discussed, religious terminology is often used by its proponents (e.g., “I believe in science,” “I believe in vaccines,” “anyone who denies climate change is reprehensible and must be silenced”).

The Religion of Medicine

Over the years, many have made the observation, medicine, by claiming dominion over life and death (and creating modern miracles like reviving the dead with cardiac resuscitation or awing the public with their ability to see through flesh with x-rays) has come to function as the foundation of the new religion of science.

Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion... The Church of Modern Medicine deals with the most puzzling phenomena: birth, death, and all the tricks our bodies play on us.
- Robert S. Mendelsohn

... Of these points, I spent by far the most time pondering his argument vaccines were medicine’s holy water, as:

•Every medical student (and now healthcare workers too) are required to be fully vaccinated—both filtering out those not aligned with medicine’s dogmas and making those who submit to them be much more inclined to push them on patients.

•Vaccines greatly increase the likelihood of chronic illnesses (typically a 3-10X increase), causing recipients to become lifelong adherents to medicine and the drugs it provides to manage those symptoms.