Medical Ethics
Many of our pandemic policies cast aside foundational principles of medical ethics. During the initial lockdowns in 2020, hospitals sat empty for weeks, and hospital staff were sent home as we waited for an influx of COVID patients that didn’t arrive until months later. Health care systems, spurred by perverse payment incentives from CMS, focused narrowly on a single disease: this biased our COVID hospitalization and death counts and effectively abandoned patients with other medical needs. The disastrous fruits of this myopia include an unprecedented 40 percent increase in all-cause mortality among working-age adults (18 to 64) last year, most of which wasn’t attributable to COVID deaths. To put this number in context, actuaries tell us that a 10 percent rise in all-cause mortality represents a once-in-200-year catastrophe.Social Isolation Versus Social Solidarity
Our ruling class saw in COVID an opportunity to revolutionize how we relate to one another and how we exist in the world. Recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the earliest days of the pandemic. This public health crisis offered the ideal pretext for expanding exceptional state powers beyond all previous limits. Our government and public health authorities have still not defined the thresholds for what counts as a public health emergency—the supposed legal justification for burdensome COVID “countermeasures” (a military, not a medical, term), serious infringements on civil liberties, and censorship of dissenting voices. The assumption of emergency powers by both elected officials and unelected bureaucrats continues indefinitely, with little critical scrutiny and no appropriate checks and balances.The lockdowns of the past two years represented the first time in the history of pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations. Those who benefitted economically from lockdowns—Amazon, for example, and professionals in the laptop class who could easily work from home—lobbied for these untested measures. The working class bore the brunt of the lockdown burdens and saw massive transfers of their wealth upwards, mostly into the pockets of a few ultra-rich tech elites.
Biosecurity and Totalitarianism
With vaccine mandates and passports, we are seeing the emergence of a new biosecurity surveillance regime designed and implemented by unelected technocrats. The unholy welding of digital technologies, public health, and police power is leading to unprecedented invasions on our privacy and intrusive methods of monitoring and authoritarian control. In this framework, citizens are no longer viewed as persons with inherent dignity, but as fungible elements of an undifferentiated “mass,” to be shaped by supposedly benevolent health and safety experts. I predict that if these trends do not meet more robust resistance in 2022, this new paradigm of governance will demand increasingly intrusive and burdensome interventions into the lives, and bodies, of individuals.The marriage of global public health with novel digital technologies of surveillance, personal data extraction, information flow, and social control now makes possible novel forms of domination unimaginable in the totalitarian regimes of the past. Whether we agree or disagree with this or that pandemic policy, this broader development should concern each of us. Farrow describes this perceptively when he sketches the “systemic change otherwise unpalatable to the people” introduced during the pandemic:
“That change is in the direction of what the World Economic Forum calls stakeholder capitalism, backed by biodigital convergence, universal surveillance, and technological control of a wide range of human activities, from reproduction to religion. Information exchange, like monetary exchange, is to be monitored and controlled. A social credit system is being devised in which conformity will be rewarded by inclusion and lack of conformity punished by exclusion. What is already operative in China, in other words, is advancing very rapidly in the West.”
To see and understand the emergence of this “new normal,” consider as instructive cautionary tales the prior regimes in which the pretext of public safety during an emergency paved the way for totalitarian systems. Anyone who draws a historical analogy to the Nazis is understandably met with the charge of alarmist hyperbole, so let me be clear: I am comparing neither the current nor the previous administrations to Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Still, it remains a sobering, instructive, and undeniable fact that Nazi Germany was governed for virtually the entirety of its existence under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed for the suspension of German law in times of emergency. Recall also the name of the group that carried out the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution: the “Committee of Public Safety.”
Vaccine passports are merely an early, though significant, step for the emerging biosecurity surveillance regime. As Farrow rightly observes, “We are not dealing with a [pandemic] exit strategy at all, but rather with an entrance strategy for the new Lords of the World.” It’s not too early for firm resistance; indeed, with virtually no pushback, we have uncritically allowed unjust and harmful measures to advance while meeting no resistance. Our general goodwill and civic-mindedness are nullified by misplaced trust and self-protective timidity. Cowardice masquerades as civility. Consider the remarks of the great Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
“If only we had stood together against the common threat, we could easily have defeated it. So, why didn’t we? We didn’t love freedom enough. We hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
The hour is later than we think; twilight is near. Continued compliance with manifestly unjust and often absurd mandates will not return us to a normal functioning society. Every good-faith or selfless act of compliance on the part of citizens has only resulted in more illogical pandemic “countermeasures” that further erode our civil liberties, harm our overall health, and undermine human flourishing.
There is a human right not enshrined in any constitution: the right to the truth. I would suggest that no right has been more systematically trammeled over the last two years than this one. Why, I ask, do our public health authorities acknowledge the truth only after the damage from the lie has already been done—only, for example, after tens of thousands have lost their jobs due to coercive vaccine mandates that have not advanced public health? Who will hold our leaders accountable for this malfeasance?
Doug Farrow knows the score, and he is correct: Nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience now constitute the right and just path forward. At the risk of ending on an apocalyptic note, I join Farrow in maintaining that firm resistance to the point of civil disobedience is not only permissible under the circumstances, but indeed required if we are to prevent this twilight from fading into night.