The debt this article owes to the anti-vaxxers is hereby gratefully acknowledged. I’m talking about all those anarchists whose knees jerk before their minds engage.
Here the difference between conservatives and anarchists is worth mentioning. A conservative resents the state claiming inordinate power. An anarchist resents the state claiming any power.
For an anarchist any state is evil by definition. A conservative, on the other hand, recognises that, though some states are evil and all can perpetrate the odd wicked deed, the state isn’t evil in itself.
Compared to the chaotic existence Hobbes described as homo homine lupus est, something that would inevitably result from anarchism if it were allowed to triumph, the state – almost any state – is, relatively speaking, a force for good. For example, the excesses of even the ghastly state of Saddam Hussein weren’t as bad as the carnage that followed its demise.
But how much state power is too much? At what point does the state overstep the line separating its legitimate remit from tyranny? An exhaustive answer to that question, if it’s at all possible, would require more space than this format allows.
However, most people would identify providing protection as a legitimate function of a legitimate state (nothing I say applies to illegitimate ones, whose name is legion). Yes, but what kind of protection?
Against enemies, foreign and domestic? Definitely. Against crime? Of course. Not only is such protection essential, but it’s the kind that only the state can, or rather should, provide.
Private armies, buccaneering navies or people’s militias might have had a role to play in times olden, but today they would be counterproductive in any other than a strictly auxiliary capacity. At best. At worst they could turn into murderous, marauding bands.
In other words, the state is there to protect its people in areas where they can’t protect themselves. But there is an important proviso.
When the state protects people from others, it stays on brief. When the state tries to protect people from themselves, it’s teetering on the edge of tyranny.
That’s why I resent state diktats on how much I should weigh, what I should eat, how much I should drink or what safety devices I should have in my car. “What makes this your business, minister?” are the words that always cross my mind whenever yet another official issues yet another edict.
I’m not buying the argument ab NHS, to the effect that my getting hurt in an accident by not wearing a seatbelt would put a heavier burden on the shoulder of that colossus, thereby harming society. That, to me, is an argument not for seatbelts but against socialised medicine.
With some reservations, it’s not the state’s remit to prevent individuals from harming themselves. When they harm others, that’s a different matter. That’s where the state’s bossiness ends and its legitimate duty of providing protection begins.
Now the Covid pandemic exists, and it kills people. Compared with what we’d expect in a non-pandemic period, there were 97,981 excess deaths in England and Wales between January 2020 and July 2021.
That the rate of spread is inversely proportional to the rate of vaccination is observable throughout the world. The most cautious study I’ve seen estimates that vaccinated people are 63 per cent less likely to infect others.
At the same time, the incidence of adverse reactions to vaccines is negligible, if not nonexistent. So on what grounds can someone refuse to be vaccinated?
There exists a hard core of superstitious haters of vaccines in general, not just anti-Covid ones. This group is small in Britain, but it’s quite large in France and especially in Germany. Parents there routinely refuse to have their children vaccinated against anything.
Those naysayers ought to spend five minutes looking at the rates of infant mortality and, say, polio, before and after vaccines were invented. If they still remain anti-vaxxers after that effort, one wonders which organ in their body they use for thinking.
When it comes to Covid specifically, many people feel the government has overreacted and curtailed our freedom excessively and unnecessarily. They may well be right to some extent, although I’d hate to see the death rate double as a bow towards libertarian rectitude.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with the government claiming emergency powers at a cost to some liberties when an emergency does exist. For example, ordering a blackout in wartime infringes on liberty, but during the Blitz not many Britons argued against that measure on those grounds.
They understood that one person refusing to comply with the blackout order could expose his whole building to a Luftwaffe blockbuster. By being a stickler for individual liberty he could effectively kill many people collectively.
My problems start when the state doesn’t relinquish such powers after the emergency no longer exists. If it doesn’t, which is often the case, then all decent people, which is to say conservatives, should rise in revolt – but that’s a separate subject.
If the cited study is to be believed, then an anti-vaxxer is a typological equivalent of an anti-blackouter of 80 years ago. He endangers not only himself, which would be his privilege, but also others, which shouldn’t be allowed.
If he still persists, I see no problem with the government stepping in and forcing him to comply. In doing so, the state isn’t being tyrannical but responsible.
And its principal, some will say only, responsibility is protecting its citizens from others: Luftwaffe bombers, suicide murderers, criminals of any kind – and idiots who don’t mind exposing others to mortal danger for the sake of upholding their misconstrued rights.
All cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
Keep taking your 12 boosters per year Mr Boot there’s a good goy.
Db1’s comment is opaque. What does it intend to mean?
I think that Mr Boot’s article today is excellent. Clear, concise and containing nothing irrelevant or unnecessary. I commend it as good common-sense to be followed/adopted by the community. Well said, once again, Mr Boot!
Thank you.
Bernie,
The gentleman above you is insinuating that Mr Boot is betraying his fellow conservatives by refusing to call out what he (the chap above you) believes to be a Jewish plot to poison white Gentiles. That is what he means by “good goy”
Db1 also knows that it started with one shot, followed by the second, then comes the booster, this will be followed by yearly boosters , however due to the whole Greek alphabet of strains, the boosters were reduced to six, then THREE months, and this will continue till mission accomplished.
I was sorry to read this article as I mostly agree with your views on many topics .
These experimental so called vaccines
Do not provide immunity and allow persons with three jabs to catch and transmit Covid . Do call that success ?
See the Government MHRA yellow card reporting system on UK column . Over a million serious adverse reactions and 1700 deaths attributed to these untested non approved vaccines . This fascist clampdown on our basic freedoms has little to do with health and everything to do with control . Your background in the USSR must be reminding you surely ?
Spread your net outside the mainstream media . See Vernon Coleman on brandnewtube.com . thehighwire.com
thecorbettreport.com
Masks do nothing but are a very visual sign of compliance . If you think Big Pharma are on your side you are away with the fairies .
Agreed! I have studied Government stats from the UK, USA, Australia and the W.H.O. and similar influenzas death stats show that over the decade the figures are similar to most years, except some years like 2019 were far worse.
Here in Queensland SEVEN elderly people have died over the last TWO years from COVID, yet I am to be put off as a teacher, just as medical staff have been. And as from next week I am blocked entry to most venues as well.
Australia had in 2019 4,000 (ABS) to 6,000 (W.H.O) die from a similar yearly influenza. We have had 2,072 deaths over two years which is about a quarter of the fatalities! So, where is the killer pandemic that warrants shooting people in the back with rubber bullets, pepper-spraying crowds, inflicting curfews, restricting cinema’s, sports events, cafe’s, etc. to patrons, closing businesses, cancelling all sport including clean air open sport like tennis, golf and surfing, mandating masks, arresting people even young mums handcuffed in their kitchen for posting notes on social-media, police brutality, army deployment, banning public debates, internment complexes that resemble concentration camps.
Seriously Alexander, after your experiences with Communism I thought you would have smelt the rat early!
My thoughts too and I am a Queenslander as well. Disappointing to read this article by an otherwise very wise man. But there wide spread of categories of people falling for this worldwide scam.
Commentators, please note that Mr Boot has criticized government’s ‘fascist’ covid measures more often than agreed with them.
Today’s blog is more convincing than all your worthy and strident opposition it has called forth, I must say.
As for those afraid to get vaccinated: If our state leaders and most profession athlete zillionaires have been vaccinated-who have no small love for their well being and bodies- then surely it must be safe!
How do you know that our state leaders have been vaccinated and not been injected with saline for example?
Eugeino some nurses have disclosed that the oligarchs are not shot with the same brew as the plebs, and it’s been revealed that is the same with top sports idols. It’s worth noting that FIFA has reported that on average 2 player die from heart related deaths per year, even in 2020 the COVID year, however that has dramatically reached 26 this year when the memory RNA has been rolled out. You would also be amazed to see just who is exempt from this mass-trial-run of this spike protein gene therapy experiment.
I am surprised that Mr Boot’s common sense did not make him realize that 97 981 “excess deaths” in one year and a half, represent less than 2 out of 1000 of the whole population, that is to say a very tiny variation, supposing all those extra-deaths are strictly due to Covid, which is dubious : one knows now that Covid kills almost exclusively old people already seriously ill.
In France the government speaks of 130 000 deaths by Covid in two years, but the very statistics from the official department Santé Publique France tells of “only” 56 000. In fact less than one French out of a thousand died of Covid in two years.
“Tout ça pour ça!” do we say when we consider the amount of restrictions of liberties and of destructions of economic sectors and of education for the young !
Why did governments in the Western World became so furiously mad ?
The comments by Adams and Marto are based on ignorance and prejudice, not on any sound understanding of the science. Fortunately, though no scientist, Mr Boot’s understanding is balanced and correct. Sadly, nothing seems able to change the mindset of such critics as Adams & Marto.
And nothing seems to be able to change the mindset of the members of the vax cult. A psychologist described it as covid psychosis.
Bernie, I suggest you read the new book out about the chief health (dictator) for the USA “The Real Anthony Fauchi, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” And rather then trusting the BBC news just examine adverse effects data released weekly by the NHS for the UK, or VERS for the USA, or the TGA for Australia and the adverse effects are detailed and death count is noted. Statically more people have died from adverse reactions to the COVID ‘vaccine’ then ALL the known and properly tested vaccines for the last 25 years combined.
That’s right go for the ad hominem attack on my post
Do not disprove the facts that my comments mention . I am very surprised you did not regurgitate the current fashionable misinformation trope !
So, if the so called vaccine now protects you, why are you so worried about the unvaxxed?
Well argued as ever Mr B – but I take issue with one or two points.
The adverse reactions to these brand new gene therapies (I’ll not call them vaccines as they don’t conform to the definition that was hastily changed this year to accommodate them) are certainly not ‘negligible’. There have been more deaths attributed to them, on the US VAERS list, in ten months, than all previous vaccines combined in the last thirty years or so that VAERS has been in existence.
These therapies are still in stage 3 human trials with no long term safety data and are therefore experimental. The coercion or forcing of an experimental, pharmaceutical intervention is still an internationally recognised crime against humanity in accordance with the 1947 Nuremberg Code and several human rights and medical ethics protocols.
I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer’, as a retired military man, I’ve had the lot. But I refuse to participate in a human drugs trial – especially when some very eminent voices in the scientific community are voicing horrified opposition to the possible short and long term effects of a new product. The seeming desperation of our political class is also extremely suspicious.
Incidentally, you’d might like to revisit polio. Where did it suddenly come from? and why did it only effect a certain demographic in the recently emerged western, industrialised countries? Why did hundreds of thousands of young people start to develop lesions on their growing spinal cords? (Clue: pesticides used on the new industrialised farms were the culprit).
Before a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, epidemics would result in up to 7760 cases of paralytic polio in the UK each year, with up to 750 deaths. Once a vaccine was routinely available, cases of polio rapidly fell to minuscule levels. QED, methinks.
But as I say, where did it come from? It didn’t exist before the 19th century and when it emerged, it only affected the young in countries that had recently adopted industrial farming production methods.
The industrial revolution produced huge benefits to human health, wealth and longevity. It also produced some disastrous mistakes – especially in the fields of industrial chemistry and pharmacy. Lead in petrol (to stop ‘knocking’ in internal combustion engines) increased the amount of lead in the atmosphere enormously. Lead never goes away and we all have in the region of 600% more lead in our bodies than humans in the pre industrial age. Remember CFCs? – great for increasing the efficiency of refrigeration. Also great, as it turned out, for dissolving ozone.
I recommend further research into polio and especially it’s correlation with an industrial pesticide called ‘Paris green’- which contained copper, lead and arsenic. When these pesticides were banned internationally, polio disappeared as quickly as it emerged…QED?
‘Mad cow disease’ is another one. What happened to that? And where did it go? Could it have had anything to do with a government mandated cattle treatment containing an organophosphate pesticide and a compound similar to thalidomide? It certainly disappeared quickly enough when the government quietly shelved this mandate.
I would also reflect on what fear can do to reason.
Informative Fin, though have not all vaccines that have ever been administered been experimental at the time, with no real long term safety data or trials? How would it be possible otherwise, unless researchers anticipated a new virus years in advance before it appeared?
Leaving aside a mandatory vaccine, if it can be statistically proven- and is it not?- that you have a greater chance of dying or being seriously crippled by Covid than by its vaccine, should you not get vaccinated?
It normally takes at least a decade for a pharmaceutical to make it from a glint in the researcher’s eye to market. These therapies have been rolled out in months and their co-inventor, Dr Robert Malone, is hugely alarmed – as are some very eminent people in the fields of virology, epidemiology and immunology.
There has never been an effective vaccine for a respiratory virus because they are what virologists call ‘slippery’ – they constantly mutate to forms that are more infectious but less virulent. My unlettered grandma would have said that ‘this year’s flu is next year’s cold’. She also had the wisdom to know that it isn’t a pathogen that makes you feel rotten. You are infected by pathogens every day – it’s your immune response to infection that makes you ill and your immune system, like your muscles, needs a constant work out in order to continue to function. Fresh air, sunlight (for vitamin D production), exercise and frequent low level exposure to pathogens through social interaction is what a healthy immune system needs to remain healthy. ‘Fresh air, sunshine and lots of hugs and kisses’ – grandma would have said…
Human history is littered with triumphs and disasters in equal measure when our hubris attempts to subvert the will of nature. I think that our response to this mutation of one of the seven corona viruses that infect humans, has all the hallmarks of the latter.
Small stat to leave you with. According to the ONS, all cause mortality is currently running at twice the rate in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated – that’s rate, not numbers.
https://dailyexpose.uk/2021/12/11/report-shows-4-in-5-covid-deaths-fully-vaccinated/
There is a chart attached to the article above that shows those injected are far more likly to die.