Scientism Subverts Secular Society: A Case Study

by Asa Boxer

Anthony Fauci laughing at the absurd notion that he should be prosecuted. This shot is from an interview on Face the Nation moderated by Margaret Brennan posted November 28, 2021.

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece for Barstool Bits called “‘This is Just to Say’: The Post-Covid Apology Genre” about the demonisation of the so-called “unvaccinated” and the truly despicable savagery levelled at this group, including calls for segregation and death. Prime ministers, presidents and other leaders of state and province, bolstered by their public health authorities, stoked fear and hatred of “those people”; and the media helped fan the flames. “This is Just to Say” was an off-the-cuff review of certain barbaric events that many seem to want to forget, and I put a humorous spin on the subject, concluding that we shouldn’t hold our breaths for an apology. The crux of the piece was Emily Oster’s article for the Atlantic, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: Let’s focus on the future and fix the problems we still need to solve.” Oster’s claim was that “We didn’t know” and therefore “we” ought to be let off the hook for lockdowns and for what we did to “those people” in ignorance. What follows is the long-form, research essay I promised on the subject of “we didn’t know” with notes and links.

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Even before covid and the sudden appearance of The Science™, I was concerned with the direction science was taking—especially as a cultural movement. Well before 2020, attitudes toward science were becoming religious. A lot of this had to do with the antagonistic agitations of New Atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Christopher Hitchens. These folks seemed to be inspiring a generation of scientistic, fact-thumping types who held unexamined beliefs in the doctrines and dogmas of institutionalised pop-science. These fanatics enjoyed monkeying about, berating “denialists” and beating their chests over any attempt to strike up a conversation about alternative perspectives. To their minds, all alternatives were “pseudoscience” and no need to bother reading or researching. Worse, their ignorance about science extended to its methods, history, sociology, epistemology and philosophy. This new cadre of believers in The Science was ignorant of the internal disagreements, paradigmatic troubles, struggles with fraud and corporate agendas. This growing faction believed in total fictions; but most troubling, it believed in “settled science” and “scientific consensus”—terms that inform the idea of The Science™ and now, by extension, notions of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

At the time, my attention was focused on this authoritative drift away from the secular and toward those elements of religion from which science had promised to save us: a canonical set of doctrines established by an elite and the dispensation of its approved dogmas for the masses via Church-like institutions. To disagree or to discuss taboos was verboten enough to warrant labelling as “pseudoscience” followed by various forms of cancellation, our modern version of excommunication. This was a group with amazing influence and with acolytes everywhere, working hard to shame others into agreeing with them and their doctrines. Disagreement would be met with sneers, rude comments and demands you show your math—though none of these folk had any math of their own to show, let alone understand.

Covid catalyzed this trend and crystallized a substantial mass who’d been primed with scientism. And with that we rounded a decisive corner and found ourselves in a new world divorced from secular values. To consolidate The Science™, after all, censorship was needed… to combat “misinformation” of course. But it was okay this time because this time we really knew what we were doing. Not to worry. Oppression and tyranny are good now that we’ve finally established the one true Truth. No need for the crutches of secularism when we’ve got it all figured out, right? Well, I wasn’t having any of it. So with covid behind us now (officially as of May 5, 2023), I thought it time to review some of the things that happened in the name of science between 2020 and 2023 that had nothing whatsoever to do with science proper, but had a lot to do with authority and the dismantling of our secular society.

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The Catholic, The Secular & The Science™

As a point of departure, let’s begin with the most general sense of the word secular. The secular refers to the worldly, as opposed to the churchly. Although dictionaries tend to set the secular against both the spiritual and the religious, I think lumping these together is misguided. The Church (or any religious body, for that matter) perceives as illegitimate any spiritual practices unsanctioned by its theology. So it’s worth making the distinction between spiritual and religious. Since the advent of religious tolerance, ultimately codified in the American Constitution—we may better define secular as the accepting spirit that brings about a pluralistic ethos. To be secular, therefore, at least for the purposes of this inquiry, is analogous to the notion of being small-C catholic in. . . well, the secular sense: i.e. having open-minded tastes, interests and sympathies.

To better understand what’s going on with the secular, it’s worth noting the etymology of the term catholic, how such a word, denoting universality, came to refer to a specific theological set of doctrines. Indeed the cultural story this word tells us is analogous to the story now unfolding with regard to science and its more authoritarian cousin, the science, or The Science™.

The case of the term catholic is by no means linear. In other words, it was not first used to mean liberal and progressively deteriorated over the centuries into its opposite. Oddly enough, its usage suggests that almost the reverse is true. The etymology of the term is from the Greek phrase, καθ όλου (kath’ olou), meaning on the whole, in general; eventually the phrase became a single word, katholikos. Church Latin borrowed the term, rendering it catholicus circa 1300-1350, when it took on its first circumscription as referring to the doctrines of the early Church before the Arian Controversy of the 4th-century that split the universal Church over whether Christ was man or God and from which Person the Holy Spirit proceeded, resulting in the East-West divide with which we are familiar today.

So, a Christian Liberal of the two-hundred year period, circa 1350 to 1550, was inclusive—so long as those in question were good Christians. As the mass slaughters of the Crusades (1095-1291) and various medieval inquisitions (initiated 1184) evidence, the Mussulman, the Jew (and other “heathen”) and various Christian heretics fell outside the grace of this universalism.

The next delimitation of the term took place with the advent of the Protestant schism (start 1517, but truly in full force with the response of the Papal Church in 1545), when catholic took on its upper-case ‘C’ mantle to denote the Western Church exclusively. Significantly, it was the Protestants who dubbed the Roman Church “Catholic.” One cannot help but sense that Protestants applied the term ironically, as one might today use the term capital-‘L’ Liberal with a wink and a nudge. It was only in the 1580s that lower-case ‘c’, catholic, came to mean (at least in the English language) “not narrow-minded or bigoted,” likely as a reaction by the newly minted Catholics to their Protestant detractors. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/Catholic)

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“I Represent The Science™—That’s Dangerous”

I predict that soon enough, this cultural transformation of attitude will affect the word, science, as well. Indeed, the process is already well underway. For example, during the three-year covid scare of 2020-2023, Dr. Anthony Fauci, reacting to Congressional, scientific and public criticism of his inconsistent messaging and libellous smear campaigns against his opponents, responded publicly as follows:

But you’re talking about systems, you're talking about the CDC, you’re talking about the FDA, you're talking about science in general.

Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.¹

Surely, more dangerous than criticizing science—considering scrutiny of one’s peers is a cornerstone of scientific progress—is spreading the idea that science ought not to be criticized. Perhaps worse is the notion that one man “represents science” and abides in a social sphere beyond criticism. And what is it “about systems” exactly that places them above public scrutiny? The paradigm Fauci is expressing here sounds very much like the Church and the Holy Offices of the clergy. Yet, this was Fauci’s message on every venue that would have him. Here’s another Fauci quotation from the New York Times “Sway” podcast:

It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves, and that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science.²

To give credit where it is due, at least here he admits that a scientist’s messaging should “evolve” according to the data. But this stance is fundamentally inconsistent with the notion that neither science nor its representatives should be challenged or criticized. Trying to parse his argument, one might rightly worry about his basic reasoning skills. A classic authoritarian, Fauci wants to eat his cake and have it too, for when the reverend doctor speaks, one must obey as though The Science were settled. And when he changes his messaging, it’s because science evolves. Does science evolve or is it settled? If it evolves, a scientist cannot rightly ask for unquestioning obedience. He cannot impose mandates directly or by proxy. Must it be pointed out how puerile this strategy is? It’s right out of the schoolyard game in which a kid makes up the rules as he goes along so as to maintain the upper hand.

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We Didn’t Know?—What We Knew & When

“We didn’t really understand the fatality rate [of COVID-19], you know, we didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.” - Bill Gates

Bill Gates explaining that “We didn’t really understand…” in an interview with Fareed Zakaria at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Meanwhile, when looking at the data, the Fauci case thickens. In early May 2022, Bill Gates, in an interview with CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria at an event organised by 92nd Street Y, confided, “We didn’t really understand the fatality rate [of COVID-19], you know, we didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.” Notably different, indeed, in that it was less harmful on the whole because it wasn’t claiming the lives of healthy children.³

If one had been paying attention from the start, however, one would ask, who exactly the ignorant “We” is to whom Gates was referring. Because we most certainly did know very early on that the data did not support claims that COVID-19 was any worse than the flu. How early did we have this data? Certainly no later than the end of the 2020 flu-season enough data was available to determine that humanity was not facing a new Black Death. As far back as March 17, 2020, Dr. John Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, warned that making policy based on such insufficient or inaccurate data could turn out to be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”

Sweden had never imposed lockdowns, and they were doing just fine, in part, because the “We” in that country had determined immediately that the world had gone mysophobic. After all, SARS-CoV had never before presented a pandemic deemed worthy of invoking universal lockdowns and shutting down the world. Faced with Sweden’s success despite its flouting of the nearly universal lockdowns around the world, the press was highly critical of the Swedish reaction, and many remain of the opinion that the country’s policies backfired, resulting in massive casualties. This position however is not borne out by the data. Sweden’s covid fatalities were well within the range experienced by countries that imposed lockdowns. Toward the end of January 2023 worldometers.info placed Sweden 42nd among impacted countries, below Canada, Australia, Switzerland and Denmark.

Arguments have been made that Sweden was less impacted due to low population density, but this notion fails when considering Australia and Canada which have lower population densities. No doubt far more quibbling is possible. My point here is that Sweden’s numbers have by no means been off the charts and a clear case of policy failure. Moreover, by rejecting lockdowns, Sweden avoided the mass casualties and social damage resulting from shuttering businesses and closing schools. A March 23, 2023 article in the Spectator reviewing excess mortality data confirms that Sweden did more than relatively well compared to other countries, indeed having the lowest or next to lowest excess deaths.

Prior to April 2021 when his message finally began to trickle out, Nobel Laureate, Michael Levitt, tried back-channelling to inform the world that the data was clear, but he was frustrated in his attempts to be heard. One of the only ways Levitt’s message could reach the public was via a little known Youtuber and data analyst named Ivor Cummins. But Fauci wasn’t listening, and Gates had no ears for it either.

Meanwhile, Levitt and Ioannides were not alone among high-profile MDs trying to be heard on a variety of issues surrounding the mishandling of this milder cousin of the rebranded flu. The messaging from well-established doctors like Joseph Mercola and Scott Atlas was politicised, with U.S. Democrats either ignoring them or claiming they were spreading dangerous disinformation, while Republicans, like Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis invited them to panels to get to the bottom of the covid scare.

Pulmonary and critical care specialist, also Associate Professor at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the U.S. Congress in early December 2020, pleading for permission to use proven and well-established therapeutics for early treatment, because patients were being sent home until coming down with severe symptoms due to newly imposed regulations preventing doctors from doing their jobs in the face of covid positive PCR results and using pre-approved and longstanding medications that might have saved lives. He was painted by House Democrats as somehow a political ringer. Meanwhile, unlike his titular colleagues, Fauci et al., running the masquerade from their manorial offices, Kory was a practicing physician, dealing with thousands of patients in the field. (Significantly, he didn’t die of this new plague despite repeated and continuous exposure.)

All these doctors were treated like heretics, their ideas of medicine and medical practice constituting apocryphal sources, and measures were taken—or more accurately, an all out campaign was initiated through behind-the-scenes collusions—to silence, discredit and marginalise such high-profile critics as mRNA vaccine developer, Dr. Robert Malone, former Pfizer CEO, Dr. Michael Yeadon, and the influential (widely published) epidemiologist, Dr. Peter McCullough through strategically placed, libellous hit pieces in established and supposedly creditable sources such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wikipedia. Warning labels appeared on messages and articles deemed heretical by the orthodoxy at the helm of Fauci’s “systems.” The terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” were deployed across platforms and in traditional media to dissuade readers from listening to leading scientific minds.

In short, we most certainly did know early on. Logic suggests that Gates had no interest in data that didn’t suit his purposes to promote public panic and sell vaccines, because he, like Fauci, stood to profit financially and reputationally from a pandemic.

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Changing Definitions & Shifting Goal Posts

Which brings us to yet another unscientific manoeuvre, this time on the part of the WHO. Just a month prior to the Swine Flu-, or H1N1-scare of mid-2009, characterized by what turned out to be a toothless (but apparently highly transmissible) virus, some committee decided to alter the definition of “pandemic” so as to exclude the clause stating that its impacts must cause “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” Evidently, this was not a data-based evolution, but instead, a way to lower the threshold of what constituted a pandemic so that in future, all that would be required was a novel “virus [that] appears against which the human population has no immunity.”⁴

This was a system-rigging definition-change meant to trigger an easy emergency that would lead to vaccine sales (a multi-billion, if not multi-trillion, dollar industry). But the H1N1 campaign failed in that regard, managing only to sell megatons of Purell® hand sanitiser, destroy millions of pigs worldwide, and produce a deadly and highly injurious vaccine. But apparently, Gates’s “We” saw the H1N1 false panic as a good dry-run.

With this knowledge in mind, one is hard pressed to determine how Fauci’s “systems” have anything to do with “science in general.” In fact, the systems to which he was referring, NIAID, the NIH, the CDC and the FDA (along with their equivalents abroad) were institutions that were undermining scientific integrity and the dignity of science-based western medicine.

And that is not all; there is much more lurking beneath the surface of the covid panic. For instance, employing Orwellian double-speak, in September 2021 “We” managed to redefine the term, “vaccine,” such that products bearing that label no longer had to deliver immunization—as commonly understood by anyone who was to hear the word, “vaccine.” This was a bald-faced marketing ploy involving collusion between Fauci’s “systems” and the pharmaceutical industry, conveniently categorising these shots as “biologics” rather than “drugs,” “medicines,” “therapeutics” (or “experimental gene therapeutics,” as the mRNA products ought to have been labelled).

Biologics enjoy a special status among pharmaceuticals, as they are exempt from a number of provisions affecting all other pharmaceutical substances. Most importantly to developers and producers, they enjoy legal immunity against insurance claims for injury and death caused by biologics. Additionally, these interventions on otherwise healthy persons, could be fast-tracked to global markets without having to undergo the rigorous and years-long, scientific processes of safety testing.⁵

In the case of genetic therapy products deployed against SARS and even mandated by unethical government edicts in 2020, they were highly experimental serums with a history of failure, injury and death among lab animals. A well known paper in the field dating back to 2003 documents how attempts to engineer a vaccine against SARS-CoV-1 resulted in lung injury and death to lab animals due to vaccine induced suppression of natural immunity—i.e. the body’s ability to produce certain antibodies—and were inducing “vaccine enhanced disease” upon contact with live virus (and other exposures).⁶

This research is especially significant because Moderna, one of the producers of the mRNA product widely distributed against SARS-CoV-2 had discovered by March 2021—at the end of their unconscionably brief testing period on humans (begun June 2020)—that their product was having a similar impact on their human subjects—a reduction in antibody production and an elevated vulnerability—meaning vaccinated groups were vulnerable to vaccine enhanced disease.⁷

In March 2020, when the data was clear that SARS-CoV-2 was no worse that SARS-CoV-1 and that therefore no vaccine was necessary, Fauci explained to the locked-down public that the road to a vaccine—which would release them from lockdowns—would take at least 18 months. MDs were up in arms, warning that this was an unprecedented and dangerous timeline. “Vaccine development is usually measured in years, not months,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar focused on emerging infectious disease at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. “Vaccine trials typically start with testing in animals before launching into a three-phase process,” wrote CNN reporter Robert Koznia in an article published April 1, 2020. But authorities skipped animal trials, and none of Fauci’s “systems” stepped in to correct the dangerous error. Koznia quoted “Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at NIAID” as saying “the typical vaccine takes between eight and 10 years to develop” and “that the accelerated pace will involve ‘not looking at all the data’.” Keep in mind that no mRNA product had ever been approved. Nevertheless, “it took less than one year to complete the design, manufacture, efficacy and safety tests, and evaluation and approval for use.” These gene therapy products were first made available to the public in Europe and North America throughout December 2020.⁸

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Downplaying Vaccine Injury Reports

In April 2022, a study entitled “Increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave” was published in Nature. The revelations were damning because the refusal to evolve with the data was now on full display:

The study by the Ministry of Health in Israel, a country with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, assesses the risk of myocarditis after receiving the 2nd vaccine dose to be between 1 in 3000 to 1 in 6000 in men of age 16–24 and 1 in 120,000 in men under 30. A follow up study by the US Center of Disease Control (CDC) based on the VAERS and V-Safe self-reporting systems further confirms these findings. The CDC has recently posted a warning regarding a vaccine-related risk of myocarditis, but still maintained their recommendation to vaccinate young individuals and children over 12. Similar concerns are reflected in the recent Food and Drug Administration approval to the Pfizer vaccine that requires several follow studies on the short and long terms effects of myocarditis in young individuals.⁹

One expects that health authorities would be especially concerned with protecting children. But as we can see, this is hardly the case. Keep in mind that we have Gates on record confirming that COVID-19 does not effect children, and as you will note below, this fact was known very early on. In light of this, why would the CDC recommend a harmful product for this age group?

On August 6, 2021, Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, a very talented PR spokesperson, skilled at rhetorical evasion, admitted to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that the covid vaccines did not stop or reduce transmission or prevent infection. What the CDC refused to admit was the injury and death rate signal they were receiving from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, was higher than decades of reports for all previous vaccines put together,¹⁰ and that other such reporting systems, like the Yellow Card in England were confirming this alarming trend. When Japan noticed the high rate of heart injuries (December 2021), they placed warning labels on the mRNA products. In mid-December 2021, Canada’s CTV News published a correction as follows: “A previous version of this article stated that the risk of contracting a serious side-effect after COVID-19 vaccination is less than one in a million. The correct figure, based on data reported to the Public Health Agency of Canada, is roughly one in 10,000.” Pharmaceuticals with a much lower injury rate in the past were pulled from shelves.¹¹ But the West covered its mouth, blinded itself and plugged its ears. Fauci’s “systems” and “science in general” were most certainly not evolving with the data. Evidently, they were flat out ignoring it.

Additionally, there were the PCR virus tests run at unreliably high cycles (40-45 rather than the recommended maximum of 20 cycles) that produced over 90% false positives, thereby generating what became known as “casedemics”—high case counts rationalising unprecedented government emergency powers, dereliction of constitutionally enshrined rights and internationally established human rights, brutalising citizens the world over.¹²

Then there was the pharmaceutical sponsored media that promoted the casedemics. It is no secret that Pfizer sponsors CNN, NBC, CBS and a host of other news outlets because they shamelessly announce to audiences their “brought to you by Pfizer” plugs as often as they can. In tandem with these unethical media manipulations were the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Fauci et al. working to censor and discredit the highly qualified medical doctors critical of the institutional refusals to evolve with the data.

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Smearing Lockdown Critics

Indeed, many came together to sound alarm bells over the psychologically, immunologically, socially and economically devastating lockdowns. In early October 2020, for instance—three MDs with qualifications that ought to have given authorities and journalists some pause—joined hands to pen the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases came together at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to draft a statement and open letter to inform world leaders and citizens alike that lockdowns were causing vast, irreparable harm.

Here are two quotations from the introduction to the declaration:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

And to once again debunk Gates’s disinformation that “We didn’t really understand the fatality rate”—remember, this is from October 2020, after these doctors were frustrated in their attempts to back channel their concerns. They knew this well before the autumn of 2020:

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.

As for Fauci’s “systems” and “science in general”—according to what data are medical professors from among the most renowned institutions with qualifications directly related to the subject under scrutiny excluded from the conversation? And, moreover, how is their criticism in any way to be construed as having “a distinct anti-science flavor”?

In any event, the media worked to black out news of the Great Barrington Declaration among passive news viewers, while at once discrediting it among those who caught wind of it and were seeking information. The tactic worked, and the public remained widely ignorant of it. Consequently, the project never built the momentum it would have gained in a truly secular society with a functional Fourth Estate (i.e. free press with investigative journalists pushing hard for honest answers). Behind the scenes, Fauci and his colleague at the NIH, Francis Collins, were colluding to conduct a smear campaign against the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, spreading disinformation about them as “fringe” scientists and discrediting their assertions as. . . you got it! “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

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Safety is the New Salvation

Despite all of these goings on, which would have been known to anyone as closely connected to the situation as Bill Gates, he was telling the public as late as mid-2022 that “We” didn’t know, and that the vaccines were ineffective, that one should keep getting boosters nevertheless, and that next time, we ought to do the same, only with swifter and stricter lockdowns and the same “safe and effective” vaccine program, only more rapidly deployed. Considering that Gates has gone on record in support of population growth-rate reduction (through improved health, since healthy societies tend to have fewer children), and since preventing overpopulation is a main pillar of his CO₂ reduction plan, many came to the conclusion that his vaccination programs were designed to kill.¹³ Though hard to believe, the effect of lying to the public, spreading disinformation and labelling solid scientists engaged directly in scientific inquiry as spreaders of disinformation has struck a blow to the credibility of the scientific project, and nearly obliterated any semblance of secularism.

Gates, by the way, has advocated government censorship of social media, especially concerning statements casting doubt on vaccination safety.¹⁴ The example he gives—i.e. “the COVID-19 vaccine makes you infertile”—is so specific as to be misleading. Considering that such a point regarding other vaccines like Merck’s Gardasil 9 vaccine against HPV is a verifiable statement of scientific and medical fact (not that it makes one infertile, but that it can and sometimes does), and, moreover an item of information never discussed in public debates and therefore widely unknown—one is morally obligated to question Gates’s motives along with the motives of all those who agree that such information ought to be suppressed.¹⁵

Nothing about the institutional reaction to covid can be interpreted as evolving with the data. Notably, as an example of bureaucratic incompetence and the irrational creep of a religious zeitgeist among The-Science™-fearing public, even following Bill Gates’s admissions at 92nd Street Y, the website of this venue retained a banner advising visitors that only vaccinated persons would be permitted entry.

As the evidence mounts in the case of the COVID-19 false alarm and the deployment of dangerous gene therapy products, what one sees is not science at all, is not careful, data-driven evolution, nor cost-benefit analyses, but the capricious and reckless policies of institutions associated with something we might call, “scientism,” or as journalist and free-speech advocate, Glenn Greenwald, dubbed it, The Science™—a sharp formulation that captures perfectly the various forces at play in the corporate, profit-motivated fear-campaign of COVID-19. Following Greenwald’s lead, we might observe how H1N1 and COVID-19 were pandemics® requiring the rushed deployment of *safe and **effective vaccines®. To add yet another analogy, we’re looking at the sort of legal trickery associated with McDonald’s “shakes”—carefully labelled such so as to exclude the word “milk”—since they don’t use milk in their milkshakes. Notably, the covid confidence game foisted on the global public was worse because, unlike McDonald’s, the Gatesian “We” was able to change the definitions of key terminology to mislead the public.

To return to my main point, the covid scare of the early 2020s provides a case study to help us view a pivotal, historical moment when social, systemic, institutional and corporate forces were operating upon the scientific project much as they did upon the Christian project centuries ago—moving inexorably from openness and universality toward a bureaucratised institutionalism, growing ever more rigid and dogmatic in the process. Same as the evolution of the term catholic into Catholic, we are witnessing the term, science, transmogrify into the term, The Science™.

In the various Catholic inquisitions against heretics like the Cathar, the Mussulman and the Jew, those who refused to join the truly “universal” and truly “open” community of Christ were tortured and put to death. Analogically speaking, COVID-19 was a science-flavoured version of the Bogeyman, or fear of the Dibbuk and demon possession. The administration of the cure, which was no cure at all, but an injurious and often deadly intervention, was mandated like a sacrament, and all those “deniers” or “denialists” who refused it were essentially excommunicated from the pious and orthodox community of believers in The Science™. A vaccine passport was mandated to enter gyms, restaurants, movie theatres, museums, stadiums, casinos, strip clubs—anywhere a public gathering took place excepting open air parks—and even those spaces were often shut down, preventing people from maintaining healthy exercise regimens. Many lost their jobs because vaccination was enforced at their place of employment. Many who did not want to take part in the experiment were coerced into doing so or face loss of home and livelihood. In some cases, access to food was also curtailed for the “unvaccinated”—a dubious term, implying a magical undoing of all previous vaccination, but also the implication that such people were somehow unclean.

These measures were not put in place based on any data whatsoever, nor did they evolve according to the data. They were meant to dragoon compliance, and establish the supreme power of The Science™. In Canada, one was barred from travel by land, air and sea, excepting land travel by personal automobile, thereby preventing the non-compliant from travel and from exiting the country. At the U.S. border, authorities required proof of vaccination. In short, one was stripped of one’s Charter Rights, that is, one was rendered no-longer a full citizen, effectively excommunicated. Peaceful protests against medical segregation, imprisonment and fines for non-compliance held in Ottawa—which came to be known as the Trucker Convoy—were quashed with further authoritarian actions via which the government froze the bank accounts of supporters and brought in a thuggish squad of masked police to intimidate and physically assault protesters.

As noted at the start, all religions perceive as illegitimate spiritual practices unsanctioned by their theology. Analogically speaking, we’re witnessing the same pattern with science today as the scientific establishment seeks underhandedly, through its various institutional influences, to malign, censor and obliterate scientific ideas and practices unsanctioned by those in high office. The main difference between Church and Science now is that the present iteration is overtly materialist, whereas the previous iteration was ostensibly spiritual. Instead of Church Offices, we have Public Health Officers. In place of their draconian actions being done in the name of your salvation, they are now being done in the name of your safety. To the analogical mind, the terms of the game have shifted so slightly, it’s not even tricky, it’s laughably silly. It’s the same face wearing a cheap Groucho disguise.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

1. From an interview with “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/28/fauci_responds_to_critics_when_people_criticize_me_they_are_criticizing_science.html.

2. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fauci-people-who-criticize-me-are-actually-criticizing-science/ar-AALjq4M

3. See https://www.92ny.org/archives/bill-gates-fareed-zakaria-how-to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-podcast (24:10). See also Youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuNWRoHRzkU&t=860s (23:55).

4. Note that the WHO disappeared this article from their site, leaving it to the Wayback Machine. See https://web.archive.org/web/20210411013938/https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-086173/en/.

5. See rumble.com/v19czj9-why-did-all-vaccine-manufacturers-have-a-complete-blanket-immunity-from-lia.html.

6. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/.

7. See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.18.22271936v1.full.

8. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/

and

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/coronavirus-vaccine-timetable-concerns-experts-invs/index.html.

9. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z#Sec14.

10. The reasons given for the omissions of the CDC re VAERS are provided in this article (from January 2023) by Josh Guetzkow (a senior lecturer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) along with analysis of CDC VAERS findings: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cdc-finally-releases-vaers-safety-monitoring-analyses-covid-vaccines?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.

11. Worth noting this study and the follow up article from one of the study’s author’s Robert M. Kaplan from September 2022. He explains as follows:

Using publicly available data from Pfizer and Moderna studies, we found one serious adverse event for each 800 vaccinees. That translates to about 1,250 serious events for each million vaccine recipients. DHHS reports the rate for other vaccines is only 1 or 2 per million.

and

Consider a 1 in 800 risk of a serious adverse reaction in the context of other vaccines.  The 1976 swine flu vaccine was withdrawn after it was associated with Guillain-Barre Syndrome at a rate of approximately 1 in 100,000. In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine Rotashield was withdrawn following reports of intussusception in about 1 or 2 in 10,000. 

12. See youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE and https://swprs.org/the-trouble-with-pcr-tests/.

13. See https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero/transcript.

14. See https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2021.

15. See https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/merck-gardasil-hpv-vaccine-lawsuits-multidistrict-litigation/.