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Glenn Greenwald: Led by Jeremy Corbyn, the British Left Opposes Vaccine Mandates as Anti-Worker and Repressive
Related: ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, Glenn Greenwald, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
re: ethics in medicine
re: Glenn Greenwald
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
Long after the microbial damage is done, we will be left with the toxic waste of the destruction of science, civility, respect, and reason. Their destruction will be the real legacy of COVID.
Glenn Greenwald: Led by Jeremy Corbyn, the British Left Opposes Vaccine Mandates as Anti-Worker and Repressive
2021-12-15
The term "anti-vax" has expanded so widely that even vaccine advocates, such as Corbyn and trade unions, are now included by virtue of defending bodily autonomy.
The shorthand label “anti-vax” once had a clear and concise meaning: namely, those who reject the prevailing western scientific orthodoxy that vaccines are a safe and effective means of protecting humans against infectious diseases by training the immune system to combat a pathogen in advance...
But exactly as we have seen with so many other political labels — terrorist, racist, fascist, white nationalist, anti-Semite — this once-descriptive, precise and useful phrase has metamorphized far beyond its original meaning into something barely recognizable or cogent. That transformation has been deliberate, with a clear motive: to weaponize the term into a potent political insult designed to compel submission to decrees from institutions of authority and stigmatize dissenters, threatening them with reputation destruction. The rapid expansion of the term “anti-vax” into a coercive political weapon has been years in the making, but the COVID pandemic was the steroid it needed to blossom into one of the most reputation-crippling labels one can affix to a political target.
Just as is true of accusing people of being terrorists, white nationalists, fascists or anti-Semites not because one espouses views traditionally designated by those terms but as punishment for any sort of dissent, the destructive power of the COVID iteration of “anti-vax” resides precisely in its vagueness, its lack of precise contours, its emptiness and meaninglessness. A term that means nothing can, by definition and by design, encompass anyone and everyone depending solely on the needs of the moment.
The utter obliteration of any coherent definition is evidenced by the fact that one can now be labelled “anti-vax” even though one a) believes in the foundational science of vaccines, b) is themselves vaccinated for COVID and makes the decision that one's children will be as well, and c) states publicly that they have chosen to be vaccinated.
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WIND: if you’re not following Glenn Greenwald, you should.
At least there is some justice in seeing the Left turn to cannibalism. Hate sooner or later destroys itself, sooner I hope.
