Elements of Refusal - by Charles Eisenstein - Charles Eisenstein (substack.com)
"Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, MD, has recently published a long, four-part article entitled Needle Points, in which he examines vaccine skepticism in America. The author, who got vaccinated “early and voluntarily,” is solidly pro-vaccine, yet he displays what is in these divisive times an unusual willingness to see the issue from the perspective of those with whom he disagrees.
I don’t want to default to critique in responding to the article, which I appreciate for its peaceful intentions, diligent historical research, lucid style, and willingness to bridge a steep ideological divide. Instead I will meet in good will its implicit invitation into dialog around the core question enunciated in its tagline: “Why so many are hesitant to get the COVID vaccine, and what we can do about it.”
As that tagline suggests, an assumption runs quietly through Needle Points that Covid vaccines are by and large safe, necessary, and generally beneficial for personal and public health. Therefore, opposition to them must be explained in psychological or sociological terms, because we all know that, scientifically speaking, opposition is baseless.
Dr. Doidge devotes a long section of the essay to cataloging the crimes and cover-ups that pharmaceutical companies have perpetrated over the last several decades. He also describes the “regulatory capture” of agencies like the FDA, CDC, and NIH, whose officials often rotate into lucrative positions in the very companies they had formerly regulated. As a result, he says, public trust in the pharmaceutical industry is extremely low:
As of a September 2019 Gallup poll, only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Pharma was the least trusted of America’s 25 top industry sectors, No. 25 of 25. In the eyes of ordinary Americans, it had both the highest negatives and the lowest positives of all industries. At No. 24 was the federal government, and at No. 23 was the health care industry. These three industries form a neat troika (though at No. 22 was the advertising and public relations industry, which facilitates the work of the other three.)
Given the track record of the pharmaceutical companies and their regulators, no wonder a large percentage of the public is “hesitant” to get their Covid shots. Dr. Doidge seems to be saying, “The shots are safe and effective, and society would be better off if everyone got them, but many people are quite understandably reluctant because of past experience.”
The obvious question here is, Why does Doidge himself trust the science promoted by the very companies and regulators whose misdeeds he so compellingly enumerates? He seems to take for granted that the vaccines have a low rate of adverse reactions. Are the agencies saying that, and the data they utilize, reliable? The article’s tagline implies that he knows it is; otherwise, he wouldn’t wonder “what to do about [vaccine hesitancy]”. He would be wondering instead what to do about vaccine credulity or vaccine naivete.
The very term “vaccine hesitant” normalizes vaccination by implying that it is the endpoint at which the unvaccinated will sooner or later arrive. Most unvaccinated people I know would not describe themselves as “hesitant.” At this point, most who have resisted the social and government pressure intend to remain unvaccinated permanently. As Raelle Kaia puts it,
We don't call people who haven't gone bungee jumping "bungee hesitant" nor do we call them "anti-bungee." There is no need for a category. It's just something some people decide to do, and some people don't. So this Hegelian dialectic cleverly sets up a dynamic that implicitly assumes that the regular thing for people to do is to take a vaccine, but we need words to describe those who don't, because they're so peculiar. So just by having the words in the first place, an entire reality is created and reified about what people are supposed to do or are expected to do.
The term “vaccine hesitancy” is patronizing and presumptuous. It encodes a smug certainty that official messaging on the vaccines is reliable, that reigning medical paradigms are sound, that the knowledge medical science produces is trustworthy. Science is real! Duh."
Read it all.
Here is the Doidge article: Why Is There So Much Vaccine Hesitancy? - Tablet Magazine
"One needn’t agree with the decisions or actions of the vaccine hesitant in order to learn something from them and about them, and about society as a whole. They pay attention to, and are vigilant about, different issues than the vaccinated, and have strong feelings about the people and institutions involved in our public health—particularly politicians, the drug regulatory process, and pharmaceutical companies. For many, vaccine hesitancy is not simply about the vaccines; it’s about the absence of faith in the wider systems that brought us the vaccines. “Public health moves at the speed of trust,” notes physician and author Rishi Manchanda. If we want our public health system to function better—safer, swifter, in ways that more effectively safeguard the lives and livelihoods of all citizens—it must be rooted not in coercion but in confidence, and not only among the majority."
I've admired Dr. Doidge's work since he wrote this two decades ago: Evil's Advantage Over Conscience:
"International agreements with tyrants are meaningless, yet pursuit of such agreements is precisely what the State Department is now endorsing by trying to get Israel to sit at the table with Arafat. "What is the law?" Saddam Hussein once asked. Then he answered his own question. "The two lines above my signature." The psychological mechanism involved is called "identification with the aggressor" and was first described by Anna Freud. When this identification occurs, it is as though the terrorist implants his own ideals and moral code inside his victim's conscience. The paradigmatic example of this occurred in Stockholm in 1973, when four tellers were held at gunpoint for 131 hours in a bank vault. Soon the captives were expressing more fear of the police who were trying to rescue them than of their captors. One prisoner, in a phone call to the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, said, "The robbers are protecting us from the police." After the tellers were released, they expressed no hatred for their captors, and even said they were emotionally indebted to them. Throughout the seventies, the Stockholm Syndrome was demonstrated over and over. Americans captured by terrorists in Lebanon emerged from captivity praising the same Arab terrorists who had murdered their fellows. Patty Hearst, kidnapped in California by the Symbionese Liberation Army, did the same. The Stockholm Syndrome is not a conscious attempt to ingratiate oneself with one's captors, but an automatic emotional response, seen in many, though not all, captives. With the help of TV, terrorism creates what one might call a "Second-hand Stockholm Syndrome" in the body politic. The goal is to make the target population fall back on wishful thinking, and say, "Maybe if we listen to their demands, they will stop. Maybe the problem is how we are handling the crisis. Maybe we are being too forceful. Maybe they can be reasoned with. Maybe we should hold our fire and give peace a chance." The citizenry becomes progressively more passive and confused and willing to appease. This confusion is manifest whenever pundits who are apologists for terror speak of terrorist violence as caused not by the perpetrators, but by some abstract "cycle of violence," suggesting a moral equivalence between the terrorist and his victims and blotting out the reality of barbarism and human psychopathy. How much nicer to live in a world of abstractions than of Richards, Arafats, Saddams, and bin Ladens."
It was true of foreign Islamo-terrorists then...and is still true of our own domestic Bio-Medical Terrorists today.
Here is another good post by the doctor: Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale - Tablet Magazine
Dr. Doidge is a brilliant guy and an old-school medical professional.
But old-school medical professionalism is all but dead, like almost every other institution of American life.
By their unbridled greed and their unchecked power lust, the Big Pharma/Big Government Axis has created millions and millions of Americans who are not just suspicious of this "vaccine", but of all others as well. That is just how disgusting and criminal their actions have been.
At this point, I wouldn’t trust these thieving tyrants to vaccinate a dead cat.
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"If we can stand up to [them], all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties..."--Winston Churchill, 1940 |
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