“An Honest Discussion of Covid Vaccine Side Effects Is Overdue”
Posted on November 7, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. While seeing some big breaks with former code of omerta about Covid side effects is welcome, this piece is still frustrating. It still recites the tired and almost certainly false trope that Covid vaccine side effects are rare.
Consider what “rare” means in medical terms in the US. This text from Johnson & Johnson is similar to that on other sites:
What makes a disease rare is how prevalent it is—that is, the number of individuals living with it. In the United States, a rare disease is one that fewer than 200,000 people live with. (In other words, 60 per 100,000 individuals.)
Around the world, rare diseases are identified and addressed differently. The European Union considers a disease rare if it affects no more than 50 per 100,000 people. The World Health Organization, on the other hand, defines a rare disease as one that strikes fewer than 65 per 100,000 people.
Other medical sites depict “rare disease” as also being a “rare disorder”.
I know four people personally (as in these are direct contacts, as opposed to members of the commentariat) who had a serious side effect from a Covid shot. One, who went to the ER for treatment, was told if she had gotten there much later, she would have suffered serious and lasting consequences.
If it takes a population of 100,000 to produce 60 cases of Covid side effects , which is what the use of the term means, then for me to know of 4 side effects, my population of personal (not extended, personal) contacts should be something like 6,667. If you merely limit the cases I know of as “severe” as in requiring medical intervention. to 3, the population would then have to be 5,000 to expect to see so many indicents. I can tell you it is in fact well under an order of magnitude lower than that. And no, my cases were neither aged nor sickly.
I suspect the data from IM Doc’s pretty large patient population (where he has sent the Covid Brain Trust many detailed examples of side effects, which were also disconcertingly varied) would be even more dramatic than my personal sightings.
A second problem not acknowledged below is that it isn’t just that discussion of Covid side effects was aggressively suppressed, but also reporting to VAERS. IM Doc again told us in gory detail about his protracted fights to get the cases he was seeing accepted by VAERS, including inevitably unsuccessful efforts to overturn the rejection. Of the 4 cases I mentioned, I am certain 2 were not reported to VAERS and highly confident the other 2 were not either (even though the ER staff in the one mentioned above volunteered that the emergency condition was the result of the Covid shot, meaning this was not the first case of this type they had seen).
Of course, the confounding problem is that the anti-vax crowd has a bias to any out-of-band health issue as the result of the vaccines, when if they do not come in pretty close proximity to a shot or fall into a confirmed category, like persistent menstrual changes to the degree that they imply changes in fertility (which the medical industry tends to blow off), they are far more likely to be the result of long-term Covid health impairment.
With the topic of Covid vaccines having become so deeply politicized, and their unacknowledged problems leading to widespread vaccine hesitancy even with old vaccines with very good safety profiles, we are sure to see the pent-up anger about Covid vaccines (the result of dubious and punitive mandates) generate full-throated criticism under Trump 2.0. But the lack of good data means the demonization won’t be factually better founded than the earlier knee-jerk defense.
By Anthony Flint, an author living in Brookline, Massachusetts. Originally published at Harvard Public Health magazine; cross posted from Undark
Three and a half years ago I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome after getting the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) viral vector vaccine for Covid-19. The neurological disorder has left me hobbled by numb hands and feet, staggering around imbalanced, and battling debilitating fatigue. It has also left me, and thousands of others, feeling ignored and unheard by the government and the public health establishment.
I wrote about the experience in 2021 in The Boston Globe, after the FDA attached a warning to the J&J shot, citing an unacceptable occurrence of this adverse effect. At the time, I bemoaned that it was so difficult to talk about vaccine side effects and argued that government and public health officials should just face up to them honestly. People could handle the truth, I said, and everyone would benefit because acknowledging those rare occasions when things go wrong would allow vaccine makers to design a better product.
Three years later, that still hasn’t happened. Public health officials, cowed by the anti-vax crowd, stuck to the line that Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective. And an existing system to address people injured by vaccines, established under President Ronald Reagan, has been all but abandoned.
Of course, vaccines save lives. But the “nothing to see here” posture regarding legitimate vaccine side effects is preventing government from having our backs and following up on flaws in the products — in the same the way it does when romaine lettuce or lunch meat gets contaminated, or air bags don’t function properly.
And, as is well known in the medical profession, there really is a flaw. Several vaccines have a problem with Guillain-Barré syndrome, known as GBS. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine triggered so many cases, it had to be discontinued. Flu shots are associated with a “slightly elevated risk.” During the pandemic, the J&J shot was effectively shut down in the U.S. for triggering at least 100 GBS cases, and AstraZeneca’s vaccine was linked to many hundreds more. More recently, makers of shingles and RSV vaccines have had to issues warnings about GBS.
Intuitively, it makes sense. GBS is fundamentally an auto-immune response. Vaccines work by tricking the immune system into attacking a target, like a representation of the coronavirus. In some people, rogue antibodies take that fight too far and start attacking the body’s peripheral nervous system — a horrifying and thoroughly damaging case of friendly fire.
One would think officials wouldn’t want to sweep anything under the rug, which could stoke more suspicion about vaccines. But unlike some other countries (Canada comes to mind), the United States is not managing this problem in the straightforward and sober manner it warrants. And thousands of people — albeit a tiny fraction of the 230 million people who got a Covid-19 jab — are suffering because of it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a process in place to handle this problem. After vaccine makers were given immunity from lawsuits to encourage product development, the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or NVICP. The program allows individuals harmed by vaccines to share what happened to them and receive compensation funded by a modest excise tax on vaccines. Eligible shots include tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, hepatitis B, and influenza. The cases are decided by special masters in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Unfortunately, that perfectly sensible system has been eclipsed by a flawed and hastily arranged program put in place after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP. If during a public health emergency someone suffers an adverse side effect from, say, a mass smallpox vaccination, they could file claims to cover lost wages and medical costs (at the very least).
The CICP looks like common-sense liability protection, but after the greatest public health emergency of our lifetime, it has become clear that it is not up to the task. Many claims have been summarily rejected, and aside from one recent large award, administrative masters had compensated a grand total of 15 individuals for less than $60,000 — none of them for Guillain-Barré.
So why not make the Covid-19 vaccines eligible under the NVICP, the program that has worked so much better? To do so requires an act of Congress, and pandemic politics has put everything at a standstill.
Democrats, joined by the public health establishment, seemingly want to avoid anything that would cast aspersions on vaccines. Republicans, meanwhile, talk a big game about the downsides of vaccination but won’t approve the necessary excise tax on the pharmaceutical companies to fund victim compensation. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Modernization Act, which would add Covid-19 shots to the NVICP, is currently languishing alongside other legislation that would improve reporting protocols and add to the corps of special masters to adjudicate claims.
“We’re entitled to a reasonable alternative remedy to litigation,” said Christopher A. Dreisbach, legal affairs director at React19, an advocacy group for some 20,000 people suffering from adverse impacts from Covid vaccines. Dreisbach, who after his Pfizer shot was diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy — essentially a recurring form of Guillain-Barré — said he didn’t expect much to happen in Washington before Election Day. But at least two current lawsuits assert that the existing government process for the vaccine-injured violates constitutional right; the suits might be worrisome enough for pharmaceutical companies to work more proactively with Congress and advocates on reform.
Three years after my essay calling for an honest discussion of vaccine side effects, what’s most disappointing to me is that some medical and public health professionals still refuse to acknowledge empirical truths — and thereby give lawmakers and public health officials the cover they need to do nothing. Some doctors, including one of mine at a prestigious local hospital, deny to this day that Guillain-Barré is a side effect of the J&J shot. At a conference for GBS survivors, another told the audience they should go ahead and get vaccinated without worry. When I objected — I’ve been told I shouldn’t risk getting any type of shot for the rest of my life — he looked at me with obvious disdain, as if I was an anti-vaxxer, and rattled off what seemed like prepared talking points to deal with crazy people. My fellow journalists, meanwhile, have mostly cleaved to pro-vaccine orthodoxy, the New York Times being a courageousexception.
I wear no tinfoil hat, I assure you. I believe simply that as a society, we have an obligation to be fair and transparent. I’m asking for the ability to officially document what happened to me, in hopes of contributing data that the medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies can use to make a better vaccine.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... erdue.html
Again and again, it's the capitalism, stupid. Trump is getting some credit for putting the vaccine program into over-drive, but by simply handing it over to the capitalists left it open to the usual abuses which he is of course blind to. I was suspicious at the start and was certainly not first in line. I waited a month or so and when people weren't keeling over in the street got in line. Where was I to get a Russian, Cuban or Chinese shot? After this I probably won't get another one.
In epidemic situations one doesn't expect 100% safety, we're talking about public health here where expediency matters as does 'the greatest good for the greatest number of people'. Still there certainly are limits, honesty and accurate statistics are mandatory.
Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
The Body Snatching Years
Nate Bear
Mar 11, 2025
[img]https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1 ... x1200.jpeg
Something happened and we could all feel it.
We all knew what had happened happened: a pandemic, a genocide, a fire (fires), a flood (floods), a war, a politics.
But listing the events was inadequate to understand what had been done, not just what had happened.
I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what, but I have some rough ideas, looking back now.
The first thing to say is that we were already not ideal.
Heaven was not a place on Earth.
The natural scientists had been warning about biospheric fragility and viral hotspots for years. The social scientists about fascism’s creep and gestating wars.
The warnings in those years were not a case of ‘this thing might happen’ but more a case of ‘this thing over there that is already happening is a sign of a more generalised decay that could spiral out of control given the right conditions.’
You could say the conditions were made right.
You could say that control spiralled.
It started with the outbreak. Sorta. Kinda.
Nothing ever really starts with anything. Everything is contingent on everything else. A trail of causality from the beginning until the end of time.
And one of the contingencies took place in the UK at exactly the same time as the outbreak was taking hold in China: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn lost an election to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
This would matter a lot. It meant things would inevitably get much worse in the UK before they ever got better, if they ever did or could. It meant certain things then happened that definitely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
It sent a signal. It killed hope. It killed the future. We knew it acutely.
Then, almost exactly three months later, the UK was in lockdown.
A brutal one-two punch for the millions who had been dreaming and working for a better world.
Most countries followed. America did not, preferring a patchwork of stay-at-home, distancing and closures. In the case of a few states, almost nothing was tried at all, other than bleach, horse paste and viral infection.
The great dying had begun and it would never stop.
Until this day it has not stopped.
This is not something we like to think about. We like befores and afters. And from the beginning of the pandemic the after was forced on us.
In March of zero year (zero-ish year, everything contingent etc), scientists warned of the most devastating pandemic in one hundred years.
Two months later, everyone was trying to be normal.
In April, Boris Johnson said the UK “was past the peak of the coronavirus.”
In May, Trump released the opening up America plan.
In June, the UK said the “long national hibernation” was at an end.
The worst was always behind us.
By November, our attempts at normal had provided the bodies that mutated the virus, and hundreds of millions were back in lockdown.
So we all went on the internet and tried to make sense of it (this will become important).
A few months later the vaccine came, and the after once again beckoned.
By late summer 2021, the vulnerable vaccinated, the youth yearning, restless and somewhat vaccinated, the pandemic was over. America’s president said so.
Then more people died of covid after the mass vaccination programme than before.
This is not something we like to think about.
Many people despite being vaccinated, vaccinated and vaccinated again, were disabled by the virus.
This is not something we like to think about.
A few were disabled by the vaccine itself.
This is not something we like to think about.
Five years after the start of the pandemic, in early 2025 in America nearly 1,000 were killed by the virus.
This is not something we want to know about.
The news is greeted with sheer silence. It does not exist as news.
Pandemics don’t end. They just get absorbed in time.
Time.
People said something had shifted in the nature of time. That our experience of time felt different now, off. It felt, somehow, less linear. We were five years further forward but maybe only six months or a year had passed since the outbreak began. Who could know really? Maybe it was just how it felt when you got older. But we’d all got older before, that’s all we’d ever been doing, and somehow it didn’t feel like this. Did it?
We are ourselves, but not.
Maybe it was because the after had been manufactured for us. Everyone had a different reference point for the after. For many people, there has been no after at all.
Our shared experience of time now splintered, pockets of people began residing in different pockets of time.
Maybe this is the multiverse.
Millions died, were disabled, and continue to be harmed, yet unlike the mass casualty event of war, this one is cultural taboo. There are no monuments, no films, no books. There are no hero narratives. No one came to the rescue. You couldn’t kill men to kill the virus (although we tried and called it herd immunity). We couldn’t switchblade drone or hellfire missile our way out of this one.
Despite the early promises of building back better, despite the claps for carers and the mutual aid, in the end there was no national renewal anywhere.
It was just sickness and death and then a quick shuffle back to the grind.
There were no stories to make sense of the dying.
No public remembrances to collectively process grief.
The taboo that had settled over the land sucked the air from places of solace. There was nowhere to consider grief and no one to consider it with. Friends didn’t talk about it. Families didn’t want to. Politicians didn’t want to. Psychologists didn’t want to. Doctors didn’t want to.
“But doctor, ever since I had this virus something hasn’t been right.”
“That’s anxiety, baby.”
If we didn’t talk about it, it probably didn’t happen.
What happens in a pandemic stays in a pandemic.
Except it doesn’t.
And the consequences of this errant belief are now bleeding out everywhere.
The distrust, the anger. The feelings of betrayal. At institutions and establishments—media, medical and political. At friends, family, at ourselves.
For all the reasons, from all the points of view.
We’re beyond the pros, cons and the antis now.
Everyone has a reason to feel betrayed. And betrayal is a powerful emotion. It scars us, changing how we interact with the world. This is dangerous. Because the act of living requires us to be vulnerable. Every day we unconsciously open ourselves up, to strangers, to friends, to the shop assistant, to the train driver. We have to, it’s what makes this all work. Vulnerability greases the gears of society. We have to trust, constantly and implicitly. We have to trust that someone we know or someone we don’t will act in a predictable way for us to get even the most menial of tasks done.
The pandemic disrupted these unconscious bonds of trust.
Billions were made sick. Many were made badly sick. Many millions have never recovered. Obviously many died. These dead have friends and families. And all these people were made sick and killed by someone.
Think of that.
And we were told half truths. We were told lies. Real ones and of omission. By the people and institutions we need to trust to keep this show on normal road.
It was a betrayal. We hardened.
But the taboo meant we couldn’t talk about it, not in real life. This anger, trauma, grief and betrayal.
So we all went on in the internet.
And this is what radicalised us.
From the richest man in the world to the average person on the street.
We couldn’t build back better because it was a WEF plan for 15 minute cities where on every street corner we’d be injected with a novel gene therapy that would turn us trans.
We couldn’t build back better because capitalists were losing money as office blocks sat empty while the homeless were being housed, the poor were being fed and the jobless were getting free money. The scam was up.
Choose your narrative.
And while we were on the internet, we saw a genocide.
And this is what radicalised us.
We saw the flayed bodies of little girls hanging from their bedrooms, places of comfort and refuge now mosaics dripping with flesh. We saw hospitals invaded and babies left rotting in incubators. We saw quadriplegics in wheelchairs executed, whole bloodlines exterminated in a maniacal, genocidal frenzy. We saw a population starved and bombed and terrorised, we saw their blood pour onto the streets for eighteen months. For eighteen months we saw the face of pure evil. We saw hell on Earth. And we saw our governments condone it, support it, provide the materiel for the creation of hell.
And we, who weren’t much inclined to trust anyway, not after the virus, were radicalised.
It was another betrayal.
Another bond severed.
We are ourselves, but not.
And while we were online we saw fires and floods.
The biggest fires and floods in the history of fires and floods.
Reaction is muted. And this too can be traced back to zero year.
Just as the outbreak was beginning, the surge in ecological activism was dying. Just another thing that we lost in the fires.
News of the apocalypse that once commanded headlines has been subordinated to all the other news.
We now breeze past climate way-markers with little fanfare.
“One point five to stay alive!” is dead. Not unreasonably, we wonder if we are all dead too.
Because for the last five years we have watched as the world marched over limits and boundaries.
Health boundaries, international law boundaries, climate boundaries, country boundaries, moral boundaries, political boundaries.
The man who, it was widely agreed, had transgressed so many boundaries he could never come back, came back. He too had been online. And this time he bought his online friends with him.
With online radicals now at the heart of empire, America swipes left and right frantically, desperate for a match that can make it feel great again.
In Britain, the government that people turned to for sanity from the bewildering Tory years are detaining dissidents, funding genocide and punishing the disabled.
There are fresh enemies inside and out: immigrants, Russians, Muslims, Hamas, the woke, the sick, the disabled.
They are all the reason why. Even the good liberal media tells us this.
People cheer for weapons of war. To talk of peace is to be weak and pathetic.
We long for the switchblades and the hellfires to protect us.
Evil that has long colonised the hearts of colonisers has been sprung free. Again. As it does, periodically.
The conditions made right, control spiralling.
For too long shame held us back.
Well it won’t hold us back now.
We’ve been hardened.
We turn outwards, we look around.
Everyone is themselves, but not.
I though, am still myself.
I am still myself.
Am I not?
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-body-snatching-years
Nate Bear
Mar 11, 2025
[img]https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1 ... x1200.jpeg
Something happened and we could all feel it.
We all knew what had happened happened: a pandemic, a genocide, a fire (fires), a flood (floods), a war, a politics.
But listing the events was inadequate to understand what had been done, not just what had happened.
I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what, but I have some rough ideas, looking back now.
The first thing to say is that we were already not ideal.
Heaven was not a place on Earth.
The natural scientists had been warning about biospheric fragility and viral hotspots for years. The social scientists about fascism’s creep and gestating wars.
The warnings in those years were not a case of ‘this thing might happen’ but more a case of ‘this thing over there that is already happening is a sign of a more generalised decay that could spiral out of control given the right conditions.’
You could say the conditions were made right.
You could say that control spiralled.
It started with the outbreak. Sorta. Kinda.
Nothing ever really starts with anything. Everything is contingent on everything else. A trail of causality from the beginning until the end of time.
And one of the contingencies took place in the UK at exactly the same time as the outbreak was taking hold in China: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn lost an election to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
This would matter a lot. It meant things would inevitably get much worse in the UK before they ever got better, if they ever did or could. It meant certain things then happened that definitely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
It sent a signal. It killed hope. It killed the future. We knew it acutely.
Then, almost exactly three months later, the UK was in lockdown.
A brutal one-two punch for the millions who had been dreaming and working for a better world.
Most countries followed. America did not, preferring a patchwork of stay-at-home, distancing and closures. In the case of a few states, almost nothing was tried at all, other than bleach, horse paste and viral infection.
The great dying had begun and it would never stop.
Until this day it has not stopped.
This is not something we like to think about. We like befores and afters. And from the beginning of the pandemic the after was forced on us.
In March of zero year (zero-ish year, everything contingent etc), scientists warned of the most devastating pandemic in one hundred years.
Two months later, everyone was trying to be normal.
In April, Boris Johnson said the UK “was past the peak of the coronavirus.”
In May, Trump released the opening up America plan.
In June, the UK said the “long national hibernation” was at an end.
The worst was always behind us.
By November, our attempts at normal had provided the bodies that mutated the virus, and hundreds of millions were back in lockdown.
So we all went on the internet and tried to make sense of it (this will become important).
A few months later the vaccine came, and the after once again beckoned.
By late summer 2021, the vulnerable vaccinated, the youth yearning, restless and somewhat vaccinated, the pandemic was over. America’s president said so.
Then more people died of covid after the mass vaccination programme than before.
This is not something we like to think about.
Many people despite being vaccinated, vaccinated and vaccinated again, were disabled by the virus.
This is not something we like to think about.
A few were disabled by the vaccine itself.
This is not something we like to think about.
Five years after the start of the pandemic, in early 2025 in America nearly 1,000 were killed by the virus.
This is not something we want to know about.
The news is greeted with sheer silence. It does not exist as news.
Pandemics don’t end. They just get absorbed in time.
Time.
People said something had shifted in the nature of time. That our experience of time felt different now, off. It felt, somehow, less linear. We were five years further forward but maybe only six months or a year had passed since the outbreak began. Who could know really? Maybe it was just how it felt when you got older. But we’d all got older before, that’s all we’d ever been doing, and somehow it didn’t feel like this. Did it?
We are ourselves, but not.
Maybe it was because the after had been manufactured for us. Everyone had a different reference point for the after. For many people, there has been no after at all.
Our shared experience of time now splintered, pockets of people began residing in different pockets of time.
Maybe this is the multiverse.
Millions died, were disabled, and continue to be harmed, yet unlike the mass casualty event of war, this one is cultural taboo. There are no monuments, no films, no books. There are no hero narratives. No one came to the rescue. You couldn’t kill men to kill the virus (although we tried and called it herd immunity). We couldn’t switchblade drone or hellfire missile our way out of this one.
Despite the early promises of building back better, despite the claps for carers and the mutual aid, in the end there was no national renewal anywhere.
It was just sickness and death and then a quick shuffle back to the grind.
There were no stories to make sense of the dying.
No public remembrances to collectively process grief.
The taboo that had settled over the land sucked the air from places of solace. There was nowhere to consider grief and no one to consider it with. Friends didn’t talk about it. Families didn’t want to. Politicians didn’t want to. Psychologists didn’t want to. Doctors didn’t want to.
“But doctor, ever since I had this virus something hasn’t been right.”
“That’s anxiety, baby.”
If we didn’t talk about it, it probably didn’t happen.
What happens in a pandemic stays in a pandemic.
Except it doesn’t.
And the consequences of this errant belief are now bleeding out everywhere.
The distrust, the anger. The feelings of betrayal. At institutions and establishments—media, medical and political. At friends, family, at ourselves.
For all the reasons, from all the points of view.
We’re beyond the pros, cons and the antis now.
Everyone has a reason to feel betrayed. And betrayal is a powerful emotion. It scars us, changing how we interact with the world. This is dangerous. Because the act of living requires us to be vulnerable. Every day we unconsciously open ourselves up, to strangers, to friends, to the shop assistant, to the train driver. We have to, it’s what makes this all work. Vulnerability greases the gears of society. We have to trust, constantly and implicitly. We have to trust that someone we know or someone we don’t will act in a predictable way for us to get even the most menial of tasks done.
The pandemic disrupted these unconscious bonds of trust.
Billions were made sick. Many were made badly sick. Many millions have never recovered. Obviously many died. These dead have friends and families. And all these people were made sick and killed by someone.
Think of that.
And we were told half truths. We were told lies. Real ones and of omission. By the people and institutions we need to trust to keep this show on normal road.
It was a betrayal. We hardened.
But the taboo meant we couldn’t talk about it, not in real life. This anger, trauma, grief and betrayal.
So we all went on in the internet.
And this is what radicalised us.
From the richest man in the world to the average person on the street.
We couldn’t build back better because it was a WEF plan for 15 minute cities where on every street corner we’d be injected with a novel gene therapy that would turn us trans.
We couldn’t build back better because capitalists were losing money as office blocks sat empty while the homeless were being housed, the poor were being fed and the jobless were getting free money. The scam was up.
Choose your narrative.
And while we were on the internet, we saw a genocide.
And this is what radicalised us.
We saw the flayed bodies of little girls hanging from their bedrooms, places of comfort and refuge now mosaics dripping with flesh. We saw hospitals invaded and babies left rotting in incubators. We saw quadriplegics in wheelchairs executed, whole bloodlines exterminated in a maniacal, genocidal frenzy. We saw a population starved and bombed and terrorised, we saw their blood pour onto the streets for eighteen months. For eighteen months we saw the face of pure evil. We saw hell on Earth. And we saw our governments condone it, support it, provide the materiel for the creation of hell.
And we, who weren’t much inclined to trust anyway, not after the virus, were radicalised.
It was another betrayal.
Another bond severed.
We are ourselves, but not.
And while we were online we saw fires and floods.
The biggest fires and floods in the history of fires and floods.
Reaction is muted. And this too can be traced back to zero year.
Just as the outbreak was beginning, the surge in ecological activism was dying. Just another thing that we lost in the fires.
News of the apocalypse that once commanded headlines has been subordinated to all the other news.
We now breeze past climate way-markers with little fanfare.
“One point five to stay alive!” is dead. Not unreasonably, we wonder if we are all dead too.
Because for the last five years we have watched as the world marched over limits and boundaries.
Health boundaries, international law boundaries, climate boundaries, country boundaries, moral boundaries, political boundaries.
The man who, it was widely agreed, had transgressed so many boundaries he could never come back, came back. He too had been online. And this time he bought his online friends with him.
With online radicals now at the heart of empire, America swipes left and right frantically, desperate for a match that can make it feel great again.
In Britain, the government that people turned to for sanity from the bewildering Tory years are detaining dissidents, funding genocide and punishing the disabled.
There are fresh enemies inside and out: immigrants, Russians, Muslims, Hamas, the woke, the sick, the disabled.
They are all the reason why. Even the good liberal media tells us this.
People cheer for weapons of war. To talk of peace is to be weak and pathetic.
We long for the switchblades and the hellfires to protect us.
Evil that has long colonised the hearts of colonisers has been sprung free. Again. As it does, periodically.
The conditions made right, control spiralling.
For too long shame held us back.
Well it won’t hold us back now.
We’ve been hardened.
We turn outwards, we look around.
Everyone is themselves, but not.
I though, am still myself.
I am still myself.
Am I not?
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-body-snatching-years
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
Roger Boyd
Geopolitics And Climate Change
COVID-19 is a very real systemic disease which is now being allowed to circulate freely among the population. The crisis response in the West was perfectly designed to hide the massive corporate/financial sector bailout that was required after the 2019 Rep Crisis. Once that was done it was all clear, covered up with the bullshit “vaccine” and the state puppets very quickly stopped counting cases and moved on. Multiple things can be true at the same time":
COVID-19 is a very real systemic disease
COVID-19 was used to cover up a massive bailout of the oligarchy
The COVID-19 “vaccine” is BS and quite possibly has nasty side-effects
The COVID-19 “vaccine” was used to facilitated a return to “business as usual” once the bailout had been put in place
COVID-19 is still circulating and causing more and more hard to a larger and larger population
Basic supplementation with Vitamin D etc., does significantly reduce COVID-19 symptoms and the probability of getting COVID-19.
There are other basic medical tools that can be used to significantly reduce the impact of COVID-19, all of which were banned by the state in the West.
China’s “short, sharp” lockdowns to specific areas to stop the spread showed how things could be done, while not needing to cover up a massive bailout. Its vaccine was based on normal vaccine development processes, so did not display the toxicity of the MRNA gene-therapy. There was also the readiness to use other medical tools and Chinese traditional medicine.
Longer-term the health of many in the West will continue to deteriorate and there is always the risk of a new more deadly mutation given how much it is circulating. China will continue to be fine in relative terms.
The oligarchy wants you to believe in some of the above and reject some of the above so that you do not identify them as the problem, and instead spent time fighting with each other. That’s why there is a fake “left” and a fake “right” both funded by the oligarchy.
Note how fast the whole state and media pivot when they get new orders from above, on this topic and on the identitarian divide and conquer strategy that is now being replaced with other ways to divide and conquer.

https://substack.com/@rogerboyd/note/c- ... ail-digest
Geopolitics And Climate Change
COVID-19 is a very real systemic disease which is now being allowed to circulate freely among the population. The crisis response in the West was perfectly designed to hide the massive corporate/financial sector bailout that was required after the 2019 Rep Crisis. Once that was done it was all clear, covered up with the bullshit “vaccine” and the state puppets very quickly stopped counting cases and moved on. Multiple things can be true at the same time":
COVID-19 is a very real systemic disease
COVID-19 was used to cover up a massive bailout of the oligarchy
The COVID-19 “vaccine” is BS and quite possibly has nasty side-effects
The COVID-19 “vaccine” was used to facilitated a return to “business as usual” once the bailout had been put in place
COVID-19 is still circulating and causing more and more hard to a larger and larger population
Basic supplementation with Vitamin D etc., does significantly reduce COVID-19 symptoms and the probability of getting COVID-19.
There are other basic medical tools that can be used to significantly reduce the impact of COVID-19, all of which were banned by the state in the West.
China’s “short, sharp” lockdowns to specific areas to stop the spread showed how things could be done, while not needing to cover up a massive bailout. Its vaccine was based on normal vaccine development processes, so did not display the toxicity of the MRNA gene-therapy. There was also the readiness to use other medical tools and Chinese traditional medicine.
Longer-term the health of many in the West will continue to deteriorate and there is always the risk of a new more deadly mutation given how much it is circulating. China will continue to be fine in relative terms.
The oligarchy wants you to believe in some of the above and reject some of the above so that you do not identify them as the problem, and instead spent time fighting with each other. That’s why there is a fake “left” and a fake “right” both funded by the oligarchy.
Note how fast the whole state and media pivot when they get new orders from above, on this topic and on the identitarian divide and conquer strategy that is now being replaced with other ways to divide and conquer.
https://substack.com/@rogerboyd/note/c- ... ail-digest
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."