Another among hundreds of novel biotech vaccines currently under development for a range of diseases has gained approval from the US FDA.
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Abrysvo is Pfizer’s vaccine for the prevention of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants through active immunisation of pregnant women at 32-36 weeks of gestational age.
Approval was granted despite the results of the clinical trial of 7126 participants, which found the rate of preterm births among the experimental group was 17% higher than the placebo group. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death in children under 5 years. RSV is a common respiratory illness that usually causes mild cold-like symptoms.
This appears to be an indication that drug safety standards have been significantly relaxed in the wake of the pandemic. High rates of adverse effects no longer appear to be a barrier to approval.
Here in New Zealand, there is a pervading sense of unreality as we drag ourselves towards an election where almost none of the candidates are prepared to discuss our unprecedented rate of excess death except to deny it is happening.
Last night I thought “a society that normalises death has lost its way” and then I started to laugh because of course death is entirely normal, in the end everyone will experience it. Perhaps a better way to express this disturbing thought is to realise that our society seems to have lost its capacity to value life.
It is profoundly worrying to reflect on the state of society.
Our medical system is overwhelmed and in any case seems determined to support pharmaceutical interventions that not only don’t work but also harm the recipients. Our economic circumstances appear unfair and unbalanced and set to become more challenging.
It is hard not to feel that everything that we had previously trusted, or in some cases tolerated, has failed us. We certainly felt we had a place in society that for many people no longer exists. There have been moments of family tragedy and some alienation too. Loss of employment and career prospects. The advice of some cultural or religious mentors has suddenly appeared inappropriate or even damaging to followers. The courts have rejected our right of medical choice, ignoring the provisions of the Bill of Rights.
Politicians are untrustworthy and more to the point uninterested or worse aggressive.
Unbelievably, everyone in authority seems all set to do it all again. National and ACT are pledged to deregulate biotechnology experimentation, apparently completely unmoved by the rapidly growing evidence of an accident at the biotech lab in Wuhan.
If you want to know just how disturbingly tied up with political and military madness this policy is, watch Tucker Carlson interview Robert F. Kennedy Jnr here or Russell Brand summarise the evidence here. If you want to review what is inherently unsafe about biotechnology, read my short summary, “Twenty Reasons Biotechnology Experimentation Should Be Outlawed“
The sheer bloody-minded commitment to a biotech future whatever the human cost speaks of lack of intelligence, complete disregard of the risk to life, venal greed, confused imagination and a deranged desire to play God.
Our first and continuing reaction has been to try to put it all right, to restore a sense of normality. We have rushed about talking to anyone who will listen and even some who refuse to listen. We have talked rationally, referenced science, history, and human rights all to a largely unresponsive and often hostile audience. So what do we do now?
The inevitable reaction is to question whether something has gone fundamentally wrong with the foundational principles of our society.
Earlier this year, we had a big storm up here in Northland. Two panels were completely blown out of our greenhouse. Recently I found time to mend it. In order to slot the panels back into place, I had to disassemble dozens of bolts holding the affected corner together, until I got down to the foundation. There I found the cause of the problem. One bolt was missing. It was never assembled properly, which meant the whole structure was able to flex in the wind enough to release the panels. If the foundation isn’t right, the structure can’t stand.
So what is the foundation of society?
It’s a big question that has no doubt already occurred to you and occupied your thoughts, as it has mine. Which and where are the foundational principles that we can rely on in troubled times?
Whilst democracy appears to have failed us and technology has sometimes isolated and disempowered us, the sun still rises every day. Can we rely on nature to see us through? Perhaps like me, you find it alarming that the focus of political rhetoric has shifted to changing nature through biotechnology.
Certainly, we must retain our faculty of discrimination between right and wrong, truth and falsehood. In the confused blur of the information age we also need to identify what is primary and what is secondary, to distinguish cause from effect. The integrity of our genetic identity is certainly primary to health. National and ACT’s plan to relax the safety rules governing biotech experimentation are reckless and out of touch with the pandemic lessons we should be learning from. Pretending to the public that all is well is an indication of what we could suffer during the next political term.
Imposing risk to human life, or even ignoring it, is a kind of madness. This suggests that collective consciousness could have been adversely affected by the pandemic. Civilisation depends on the quality of consciousness of its members. Stability, adaptability, creativity, intelligence, respect, fairness, empathy and countless other rational qualities have built civilization, debase these and we can hardly imagine where we will end up.
Justice is a function of society that should never be bypassed. There are countless cases of miscarriage of justice throughout history that bring shame on all those involved. For example, Edward Ates, a fifty year old black man was released in 2018 after spending 20 years in a Texas jail for a murder he did not commit. Five years later, he is still classified as out on parole despite DNA evidence that proves he did not commit the crime. Ates was convicted partly through the false testimony of a felon who was promised a reduced sentence.
The authorities in Texas have no desire to exonerate Ates because he would be eligible for compensation, so he still languishes with the stigma of parole status, despite being completely innocent. The Innocence Project believes they know who the actual perpetrator was. The Texas authorities are abusing their power by failing to pursue justice for Ates and failing to go after the real perpetrator. They are determined to stick to their big lie despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including DNA. The Ates case is the subject of episode three of Web of Death, entitled Crowdsourced Justice which is currently streaming on Disney.
The parallels to pandemic justice have probably not escaped you. Three years ago the unvaccinated were wrongly accused of a crime and punished. Despite growing evidence that mRNA vaccination is neither effective nor safe, the unvaccinated still carry a stigma. Mistakes have not been acknowledged. The real victims of the crime are the vaccinated who have been subjected not just to Covid infection which is almost certainly the result of an escaped genetically modified virus, but they have also received multiple shots designed to teach their nervous system to produce toxic levels of its spike protein. The perpetrators have never been subject to public scrutiny, instead, they have been richly rewarded.
Doubling down on unregulated biotechnology experimentation, as National and ACT are proposing, will simply create opportunities to repeat offences. The parallels to Ates’ case stop here. Ates was one man wrongly convicted of a horrific murder. The pandemic has created billions of victims, millions of wrongly convicted individuals, and tens of thousands of very rich perpetrators. Genetic modification is inherently unsafe, spreads without limit, and can never be recalled.
