Sunday, January 30, 2022

It Was All There in the EUA. Why Couldn’t They See it?

I did so because my intuitions, backed by my reading of non-mainstream sources, had long suggested to me that the endgame envisioned by those managing the pandemic was to impose vaccine mandates on as many people and as many populations as they could.

Shortly after the document was published on December 10th 2020 I read the 53-page document and zeroed in on the section titled "Known Benefits" where I found the following three-line summary: Reduction in the risk of confirmed COVID-19 occurring at least 7 days after Dose 2 Reduction in the risk of confirmed COVID-19 after Dose 1 and before Dose 2 Reduction in the risk of confirmed severe COVID-19 any time after Dose 1 Hmm, that's funny I thought, there was nothing about the ability to do what government officials and media talking heads were clearly suggesting they would do: stop people from getting infected and passing on the virus.

What thus disturbed me even more were the non-reactions I got from friends here in the US in late winter and early Spring, and the readers of my monthly column in the Catalan-language press in May 2021, when I pointed them to the above-cited documents and asked them to observe the enormous gap between the known capabilities of the vaccines and what officialdom was saying they would do for us.

Is that not one reporter in the US that I know of ever confronted anyone in any of the government agencies or in the media with the contents of these easily retrievable and easily read documents.

Because we were a nation of obsessive readers, we were, he suggests, unusually well-equipped to visualize the many abstract ideas that one must assimilate to act responsibly and intelligently within a citizen-driven polity.

Whereas reading encourages contemplation, linear thinking and as we have said, abstraction, the television encourages entertainment, atemporality and the consumption of fleeting visual sensations.

Whereas my first experiences of intellectual discovery, and those of most people coming of age during the half millennium previous to my time on earth, had largely taken place in the solitary and contemplative encounter between reader and text, theirs had mostly taken place before a screen that tended to push often disparate and random sounds, images and short chains of text at them in quick succession.

As a result, reading, with its need for sustained attention and its requirement that one actively imagine for one's self what it is the writer is trying to say, was extremely challenging for them.

In a world where, to paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman, all is liquid and most are driven by the search for fleeting sensations, and where establishing a personal hermeneutic through reading and contemplation is considered quaintly quixotic when not impossible, the mutterings of the authority figure nearby take on an enhanced attraction.

Unfamiliar with the slow and deliberate processes of deep analytical reading and the importance of seeking information that lies beyond the frenetic and ever more highly managed jungle of delivered feeds, they find it very difficult to forge a durable, unique and cohesive critical praxis.

We are all citizens who believe that, among other things, the ability to develop individual critical criteria through independent reading and research, and to openly challenge the powerful with the knowledge resulting from those activities, is key to achieving such an outcome.

https://redwave.press/it-was-all-there-in-the-eua-why-couldnt-they-see-it/ 

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