Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a false dichotomy. Here's why.

First thing to make clear is that there are billions of people who don't have access to vaccines. Vaccine equity is not happening at the scale needed to protect all those people. 

Second, epidemiological and public health strategies to suppress community transmission of the virus to minimal levels are not being followed across the major developed states and that puts everyone else at risk - we have seen repeated cycles of transmission getting out of control because under the guise of 'protecting the economy' community transmission is being allowed to occur at 'low levels' - defined as not overwhelming Health Services, but allowing constant extra stress on existing Health Services - and that guarantees surges will happen and variants will emerge.

So what populations ought to be united in demanding is support to reduce the transmission in the community to the minimum, and certainly quarantine at borders to limit export/import of the virus. The techniques to do this can be supportive rather than 'draconian'. It can be done.

The vax vs unvaxxed adversarial narrative - essentially a concocted angry argument - is obscuring clarity on what needs to be done. So here's an exploration of why this matters. 

Beefs.

There's an industrial scale practice of starting endless arguments, between people imbued with a belief, opinion, bias or bigotry in order to exploit their activity.

 It is known as The Internet of Beefs.

It started out as a tactic to drive up traffic to a page that carried advertising, in order to generate income from the page. Start an argument, get believers on board, troll them, get them angry and sit back as more pile on to argue to win. 

Start an argument, divide the room.

What is a 'beef'?
 

Venkatesh Rao the creator of Ribbon Farm Website wrote really informative piece where he coined the term 'beef-only thinking.'

"You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking.

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs."

source: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

Continuous conflict. Facebook algorithms that increase 'engagement' are rooted in this dynamic. Fight or flight hormone cascades drive the internal urge to win the unwinnable. Addiction patterns of behaviour becoming habitual. Rational discourse becomes almost impossible, and those who try to maintain a rational stance become exhausted. 

Many of the online arguments that rage are rooted in this practice. Brexit was an example of this practice being deployed online and in News Media in order to seed irrational divisions across the electorate. 

How rapidly the English democratic debate descended into Leave vs Remain as an endless argument largely void of rationality. How quickly previously calm folk became enraged, enervated, to the degree of poisoning familial relationships!

The Vaccinated against The un-Vaccinated against The Vaccinated.

We must protect vaccinated and unvaccinated populations equally, in order to bring this pandemic down to safe and managed levels that prevent avoidable harms. This is critically important given the inequity of global Vaccine distribution, unwillingness to share Intellectual Property rights and technology, which is rendering billions of people vulnerable to SARSCOV2, it's variants and the adverse outcomes associated with it.

Pitting one against the other is toxic and is a large part of the misinformation activity that impedes the preservation of our Right to Health within the specific context of the Pandemic.

image source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-july-2021/ - a study of attitudes which reveals the potency of misinformation, political grooming and adversarial messaging in influencing sectors of the population, in generating lateral distrust and social incoherence, preventing social solidarity at a time when it is quite clearly needed. Question: who has the most to fear from social solidarity?

what effective suppression of community transmission of the virus using non-pharmaceutical interventions and social solidarity in a population of 1.4 billion people looks like.

Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a false dichotomy.
First off we are all human beings, deserving of care and the preservation of our Right to Health. Secondly, the vaccinations are superb, and they do offer some reduction in helping to avoid some of the avoidable harms, but not all. Thirdly, there is no real dichotomy in being vaccinated vs not being vaccinated.

That adversarial narrative is a concoction, a logical fallacy, or at least the adversarial aspect of this narrative is a logical fallacy. 
It is part of the weaponization of words and ideas that is part of the wider political grooming operations underway.

Byline Times have published a few insightful and damning articles on misinformation networks linked to the Covid Recovery Group and The Great Barrington Declaration.
Here's why.
Given that the vaccinations were never touted as stopping transmission, only as reducing severity of symptoms, and incidence of fatalities, to function as a cushion for entire populations that reduces systemic stress to lower levels, giving us resource space. and time, to suppress the transmission of the virus in the community, locally, nationally and globally, the issue of vax vs non vax as an adversarial dynamic or narrative is a deflection of focus away from the deliberate failure to suppress transmission, and is therefore yet another way to obscure the public discourse on what is needed to manage this pandemic.
Suppression of transmission must be the global over-riding strategic protocol, because we know it damn well works. I and others have written millions of words on this, drawing from the lived experience and the available evidence. Allowing spread guarantees the emergence of unpredictable variants, some of which may result in greater harm. The only bulwark against that under the current situation is luck. We cannot afford to throw such a dice.
Mis-use of the Vaccine.
In the UK, which is where I live, (I can speak to the experience here) the Johnson regime abused or exploited the vaccine to lower hospitalisations/deaths knowing full well that their policy options enabled and allowed spread of the virus. They talked a lot about slowing the spread, they never talked about suppressing community transmission to lowest possible levels, except to dismiss it. Instead they spoke and wrote about 'acceptable; levels - which means that avoidable harms continue, at a lower yet still socially significant  rate, the '1000 deaths a week' as a 'cost-benefit rationalisation' of allowing spread to continue since July 19th.

Epidemiological recklessness. Emotional blindness.

75 seconds to describe Johnson Regimes opening up in July 2021

The point of the vaccines then, from Johnson's perspective, the perspective of those who wish to hold onto their existing almost completely hegemonic power, is to protect their power: because they sense that hospital, health care and social care systemic collapse would threaten their position. They fear that if and when public ire becomes too intense, support would evaporate and the people would demand their complete removal, to be replaced by a government of national unity tasked with suppression of community transmission (which has never been attempted yet in the UK) and so it was never about protecting the NHS, it was about protecting those in Power.

That stance is by definition an evil stance.
So when they called on us all to 'protect the NHs, save lives', they were gaslighting in full flow. It was all about them, not about us.

Certainly their concern was not about the welfare of all NHS staff, who were denied the pay raises they so clearly deserved. Certainly not about the millions of people receiving paltry state assistance.  Furlough protected the large corporate employers for the most part, 3 million small business people were excluded from financial support. Certainly their concern was not for the health and safety of all our children.

Trust.
Mike Ryan at WHO is someone I trust. He made it plain in March, April, May, June and July 2021, and ever since that the vaccines on their own were not the way out, that they were a cushion, and that the elimination or reduction to lowest possible levels of community transmission had to be the global strategy to protect whole populations, locally, nationally and globally and to start to bring an end to the pandemic. He was and is still correct. Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love. 

Why not spread the Love?
The reason USUK and EU chose to not do elimination is because to do it you must support the population in ways that amount to Socialist policy. Using central State funding to empower local authorities to do effective elimination strategy, confronting misinformation and political grooming head on with clear, evidence based communications so that the population is clear as to what needs to be done, and why, providing financial support that enables people to isolate, businesses to stay viable via grants, furlough and other protective measures are all socialistic policies. Those who argue they have tried ignore the facts. Test and Trace is a failure, PPE provision was handed to profiteers, the virus is spreading at a significant rate, people are dying, Long Covid is afflicting millions of people. That is not a success story by any measure.
The Wealth Extraction ideologues, the Neoliberal/Free Marketeers and others detest this approach - suppression of community transmission - because it shifts power away from the Executive to the Community, away from individualism, to the collective, and they know that if a population experiences beneficial collectivism, their reign, in philosophical terms, is practically over. The NeoLiberal ideology of the Sovereign Individual competing with others would be over, finished, dealt a death blow by experience. They will never let that happen. 

We must make it happen to bring this pandemic to safe closure.
And it becomes more obvious when we understand that the same applies to climate, poverty, war and other issues- that the lived experience of working together to adapt to a problem and resolve it would inspire a huge perceptual shift, away from core individualism, (there is no such thing as society) towards collectivism. We are all in this together and we are only as safe as the least safe among us.
Democracy at it's very best is consensual collectivism. 

The Wealth Extractors will never cede this point, because it destroys their foundation and sense of entitlement to power. 
We are all in this together. Vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
The Vaccinated vs unVaccinated is a deliberate gaslighting, a false dichotomy designed to protect the established power system.
It really frustrates me, that almost no-one sees this for what it is.
Sometimes I feel utterly alone in this perception, and while I have some doubts, I think the evidence supports it, as it explains what is being done better than any other thesis I have come across. By miles. 
I hope more of you will recognise the validity in the essence this perception, and add to it and I hope, fervently, that it will lead towards more effective action, locally, nationally and globally.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

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