To McCullough, America’s full response to the pandemic was already determined back in early May of 2020. Innovative attempts to create early treatment protocols were almost universally shelved. Instead, all the eggs went into the basket of the vaccine. Vaccinations were now pushed as the silver bullet. Growing mechanisms of control developed, the aim of which was to delegitimize any attempts to examine or utilize significant and effective early treatment protocols to fight the virus.
Thus, the first reason why vaccinations became the only permissible solution to SARS-COV-2 was because the public health bureaucracy decided this by fiat. This fact was fully on display in our societal response to those who contracted the virus.
The message for the sick would be something unprecedented in the recent medical tradition: Patients would be advised that there was nothing that could be done for them until they were at death’s door. The dereliction of duty at the heart of therapeutic nihilism meant that someone who received a positive PCR test would simply be informed to go home, rest, and then go to the ER if things ever got really bad.
The standardization of therapeutic nihilism also revealed something more disturbing that helps to explain further why the vaccines have been pushed with such ferociousness. By March 2020, there were already curious trends regarding the COVID narrative. In a March 17, 2020, article in Stat, Stanford epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis, made the prophetic case that the response to SARS-COV-2 would eventually be revealed for what it is -- a “once in a century evidence fiasco.” To Ioannidis, the scientific and medical tradition that formed the foundation for how to respond to pandemics was quickly trashed. It was replaced by a juggernaut the saw constant, decontextualized information intentionally deployed to inculcate fear narratives.
Why, though, were global mechanisms being utilized in this way? The answer is as simple as it is unsettling. The response to the pandemic was meant to accelerate the conditions of a social and political ecosystem that attacks the virtue of prudential judgment. In his most recent book, Joshua Mitchell has succinctly summarized this psychological context for which the pandemic response has helped to solidify:
Citizens are not, after all, competent enough to exercise prudential judgment about how to care for themselves, their families, or their neighbors. They must leave that to the global managers.... [E]very day citizens will surely die if they dare attempt to figure things out by themselves or together with those around them. (P. 237)
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