Are We Building Our Own Prison Thinking We Own the Key to Our Cell?

EDITORIAL, 30 Aug 2021

#708 | Marilyn Langlois – TRANSCEND Media Service

Like frogs in water that keeps getting hotter and hotter, we are nearing the boiling point.   A plague of “vaccine mandates” and “vaccine passports” is rapidly spreading across the globe.  There has been visible resistance, including multiple massive protests throughout France, and rallies in many cities around the world.  I attended one in San Francisco.  Last week health workers in Greece staged a 5-hour work stoppage in opposition to Covid vaccine mandates.  Courts have ruled against vaccine passports in Andalucia, Spain, and against vaccine mandates in Meghalaya, India, and more legal challenges are in the works in numerous places.

Despite the pushback, many leaders in the public and private sector are imposing vaccine mandates for workplaces, universities, large events, travel and even throughout whole cities and countries.  A large number of their constituents appear to be either quietly welcoming or fatalistically accepting these insidious intrusions into their privacy and freedom of movement.

Regardless of how strongly one might support the vaccine program—and I use the term “vaccine” very loosely, as these injections are far different from traditional vaccines—mandates should be vigorously opposed.  There is no proven benefit to such requirements, and if left in place they will only escalate and allow Big Pharma and Big Tech to take increasing control over more and more aspects of our lives.

Experience and research have shown that these injections will at most protect one against serious illness but will not protect others, as the US Centers for Disease Control itself revealed recently that vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus.  Hence there is no reason to prevent people from exercising their right to informed consent and making their own risk-benefit analyses and health decisions.  This is not about being pro-vax or anti-vax. Those who want to take the vaccine should not be hampered from doing so, but depriving people of their jobs, livelihoods and ability to participate in their communities for choosing otherwise would be unjust.

There are serious risks associated with the vaccine.  Severe adverse events, including deaths, following the jab are underreported.  Risk of acute Covid illness for those under 70 and without co-morbidities, on the other hand, is negligible. Most cases are mild or asymptomatic. For at-risk people (vaxxed or unvaxxed) who might get sick, cheap, safe and effective early outpatient treatments exist but have been unconscionably suppressed. There are abundant highly credentialed scientists and medical practitioners who put their careers on the line to disagree with aspects the dominant narrative on Covid, and they are mostly censored.  Silencing dissent is anti-science.  The constant drumbeat of PR-driven fear mongering from corporate media hammers home the dogma that every single person must be injected with a minimally tested concoction containing genetic code to turn people into spike-protein factories.  Paid for by tax moneys and bringing billions in profits to the vaccine makers.

San Francisco protest against Covid vaccine mandates

Big Pharma is not our friend, and it has seduced its way into the hearts of our public health agencies.  In my home town of Richmond, California, we have experienced firsthand how government regulatory agencies can be captured by the very industry they are supposed to police.  It took us over 10 years of intense grassroots mobilizing against Big Oil interests to get our local Bay Area Air Quality Management District to implement a sensible emissions-reduction rule for the Chevron oil refinery in our city.  And in spite of our ongoing community mobilizing, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control is still stubbornly protecting Astra-Zeneca’s bottom line over the health of local residents, by not requiring the corporate giant to fully clean up a heavily contaminated super-fund site it owns within our city limits.

In her seminal 2004 book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell offers a scathing critique of the unscrupulous methods employed by the pharmaceutical industry to bolster its profits:  taking advantage of government-funded research, using deceptive marketing to the public, offering propagandistic “education” for doctors, and aggressive lobbying of lawmakers for unwarranted protection from losses, liabilities and undue competition. Big Pharma is adept at using its enormous financial clout to exert tremendous influence over public health and regulatory agencies (e.g., CDC, WHO, FDA), research funders, medical journals, professional medical organizations, and even the major media that depend on their advertising dollars.

Big Pharma is clearly not interested in promoting lasting health, though it cons many of its employees and the general public into thinking otherwise.  Pharmaceutical executives can only boost their ill-gotten riches when people are sick, think they are sick or are terrified of becoming sick.  Maintaining lasting health would be a bad business plan for them.

In a double whammy, Covid has brought us a marriage of Big Pharma and Big Tech (how else did Bill Gates get his sticky fingers in the forefront of the Corona panic last year?):  Distance learning, teleconferencing, on-line shopping, QR codes everywhere, an app for everything–whatever it takes to keep us glued to our devices and refrain from actually interacting face to face with one another as members of the human family.  But that’s not all.  As has been amply alluded to throughout the media, the ultimate goal is implementing a system of interoperable, digital ID “vaccine passports” that would eventually be required for all aspects of daily living.

San Francisco protest against Covid vaccine mandates

Vaccine passports would involve establishment of huge databases, or even one global database, that might start out with one’s Covid vaccination status, but could easily be expanded to include all sorts of other personal medical, psychological, legal, and financial information and functionalities.

Such passports are already popping up in New York, France, UK and throughout the EU. And it won’t stop with one- or two-dose vaccines.  Next could come a requirement for frequent booster shots (ka-ching, ka-ching for Pharma), then maybe some other requirements not even of a medical nature—the possibilities are endless and chilling.  Then maybe you can’t access your bank account or drive more than a certain distance from home unless you are fully compliant with whatever the greed-fueled elites cook up.  Persons deemed “less desirable” could be denied entrance to any building and be basically outcast.

Your every move and your associations would be tracked, as you and your friends “swipe your passport” to gain entry into venues and locales.  Who would own and control this information?  High-rolling investors will bet on future trends in the copious amounts of our personal data they’ll be collecting.  Do you really want to live in a world with ubiquitous check-points, where a red light flashing on your cell phone can deny you entry, even if you have no idea why?

In case you still favor vaccine mandates, be careful what you ask for.  Follow the money.  Big Pharma and Big Tech billionaires have been making out like bandits this past year and a half, while the economically vulnerable in our communities are barely surviving.

San Francisco protest against Covid vaccine mandates

And no Covid vaccine can provide what we already know will achieve better health outcomes for those who are struggling the most:  decent jobs with a living wage, dignified and secure housing, a toxin-free environment, access to healthy food and physical exercise, ample educational opportunities, meaningful participation in decisions that affect their lives, minimal stress, and strong interpersonal relationships.  Now that’s what we should be focusing on trying to achieve–and massively taxing the fat cats to pay for it (I’ve proposed a 100% tax on all personal wealth over $10 million, for starters).  By eliminating the excessive greed factor, we can ensure healthy living conditions for all that will radically diminish the need for pharmaceutical treatments.

If you accept the constraints that come with vaccine mandates and passports, believing that as long as you are vaccinated it’s no problem, just remember that in fact you are helping to build a prison that could extend throughout the world.  And if you are confident you’ll have the key to your cell, what if at some point in future they change the locks?   Resist now, while you still can.

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Marilyn Langlois is a member of TRANSCEND USA West Coast. She is a volunteer community organizer and international solidarity activist based in Richmond, California.  A co-founder of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, member of Haiti Action Committee and Board member of Task Force on the Americas, she is retired from previous employment as a teacher, secretary, administrator, mediator and community advocate.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Aug 2021.

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