The Equilibristics of Vaccination Ill Logic
![Paul Klee, Seiltänzer [Tightrope Walker]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F672c1c1e-3d11-43e9-a9ae-6f82aa7b09d4_600x1070.jpeg "Paul Klee, Seiltänzer [Tightrope Walker]")
On the vaccination of the elderly bit — shouldn’t this be a personal decision based on how one relates to the prospect of death? Do you think that a vaxx should be refused if this person demands it? @M_x_m_l_e_ 07:43 AM Jan 10, 2023
Man-god engineered and computed an illusion of the non-sense world.1 We live it as if it were true. Our truths are transitory.2 Historically, the question “should I give medicine to any man that is not sick?” was a logical impossibility.3 Some sick people who could not cope with an illness on their own sought help from a healer who may have suggested the use of some potion to facilitate healing in some cases. It would not occur to a physician to treat man for a disease he did not have and may never have. This may help re-frame the question as it pertains to this old man standing in front of you - how has he lived his life?4 Did he take medicine when he was not sick? Did he vaccinate routinely or at all?5 What is the least a physician can do to not upset this man’s peace? In a sane world, a physician does not treat an abstract disease as a future probability in a population but attends to the sick man in front of him who sought his help.6 Should a physician find himself facing well man, historically, there was nothing a physician could do to improve upon this man.7
In a situation when man appears in front of a physician, transforming himself into a patient, demanding a vaccine, whether to give him medicine is not an easy question. Do the physician and the patient know each other well? Why does the patient demand a drug? What is the indication for the drug? What is the physician’s philosophy of practice? What are his standards? Does he have any? What are the legal restraints of his practice? How would we mitigate a case of a man, who is not sick and who believes he needs medicine for some reason, should he suffer adverse effects of the medicine after taking it?8 What if the physician refuses to give the medicine and the patient suffers disability from a disease that the vaccine might or might not have prevented? What are his ideas about health, medicine, life, death? Algorithms, protocols, and legal immunity got rid of the complexity of dealing with the inherent uncertainty of being.9
In a recent Twitter Space hosted by Anish Koka, MD discussing vaccination, it was hard not to notice that the conversation of physicians centered around the treatment of a population.10 John Mandrola, MD summed up the discussion in the second unrecorded part along the lines of “we always consider risks and benefits of treatment for a patient”. The concept of “risks and benefits” appears in large numbers of statistics.11 These abstract calculations are applied to an individual well man in the feat of fuzzy logic equilibristics that rest on the unquestioned and unexamined set of assumptions that all people strive for good health, prevention is better than cure, and causing harm to some well people is justified because of the greater benefit for the population at large.12 It does not occur to most physicians that population risk cannot be transformed into personal risk. It is a logical fallacy. Since most physicians never personally administer vaccination injections, if well man becomes severely disabled after getting a vaccine, a physician never feels personally responsible for causing harm because, technically, he did not do it. There is a spatial, temporal, and actor separation in the drama of Public Health salvation by numbers. A rare physician can articulate how or why he, while in his office, indirectly injects medicine into an arm of well man at a CVS pharmacy across town, to treat some population. “Physicians are the front line of public health.”13 Sacrebleu! What happened to clinical medicine when a physician attended to the sick man in front of him?
Vaccination is the third rail of biopolitics. It is a symbol of modern man-made civilization that claims to have control over life and death.14 It is hailed as a miracle of modern medicine that “saved lives and prevented disabling diseases”.15 A vaccine is a drug that exists on par with a vitamin in its indiscriminate use as an undisputed good.16 It does not belong to the realm of classical clinical medicine because it is given to healthy people. It exists outside of many physician-patient interactions because it can be given on demand by any trained technician in a parking lot. It is a unicorn of a drug that is good for all by default. It exists as a myth, a lore, a magic potion, a ritual, and an ideology as much as a medication.
A vaccine as medicine is not safe just as a vitamin is not safe. Safe medicine is an oxymoron and a regulatory designation.17 Any medicine may harm. We do not know whom, when, and how. If we humble ourselves and re-think our behavior, we may re-discover appropriate limited use for a vaccine. Better yet, we may re-discover that well man does not need medicine.
Knowledge emerges as bound by some ideas. The knowledge of the past that arose bound by faith in God the Creator will be qualitatively different than any knowledge that arises in the world of no God, although a lot of initial and current scientific ideas were rooted in the idea of the world of Logos. One example is the idea of “law” in science. Much of what we know and experience today did not exist as physical objects or ideas in the natural world of the past. Statistical mortality is a good example of non-sense as opposed to the a reality of man that just died at your house. The reality we live today was made up by us - hence man-god.
"When considering mandating vaccines in the future, we should proceed with humility, acknowledging that our knowledge is far from perfect and our truths are often transitory.” Paul Fenyves. You have no mandate: a preemptive argument against mandating bivalent boosters. Sensible Medicine. September 29, 2022.
Compare transitory scientific truths to the idea of truth in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Inoculation as a folk practice of unknown specifics arose in China, India, and the Ottoman Empire. Whatever the case, qualitatively they were different practices from other areas of the world where unique healing practices and the custom of medical practice developed within the limits of local worldviews. Totalitarian legally enforced medical treatment of populations or an abstract human is a novelty.
Radical opposition to the use of drugs is not new. Tatian, the Assyrian theologian of the 2nd century, condemned pharmakeia as demonic lure in his “Address to the Greeks”: “Pharmacy in all its forms is due to the same artificial devising” that is magic, demon’s counterfeits. (Chapters 17, 18). Resistance to inoculation and later vaccination is also not new. It is worth asking a question “Why do people refuse “salvation”? and “Do illness and suffering have meaning?” Why does the radical renunciation of medications emerge as a phenomenon when certain drugs in certain cases have undeniable “desirable” effects?
How one orients his life is qualitatively different. Orientation towards God is not trying to be healthy. Striving to live a good life, within some confines of faith, science, theology, philosophy, ethics, tradition, or custom, is not equivalent to the goals of government and public health administrators that optimize for population outcomes through statistics.
Old man as a number in population statistics is not the old man who stands in front of you. Depending upon the unique background of this person, vaccination may or may not make sense. The whole purpose of a physician is to situate rather abstract knowledge by interpreting the context of the situation of this living and breathing man, not a number. It is not a question of death prevention. It may be. You have to figure out if it is for this man.
Pay attention to the language of vaccination promotion. It is always abstract - prevent disease, morbidity, and mortality. In a population. While a generic vaccine is a drug intended for personal protection from severe illness and/or death that does not prevent either illness or transmission, it is propagandized on the merits of the most benefit when the majority of people are vaccinated. There are statistical computations involved in the reasoning behind it. Traditionally, a physician did not treat disease. He attended to a suffering man. It is almost incomprehensible today. Doctoring took place based on quite literal common sense(s) between a physician and his patient.
If you live with an idea that man is a creation of God in the image of God, it would not occur to you to improve what is already good in whatever shape or condition this creation arrived into this world. Once God is dead, there is no limit to how much you can improve anybody. Nobody is perfect. There is no limit to molecular, genetic, or physical modifications you can contemplate. Oliver Clerc equates vaccination with baptism in his book Modern Medicine: The New World Religion. As a ritual, vaccination transforms a creature of nature into the product of man-god.
You have to understand, if Bob Smith takes a drug and something happens to him immediately after, Bob and his family will not resort to scientific reasoning to distill the cause of his misery. This possibility should be discussed - what will you think should this happen, as the result or as a mere coincidence…? Remember, Bob and his family will have to live with the aftermath of whatever decision he makes.
Common sense practicing physician would probably land in the vicinity of his patient feeling apprehension about some impending doom. Today a vaccine could be the medicine that creates a feeling of peace and calm by giving false assurances through statistical calculations that cannot be given in any individual case. The non-sense practicing physician applies an algorithm to a non-patient to risk stratify him, plugs the risk into a protocol, the protocol spits out what a physician must do to prevent death. It is so easy, this role is now delegated to the non-physicians who plug in the values into the computer, and the computer decides if Bob Smith needs a vaccine.
There are many parts that feed into the phenomenon of vaccination. What seems like “we always”, no we did not always.
Ulrich Beck. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications, 1992.
Theodore M.Porter. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900. Princeton University Press.
Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh. Handbook of Analytic Philosophy in Medicine. Springer, 2015. Understanding by analysis is not the same as synthesis. I do not think anyone can fully understand the mess we got ourselves into by engaging in non-sense. Fixing the parts, winning in individual categories by numbers but finding ourselves desolate as a whole is hardly an accomplishment. There is something to be said for the One that the scientist proclaimed as unproved and unprovable. If you believe in it, this is the whole reason it is called faith (as knowledge), not proof, you may start to figure out things differently as a scientist. Nobody is taking your ruler and your calculator away.
Barbara Duden. Woman Beneath the Skin. A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Harvard University Press, 1991.
In religion, life and death originate with God. This is why in the past, a physician knew when he reached the limit of his ability to facilitate healing within the limits of reason, and removed himself from the patient who remained in the care of his family. We have no limits. If we find one, we remove it. It often results in the torture of a slowly dying and decaying man in the name of the idea of “saving a life”.
“Saving Lives” as a political slogan, torn out of the context of Jewish law to preserve the life of man convicted of a crime, conflated with loose ideas from Judeo-Christianity transposed into bioethics, has nothing to do with the original meaning of what it meant to save a life in the context of any Abrahamic religion.
Ivan Illich. Life as Idol. (podcast)
The concept of what good is as it emerges in sacred texts is qualitatively different from the moving goal posts of the greater good rooted in utilitarianism and materialism. You must have observed the rocking boat of “covid vaccine is good for all” with subsequent “maybe not for all” and even “not good at all”. Never there have been such lost people. Well, maybe there have been but it does not have to be. It is possible to live within some world where good and truth exist unconnected to statistical calculations of risks and benefits. In this world you cannot arrive at the benefit of selling your mother, putting your grandmother in solitary confinement, or keeping little Johnny in the basement lest he infect everyone with a deathly cold because your calculator told you so.
"Safe drug” emerges in statistics. Any “safe drug” causes harm in someone. It may be one in seven billion chance.
This is an amazing piece!! Thank you.