Stop It
My local school district has begun to fire unvaccinated teachers, while my small town city council has banned unvaccinated senior citizens from the senior center. Below, two email messages I sent to my school board and city council, which might be useful for other people who would like to do something similar. If it helps, steal any portion of this that you want for your own local messages. Two quick notes before the messages:
First, when I write an essay on Substack, I embed links into the text. I’m not going to do that here — the messages below have links scattered in the text because that’s what the messages I sent to my local elected officials looked like. Substack converts Twitter and YouTube links into embedded video and tweets, but otherwise, links appear here as they did in my messages.
Second, none of this works. My message to the city council produced zero discussion, for example, and the ban on unvaccinated senior citizens passed quickly and with nothing more than the usual we have to be safe ritual chanting. The one thing we know for sure, at this point, is that facts don’t work against hysteria. But my view, frustrating as it is, is that we have to do this anyway. We have to keep telling them until they notice, or until we can make them stop through lawsuits, elections, and relentless noncompliance. Saying “I object” is part of a painful process that frequently feels empty, but silence is consent.
So.
First message, to the school board (and looking much like a comparable message to the city council), as written:
While you begin to fire teachers, a newly published letter from a public health expert in The Lancet, "The epidemiological relevance of the COVID-19-vaccinated population is increasing," says this, with emphasis added and citations omitted:
"In Germany, the rate of symptomatic COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated ('breakthrough infections') is reported weekly since 21 July 2021 and was 16.9% at that time among patients of 60 years and older. This proportion is increasing week by week and was 58.9% on 27 October 2021 providing clear evidence of the increasing relevance of the fully vaccinated as a possible source of transmission. A similar situation was described for the UK. Between week 39 and 42, a total of 100,160 COVID-19 cases were reported among citizens of 60 years or older. 89,821 occurred among the fully vaccinated (89.7%), 3,395 among the unvaccinated (3.4%). One week before, the COVID-19 case rate per 100,000 was higher among the subgroup of the vaccinated compared to the subgroup of the unvaccinated in all age groups of 30 years or more...
"Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(21)00258-1/fulltext?s=08#%20
It has been known and acknowledged for a long time that the available COVID vaccines do not prevent transmission or infection -- as you must know, since the expert presentation at your Sept. 14 board meeting focused on the degree to which the vaccines appear to protect against severity of illness, not the degree to which they prevent transmission. Watch this CNN interview with Dr. Rochelle Walensky , the director of the CDC, and fast forward to 2:17:
"What they can't do anymore is prevent transmission." Straight from the director of the CDC. How do you justify a livelihood-destroying vaccine mandate, given the now-well-known and undisputed limits of the available vaccines at stopping transmission and infection?
Clearly, high rates of vaccination do not prevent COVID illness. A hockey team in Canada, the Ottawa Senators, achieved 100% vaccination among team members and staff; then 40% of the fully vaccinated organization tested positive for COVID:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ottawa-senators-covid-11637123408
Similarly, the football program at UC Berkeley achieved near-100% vaccination among players and staff, after which "at least 44 people in the program have tested positive for COVID" in a single week:
Gibraltar is an island with a vaccination rate over 100%, because they also vaccinate visitors who regularly travel to the island for work. They're experiencing a surge of COVID cases:
https://news.yahoo.com/gibraltar-cancels-official-christmas-celebrations-covid-coronavirus-163444274.html
As for the reason why high vaccination rates do not end transmission and infection, here's an August article in a British medical journal: "Covid-19: Fully vaccinated people can carry as much delta virus as unvaccinated people, data indicate."
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2074
Firing good teachers over their unwillingness to take novel vaccines that have obviously been under-tested and oversold, while the limits of those vaccines becomes clearer by the day, is a shameful policy. There will be a political reckoning for this when the hysteria fades, as all moral panics do. The question now is this:
Are you capable of responding to evidence, and using evidence to shape policy, or are you willing to passively ride the wave of a moral panic and call it leadership?
I know what the answer has been so far.
Second message:
Further w/r/t the question of vaccine mandates, an observation that applies equally to city council and school board members.
The historian Thomas Haskell used the great term "recipe knowledge" to examine the choices of historical actors. Recipe knowledge is the knowledge that allows a person to reliably produce a chosen outcome, so that you want to accomplish something, you propose a set of steps to accomplish it, and the steps you propose to take do produce the outcome that you intend to produce. If institutions have recipe knowledge, means and ends align.
Responding to the pandemic, have our governments demonstrated recipe knowledge? Joe Biden signed a 100-day mask order immediately after he was inaugurated, and he said that 100 days of mask wearing – January to April – would end the pandemic:
Did it?
The City of South Pasadena closed outdoor tennis courts to stop the spread and end the pandemic. Did it? Anthony Fauci said in November of 2020 that we were about to end the pandemic by vaccinating up to 70% of adults. We did that. Did it end the pandemic?
So governments say, if we do X, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do X and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, if we do Y, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do Y and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, if we do Z, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do Z and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, wait, wait, we've got it this time, and then....
How many times are we going to do this cycle? The Israeli health ministry has decided that a fourth COVID shot will end the pandemic, while the minister of health in the UK has just given a speech on the floor of the House of Commons announcing that the thing that will end the pandemic is a quarterly booster shot forever:
When that fails, the UK can transition to monthly boosters. To end the pandemic!
We respond to the failure of our public health measures by adopting more aggressive public health measures, after which they fail and we adopt more aggressive public health measures. Austria wants to imprison the unvaccinated. This isn't becoming absurd to anyone?
Break the cycle. Nothing that you've done so far has mattered, so stop. Don't fire teachers. Don't ban unvaccinated seniors from the senior center. Do nothing. Stop. Pandemics end. Let it end.
Man, how true was this? One of the things I appreciate about your substack is bits of wisdom from solid thinkers. I remember in July 2020 I was working by myself in a rice field thinking, How many different plans are they going to try before enough people stop believing them? It's gotta end soon. But man, it lasted forever. Until Januaryish 2022 when EVERYONE got Omicron and people just collectively stopped playing along.
You posted this December of 2021. A couple months later, everyone got Covid and it didn't matter how many shots you'd gotten. A lot of those teachers who held out against these mandates are the kind we want teaching our kids. It's a shame. I hope this letter helped others.
From the post:
"If institutions have recipe knowledge, means and ends align.
Responding to the pandemic, have our governments demonstrated recipe knowledge? Joe Biden signed a 100-day mask order immediately after he was inaugurated, and he said that 100 days of mask wearing – January to April – would end the pandemic:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/jan/21/joe-biden-mask-up-100-days-covid-coronavirus-pandemic
Did it?
The City of South Pasadena closed outdoor tennis courts to stop the spread and end the pandemic. Did it? Anthony Fauci said in November of 2020 that we were about to end the pandemic by vaccinating up to 70% of adults. We did that. Did it end the pandemic?
So governments say, if we do X, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do X and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, if we do Y, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do Y and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, if we do Z, we'll end the pandemic, and then we do Z and it doesn't end the pandemic, and then governments say, wait, wait, we've got it this time, and then...."
Virus gonna virus, and fascists gonna fascist. But we can't shoot the virus.