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It’s bigger than we realize. It means more than we currently see.

I spoke with a friend yesterday whose daughter is about be thrown out of her university for her failure to accept the Sacrament of the State. On the same day, the University of California similarly fired Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an experienced physician and professor of medical ethics, who has recovered from COVID-19 and declines the available vaccines on the premise that he is protected by natural immunity.

As institutions move to finalize the purge of the unvaccinated, universities that have achieved COVID vaccination rates in the high-90s are shutting down and emptying their campuses because they’re in the grips of massive COVID outbreaks — which have centered, given the fact of near-complete vaccination rate on these campuses, on the fully vaccinated. Here’s what happened at Cornell:

On Wednesday, Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina said in a statement to PEOPLE, "Virtually every case of the omicron variant to date has been found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot."

We’re shutting down because people who have done X have not been protected against infection; also, we demand that you do X immediately, to protect against infection.

At the same time, fully-vaccinated teams in the NFL, NHL, and NBA are postponing games and ramping up ever-more-extensive COVID protocols as nearly 300 athletes have tested positive for COVID in recent days. “Not counting practice rosters, the Los Angeles Rams sees 26 players out with Covid-19 followed by the Cleveland Browns and Washington Football Team each with 21.”

While organizations see waves of positive tests among triple-vaccinated people, regulators are warning with growing clarity that the available COVID vaccines are not as safe as promised. This week, precisely as Cornell imploded in a panic over its high number of cases, a CDC expert panel voted to warn people against taking the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine. Note these paragraphs in the linked story:

Pablo Sanchez, a member of the ACIP, said he has concerns about the vaccine, according to The Washington Post.

"I just cannot recommend a vaccine that is associated with a condition that may lead to death," he said.

You may be onto something there, Pablo.

While the CDC panel advises people avoiding the J&J vaccine to take the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines instead, regulators in Nordic countries are warning younger people against use of the Moderna vaccine, and have been joined now by regulators in Germany and France.

So the effectiveness of the vaccines is being tested by reality in dramatic ways, regulators are taking a much more critical look at the emerging safety concerns with vaccines that are also increasingly ineffective, and institutions are going all-in on complete and immediate purges of the unvaccinated. The failure is increasingly clear, so institutional actors are committing to the failed course in an increasingly aggressive and unyielding performance.

Just as critics of the GET THE JAB moral panic like to say that it’s not about your health, it’s disturbingly clear that the collapse of institutional governance isn’t about COVID at all. Rather, it’s a complete transition into an emptied and performative “expertise,” a world without recipe knowledge. People who run big cities attack routine policing in ways that lead to much-higher murder rates; political leaders call for the passage of multi-trillion-dollar federal spending measures to bring inflation under control. We must run the printing press to strengthen our currency!

We abandon measures that have worked, embrace policies that have failed, and wait for the success of our choices. Tom Wolfe called this “the great relearning.”

The question is, Can the people who are in charge of our institutions respond to evidence, analyze it calmly and rationally, and make decisions that are likely to produce the results they intend?

It sure doesn’t look like they can. You must take the vaccine to stop the spread of the virus that’s spreading rapidly in our fully-vaccinated population is a warning siren. It’s our alert to the decline of evidence-based thinking in our self-credentialing leadership class; it warns that the devolution of institutions into ritual performance is a disaster.

The implications go far beyond this bizarre moment.