The ultimate antivax conspiracy theory

I’ve long argued that antivaccine beliefs are, at their heart, nothing but a big conspiracy theory, even going so far as to delineate what I consider to be the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement. Indeed, I’ve gone further than that and argued that antiscience beliefs are always rooted in conspiracy theories. I was reminded of this one more time the other day by Toby Rogers, whose Substack is a reliable source of only the most bonkers antiscience conspiracy mongering, be it antivaccine, transphobic, or whatever. This reminder came in the form of two posts, Every step was designed to inflict maximum harm and The economic crisis we face.

If you want to see what I mean by conspiracy theory, the first post is instructive, while the second post weaves the reasons together into a fevered stew of nonsense that views scientists, physicians, governments, and the public health establishment not just as lax but as actively wanting to kill millions of people:

What’s striking about Covid is that every step was designed to inflict maximum harm:

• Splicing HIV into a coronavirus (who even comes up with an idea that sinister!?).
• Blocking access to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
• Removing NAC from the shelves.
• No early treatment.
• Respirators that kill 90% of patients.
• Seeding nursing homes with Covid+ patients.
• Blanket “Do Not Resuscitate” orders for the disabled.
• “15 days to flatten the curve” that slowed the rate of natural immunity.
• Closing schools for two years.
• Masks that reduce oxygen.
• Shutting down gyms to reduce exercise.
• Keeping liquor stores open while closing the churches that host AA meetings.
• Closing hiking trails, beaches, and parks thus preventing people from getting vitamin D.
• Remdesivir and Paxlovid that are expensive, useless, and deadly.
• The most toxic and deadly vaccines in history on a new platform that will never work.
• Billions of dollars spent on propaganda to convince people to accept every step of this nefarious plan.
• Firings, censorship, and blacklisting of critical thinkers.

Actual science was always ignored. Every action by government for four years degraded the health of the public. Covid is a world war, launched by the ruling class, against humanity.

See what I mean? Two of of the key elements of conspiratorial thinking are to see patterns in randomness and to attribute malign intent to this pattern, regardless of whether there is any evidence of malign intent or not; well, that, and to claim that the “truth” is being “suppressed,” as Rogers does in the last two bullet points. As for the rest, I’ve written about damned near all of those pieces of misinformation, such as the false claims that HIV was “spliced into” SARS-CoV-2. I don’t feel the need to address all those claims individually, as they are all nonsense, with the possible exception of the “flatten the curve” claim, which is not nonsense in the way that Rogers implies. (It’s nonsense in that in retrospect it should always have been obvious that a period of 15 days was never going to be sufficient to flatten the curve.) The point is that “they” (the “ruling class”) are not just malign; they actively wanted to kill millions of people, to launch a “world war” against all of humanity. Why? Who knows? As much as we might despise the ruling class, they are part of humanity too and can’t escape that.

More interesting to me is the reason for the war against humanity supposedly launched by the ruling class as described by Rogers in his other post. First, though, I was very interested in this part:

Last week I traveled to Connecticut to participate in a four-day writers’ retreat hosted by Jeffrey Tucker and the Brownstone Institute. It was amazing. Speakers presented on a topic or question for 15 minutes that was followed by a discussion for 15 minutes.

You might recall that the Brownstone Institute has been spreading antivax and right wing conspiracy theories ever since it was founded a couple of years ago by Jeffrey Tucker, the neo-Confederate activist who had helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration, that document advocating a eugenicist “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic to build up “natural herd immunity” as rapidly as possible by letting the virus circulate through the “healthy population” while claiming to have a strategy to “protect the vulnerable.” Never mind that they never actually had such a strategy other than platitudes used to browbeat public health officials and that “natural herd immunity” never would have worked as a strategy given how easily SARS-CoV-2 could evolve new variants to evade immunity from infection with previous variants.

Given its history, I should have guessed that the Brownstone Institute would be holding writers’ retreats, the better to help its propagandists hone their rhetorical skills, the better to fool those sympathetic to their ideology and/or lacking the knowledge of science and critical thinking skills to recognize their bullshit for what it is. It should therefore be no surprise that Toby Rogers’ “remarks” to the retreat, which is why he summarizes in his post, are bullshit of the highest, stinkiest order.

He begins by declaring:

The crisis of Covid is not just that the ruling class killed a lot of people.

The crisis of Covid is that the fundamental basis of our economy shifted from a positive-sum game to the worst negative-sum game in human history.

I’m sure my readers are all familiar with a zero-sum game, in which the gains of any participant are exactly balanced out by the losses of another or others. Similarly, a positive-sum game is a game in which the gains overall are greater than the sum of the losses. But what about negative-sum games? I think you can see where Rogers is going with this:

In a negative-sum game, the total losses of the participants exceed the total gains.

Wars are often cited as negative-sum games. The resources expended in terms of lives lost, destruction of infrastructure, and economic impact outweigh any potential gains.

Now let’s apply these definitions to our current situation.

Oh, goody. Let’s not and say we did. Unfortunately, Rogers can’t resist:

When our country was founded, white men participated in a positive-sum economy — free and equal exchange between sovereign citizens. With the civil war, the franchise was extended to people of color. With the gains of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, that positive-sum economic game was extended to the whole of society.

Yes, Rogers, speaking to Brownstone, has a predictably blinkered view of American history that leaves out a lot, such as that the “free and equal exchange” he touts was never totally free, much less equal. He also seems to forget that whole bit about slavery, too, other than to seem to think that inequality magically disappeared after the civil rights movement and that the whole of society participated in this “positive-sum game.” I won’t dwell on that too much, because what comes next is the doozy:

Covid marks an abrupt shift from a positive-sum game to the most extreme negative-sum game in history. I take the point that this had been coming on for fifty years if not longer. But Covid marked the moment where the ruling class revealed their true intentions.

By Covid I mean, the development and release of SARS-CoV-2, the murderous hospital protocols, government edicts that blocked access to safe and effective medicines, and the creation of the most dangerous vaccines in human history.

Another characteristic of conspiracy theories is that their internal contradictions don’t seem to bother their believers. Think about it. If, as Rogers first claimed, the US had been enjoying this fantastical game in which the free market, consisting of the free and equal exchange of goods and services among sovereign citizens, was benefiting all (at least since the 1960s, I guess), then who is this “ruling class” and how could it possibly have the power to do what he claims next?

I mean, the power to do this:

Robert Kennedy Jr. actually figured out this shift right before Covid and I think it’s the most important economic insight of our lifetime.

At a speech at a fundraiser in Florida in early 2020 before we realized that Covid would be a thing, Robert Kennedy Jr. explained that Big Pharma globally makes about $50 billion a year from vaccines but then makes another $500 billion a year from treatment of vaccine injuries. This stunned me at first, but when I started to do the math I realized that he is right. We’ll return to this in a moment.

With Covid, Big Pharma basically doubled its money with another $50 billion a year in Covid vaccine revenue followed by another $500 billion a year from treatment of Covid vaccine injuries. That’s why Pfizer is going into the cancer treatment business for example.

See what I mean? This is how conspiracy theorists refute the idea that pharma doesn’t make a lot of money off of vaccines. To them, vaccines have always been a “loss leader,” produced to make people sick so that they require other products that big pharma does make a lot of money selling. Ingenious, right? Far be it from me to claim that pharmaceutical companies are any sort of paragons of virtue, but this is supervillain-level plotting so extreme that the producers of the James Bond or Marvel movies would probably find it too implausible to incorporate into the plot of one of their films.

You might respond, quite reasonably, that we have lots of evidence in the form of scientific studies showing that vaccines are safe and effective, but Rogers is read for that gambit of “suppression” of evidence:

Vaccines are an incredibly difficult topic to study.

• The blacklisting and censorship are so severe that anyone who goes near this topic with an open mind is committing career suicide.
• There are no double-blind, randomized controlled trials with a true saline placebo and so there are no proper meta analyses or systematic reviews of vaccines or the vaccine schedule.
• The studies that do exist are low quality and contaminated by financial conflicts of interest.
• I wrote an article about this problem a couple months ago titled, “Systematic review and meta-analysis are broken.”

It basically takes four or five years to read all of the pro studies and identify their weaknesses and then work through the alternative literature to find the censored studies, read the documents turned over via the Freedom of Information Act and in discovery in the courts, and to interview enough parents of vaccine injured children to understand the scope and dynamics of the problem.

Almost no one has the bandwidth to do that. It’s actually an interesting epistemological problem because the only people who are willing to take this on are parents of vaccine injured children and a handful of academics who are naïve enough to think that they can change the world — and then they get lynched by the drug cartel.

But if one does the hard yards one will see that autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders including arthritis, deadly allergies, asthma, Alzheimer’s, childhood cancers, diabetes, eczema, seizure disorders, and sex dysphoria are vaccine injuries. The various studies that prove that are generally censored by Google (or de-ranked into oblivion) and so you have to use alternative methods and networks for finding them. All of these medical conditions require expensive treatments over a lifetime.

See what I mean? To Rogers, the reason that science doesn’t take seriously his ravings and all the bogus claims of harm from vaccines couldn’t possibly be because the scientific evidence not only doesn’t support such claims but in fact strongly refutes them or that he doesn’t understand the evidence. After all, he parrots the claim that there are no “double blind randomized controlled trials with a true saline placebo,” even though it’s easy to find a number of these trials just by searching PubMed and we all know that the COVID-19 vaccines were approved only after very large saline-controlled RCTs with over 70,000 subjects between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials in 2020.

While it is true that there are some vaccines in the childhood vaccine schedule that were not tested against saline, this was not the result of some conspiracy to “hide” how harmful they supposedly are. It was the result of simple clinical trial ethics, specifically the concept of clinical equipoise, which states that there must be genuine uncertainty over which group in an RCT will fare better or else the trial is unethical. As I described in detail last summer, if there already exists a licensed vaccine that is safe and effective preventing a given disease, it is not ethical to test a new vaccine against that disease versus placebo, because it would require that the control group be randomized to remain unprotected against that disease. (Also, saline is not the only valid placebo control.)

Finally, there is nothing that says that you can’t do a “proper meta-analysis” if there are no saline-controlled RCTs to examine. Scientists do this all the time with questions for which the primary evidence base is epidemiological or observational. Strength of evidence is ranked the same way that it always is. Basically, what Rogers is doing here is making excuses for why science doesn’t accept all the antivax claims of harm made by him and his fellow conspiracy mongers. The data are tainted by conflicts of interest (whether that’s true or not)! Big pharma attacks anyone who dares to look into this matter. It’s career suicide not to toe the line. Oh, and it’s not just pharma, but social media, the food industry, psychiatry, and the whole “biowarfare” industry that’s keeping you—yes, you!—from learning The Truth, with the result being an impending economic crisis that They will blame on You. They even created the pandemic to accomplish this!

The end result, according to Rogers:

Our economic system now is the opposite of liberalism. It’s the fulfillment of the dreams of the Third Reich. With CRISPR, the biowarfare industry can infinitely change the DNA and RNA of humans and viruses. They’re bad at it right now. But the temptation is too great, they will never stop playing God. 

Why hasn’t big business pushed back against this? Companies including Walmart, Apple, Ford, and Nike have a lot to lose from this widespread destruction of American society. My hunch is that it’s because the biowarfare industry has captured capital itself. Pandemics, chronic disease, and response is a growth industry — one of the only growth industries on Earth at this point. DNA is the new terra nullius to be conquered and colonized.

So first it was the childhood schedule, then Covid, and now the plan is for new pandemics as far as the eye can see.

That’s the system that we are fighting to overthrow.

See? Rogers can even manage to make up reasons why companies that, one would think, would not be down with this whole conspiracy because it would affect their profitability, would go along; that is, before he boringly parrots the same old antivax conspiracy theory that “They” will keep producing pandemics so that “They” can keep forcing you to take their vaccines.” (Seriously, antivaxxers, you need a new schtick at this point.)

Again, it’s so bad that not even Rogers’ devoted commentariat is all buying it, in part because what he is saying clashes with other parts of the antivax narrative, as this commenter points out:

Erm, should I tell him or you?

Covid, if “released” would have to go down as the weakest Dr. Badguy plot ever conceived! A terrifying IFR of 0.03! No, covid was simply a ruse of 24/7 news propaganda with a side order of one size fits all death certificates and a sprinkling of deadly hospital/nursing home protocols. Remember that annual influenza disappeared for two years, yep year after year, regular as clockwork, but for the period that “covid” came to visit it took a well deserved vacation.

The “badguys” will never release a deadly anything as, newsflash…it would get them too! Nice try though.

See what I mean? They’ve been told by antivax conspiracy theorists that COVID-19 was both a biowarfare agent but also that it is no more dangerous than a cold, that latter reason being one reason why they view COVID-19 vaccines as unnecessary.

In the end, though, the specifics of any given conspiracy theory (or theories) promoted by antivaxxers like Toby Rogers are not nearly as important as realizing that antivax is just one big conspiracy theory. This one is just one of the biggest ones I’ve seen. I’m half tempted to say that the only thing it lacks is aliens.