A friend in Boston just sent me a Boston Globe interview with Nobel laureates Dr. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, in which they reaffirm their faith in the COVID-19 vaccines. Their most notable proclamation can be seen in the following screenshot.
This is a stunning assertion, given that even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged (almost two years ago) that the COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. Why would the laureates make such a patently false assertion in a newspaper published in one of the world’s most highly educated cities?
The first answer that comes to mind is that they are cynical shills of the biopharmaceutical complex that has penetrated the groves of Academe in Boston. I suspect that this is indeed largely the case, though I wonder if their cynicism is partly admixed with true faith.
For some time, I’ve gotten the impression that the biopharmaceutical complex has erected a secular religion with the vaccine offering the promise of deliverance from our frailty and vulnerability. Dr. Weissman and Ms. Karikó are “high priests” who make pronouncements about the injections that are NOT propositions deriving from empirical observation and testing, but are axiomatic articles of faith. They present these articles of faith to the Globe reporter as the Roman Emperor Constantine I and his bishops presented the Nicene Creed following the First Council of Nicaea in 325.
Philosophers and anthropologists have long observed that humans seem to be inherently religious in nature. Thus, if people no longer believe in the God of Judaism or Christianity, they are left in a spiritual vacuum in which they feel an implacable yearning to believe in something else. Many of the social and political movements now afoot in America and Europe strike me as an expression of fervent religious energy.
During the pandemic, we witnessed something like a COVID-19 cult, with Dr. Anthony Fauci playing the role of a “scientific” Pontifex Maximus replete with papal infallibility. “I am science,” he proclaimed, suggesting that he is Science Incarnate.
The so-called COVID-19 vaccines were conceived as our Salvation, and their purported safety and efficacy were adopted as Articles of Faith. Once people embraced these gene transfer products as safe and effective, no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary would dissuade them.
Even among some people who consider themselves Christian, the vaccines were conceived as more protective of life than Christ himself. Indeed, one Methodist church in Cape Town, South Africa, draped itself with a banner that explicitly announced this:
Around the same time, in Rome, Vatican City issued a 20 Euro silver coin. As the Numista catalog describes it:
“The coin depicts a doctor, a nurse and a young person who is ready to receive the vaccine. The Holy Father has repeatedly stressed the importance of vaccination, recalling that healthcare is ‘a moral obligation’, and it is important to ‘continue efforts to immunize even the poorest peoples.'”
Note that the formulation, “a young person who is ready to receive the vaccine,” is identical to the formulation for a communicant “who is ready to receive the host”—in Italian, “pronto a ricevere l’Eucaristia.”
I suppose that true believers consider the banner in Cape Town and the coin in Rome as artifacts of a religion corrupted by falsehood and false worship. I also suppose it’s no coincidence that many of the doctors who treated COVID-19 (instead of doing nothing and waiting for the heralded Vaccine Savior) were, to some degree, believers in the Jewish or Christian faith. Their faith in traditional religion perhaps made them disinclined to embrace the new religion of Vaccine Scientism.
The Christian philosopher Paul Tillich once described religion as one’s “ultimate concern.” Even people who do NOT see themselves as religious will nevertheless have an ultimate concern—that is, something they believe to be the most important thing in their lives that shapes their identities and motivates them to pursue certain ends.
For thousands (including many doctors) who participated in the pandemic response, the ultimate concern seems to have been MONEY. Humans have always worshipped money, and moralists have always lamented it. Nevertheless, the trillions of dollars created for “COVID-19 countermeasures” seem to have elevated Mammon to a new and lofty height.
Reposted from John Leake’s Substack
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