The breaking news of the day: two decisions from the Supreme Court, one striking down the Biden Administration’s OSHA mandate, that companies with 100+ employees must ensure that their employees are vaccinated or submit to weekly testing, the other allowing the Administration’s vaccine mandate for workers at health care facilities receiving federal funding (which is approximately 100% of such facilities). Good news on the OSHA front, bad news on the health care worker front. The fight against the biomedical security state continues.
This is a political problem that requires a political solution. Politics—“the most authoritative and architectonic art,” which “ordains what sciences there must be in the city,” “makes use of the remaining sciences,” and “legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from” (Aristotle, Ethics 1.2)—will either be part of the problem or part of the solution. There is no middle ground. Those holding political office will either continue to advance—through commission or omission—the interests of our increasingly transnational, posthuman oligarchs, or else attempt to slow down and roll back the biomedical security state that has overtaken the world these last two years.
Much could be said. Here are two brief thoughts, the first on the expressly political dimension, the second on the bigger picture.
First: we have not yet seen a truly political response to the COVID public health regime. In the United States, COVID arrived early enough before November 2020 to make a difference in how those elections proceeded (a massive expansion of mail-in voting), but too close to the election for the public health regime itself to be an issue in the election. Imagine if COVID had arrived in January 2019: policy decisions made in response to it would have been, or been closely related to, the top priorities for voters in a national election. The 2022 midterms will be the first chance for the American people to at least try to hold our public officials responsible. There is chatter at the margins—unfortunately, the very far margins—of Congressional committees opening investigations into the public health establishment’s misconduct. If such talk is every to become reality—a very big if—it will begin with the people speaking out, pressuring and in some cases replacing their representatives.
We are very far into wishland already, but since we’re here: what would it take to increase the likelihood that the American people could respond politically to our irresponsible public health regime of the past two years? Here is a humble suggestion. We need a medical liberty / medical tyranny rating agency. Such an agency would give every politician a grade, from A to F, based on every decision they’ve made about lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, etc., just like the NRA does for gun rights. I don’t know how many “medical liberty” single-issue voters there will be, but the last 12 months in particular has shown that there is dissent against the public health regime bubbling up from all kinds of corners, left and right. What we the people need now, nationally and locally, is clarity on who stands where, so that we can pass judgment at the ballot box.
But this is not a normal political controversy, and it is hard to imagine normal political measures addressing the depths of the crisis. On the larger, extrapolitical dimensions to this crisis, I can do no better at present than commend to you the writings of Paul Kingsnorth, especially his three-part essay The Vaccine Moment (originally published on his Substack). I hope to find time soon to write something about Kingsnorth and his COVID essays, because they deserve a larger audience, especially here in the United States. As he writes in the introduction to his Vaccine Moment essays:
These three essays do not pretend to any expertise on either virus or vaccine, but then they are only tangentially about those things. What I am writing about here is the systems of authoritarian control which have been built around us these last eighteen months, for which both virus and vaccine have provided a pretext. I am trying to get to the root of what is going on, to understand the stories we are telling ourselves about it all, and especially to emphasise how those stories are means in themselves of exerting control over our future direction of travel.
“We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state”
With the severity of the labor shortage already happening right now, a vaccine mandate for the businesses could have led to a major disaster for the country. That, and permanent Constitutional damage that a feckless President Biden almost caused, is the point we should all be hammering home with those who will listen to us right now
"There is no middle ground." Correct!