I’ve just read Do No Harm, the account by Dr David Cartland, a Christian family physician now living in Cornwall, of how COVID made him a dissenter from the “trusted narrative,” leading up to the time the GMC struck him off permanently last year. His persecutors, since then, have also managed to get the DBS to pronounce him unfit to work with children, and the Football Association has barred him from refereeing matches. As we all know, hanging,drawing and quartering is too good for vaccine sceptics and whistle-blowers. Read the book.
But my reading has prompted me to consider again how just one meaningless phrase became the shibboleth on which careers and reputations, like that of our Brother David, stood or fell over COVID. That phrase is, of course, “Safe and Effective.” Somewhere in the book Cartland mentions that in the 1990s he was trained in the unexamined assumption that vaccines are “safe and effective,” vaccination being trumpeted as medicine’s greatest contribution to human well-being, without their risks even being mentioned.
I find that interesting because when I was trained, fifty years ago, it was not so. True, it was assumed pretty much unquestioningly that vaccines work pretty well (though remember how many fewer there were back then), and that the risks are outweighed by the benefits. But I don’t recall ever imbibing the idea that they were an exception to the universal principle of pharmacology that good drugs always have a failure rate, and invariably carry risks, which must be taken into account in prescribing, and development too.
It was common knowledge, I think, that the original vaccinations by Jenner decreased the 1-2% mortality rate of the older variolation with smallpox serum, but did not obviate it. This much was standard knowledge, even without the exposure of smallpox vaccination’s questionable historical track record, as documented for example in Humphries and Bystrianyk in Dissolving Illusions. I even remember being told in Pathology how analysis of old smallpox vaccine showed it to be a soup of various contaminants, sometimes with little or no cowpox.
Then again the original polio vaccine scandal of the 1950s was within us students’ lifetime, and within the careers of older doctors. Vaccines, then, could be reasonably effective and moderately safe. But the long development and trial times and the strict regulatory apparatus around them were, in themselves, a constant reminder that “safety” and “effectiveness” were no more blanket descriptions of vaccines than they were for other drugs.
Those drugs notably included thalidomide, for whose then-teenage victims there was a special unit at Roehampton Hospital, where I did some training. We all assumed that the world’s sad experience in that quarter had permanently alerted drug firms and doctors alike to the need for rigorous caution.
But if all that is ancient history, the Pandemrix scandal just eleven years before COVID should have alerted even David Cartland’s generation of teachers that “Safe and Effective” has no place in the discussion of vaccines. The fact that Anthony Fauci had been the voice making the loudest reassurances about Pandemrix in 2009 should, alone, have alerted the whole medical world to the degree of bullshitting over the novel, entirely experimental and grotesquely under-tested COVID immunotherapies forced into every arm, with menaces.
So how could it have ever come about that the “Safe and Effective” mantra, the sales slogan for the COVID genetic therapies, was not only parroted by stupid politicians around the world, nor even by Chief Medical and Scientific Officers dependent on their patronage and well-endowed with Big Pharma shares, but by nearly every doctor sticking them into our bodies?
You can look at my own blogs of the time, and see the severe doubts that even this retired GP had about skipping vital long-term safety studies, and about the novel mRNA technology itself, which already had a horrendously lethal track record that was easy to find. That was before it became clear how much corruption, research obfuscation, legal gerrymandering, poor quality control and so on were involved.
Yet even after all that, “Safe and Effective” remained not only a jingle to sell boosters, but a cross on which to crucify any dissidents in the profession, in the media, in Parliament and in families. Even now the NHS website uses the same mantra, although slightly rearranged to sound more convincing:
“COVID-19 vaccines in use in the UK have all met strict standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.”
Remember, until 2024 that phrase used to include the world-beating British AstraZeneca shot quietly withdrawn after 3 billion doses because of its smetimes-lethal reactions. And of course the “strict standards of safety” have been met by industry-funded bodies no longer dedicated to pharmaco-vigilance, but to “facilitation.” The NHS is generating propaganda, not information.
The predictable explanation has to be (as Cartland suggests) mass formation, or whatever variant on that theory you prefer. As the theorist Mattias Desmet asserts, free-floating anxiety already existed aplenty in 2020, making the population highly vulnerable to suggestion. The biosecurity industry which both invented the virus, and spearheaded the response to cover their tracks more than to remedy their error, deliberately engineered more fear to increase compliance and trust. Marginally less reprehensible governments and professional leaders accepted “Project Fear” for the public good, lacking sufficient moral compass to understand the difference between good and evil. They even lacked the nous to realise that fear and panic reduce immunity, rather than protecting the vulnerable.
And the masses, including sadly the mass of my professional colleagues, ranged between passive indoctrination (encouraged by the constant repetition of slogans like “Safe and Effective” – see also “Diversity is Strength,” “Community Cohesion,” etc), and half-willing compliance through fear of marginalisation.
On the latter, Cartland documents several examples of professionals declining the vaccines for themselves and their families, but then organising the clinics that jabbed everyone else. They didn’t even think to practice real informed consent. £12 profit per shot might have played a part, but my own impression is that they believed “Safe and Effective” with their professional minds whilst rejecting it as nonsense in their personal minds. In the trade, that is called “double-mindedness,” or more succinctly “hypocrisy.”
And so cultural insanity may be said (according to Desmet) to depend on a very small group of propaganda originators, with a range of perverse motives usually related to money, power or demonic religion.
A much more sizeable chunk of humanity is chronically susceptible to the propaganda, which makes for widespread true insanity if the whole society is steeped in multiple propaganda programmes: the bogeymen here and now include simultaneously the anti-vaxxers, the Putin stooges, the Far-Right thugs, the Islamophobes, the Zionists and of course the climate deniers.
But another large chunk of people to a greater or lesser extent disbelieves the propaganda, and may even take discreet steps in denying it, such as not turning up for the “Safe and Effective” shots, buying an ICE car, or sidling up to known dissidents and saying, “I agree with you, you know, but I have a mortgage/a career/influential friends/a church fellowship to consider.” Yet such people will usually still sign the open letter calling for the dissident’s head on a platter, because to refuse would suggest support, and the promotion still needs to be won. And so they may just as well be lumped with the fully mass-formed.
Those who refuse to comply (once more, encompassing a spectrum of defiance, for they are not sociopaths immune to fear or coercion) comprise, according to Desmet, as little as 1%. And that seems to accord with the way that the persecution centres on a few scapegoats, rather than all who dissent. Think of Cartland or Anthony Bridgen over COVID, Tommy Robinson or Raja Miah over the rape gangs, Danny Tommo or Lucy Connolly over illegal immigration, J.K. Rowling or Graham Lineham over transgender madness, and so on. These are a small percentage of a small percentage.
But the good news, according to Desmet, is that whilst such small numbers of public figures, bloggers, and unwelcome spectres at the family party or the practice meeting are too few to overcome the mass-formation, they have a unique role in breaking the power of its spell. In other words, they can prevent the delusion, it seems, from descending into the customary end of mass-formation in the violent repression of totalitarianism.
That makes sense. David Cartland has been struck off as a doctor and, in many ways, un-personed as completely as any Soviet dissident. But because of his open stand for truth, not only many of the public at large, but more importantly many patients and medical staff who were too fearful to stand with him, know he has been falsely accused, and rightly feel guilty for their part in that. And the more people there are convicted of guilt, the less power the propaganda has over them. True, scape-goating often assuages societal guilt (as per René Girard), but for a significant number in the mob, the dissonance is increased.
The more of these people there are, the easier it is to say “Unsafe and Ineffective, actually.” And that’s why, in the end, it is always the truth that prevails.
