The following excerpt from my book, “The New Abnormal,” was published on The Stream last week, reprinted here with permission (yes, I gave permission to Regnery, the book publisher, which gave permission to The Stream, which gave permission back to me to print this excerpt—intellectual property!). Enjoy...
Hippocratic Versus Technocratic Medicine
Many of our technocrats seem undeterred by the failure of public health policies and associated new technologies to mitigate the COVID pandemic. Consider, for example, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines. How successful was this technology in its first large-scale trial run in humans?A useful metric to cut through a lot of statistical noise is all-cause mortality. We can argue about the causes of death. Did this person die with COVID or from COVID? Was this fatality a vaccine side effect or a random temporal association? But we cannot argue about the body count. It is hard to spin death certificates. A recent preprint study in the medical journal The Lancet found that the mRNA vaccines showed no net benefit for all-cause mortality.
