The Brazen Serpent (Numbers 21:9), Artist: Tissot; Photographer: John Parnell. ©The Jewish Museum

The current vaccination craze presents some puzzles.

Those who insist that we must have a regulatory body like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), even if it adds great expense to drugs and prohibits many useful treatments with calculable loss of life, are the same folks who also believe that the population of the whole world should be injected with experimental gene therapy while pretending that only good can result.

Though the new therapeutics has been studied for 20 years, the studies are by no means exhaustive.

Libertarians are beset with the inverse problem: a fast-tracked pseudo-vaccine has reached the masses, and because normal FDA procedures were bypassed (by Trump), it can look like a triumph of pharmaceutical capitalism over regulatory dirigisme. But note: the drug was indeed pushed by politicians and bureaucrats, is heavily tax-subsidized, and demand for it has been whipped up by a massive panic orchestrated as a psy-op by our managerial elites, not a few of them inhabiting the corridors of power in that sector we call “the Deep State.” The explicit goal for many people inside and outside of government is to inject all of humanity with this peculiar treatment. This is nothing like a free market. It is a government operation, and the product being pushed has consequences we cannot know. But we do know that it has unknown consequences.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a common-sense cautionary maxim.

”Don’t inoculate the whole world with an experimental gene therapy” would be that wisdom translated into the contemporary situation.

At base, here, are issues that get to the heart of medical intervention. Public goods problems abound, at this level, and they do not suggest the advisability of a uniform policy. Indeed, uniformity of policy is a very dangerous course to take. It is inherently fragile, not antifragile — and as I write this, I am more than aware that the coiner of that term, antifragility, has been a huge pusher of the COVID panic. I believe he has been profoundly wrong, because he has only conceived of the danger in one dimension. Which is a strange thing in itself, since Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s genius has been to broaden our conception of threats and menaces. In his reaction to the pandemic, Taleb has become the thing he despises, a fragilista.

But then, fragilistas have been generally ascendent. When confronted with a menace, it is hard for most people — driven by fear and with their imaginations limited enough to prevent them from considering the sheer variety and enormity of possible threats — to resist the promise of a panacea, even if said panacea makes our species and our civilization weaker. And in this case could open us up to much worse diseases with far graver consequences.

Fragilistism is the mind contagion against which our welfare-state, social-engineer dominated civilization has proven to possess few antibodies.

Pity. It has been an astounding civilization, for all its horrors.

twv