On vaccine passports, Solzhenitsyn and conspiracy theories

Argentina has become the latest country in the world to adopt some kind of mandatory “vaccine passport”. I don’t know or care how it’s called, perhaps it has a different official name, but it is a vaccine passport.

Some say I am a “conspiracy theorist” to point it out, but… How is it possible that all those countries came up independently with the idea of “vaccine passports”? An idea that, by the way, does NOTHING against a disease or a pandemic, and is only used to coerce people into getting vaccinated.

You will say, “but getting vaccinated will end the pandemic”, right? Well, no one believes that anymore. It didn’t and it doesn’t, especially with failed vaccines that don’t stop spread and need “boosters” every six months.

But even if it was true, even if the vaccines were as great as they were initially touted, would “vaccine passports” be the answer? No, not necessarily. Different countries could have chosen different methods to motivate people to take it. A few, outside of the Western world, did. Japan, for example, has no vaccine passports and the vaccine is completely optional for its population. Nevertheless, they have a higher vaccination rate than many other countries with much more forceful measures.

So we have to conclude, almost forcibly, that there is some sort of global operation to institute “vaccine passports” worldwide, or at any rate in the Western world, and that the reasons have very little to do with health. Some have argued that it is a push for a social credit system and digital cash. If you’re not in the system, you will be removed from all social and economic life. “You will own nothing and you’ll be happy”. Or perhaps unhappy, but who cares. Not Mr. Schwab.

Maybe the reasons are others, who knows. But it is a fact that the two things that are being pushed worldwide, and which were planned to be pushed almost from the start, are two completely new things that we had not heard about and had never been used before: a) mRNA vaccines and b) vaccine passports.

This is what they want, mRNA injections (to be used for all kinds of things, not just for diseases, to treat your body as an “operation system” requiring updates every now and then), and digital passports to control you.

Some say it is a “conspiracy theory”. But can it still be called a “conspiracy theory” if it is really happening?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said once that we should not live by lies. That is, if we know that something is a lie, we should not help to promote it with our actions.

The idea that “vaccine passports” are a health issue is a lie. And we should not pretend that it isn’t.

P. S. I don’t know if it is true, but here there’s an interesting theory suggesting that the “Omicron surge” is nothing more than the tests picking up the spike proteins generated by the vaccines. That would explain the high number of cases every time there is a new booster, which again requires the use of new boosters and so on. This way the “vaccine passports” can keep being mandated forever, the mRNA vaccine being some kind of moto perpetuo machine keeping the pandemic panic ongoing. Forever. Until we stop it. With civil disobedience, or simply ignoring the passes. It’s not that hard. If we all ignore them, there’s nothing they can do.

I have a strange feeling of dejà vu…

Happy New Year! But are we already in 2022, or have we gone back to 2020?

Canada is now joining the “Lockdown 2022” club, where most European countries already are. At least in Quebec, from 31 December new strict restrictions were announced, with nightly curfews, prohibition of private events (you can’t meet anyone outside of your own family), closure of bars, cinemas, cultural institutions. Schools and universities are becoming online again. Masks mandatory. And I am sure there are a lot of other bad measures which you can read about here, if you have the stomach for it.

Bear in mind that people in Quebec are 90% or 95% double-vaccinated, and many of them triple-vaccinated with boosters.

I used to live in Quebec and I would probably be back there now, were it not for this never-ending “war on viruses” that most Western governments have decided to bet on. The depressing part is that there are not many countries were you can escape to: it is almost everywhere the same.

How did “liberal democracies” turned into this? How many years will it take until they realize that all these measures are mostly useless, and whatever effects they may or may not have on “corona”, they have terrible consequences in themselves? Isn’t it clear that the cure, at this point, might be worse than the disease? People are increasingly unhappy all over, even those who initially supported the measures.

But madness without results cannot continue forever, and at some point it will have to end. With the passing of winter, cases will naturally reduce, and perhaps people will start to be less compliant about following the next harebrained ideas of governments to “stop the pandemic”, and it will become harder for ideologues to continue pushing restrictions and forced vaccinations too much. At least, that’s the hope.

Happy New Year to all.

This is me playing (very badly) “In the Bleak Midwinter”, a wonderful Christmas song with lyrics (actually a poem) by Christina Rossetti, and music by Gustave Holst. However, I am still learning and I play really badly. Check for other versions for a better experience. Hopefully, one day I will learn to play it…

Here we are at 2022, but it feels more like 2020, a dejà vu feeling with “lockdowns” and new restrictions popping all over again. I was hoping for a less mad 2022, but I am not sure it will happen.

That said, here at Contrarium we have many plans. New upcoming books and a new Geist magazine coming in May.

NOTE: here at the website blog, from now on I will be publishing mostly news related to books, literature, film and other cultural projects. For longer and more interesting texts about culture, society or just personal thoughts, please head out to our Substack blog, contrarium.substack.com

Happy New Year!

The “war on viruses” must go on.

Some compare corona times to the novel “1984”, but I thought that perhaps Terry Gillian’s “Brazil” could be an even more apt comparison. In that movie, the totalitarian nightmare is coordinated by bumbling and incompetent bureaucrats, who nevertheless never give up in their indefatigable pursuit of more paperwork.  

If there was one thing that this damn pandemic sure increased was bureaucracy. To travel, to meet people, or even to have a cup of coffee somewhere, anywhere, now you need to show your “papers” — or, at any rate, a QR-code in your smartphone. 

I traveled to Italy during the “first wave” of the pandemic — or was it already the second? It’s hard to recall, there were so many. At the time, the bureaucrats had invented some kind of contact tracing form that everyone needed to fill before boarding a plane, however there were four or five different forms available, and confusion reigned. People weren’t sure which form to fill or how to fill it, and in the end, no one at the airport even checked the forms. 

The procedure has been streamlined, and now they certainly check all forms and digital passes, but the confusion has only increased. Italians initially had a “Green Pass”, then a “Super Green Pass”; now they seem to be inventing some kind of “Booster Green Pass”, and yet, predictably, none of it is reducing cases. It appears, go figure, that viruses and diseases are immune to paperwork. 

On top of the passes, now they, like other European countries, also added an obligatory PCR test to all vaccinated travellers, however, the same test that is valid for the vaccinated is not valid for the unvaccinated, who are still banned from most social and economic life, even if they present such negative test. Unless they get a vaccine first. Then a booster. Then yet another PCR test. And of course all respective obligatory passes and forms. 

But there is no reason to laugh at the Italians, as the same bureaucratic nightmare takes place basically everywhere. Germany is not short of idiotic rules either. For instance, after a year of accepting surgical masks, now they are requiring FP2 masks on public transportation and even supermarkets. Is there any study that shows that FP2 masks work any better than surgical ones? Not really. It seems that the idea is that, since such masks make breathing harder, they are thought as more efficient. The cashiers, however, wear just simple surgical masks or no mask at all. I suppose they are immune to the virus. And of course, the German 2G/3G rules is a “vaccine passport” scheme with a different name, and just as useless. 

Since none of that works, one would think that with such abysmal failure the pandemic bureaucrats would give up, but that is misunderstanding the issue. As a wise man observed long ago, a bureaucracy, like a virus, exists only to perpetuate itself. 

People still have to take off their shoes and have them x-rayed before boarding a plane, twenty years after the only unsuccessful and very suspicious “shoe bombing” attempt, and they cannot carry a bottle of water through customs, even though no “water bottle bombing attempt” was ever recorded. 

Now on top of the “war on terror”, we have the equally unwinnable “war on viruses”. And its attending bureaucratic overload (“it’s for your safety!”) will last as long. 

(without burning down the house)

I remember reading a story a few years ago about a man who was so afraid of spiders that in order to kill one, he burned down his own house.

When I think of the response of most Western governments to the pandemic, that story comes back to my mind. The monomaniac obsession with “corona” seems to have turned many people blind to the several problems caused by the “fight against corona”, including increase in suicides, depression, economic downturn, social atomization, accidents, not to mention other diseases. In many ways, the “fight against the pandemic” has been a disaster in itself.

Since February 2020 I (and millions of people) felt something was off about the measures taken by authorities, and the way they developed almost as if they had been planned in advance. In fact, some of the “solutions” proposed, already by March 2020, included “mRNA vaccines” (a technology that very few had heard of before) and “vaccine passports” (a novel idea but that has been in the works for a while). First considered “conspiracy theories”, they nevertheless came to be.

I’ve been writing about the corona pandemic for a while, but a lot of it has been on social media or on blog comments, and occasionally in articles that appeared in different sites (Off-Guardian, New English Review, among others) so I am now trying to unify them here under one single publication.

The thing about the pandemic measures, which includes the original “lockdowns”, the strange vaccination campaign with “boosters” every few months and the novel idea of “vaccine passports” to enter into a cafe or use public transportation, is how unusual they are, and yet, how comparatively few people complain about them or even see them as strange. Most appear to accept them as a natural response to a pandemic, even though they have not been tried in any pandemic before.

It seems to me that it is more an instinctive thing. Either you understand instinctively that something is wrong in the approach taken by most authorities, or you don’t. (This regardless of the actual disease of “corona”, which is another matter). But why? And is there a way to do things in a better way?

The idea in some of the next articles will be to explore it.

The following was a text written for “Off-Guardian” almost a year ago as a satirical piece, but since then most of it has come to pass, except (so far) for the brain implants.

“Hi, dude!”

“Oh. Hi. How are you?”

“I’m good. How do you like my shoes?” 

“Nice. Are those…” 

“Yeah. The original Nike Lil Nas X Satan’s Shoes, version 2030”. 

“Wow. But don’t those cost a fortune? How can you afford them, with just the Universal Basic Income?”   

“Well, duh. I didn’t buy them, dude. I’m just renting them from Amazon Prime, of course. All of my clothes are rented, including the original Calvin Klein underwear.”

“Eew… Well, they did say that ‘you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’…” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“Nothing, just remembering and old joke here. So, what’s new? What are your plans for next week?”

“Not sure. Maybe I’ll go to the City Hall Yearly Masked Ball. You want to come? The masks are all N95 compliant, so it’s safe.”  

“No, thanks. I thought you were travelling to Italy for the holidays?” 

“Nah, I can’t board a plane this month. I didn’t get my Moderna monthly booster shots. I wanted to, but the lines were so big, the next appointment available for me is only next month.”  

“This Covid-29 is really pesky, isn’t it?” 

“You bet. But I’m sure the vaccine is working. Just give it time. It takes a few years to achieve full immunization, but of course, with the new variants and viruses that appear every month, it’s always a game of catching up. We got to be patient. So, yeah, no travel this month for me.”  

“Well, you know, you could always travel around your own room.”

“What?”

“Oh. I just got reminded of an old 18th century novel. ‘Voyage around my room,’ by Xavier de Maistre.” 

“What it’s about?”

“It’s about a guy who, well, travels around his room.”  

“18th century? Man, that’s like, old. When was that exactly? I guess that’s when the first lockdowns happened, right? In the first Covid era?”

“Yeah, sort of… Anyway, forget it, you just reminded me of that book. But I guess reading is not really your thing.” 

“Nah. Is there a YouTube version? You are funny, you’re one of those guys who still read, right? You’re really old-fashioned. I bet you don’t even have a microchip in your brain, L.O.L.”

“Thankfully not…” 

“…”

“What’s wrong?” 

“Don’t get close to me.” 

“What? Why? Who are you calling?” 

“Who am I calling? Who am I calling? The police, dude. Not having a brain chip is a felony, and it’s my duty as a citizen to report you, sorry. I know you’re a friend and neighbour and all, but, that’s just sick, dude. That’s really fucked-up.” 

 “No, No… Wait, stop! I meant that I don’t have the latest version of he chip. But I still have the 2029 model. As you said, I’m old-fashioned…”

“Ah… Ok… But… I don’t see the scar in your head…”  

“Oh, it’s there, trust me. It’s just that I got a hair implant on top of it, so, it’s not visible.” 

“Ah, OK. That’s cool. You were starting to scare me, dude. I mean, not having a brain chip, in this day and age…  I was starting to think you were a radical or something…” 

“Well…” 

“Oh man, it’s getting late. It was nice seeing you, but, sorry, I got to go now. I have a Zoom meeting with my family. But, see you another time, I guess. Should we do an elbow bump, or a foot shake?”

“…”

“What’s up dude? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, you know, memories. I’m kind of old now, and sometimes I get flashes of images from previous times. And now I was thinking of an old movie I saw once, long ago… “The Flowers of Saint Francis”, it was called. By Roberto Rossellini, about Saint Francis of Assisi. There is one scene in which a leper comes, ringing a bell… You know, at that time, in the Middle Ages, lepers were forced to wear bells on their clothes to announce their arrival… And so this leper comes, his little bell ringing, asking for some money, but all people move away from him, and he’s there all alone, looking so forlorn. So Saint Francis sees this, and he is so overcome with pity, that he approaches the leper and hugs him. A long hug, for several minutes. And when the poor leper goes away, he starts to cry.”    

“Eew… That’s sick, man. I mean, hugging someone. That’s just gross! What’s a leper?” 

“Oh… it’s a… Leprosy was a disease that existed a long time ago. I mean, it still exists, but it was more common then.” 

“Oh. I guess mRNA vaccines cured it, right? Man, viruses are evil. But thankfully we have those magic vaccines today.”     

“Sort of. It’s not really caused by a virus, and the treatment is not a vaccine. But anyway, I was just reminded of that scene, I don’t know why…” 

“OK. So, elbow bump or foot shake, then?”  

“Honestly, I prefer neither.” 

“Sure, that’s the safest way. See you around then, man. And get that 2030 brain chip, bro, for Satan’s sake. I mean, we’re in 2030, dude. We are not in the Middle Ages anymore.”   

“Yeah… We sure aren’t…”  

A Kafkian Short Story

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight, but this time she didn’t appear.

Instead, there were two gentlemen in dark grey clothes standing by the door.

“May we see your vaccine passport?” they asked.

Josef K., who was an unemployed bachelor and kept mostly at home, wasn’t aware that he should have taken any kind of vaccine, much less carry a “vaccine passport” with him, a concept which he didn’t really understand even though the two gentlemen explained it to him in utmost detail.

After denying having a vaccine passport, certificate, QR-code, or any proof of current and up-to-date vaccination, the two gentlemen declared his arrest.

“But why am I being arrested?” asked Josef K, timidly and politely, as he hated being rude even to strangers who woke him up early in the morning unannounced.

The two gentlemen proceeded to explain that there was a terrible contagious disease going around in the city, and since now vaccines against it were mandatory and he hadn’t gotten one, nor had he the aforementioned vaccine certificate or passport, he was endangering public health and safety.

Josef K. replied that he didn’t understand how he could possibly be endangering anyone, much less the whole of society, since he had never had such disease they were talking about, and thus could not have spread it. Moreover, he hardly got out from his house those days. But it was to no avail. The gentlemen were adamant that he was a criminal for not submitting to the still experimental medical procedure, which was, however, they assured him, “100% safe and effective.”

“But why is this vaccine mandatory?” he asked. “Can’t it just be optional for those who want it?”

The reply was that only with a 100% fully vaccinated population, which by then meant two “jabs” plus another “booster” every six months, the city could reach “herd immunity”, and thus stop spread of the disease and end the pandemic.

“So the vaccine contains the spread of the disease?”, asked Josef.

Here, the two gentlemen had to make an embarrassed pause and admit that it didn’t really stop the spread, and that in fact there had been more cases since the vaccine was introduced than before it, but insisted that the unvaccinated were the problem, because by irresponsibly being unvaccinated they were giving a bad example to the rest of the population. Besides, the concept of “vaccine passports” could not fully work if people didn’t get their mandatory vaccines every six months.

“But if the vaccine does not contain the spread, then what is the point of the vaccine passports?” Josef asked.

Here, the two gentlemen had to make an embarrassed pause again, and inform him that the point of the vaccine passports was to force people to be vaccinated, so that they would be protected from contagion by the unvaccinated, even though they could still get it from the vaccinated, but at least it could provide useful tracking information to the authorities. Only with total vaccination it would be possible for society to “go back to normal.”

“But if we need a vaccine every six months, and a ‘vaccine passport’ to go anywhere, and still have to wear masks indoors, and suffer with lockdowns every winter, and not even get rid of the disease, then how is this in any way ‘back to normal?’” asked Josef again.

Here the gentlemen started to lose their patience. One of them made a threatening gesture and the other moved to block the door, in case Josef K. was just trying to distract them with complicated questions while planning an escape.

Josef K. still did not understand why they were trying to arrest him, nor why a “vaccine passport” could be needed by anyone, healthy or sick, but rules were rules. Besides, the two gentlemen informed him that he could avoid the fines and the long prison sentence if he would just follow them to the closest vaccination centre that same day. 

So he did as ordered and took a double-vaccine, plus a couple of “boosters” at the same time, just in case.

The next morning he awoke from uneasy dreams and found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. But that’s another story…