Vaccine incentive calculator

Apparently, no one’s ever seen a dystopian sci-fi movie in which a futuristic, authoritarian government keeps society on a leash by appealing to primal fears of contamination, loneliness, sickness and death.

The fact that (educated) dissident voices are being systematically silenced, and that non-collaborators are being pointed at as pretty much enemies of the State should ring some bells. Just some basic pattern-recognitions skills are enough to realize that something is off with what’s going on. For the record, it always seemed that way to many of the regulars at The Outpost.

That’s because this is not about the current pandemic; at least, not only about the current pandemic. Do people die of Covid? Yes, they do. But a lot of the things that Covid is being blamed for, are actually a consequence of the response to it.

Governments have been citing pandemics as a primary risk in their security strategies for decades now. It seems surprising that, precisely when all the written and carefully planned protocols should be put into action, the administration instead opts for panicking and applying draconian measures which are ineffectual at best.

But again, this would be the case only if this was just about a respiratory zoonosis originated in Wuhan, and nothing else; we have already established that that’s not the case.

What is being done with making vaccination mandatory to the general population is just the beginning of something else. It sets the precedent for direct, unabashed intervention over people's bodies in a way that's never done with ultimately positive consequences (plenty of times with negative consequences, but that’s a topic for another day). A biopolitical dream, enlisting the help of surveillance technologies with an unprecedented reach.

Everything started with the smoking ban. Decreasing tolerance for risk in general, and for health risks in particular, have led to the false pretense that life can always be preserved by applying the correct, Science™-approved measures. Doom is not doom, but “a situation” to be technically managed.

This is all absurd, of course, but what can you expect from a world in which death equals annihilation and health is a right and not a blessing.

It's not that this jab is particularly dangerous and that we are being led to the slaughterhouse. Power can do many more things to the Human body. Things that are often quite horrible and unnatural, albeit sometimes in subtle ways: debt-slavery and k-12 mandatory schooling are fine examples. And of course you also have prison, the death penalty, and the draft. Ever heard about the Battle of the Somme? Yeah, those were probably worse odds than getting injected with Pfizer’s venom (Yours Truly is a survivor of the latter, but not the former).

The point is that mandatory vaccination for such a disease represents a justification, a field and a method of control almost unexplored so far by liberal democracies. Other regimes have experimented with similar stuff and worse before, with well-known outcomes that are beside the point.f

Many of the misunderstandings regarding this matter come from an erroneous perspective on what Power is, and particularly State power.

The democratic myth establishes that the State (Power) serves the People. That’s either because Power resides in the People, or because Power serves the People. The first is obviously false, as the material reality of Power -the correlation of forces, a Russian would say- is simply on the side of the State. The second is false by definition, as Power is the opposite of Service.

In the ethical dilemma regarding medical interventions-certainly not in propaganda pieces and fearmongering pamphlets of all sides-, there is something that is rarely mentioned: vaccines are directed towards populations, not individuals.

The jab does in fact provide with protection on a personal level. Its design and its logic, however, is based on the collective. The telos of a vaccine is always to protect a population, and not a person. It is a means of immunizing a group by way of reducing the probability of infection following a geometrical progression.

Under such a context, adverse reactions are simply collateral damage, and usually they happen at a rate that is extremely cost effective - from the population's point of view. A single death is nothing compared to the breaching of the group’s inmunity.

The incentive balance is lopsided: a single individual getting the injection improves very little the situation of the collective. As much as he may be partially protected by the shot, a myriad of personal factors can affect his situation. If he gets infected anyway, vaccine notwithstanding, the likelihood of a severe-to-fatal outcome is small.

On the other hand, he does face a significant risk. Although an adverse reaction is very unlikely, its cost is potentially total: death/paralysis/other severe, life-altering consequences.

Let’s put some numbers into this, just to make it more understandable.

From the individual’s point of view, a 0.0000000001 probability of paying an infinite price (their life) equals infinity. This does not change however small said probability may be.

From the collective’s point of view, the life of a finite number of people represents a finite "price", however expensive. Meanwhile, a 0.000000000000000000000001 probability of Covid destroying the collective, times the infinite cost of the collective's survival, remains infinity. Thus, through this logic, the Covid vax could be much deadlier and erratic and still be worth it in this calculation.

In other words, the incentives of the individual and the collective are diammetrically opposed in this instance.

It is in fact quite similar to voting. If you vote, you trade the price of legitimizing the electoral process for a very marginal influence on the outcome. And if voting, as a civic duty, represents an act of paying allegiance to the State, then you’re actually selling your soul for a near-zero amount of power.

That said, vaccines -at least conventional ones; i.e. polio et al- do, in fact, work. This does not mean they are exempt from problems, just that they are worth it to the collective; whatever benefit the individual derives from them is a bonus in the eyes of a National Health System.

Although individuals working for Power are human and prone to virtuous feelings themselves, Power itself is not. Public health is not compassion towards the population, but the managing of an asset, which happens to be Human in this case.

When your patient is the collective and not the individual, such measures are the obvious choice - public health professionals work for the public, not for you.

Is this perverse and Satanic? Probably. That's why we should pray.