Amnesty for the unvaxxed is not yours to give
or forgiveness by the damned is no forgiveness at all
Seneca, de clementia 1.2
I know, however, that there are some who imagine that clemency only saves the life of every villain, because clemency is useless except after conviction, and alone of all the virtues has no function among the innocent. But in the first place, although a physician is only useful to the sick, yet he is held in honour among the healthy also; and so clemency, though she be invoked by those who deserve punishment, is respected by innocent people as well. Next, she can exist also in the person of the innocent, because sometimes misfortune takes the place of crime; indeed, clemency not only succours the innocent, but often the virtuous, since in the course of time it happens that men are punished for actions which deserve praise. Besides this, there is a large part of mankind which might return to virtue if the hope of pardon were not denied them. Yet it is not right to pardon indiscriminately; for when no distinction is made between good and bad men, disorder follows, and all vices break forth; we must therefore take care to distinguish those characters which admit of reform from those which are hopelessly depraved. Neither ought we to show an indiscriminate and general, nor yet an exclusive clemency; for to pardon everyone is as great cruelty as to pardon none; we must take a middle course; but as it is difficult to find the true mean, let us be careful, if we depart from it, to do so upon the side of humanity.
Over the last few weeks there have been calls for a “pandemic amnesty.” In particular, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University—and one of the great misinformers and miscreants of the last two years—thinks it is time to forget and move on. She closes her rather banal piece in the Atlantic with the following:
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
There are a number of profoundly insipid claims here, that reflect a lingering lack of self awareness.
People did not “neglect their health care.” Lockdowns resulted in cancelled health appointments. People died because of these cancellations. Gyms closed. People got fat (or fatter). Curfews were imposed. People committed suicide. People overdosed on drugs. People became alcoholics. A massive propaganda campaign inflicted emotional and psychological damage on countless individuals (including Oster, no doubt). Rather than spend billions and billions on improving health care infrastructure and modernizing the health care industry to deal with things like a new cold virus, these billions were handed over to private pharmaceutical companies to purchase a product that had not been adequately tested for safety or efficacy, and the claims of its safety and efficacy simply came out of the marketing budgets of these companies. This misallocation of public funds and resources will have generational impacts as the health care industry continues to disintegrate and fail. Oster shows a deeply ignorant view of precisely what has occurred the last two years. People didn’t neglect their health care: the public health establishment promoted policies that actively harmed people’s physical, mental and emotional health.
She does not want to debate the “messaging of the COVID vaccine” as she then gestures to more “vaccine mandates.” The issue is not one of messaging, or how to package a novel pharmaceutical intervention. The issue is the deleterious employment of “nudging” and behavioural science to corrupt language in order to drive compliance.
The definition of vaccine was changed in 2021 to include a novel mRNA technology that in no way operates like a traditional vaccine. I am a philologist by training. When a biomedical regime begins to change the definitions of medicalized language in order to establish new linguistic realities there must be a rigorous debate as to what we mean by these words and how these words shape our reality, especially when these words result in a substance being shot into the bodies of human beings under coercion and duress. Meanings of words change over time, no doubt. This lexical change is an organic change in which social and cultural usage expands the meaning of words, or reduces the meaning of words, or invents new words or simply stops using words. A new technology requires a new word. But a new word to describe the new technology would have resulted in a lack of compliance in accepting this new biomedical product into your bodies. What was “two weeks to slow the spread” became let us redefine vaccine. But this redefinition was essential.
The change in the definition of vaccine was derived from behavioural science and nudging. Let us take a couple of moments and reflect on how nudging has been used the last couple of years. Two kinds “nudges” were employed during the last two years and are still being employed. The first is the “bandwagon” nudge. This nudge serves to instil a belief in people that they are part of a large in group, that a large majority want x-mandate or y-intervention. Because people naturally want to be part of a majority (especially one that is cloaked in the language of virtue, compassion and care) the bandwagon nudge is particularly effective. This nudge was recently employed in Canada in the context of masking, in spite of the clear and settled science that masking is largely useless in stopping aerosolized viral spread. A survey stated that 70 percent of Canadians were in favour of mask mandates, although less than 2 percent of Canadians are now visibly wearing masks in any and all contexts.
The 70 percent number is significant. This is precisely the percentage of mask compliance we were told was necessary in 2020 in order to “stop covid.” It also happens to be the same number pushed in 2021 of Americans’ support for mask mandates in schools. For those of us familiar with the employment of “bandwagon” nudging surveys like the one recently promoted by Canadian regime media—the very day before the prime minister receives his 4 “booster” shot and flu shot, in a video that expressly shows that proper informed consent was not followed—in no way offer us a mirror into the social reality of Canadians’ desire for masks mandates. Instead, they offer us a window into the employment of behavorial science in shaping what the government wants our reality to be or become.
Oster, however, is guilty of the “status quo” nudge. Most of us are aware of this nudge with respect to the “vaccine” passport system that denied people entry into countries based on COVID vaxxination status (as is currently the case for the USA), and was then extended to include all social spaces like libraries, bars, restaurants, and schools. Places like NYU and Harvard are still employing this status quo nudge. The vaccine passport is wholly derived from nudging and behavioural science. It is worth quoting Sotis et al. (linked above) in order to understand the precise nature of this type of nudge and why it matters when evaluating Oster’s idea of “vaccine mandates.”
While COVID passes present significant ethical and scientific challenges, requiring proof of vaccination for international travel is not a new practice. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) has long endorsed certificates confirming vaccination against yellow fever to travel to certain countries. Building on this precedent, policymakers and private companies have either introduced, or are planning to introduce, some form of COVID pass for international travel. For example, the European Commission has reached an agreement on the “Digital COVID Certificate”, which will provide a proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result, or recently recovered from COVID-19. Moreover, leading airlines are working on the IATA Travel Pass App and are considering allowing only holders of such a pass to board their flights…The first nudge exploits the status quo bias, which is an effective technique to increase the acceptance of a policy by presenting it as a sign of continuity with the past and has proven effective in a variety of contexts. Here, we note that proof of vaccination for international travel is not a novel idea and hypothesize that this will increase the support for the COVID pass. The second nudge instead builds on the peer effect. There is evidence that information on a person’s peers’ actions can induce pro-social behaviors and that people tend to conform to the policy preferences of their peers. Moreover, previous literature has shown a tendency to conform driven by a need to belong to a group and the influence that the group’s opinion has on the individual. In this vein, we hypothesize that informing respondents about the limited opposition to COVID passes for international travel would increase the support for this policy.
The central idea of the status quo nudge is to employ a new policy under the language and framework of existing policy. Most people understand that attenuated virus vaccines have been efficacious in offering people life long immunity from severe diseases that impacted (generally) very young children. Because these vaccines have been mandated in the past, and the mandates have been used to limit freedom of travel to certain countries or to attend school it became vitally necessary to situate the COVID vaxxine within this prior paradigm. It is precisely for this reason and this reason alone that the definition of vaccine was changed in 2021. By changing the definition governments and institutions could simply situate COVID inoculations within preexisting structures of mandates and a large swath of people (like Oster and her LowIQ ilk) then would accept these mandates just like they have accepted mandates in the past. The added bonus is those who reject this form of biomedical nudging can be called “antivaxxers” and “antiscience,” thereby constructing an “in group-out group” binary that was designed to coerce people into mRNA experimentation in the fear that one might be labeled an “anti-vaxxer.”
In order to understand the depth of the informational crisis due to nudging it is worth reading through the following articles on nudging and vaccination here, here, here, here, here. There are literally thousands of studies like these on the mechanism of nudging in shaping choices and behaviour. It is vital to realize that if you are nudged into a medical intervention your informed consent has been violated.
The last point of Oster’s piece gestures to the idea that “we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.” No choices were made. There was no debate as to the best way forward. A choice requires debate. The advocates of the Great Barrington Declaration were pilloried by the hysterical media. This assassination of a wholly reasonable and sensible approach to COVID came at the behest of Fauci and Collins. I had no uncertainty about COVID, just like I have no uncertainty about all diseases. Disease and mortality are a natural part of life. They are a CERTAINTY. It was clear that the vaxxines would never stop transmission or illness. This was always going to be the case. A “focused risk” response was always the best policy. But there is no doubt that from the beginning of this “crisis” mass, global vaxxination was to be the only solution, as the WHO states, again employing the 70% number for global covid vaxx coverage. Lockdowns were never about saving lives or stopping the hospitals from being overwhelmed. Lockdowns were simply a mass demoralization campaign in order to coerce billions of people into taking a novel intervention in order to “get back to normal,” a normal that included masking, vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, violation of informed consent, the establishment of “implied consent” (or what the nudgers called a “vaccine exemption on religious or moral grounds”). Just because people like Oster made the wrong choices, and made them over and over and over again—-choices that could have been stopped at any time—that does not mean they were complicated. We privileged a Public Health discourse over all other discourses, and we employed some of the more grotesque forms of nudging in order to compel and coerce behaviour. And they are still doing it.
And now the idea of amnesty is raised. Let us take a few moments to reflect on exactly what amnesty entails.
I quote Seneca’s de clementia above. Seneca wrote this essay to the young emperor Nero. Clemency is the Latin equivalent to Amnesty (Greek in origin), although the Romans did use the term amnestia as well. Both clementia and amnestia are useful words to understand what is precisely behind Oster’s dangerous thinking in her article. Amnesty reflects the idea of forgetfulness and oblivion, literally meaning the abstract idea “no-memory.” Amnesty generally is found in contexts in which enemies of the state are offered “amnesty.” The regime decides to forget about the actions of the enemies of the regime. In a Roman context individuals like Julius Caesar or Caligula would burn letters and correspondences which might implicate Romans in “treasonous” activity against the regime. The romans could call amnestia: venia et oblivio (a pardon and oblivion). Destroy evidence of criminal behaviour against the state and move on. Clementia operates along a similar idea: the regime grants clemency to those who are guilty of a crime. Julius Caesar famously granted clemency to any Roman who had sided with Pompeius Magnus in the Civil War of 49-45 BCE. Of course, those same people ended up assassinating him a year later.
The language of amnesty in Oster’s piece is deeply disturbing. She sees those who rejected the biomedical regime narrative…who rejected the nudging of vaxxine mandates, who championed Informed Consent as an inalienable human right…she situates these people among “enemies of the state.”
It is a remarkable insight into her disturbed mental state. She does not conceptualize those who run the FDA, CDC, US Government, Pfizer, Moderna, Harvard or Brown as the criminals and villains that ought to need amnesty or clemency. She views those who were not susceptible to biomedical nudging of the regime as criminals. She sees those of us, who understood from the beginning that lockdown policy was not only wrong, but a violation of human rights, as criminals. She sees those, who understand the nature of informed consent and model our choice architecture on it, as criminals. She see those of us, who saw through the Bull Shit from day one, as criminals.
Unfortunately for Oster she is on the wrong side of a proper morality and ethics. She made herself into the mouthpiece of the criminals. She was useful idiot for the nudgers.
Amnesty is not hers to give. The way forward for people like Oster is self-reflection. They must ask themselves how did they get it so wrong, when the people they demonized got it so right. What data and evidence were the demonized reading that allowed them to come to the proper conclusions with respect to COVID policy. People like Oster must question their entire informational ecosystem. Their ecosystem is saturated with nudging, pharmaceutical marketing, institutional capture and ideological purity. People like Oster must confront the radical idea that everything they think they know could very well be wrong. But this very idea can only be achieved by those who understand the nature of humility, something her arrogance may not allow.
Amnesty is not an option. Those of us who employed a proper medical ethics in Informed Consent are not enemies of the state. We represent the proper moral and ethical behaviour of a properly moral and ethical state.
MC, If you ever find yourself in Asheville, NC, please come get a haircut at Fox Barber & Beauty. 
Thank you for writing this entire project, MC. I just found it. It makes me want to cry.