"In Vaccines We Trust"

In recent interview with Cheryl Hines, Tucker Carlson pointed out that vaccines are a religion, and he referenced Diego Rivera's "Vaccination" mural.

In a recent interview with Cheryl Hines, Tucker Carlson spoke about the “religion of vaccines” and mentioned Diego Rivera’s “Vaccination” mural (part of the Detroit Industry Murals) painted in 1932-33.

The mural depicts a modern laboratory producing vaccines, the animals that provided the serum, and three figures representing a Jewish, a Catholic, and a Protestant scientist. As Carlson remarked, the foreground of the painting is reminiscent of the Christ child in the manger, flanked by Mary and Joseph.

I wonder if the image of the child is a jocular self-portrait, as the plump cheeks and large nose are reminiscent of Rivera’s

The Rivera mural instantly reminded me of the 20 Euro silver coin that the Vatican issued in 2022 to commemorate the COVID-19 vaccine. As the Numista catalogue describes it:

The coin depicts a doctor, a nurse and a young person who is ready to receive the vaccine. The Holy Father has repeatedly stressed the importance of vaccination, recalling that healthcare is “a moral obligation,” and it is important to “continue efforts to immunize even the poorest peoples.

Note that the formulation “a young person who is ready to receive the vaccine” is identical to the formulation for a communicant “who is ready to receive the host”—in Italian “pronto a ricevere l’Eucaristia.” The obverse of the coin bears the name Franciscus, the year 2022 (“Anno MMXXII”) and the Coat of Arms of Pope Francis.

As we document in Chapter 25 in our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, vaccines are indeed a religious artifact. We would be most grateful if you would share this post (with chapter excerpt) with your friends and ask them to consider purchasing a copy of the book.

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CHAPTER 25: In Vaccines We Trust

After being locked down and systematically terrorized by the mass media for most of 2020, most of humanity anxiously awaited the vaccine that was heralded as their savior and liberator. As vaccine investor and enthusiast Bill Gates repeatedly stated in the spring, the world would only be able to go back to normal “when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” This was an uncanny thing for anyone to say, but especially for the man who had, just twenty-two years earlier, been widely considered the most ruthless monopolist since John D. Rockefeller. The proclamation that “almost every person on the planet” needed to be injected with a novel substance about which they knew nothing seemed like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

When the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines were rolled out in December 2020, most of humanity was apparently unaware that they were not vaccines in the traditional sense of inactivated or attenuated pathogens that would induce an immune response. The new injections were the genetic code for instructing the body to create a foreign, toxic protein. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg understood this, and he starkly contrasted with the public when, during an internal meeting with company executives on July 16, 2020, he stated:

I do just want to make sure that I share some caution on this because we just don’t know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people’s DNA and RNA to directly code in a person’s DNA and RNA. Basically, the ability to produce those antibodies and whether that causes other mutations or other risks downstream. So, there’s work on both paths of vaccine development.

Molecular biologists had been tinkering with messenger RNA since 1961, when Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and François Gros at the Institut Pasteur in Paris presented a paper about it for which they later won the Nobel Prize. BioNTech was founded in 2008 and Moderna was founded in 2010 to create methods for using mRNA to intervene in disease processes such as cancer. Creating cancer therapies was the original concept of the founders of BioNTech.

A major difference between natural mRNA—which is broken down by the body’s enzymes soon after it performs its function—and the “modified” mRNA produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is that the latter has been chemically altered with methods created by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2023 for their work on these modifications. Both use N1-methyl- pseudouridine-modified mRNA encoding the SARS-COVID-19 spike protein delivered with a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulation. These novel and highly experimental products were repeatedly injected into billions of people in 2021. We believe this was the largest and most ambitious experiment ever conducted on humanity.

Because most of humanity did not understand what they were being injected with, the creators of this injection apparently perceived it necessary to erect something akin to a religion that deified the vaccines. This came naturally to them because many perceived that, with their new messenger RNA vaccines, they were using God’s language to direct the cellular machinery of the human body to do their bidding. In his 2006 book, The Language of God, NIH director Francis Collins begins by quoting President Bill Clinton when he announced in early 2000 that the human genome had been sequenced. In fact, about 88 percent had been sequenced at that time, but as the leader of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Collins was apparently keen to make the big announcement sooner rather than later. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House, with Dr. Collins standing next to him, President Clinton announced,

Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.

Here it is worth recalling the archetypal “Scientist Playing God” whose lineage traces back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus about a Swiss German doctor named Victor Frankenstein who applies his understanding of chemistry and electricity to create a living creature out of the dead. While this aspiration sounded interesting in theory, Frankenstein’s creation is monstrous, and when he is rejected by society, he becomes a vengeful serial killer. Already in 1818, Shelley intuitively understood that no matter how clever a scientist may be, he cannot mimic nature with accuracy. Nowadays we often see examples of this in older men and women who have undergone cosmetic surgery. Even the most skilled of plastic surgeons cannot mimic the bloom of youth that only nature can bestow.

An apt example of the “Scientist Playing God” is the already mentioned Eldon Tyrrell in the 1982 science fiction film, Blade Runner. Risa Peoples, the daughter of screenwriter David Webb Peoples, was studying microbiology and taught her father about DNA replication. Tyrrell, whom the lead android playfully calls “Maker” and “Father,” references this in his explanation of how the lead android, Roy Batty, was created. The code of life consists of the trinity of replication, transcription, and translation. Replication creates identical DNA strands; transcription converts DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA); translation decodes mRNA into amino acids, forming proteins essential for life functions. While this is an endlessly fascinating field, the practical applications of it are still in their infancy. Anyone who claims that all potential outcomes of this experiment were understood is either delusional or lying or both.

It appears the gods of biotechnology initially expected far more resistance from the lay public to receiving the experimental shots. In October 2021, Bayer Pharmaceuticals Division President Stefan Oelrich gave a speech to the World Health Summit in which he expressed his surprise at how many people had been willing to be experimented on. As he put it:

I always like to say: If we had surveyed two years ago the public, ‘Would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?’ we probably would have had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has opened many people’s eye to this innovation.

From the outset of the pandemic, those who were said to be working “at the speed of science” to create a new vaccine were presented as high priests of molecular biology and vaccinology. They used lots of Latin and Greek words that lay people couldn’t understand. Anthony Fauci was presented by the adoring media as the Pope of the COVID-19 vaccine program. He frequently stated the mantra “follow the science,” which consisted of his edicts, issued like papal bulls, that no one was allowed to question. On June 9, 2021, Dr. Fauci implicitly invoked the doctrine of papal infallibility when he proclaimed, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Those who did question Fauci in public forums and on the internet quickly ran afoul of an army of censors who worked for various internet policing organizations that resembled the Holy Office of the Inquisition during the Counter-Reformation. Doctors who advocated treating COVID-19 with old, safe, and effective repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were branded as heretics and excommunicated from the college of physicians and from the rest of society. The safe medicines they recommended were banned as anathema that could not, under any circumstances, be dispensed, even to a patient dying in hospital to whom nothing else was being offered.

This religion wasn’t entirely new in that it appropriated existing religious iconography and symbols in the same way the early Roman Catholic Church overlaid Christian symbols and rituals onto existing religions throughout the Roman empire. We were reminded of this in 2022 when Vatican City issued a 20 Euro silver coin commemorating the COVID-19 vaccine.

. . . . [chapter continues].

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