In my previous article, I reflected on a quote from an essay by George Orwell titled Politics and the English Language, in which he describes how political language often consciously employs words for which there is no agreed-upon definition. The full article can be read here:
I wish to begin this article with a different extract from the same essay:
… an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
—George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1945
While it by no means accounts for the whole of the madness taking place from early 2020 to the present day, the failure to use accurate language and the self-perpetuating negative effect this had on clarity of thought, is nonetheless a central feature of the Covid pandemic. The failure to define critical terms precisely, or the failure to use accurately words which already had technical and distinct definitions, caused us to spiral into increasingly foolish thinking, and in turn, ever less precise and ultimately more dangerous language.
Perhaps the single most important word of the past two years to have defined carefully is the word pandemic itself. It has been observed that some years ago the WHO altered its definition of a pandemic,1 and that were it not for this change (which removed the need for high numbers of death) the past several years may have passed by quite unremarkably.
Leaving this to one side, however, it seems to me that the genesis for this positive feedback loop of pandemic-related slovenly language and foolish thought can be traced back to just three words:
Coronavirus,
SARS-CoV-2, and
COVID-19
These three words have been used more or less interchangeably throughout the pandemic, however, each in reality have quite discrete definitions. The first, Coronavirus, is not overly relevant (referring as it does to a family of viruses including SARS, MERS, and common cold viruses, and not to any specific pathogen) but has nevertheless been used quite extensively in ways beyond its scope. The second, SARS-CoV-2, refers to the particular virus to which we apparently owe the pandemic of the past two years; it references the thing with which one might be infected, the alleged pathogen, or the agent suspected of causing disease. The third, COVID-19, is the name given to the disease itself; the sickness resulting, ostensibly, from successful SARS-CoV-2 infection.
While potentially confusing at first exposure, very little effort is required to get these three straight. It seems a small thing, but whether through laziness or malfeasance, the imprecision displayed by media and political actors when handling these words has resulted in a profound and persistent ignorance in the community at large, and permitted us to fall for a series of cascading errors.
This first error—the belief that these words were just synonyms, different ways of saying the same thing—is a small error to be sure, and on its own perhaps, insignificant. However, the effect of the conflation of these terms on our thinking does not remain isolated.
PCR test is a term no doubt familiar to all at this point, but what exactly does it test for? ‘Well, Covid, after all, don’t we call them Covid tests!’ Unfortunately, if by Covid we mean COVID-19, the disease, then we would be mistaken. Actually, it is SARS-CoV-2, the virus, for which the PCR test is searching, or more specifically, 2–3 snippets of genetic sequence apparently unique to SARS-CoV-2. But discovering the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus, in our nose or throat is not the same as confirming that it has infected our cells; or that it has proliferated to the extent required to produce the disease, COVID-19; or that we are now generating the high viral load required to make us capable of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to another. Dr Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) described his invention simply as a process for taking genetic material (DNA) and making more of that genetic material. And that if the process were repeated enough times, he believed you could find almost anything in almost anybody, but the process itself could not tell you whether what it found was alive and it certainly couldn’t tell you if you were sick.2
Much more could be said on the subject of testing (and for those wanting to understand more deeply, it would certainly be a worthy avenue of study3), however, I think this is sufficient for our current purposes. The language used concerning testing led us to think it told us something quite different from what it actually told us. In fact, I find it quite impossible to overstate just how foolish the collective thinking became as a result of this error, given the errors that followed.
From testing, our freshly muddied thinking led us unavoidably to further ugly and inaccurate language, that of Covid cases. Once again, one could be forgiven for thinking that a Covid case meant a case of COVID-19, the disease. Once again, unfortunately, we would be mistaken. Cases are not the same thing as a clinical diagnosis of disease, which would require the involvement of a skilled physician. In fact, the sole criterion in most jurisdictions, certainly in Australia, for a confirmed Covid case is the return of a positive test. And since, in Australia at least, the entire testing infrastructure operates completely independent of any such physician; processed solely by technicians, and interpreted exclusively by bureaucratic policy; the question remains: positive for what precisely?
By now our language and thinking have become so inaccurate as to bear little resemblance to anything real. And the errors begin to compound rather quickly with respect to hospitalisation and death. Once more the sole criterion which separates an ordinary hospitalisation from a Covid hospitalisation; or death from a Covid death; is whether the same was, at or near the time, considered a Covid case.
The presumption by most was that even if not all cases were serious, hospitalisation numbers at least could be relied upon to indicate the prevalence of serious disease. This of course assumed that Covid hospitalisations were exclusively those hospitalised for serious symptomatic cases of COVID-19, the disease. The actual criteria, however, permit such examples as those that occurred to a friend of mine, wherein he was hospitalised after developing a serious infection in a wound sustained to his foot. It was determined that he would need surgery to address it and as was hospital policy, he was required to be tested. The test returned a positive result and at that moment he became a Covid hospitalisation statistic.
Covid deaths were also presumed to indicate those who died as a result of COVID-19, the disease. As you might’ve guessed by now, it indicates nothing of the sort. Policy around the world made it impossible to separate those who died from COVID-19, from those who died with COVID-19, from those whose death had nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19, but who had nonetheless produced a positive test result within the 14, 28, or in some places 90-day threshold required to qualify their death to be coded as a Covid death.
Everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organisation of such professionals and every established social organisation becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
—Carroll Quigley
While this is far from a comprehensive treatise on the subject, it hardly seems necessary to go on; all else that followed did so only on the basis of what we have already discussed. The mental ground we ceded, the clarity we yielded, made place for obfuscation and permitted every other measure from masks to lockdowns, to gain traction. But there is perhaps one other aspect worthy of consideration, that of vaccination.
Vaccination is a curious case where, quite apart from the role it has played in the pandemic and for many years prior, it has been subject to some ugly and inaccurate language of its own. Many years ago I observed a tendency to use the word immunisation as a synonym for vaccination. Immunity, when achieved, is the result of an internal bodily process, the consequence of a successfully mounted immune system response to the provocation of some pathogen or antigen. Immunity is not something with which you can be injected, immunity is the objective of that injection, the outcome one hopes will result from it, but it is not the same thing. This is only one example of the hazy cloud of speech and thinking which already hung over the subject of vaccination and which we carried with us into the pandemic.
In the context of the pandemic, vaccines became the object to which all hope of a return to normalcy was pinned. The will they/won’t they coverage of the vaccine combined with the in again/out again lockdown dance only served to heighten the public anticipation. When it did arrive, I recall that nearly all were hesitant to be first in line; after all, it seemed far too short a timeframe to have gone from completely novel coronavirus through design, manufacture, and testing. What’s more, is that the technology employed was also completely novel, and therefore completely unlike all vaccines that preceded it. Despite all this, however, an apparent scientific consensus quickly emerged among the experts—the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective. A miracle of modern science.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
—Michael Crichton
It should have been obvious that safety and efficacy were two qualities for which it was too soon to draw any certain conclusions. Ordinarily, a vaccine takes 7–10 years to develop and bring to market. The prudent course would have been to assume this new and radically different approach was dangerous, until it could be proven otherwise. We did not take the prudent course.
Up to this point, most discrepancies could, with some degree of ease, be written off as unintentional. From here, however, it appeared to take on a decidedly conscious quality. There were very few categories into which one might fall—vaccinated or anti-vax. The third, albeit temporary, category of vaccine-hesitant was also utilised. But only so long as was necessary to coax the hesitant from their fence-sitting position and into the compliant majority, or else be written off as anti-vaxxers and banished as proverbial lepers. Anti-vax is not widely considered a positive appellation, so it is no surprise that the pressing need for social self-preservation drove many to avoid at all costs, being labelled such. What was surprising, however, was how many researchers, medical professionals, immunologists, epidemiologists, and even the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology himself, began to earn themselves this label.
While ultimately invaluable in driving broader society to hate or forget the dissidents, language alone either yielded unsatisfactory results or was too slow in doing so, as compulsion quickly followed. Mandates made activities such as dining out, visiting the cinema, going to church, or attending your place of work conditional—to participate you must first prove your vaccination status. The messaging from politicians, media, and the medical establishment was apparently unanimous in their assertion that if you were vaccinated you could not get Covid, nor could you transmit it to others. Many wondered, therefore, what the basis was for excluding the unvaccinated from the general population, if these vaccines performed as advertised there was nothing a vaccinated person need fear from an unvaccinated individual.
The official answer to this musing was the need to protect the vulnerable, people who were unable to receive the vaccine for some legitimate medical reason. Already we have covered several examples of slovenly language as it was used concerning vaccines generally and COVID-19 vaccines specifically: conflation with immunisation; scientific consensus; safe and effective. This phrase, however, protect the vulnerable, proves to be especially pernicious and persistent. Pernicious because it was the basis for overriding a great deal of personal bodily autonomy and constitutional law, which is not easy for a country with so few constitutionally enshrined personal rights, but we had that one.4 Persistent because this sentiment remained for a long while after the language that justified it had changed, but I will return to this point shortly.
I place this phrase in the category of ugly and inaccurate language for two reasons: Firstly, it was not known at that early stage whether it was even capable of accomplishing the task of protecting anyone, and became obvious later that it definitely couldn’t; and secondly, it wasn’t obvious that there were many, if any, people being permitted into the medically exempt category which constituted the vulnerable. There was (in Victoria Australia at least) only one reason for which a person could be granted a permanent medical exemption: an allergic, anaphylactic response to a vaccine or one of its ingredients. As it happens, I have friends, and friends of friends who qualified on that basis—they were not granted a medical exemption. Apparently, in my state, medical professionals do not grant permanent medical exemptions; they only submit recommendations for the same, it is the state which approves or rejects.5
Perhaps the primary error in language we made was to use the term vaccine at all. They bear no resemblance in their mechanisms of action to those of previous vaccines, nor do they produce an immune response sufficient to prevent infection, stop transmission, or stave off disease. As I mentioned earlier though, the effect on our thinking that this kind of careless use of language can have, sometimes persists longer than the offending language is used. Even after it was acknowledged that it could not prevent infection or transmission, the concept of vaccine-induced herd immunity continued to underpin the justification for compulsion, that the vulnerable might be protected from the selfish. It still baffles me that such an idea lingers, herd is simply a collective noun—how can the herd collectively, have immunity not found in any of its individual members? And yet, those of us who declined and who still decline, are decried for our failures to trust the science.
Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realise that science is a method and nothing else.
—Carroll Quigley
We allowed ourselves to think that when our political leaders spoke of “following the science” they meant what we thought they meant. What I hope is obvious now, is that what they really meant was political science, which is to say: the getting and keeping of power.
If you’re inclined to offer a great sigh of relief, that despite all this inaccurate language and foolish thinking we somehow managed to avoid any real-world damage, then I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention. The health consequences of the vaccine alone6 are beyond my ability to fully articulate, let alone the emergent mental health crisis, the impending collapse of health and emergency services infrastructure, education loss, employment loss, the wholesale destruction of small business, the cascading effect on inflation, and material cost and availability, nearly all areas of contemporary life. But it is in this wake that perhaps the most relevant example of slovenly language now manifests, that language which now attributes these consequences to the pandemic. They are not. They are the consequences of policy.
The relationship between language and thought is a subject on which Orwell evidently dedicated a great deal of consideration, and the corruption or manipulation of language is not something he considered to be a wholly spontaneous phenomenon, but rather one, behind which, often lurked political motivations. Orwell expressed this convergence in the form of 1984’s Newspeak, the state-sponsored language in constant refinement. Refined not to enhance communication, but in as much as it were possible, to strip it of any words a citizen might require to form a thought out of step with the party line. The effect that our language has on our thinking is undeniable. The effect that our thinking has on our speech may be even more obvious, how can one employ language any more precise and clear than their thoughts allow? The suggestion that political intention might be behind any effect on either language or thought, however, is likely to earn one the label of conspiracy theorist. But that is perhaps a subject for another time.
Whether the result of intent or emergence, the inaccurate language of politicians and media personalities is out of our control. It is on our own language and thinking that we must ensure the Orwellian positive feedback loop is not played out. It is a loop that is only too easy to step into, precision, after all, requires effort. People are rarely precise by accident. Imprecision however can be an entirely passive endeavour. Passivity of any kind is risky, but passivity in speech is especially dangerous. The relationship between speech and thought is so significant that it’s not obvious they aren’t the same thing, and if we passively or uncritically adopt someone else’s language, we give that same someone unparalleled control of our thoughts. Orwell, however, goes on:
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English… is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.
—George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1945
When we are careless with our language, taking little pain to define our terms clearly or to apply them consistently, we unavoidably compromise our thinking. None of which is to say that it is entirely avoidable, it’s not. And waking up to the reality that we use inaccurate language or have foolish thoughts should not cause us irredeemable shame. The process is reversible, the polarity of the spiral can be inverted. It will undoubtedly be difficult and demanding—taking personal responsibility always is—but even our modest efforts will begin to yield immediate results. The moment we make the least effort to think clearly or to speak with greater precision, we begin to reverse the direction of the feedback loop. And while progress may be small at first the effects will compound as our language leads to greater clarity of thought which in turn leads to greater precision of speech and so on, indefinitely.
Sincerely,
The Quiet Dissident
The PCR testing program employed globally has been described as the central operational deceit and understanding it is, I believe, essential to comprehend the scale of the fraud that has been perpetrated. It is, however, beyond the scope of this article, and beyond the scope of this author to adequately articulate. Two sources may suffice to bring anyone interested up to speed:
Point 5 (pg 6–7) of Dr Yeadon’s comprehensive review offers a succinct summary of the role PCR played in the Covid pandemic: The Covid Lies by Dr Mike Yeadon
For those with the time and inclination to go deeper, the 5-hour long third day of Reiner Fuellmich’s Model Grand Jury convenes a panel of experts giving testimony and evidence on the PCR fraud: Reiner Fuellmich, Grand Jury Day 3 — PCR Test
This is something addressed in greater detail in a DarkHorse podcast interview between evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein and Melbourne caterer Betty Pezzimenti in an episode titled: No Exceptions: A story of Medical Tyranny in Australia
You did an amazing job on this!!🤩