Alleged libertarian outlet Reason has released a string of clips recently praising Operation Warp Speed — the greatest public health disaster possibly in human history — and the pharmaceutical corporations and government agencies that made it happen.
These people are highly impressed.
Reason really puts the corporate in corporate libertarianism, but they’ve been doing that for a while. What’s new is their fetishization of government-corporate collusion — the textbook definition, incidentally, of fascism — in the form of Operation Warp Speed.
Here’s how Reason framed its recent Pfizer-fest:
Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, has assembled a team devoted to analyzing and applying the lessons of the pandemic. The institute has published papers arguing that Operation Warp Speed was a success that should be duplicated, for greater investment in indoor filtration, and for better biosurveillance. Stapp joined Reason’s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe for a live conversation about how to prevent the next global catastrophe.
Wolfe and Weismueller let several dubious claims go unchallenged by Stapp, even assisting in his talking points at times, starting with claiming that Operation Warp Speed produced “maybe the greatest return on investment of any government program in, like, fifty years.”
The cost of Operation Warp Speed was worth it, Stapp argues, because the lockdowns keeping everyone locked inside, engulfed in terror for a virus with a minuscule kill rate, were costing more in the aggregate. He never mentions that the lockdowns were entirely unnecessary and counterproductive projects of a government that effectively held the population hostage until they agreed to take the shots that the government had just shelled out billions of dollars to develop.
Apparently, according to Reason, that’s just how the free market is supposed to work.
The real question is: who is this for?
If worshiping the Public Health™ bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical industry is their target viewers’ fetish, why wouldn’t those people just watch MSNBC?
On the other hand, it could be that these Reason people are genuine Kool-Aid drinkers themselves, and they really believe their own BS — which, arguably, might be worse but at least it wouldn’t be dishonest.
I hope the “brought-to-you-by-Pfizer™” sponsorship, or whatever they’re angling for with this tripe, is worth their dignity and reputation.
For the record, once again, there was nothing remotely libertarian or decent or moral about Operation Warp Speed or the vax mandate travesty of justice that ensued after the hastily approved shots — legalized under documented fraudulent pretenses by Pfizer — were introduced to the market.
Aside from all of the malfeasance of the pharmaceutical industry in its profiteering, the government overreach was unprecedented. This kind of stuff is the bread and butter of libertarian ideology: no moral government can compel citizens to inject themselves with any product, no matter how “safe and effective,” which the COVID-19 shots were not.
Furthermore, the entire justification for the mandates in the first place was based on the false claim, repeated ad nauseam for years in the corporate state media, that the shots stop transmission. Without the element of preventing the spread, there is no true public health excuse to coerce people into taking them through shame or bribery or impoverishment due to inability to work.
The shots do not stop transmission, they have never at any point stopped transmission, and Pfizer itself has admitted it never even tested them to see if they stopped transmission.
