Interesting that ‘they’ coerced people to get jabbed so as not to ‘kill grannies’ while espousing it not mattering if a few ‘grannies are coerced into dying’. Sheesh. The sheer hypocrisy of our institutions - and the sheeple that buy into all this planned destruction as it’s for the ‘greater good’ (and whose good would that be?).
Brilliant breakdown of Marsh's utilitarian logic here. The slip about not expecting his words to go public is revealing becuase it confirms the disconnect betwen stated principles and private calculations. I've seen this playbook in tech where "acceptable failure rates" become shorthand for ignoring specific harms, and it's unsettling how easily quantified metrics replace moral deliberation.
“Firstly, many people would be surprised (or maybe not) to see a doctor so comfortable with bringing in utilitarian “greater good” ideology into the practice of medicine.”
….
Count me among those who are not surprised. What does surprise me is the reactions from the millions of patients who clamored for socialized medicine and now act SHOCKED at the result. After all, aren’t utilitarianism and altruism also the collectivistic premises behind any form of socialism, including socialized medicine?
Exactly. When the foundation of public policy is the idea that people are the means to each other's ends, no one should be surprised when humans are viewed as disposable.
Most doctors have favored "single payer" or "universal healthcare" for decades now, so it shouldn't have shocked anyone in 2020 when they outed themselves as sociopaths. A lot of their patients favor socialist medicine, too, and now they're getting it, good and hard.
He sounds like an 'ends justifies the means' type of A*hole. We would not get along. Doing the right thing should never be at the expense of doing the right thing. If it is, that's how you know it's the wrong thing. Another stupid and evil person.
"The Greater Good" is in fact the principle everyone has to work by, when evaluating alternative actions. So I think it is a mistake to argue against or attempt to shame a medical professional for evaluating courses of action according to this principle.
Should a person stay at home to tackle a likely non-fatal illness or should they travel to a clinic to receive professional medical assistance? In almost all circumstances, assuming the medical assistance will be helpful, everyone agrees that the person should travel, typically by driving but also perhaps by using public transport and crossing roads on foot, to the clinic.
However the act of driving involves the risk of injury and death, and of killing or injuring other people.
The same applies to numerous decisions involving driving anywhere, such as the supermarket. Is it better to go there, choose the best items, socialise if you are lucky and get some exercise than to wait at home and rely on home delivery, when the quality of the produce can't be checked, and where the risk of injury and death is transferred to the delivery driver?
The problem with "The Greater Good" is when it is used as an argument to convince people to make unwise or otherwise harmful choices, especially regarding medical interventions such as vaccination or assisted suicide in which the full range of harmful outcomes has not been properly considered. [C. Momma 2021]
I think it is a mistake to expect anyone, including especially medical professionals, to avoid evaluation according Greater Good criteria. Diagnosis and treatment generally involve significant risks, and if the clinician is literally required to "do no harm", then they would not be able to do anything in the majority of situations.
The best approach is a wide-ranging assessment of potential harms to the patient and to others, to inform the decision on how to act.
This means that the systemic avoidance of researching and acknowledging harmful outcomes from vaccination (and from modified mRNA and adenovirus vector injections falsely portrayed as "vaccines") needs to be replaced with thorough research and disclosure, including some wide-ranging discussion of unknown unknowns. This avoidance is a first-class example of how a sincere and/or corrupted, groupthunk, belief in The Greater Good leads many medical professionals, and the mainstream media, to ignore, to remain ignorant of and to avoid discussion of numerous aspects of vaccine-caused harm because they believe that to research and acknowledge these harms would reduce the Greater Good which results from widespread acceptance of vaccines to an unacceptable degree.
The quasi-religious, Greater Good based, faith in vaccines led directly to the DEFUSE-related research into vaccines to immunize wild bats, all over the world (with a live, infectious, gain-of-function engineered virus to be sprayed on bats as they enter or leave their roost caves) against coronavirus viruses which have the potential to infect humans. [https://jimhaslam.substack.com] The resulting virus escaped the lab, became SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic, disastrously mismanaged to focus on vaccines to the exclusion of proper vitamin D supplementation [https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/] and early treatments, killed tens of millions of people.
There was no virus in 2020. Not from bats, not from labs. It was a military psyop.
As for the greater good, it absolutely should not be the principle everyone works by, nor, if widespread good is the goal, can it be. The principle to adopt in order for a society to be both human and civilized is that of individual rights. When people exist for their own sake, when they're not viewed as the means to each other's ends but as ends in themselves, when their rights to life, property, and freedom are considered inviolate and upheld by objective laws, then and only then can they work toward the greatest good they can achieve for themselves, while leaving everyone else free to do the same. The aggregate of those individual efforts is the only way a general, social good can be achieved. But it's as a result of individualism, not as a result of collectivism. The most collectivist societies have always been the most repressive and least free.
"When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals...But 'the good of the majority,' too, is only a pretense and a delusion: Since, in fact, the violation of an individual's rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be 'the voice of society' and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means. If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting 'the common good' as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to 'the common good,' where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population... existed in subhuman misery for over two generations."
There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of research articles on the details of a vast number of viruses. If your statement that viruses do not exist were true, then you could easily establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that every one of these articles, including for instance, this one on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein's structure and complex mechanical behaviour https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-021-00418-x is either a fraud or part of a massive delusion.
Obviously, this is not the case. Viruses exist. The Earth is spherical, rather than flat. The Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth.
Ideally we would not accept the principle of trying to optimise the Greater Good for all people, all living things or whatever, when doing so involves the risk, or certainty, of serious negative impact on individuals. There lies the ideals of communism, which views individuals as part of a mass, and which always leads to tyranny and death, since the ideal is both morally wrong and unsuited to actual people.
However, we are forced to accept this principle, since there is no other way of getting around. If I get in my car and drive somewhere, there is a small chance I will have a stroke, veer into oncoming traffic and injure / kill multiple people. The risk to other people could be reduced by setting a very low speed limit, but then the cost would be to all people, having to spend an even greater fraction of their lives on the road.
I agree with you all you wrote about the evils of societies structured to sacrifice individual rights and happiness in order to create better outcomes for the greater population, however defined.
I am being pernickety - and objecting to the medical profession being expected not to use interventions which carry risks to the patients. The aim of good medicine is to optimise the outcomes for a large number of individual patients, since it is impractical or impossible to know beforehand whether the generally helpful intervention will actually harm each specific individual. This is aiming for the Greater Good in individual patients, in general.
Arguments for vaccination include reduced transmission of the disease in question. This is of no direct benefit to the vaccinee, though it may provide benefits for them in terms of reduced risk of disease for for friends and family, and more broadly contributing to a healthier society. This form of Greater Good argument tends to diminish individual safety and freedoms, and so should be resisted. Those who make it should do so explicitly and with full disclosure of actual effectiveness and the dangers to the vaccinee. In the case of self-spreading vaccines (oral polio and current measles vaccines), the risks extend to other people, as well as the supposed, in general, benefits.
Vaccinophiles are so committed to their cause that they support mandated COVID-19 injections for children, who are at almost zero risk of serious illness from the virus, on the basis that this will reduce transmission and so protect the elderly and otherwise vulnerable people, who for one reason or another cannot be fully protected by the injections themselves.
Vaccinophiles are so unaware of their inadequate knowledge of vax benefits and risks, and so committed to their faith that they don't care to find out the ugly truth, that they can't imagine their zeal is harming and killing children for little or no benefit to anyone. This is the broader Greater Good argument being seen as so important that anything which threatens mass compliance is avoided and denied. Just like communism or any other cult.
The problem with both your comments, with respect, is that you’re straw-manning to the extreme.
A critique of the “greater good” ideology in medicine is neither “don’t weigh up risks / benefits”, nor is it “always let the patient do whatever they want without regard to anyone else”.
The critique is directed at those who seek to (and are clearly succeeding at) gradually whittling away the primacy of the rights of the individual patient, progressively subjugating them to broader societal notions.
Likewise your critique of those who have doubts about the virus model is aimed at those who state (without much more nuance) that “viruses don’t exist”.
For most, the critique of virology is not that fancy machines and measurements don’t “light up” when the scientists expect them to (“hey presto”), but more that the virus model under which the biomedical complex operates (and extracts its trillions out of humanity) is so full of holes its explanatory power is extremely limited.
The first hurdle of proof required for the validation of that model is surely that transmission from those purportedly ill with the illness said to be caused by the distinct identifiable virus to the healthy should be easily replicable by optimizing the conditions which form the basis of the transmission paradigm.
Yet all we have in terms of the history of deliberate transmission studies is a litany of failure.
Hi Jonathan, I agree with you and Ralph about medical professionals, the media or anyone else in a position of power or influence trading off individual rights and benefits for some other purpose, such as improving the health of others, most obviously be reducing disease transmission.
If the medical intervention is justified by its benefits to the recipient, as judged by the doctor and, where possible, the fully informed and unpressured patient, or their guardian, then its a bonus if the treatment also protects others by reducing the transmission of the disease.
One example of the pernicious Greater Good logic which you are criticising is the insistence on vaccinating (or mRNA/adenovirus-vector injecting) children and younger adults who are at no serious risk of harm, to protect other people, such as the elderly and those with even weaker immune systems than is the case today with most people having less than the 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to work properly.
This Greater Good argument used to apply to the initial pertussis vaccines, to protect children who were too young to benefit from vaccination or other treatments. When those vaccines were quietly dumped, because of the serious harm (and I recall, death) they sometimes caused, the vaccinophiles neglected to explain that the new, acellular, vaccines offered no such reduction or prevention of transmission. Their sole epitope is the bacterial toxin. The vaccine reduces the severity of disease symptoms, but as far as I know does not reduce the rate of infection or of shedding the bacteria to infect others. The original scheme was a form of "Greater Good" logic, at least to the extent that people were expected to be vaccinated to protect others - though we were often happy to do so, especially regarding infant family members.
I regard the lack of awareness of the different functionality of the acellular pertussis vaccine as an example of a much larger Greater Good argument which silently, and overpoweringly, pervades mainstream medicine, as well as many other fields such as politics, theology, cosmology and probably climate science.
This overarching Greater Good justification for all sorts of violations of logic, truthfulness and individual rights arises from the widespread conviction of most people involved, including most members of the public, that the best outcomes, for the whole world, depend upon most non-specialists, including all the general public, trusting the judgment, beliefs, policies and conceptual frameworks of the specialists - in this case, doctors, researchers and the pharmaceutical / vaccine manufacturers.
This sets up an industry-wide framework where nothing matters more than seeming to be right. Specifically, even if the experts recognise they were wrong, they are at pains not to admit it for fear that the general public will recognise that their judgement is not entirely reliable.
This does not happens in engineering fields, since, apart from questions of long-term durability and reliability, anyone can test whether an engineered device, such as a piston, an integrated circuit or an entire system such as a passenger jet or laptop computer, works. The feedback loop which corrects mistakes is relatively short and cannot be corrupted by manipulation or ignorance. The device works or it does not. Engineers who design and build things which don't work change their ways or leave the field.
In medicine, many questions regarding diagnosis (and so the whole framework for thinking about health and disease), prevention and cure depend upon complex research projects which take years to complete, and which are often subject to corruption, the groupthunk conceptions of the experimenters and which are evaluate in hard to understand debates.
As far as I can tell, only the most doctrinaire virologists fail to recognise the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. All virologists should recognise this, and should have recognised it early in 2020. Then, every virologist in the world should have spoken as one, in horror that their work had harmed and killed millions. They should have commited their entire field to avoiding all such reckless research.
Collectively, this has not occurred. AFAIK this is largely due to them being entirely dependent on research grants, which should be curtailed in general (we wouldn't need so much virological research if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently for their immune systems to work) and very much more tightly controlled than in the past. The field would shrink and many virologists would need to find other work.
Instead, they let the fiction of zoonotic transfer float on and on, and use it as justification for _more_ virological research, including fascinating, likely productive, but completely reckless, gain of function research.
To keep their careers, for virologists, it is more important to be seen to be right than to be right.
Likewise, in many respects, the whole edifice of mainstream medicine.
Likewise the vaccinophile cult, which involves a likely majority of people worldwide who fervently believe that these priestly concocted and administered substances are just as safe and effective as the industry, and the entire cult, claims.
So vaccinophiles shy away from any evidence of harm or ineffectiveness, and of any argument for less vaccines.
A second example of the Greater Good principle is trading off the rights and safety of some individuals for the perceived (and quite likely real) benefit to most other individuals who wish, for their own perfectly valid reasons, to shorten their life and so avoid purposeless torment.
The availability of such arrangements inevitably leads some individuals to be pressured, or feel a responsibility, to end their life early for the benefit of others.
There's no way of completely preventing such pressures, so euthanasia proponents must argue for the Greater Good if their schemes are to be supported by the state.
Much the same process occurs with medical interventions and risk to the recipient. Its not the Greater Good of other people benefiting, at a cost to the individual. It is the reality that many treatments are sometimes worse than the disease they are intended to cure, just like being killed in a car accident when travelling to or from a medical appointment.
Ideally doctors would communicate the risks to the patient who can make an informed decision. This is not possible in emergencies - and many people lack the mental capacity, or the desire, to be fully informed about complex medical matters.
The danger is that the medical profession, in order to achieve what they think is the best outcome, in general, for patients, downplay, ignore or dismiss the risks of harm from the treatment. This is highly evident in the field of vaccines.
The Greater Good logic which trades off individual rights and benefits for the benefits of others is noxious - and this is what you are discussing.
As part of a field where it is more important for many doctors to be seen to be right than to be right, I see this as closely related to the avoidance of proper knowledge or recognition of the potential harms to the recipients which are caused by treatments, including especially vaccines. However this is probably stretching the discussion away from your core concern.
The only people I have seen proclaim that no virus was involved in the COVID-19 crisis were those who denied the existence of all viruses. So I responded to Fager 132 as if he or she was denying the existence of any virus.
I don't know enough about your beliefs, but perhaps you too believe there is no such thing as a virus. You wrote https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/why-i-have-asked-for-my-name-to-be of the COVID-19 crisis: "Any and all harms observed and reported can be explained by a combination of: mistreatment, maltreatment, non-treatment, neglect, abuse and data fraud."
I can't imagine how anyone could believe that at least some viruses exist and deny the existence of a causative virus in the people who were hospitalised, with their lungs filling with fluid, due to massive levels of self-destructive, inflammatory, cytotoxic immune responses which damaged the pulmonary endothelium and caused the blood to be hyper-coagulative. This pattern of death by suffocation and/or by micro-embolisms and larger clots damaging the lungs, heart, brain etc. can only have been caused by an infectious agent. The pandemic response, with all its avoidance of proper nutrition and early treatment, and focus on reckless "vaccines" and anti-virals, can't hospitalise and kill people like this.
"I think it is a mistake to expect anyone, including especially medical professionals, to avoid evaluation according Greater Good criteria. Diagnosis and treatment generally involve significant risks, and if the clinician is literally required to "do no harm", then they would not be able to do anything in the majority of situations.”
In my understanding, practitioners avoid a charge of battery if they obtain informed consent. In this way they are able to treat the individual. The greater good is not achieved by treating individuals as a collective, subordinate to a group of humans who assume God-like knowledge and authority. Rather, the greater good is more likely to be achieved by respecting us all as individuals.
Thanks for mentioning him. I did an article myself back in April last year on him. He is seriously deluded. With a name like Marsh that makes him a swamp creature!
Interesting that ‘they’ coerced people to get jabbed so as not to ‘kill grannies’ while espousing it not mattering if a few ‘grannies are coerced into dying’. Sheesh. The sheer hypocrisy of our institutions - and the sheeple that buy into all this planned destruction as it’s for the ‘greater good’ (and whose good would that be?).
Marsh is a humanist and they pushed the jabs. He is a patron of Humanists UK.
I wrote about him.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/killing-granny-henry-marsh-neurosurgeon?utm_source=publication-search
Brilliant breakdown of Marsh's utilitarian logic here. The slip about not expecting his words to go public is revealing becuase it confirms the disconnect betwen stated principles and private calculations. I've seen this playbook in tech where "acceptable failure rates" become shorthand for ignoring specific harms, and it's unsettling how easily quantified metrics replace moral deliberation.
“Firstly, many people would be surprised (or maybe not) to see a doctor so comfortable with bringing in utilitarian “greater good” ideology into the practice of medicine.”
….
Count me among those who are not surprised. What does surprise me is the reactions from the millions of patients who clamored for socialized medicine and now act SHOCKED at the result. After all, aren’t utilitarianism and altruism also the collectivistic premises behind any form of socialism, including socialized medicine?
Exactly. When the foundation of public policy is the idea that people are the means to each other's ends, no one should be surprised when humans are viewed as disposable.
Most doctors have favored "single payer" or "universal healthcare" for decades now, so it shouldn't have shocked anyone in 2020 when they outed themselves as sociopaths. A lot of their patients favor socialist medicine, too, and now they're getting it, good and hard.
He sounds like an 'ends justifies the means' type of A*hole. We would not get along. Doing the right thing should never be at the expense of doing the right thing. If it is, that's how you know it's the wrong thing. Another stupid and evil person.
"The Greater Good" is in fact the principle everyone has to work by, when evaluating alternative actions. So I think it is a mistake to argue against or attempt to shame a medical professional for evaluating courses of action according to this principle.
Should a person stay at home to tackle a likely non-fatal illness or should they travel to a clinic to receive professional medical assistance? In almost all circumstances, assuming the medical assistance will be helpful, everyone agrees that the person should travel, typically by driving but also perhaps by using public transport and crossing roads on foot, to the clinic.
However the act of driving involves the risk of injury and death, and of killing or injuring other people.
The same applies to numerous decisions involving driving anywhere, such as the supermarket. Is it better to go there, choose the best items, socialise if you are lucky and get some exercise than to wait at home and rely on home delivery, when the quality of the produce can't be checked, and where the risk of injury and death is transferred to the delivery driver?
The problem with "The Greater Good" is when it is used as an argument to convince people to make unwise or otherwise harmful choices, especially regarding medical interventions such as vaccination or assisted suicide in which the full range of harmful outcomes has not been properly considered. [C. Momma 2021]
I think it is a mistake to expect anyone, including especially medical professionals, to avoid evaluation according Greater Good criteria. Diagnosis and treatment generally involve significant risks, and if the clinician is literally required to "do no harm", then they would not be able to do anything in the majority of situations.
The best approach is a wide-ranging assessment of potential harms to the patient and to others, to inform the decision on how to act.
This means that the systemic avoidance of researching and acknowledging harmful outcomes from vaccination (and from modified mRNA and adenovirus vector injections falsely portrayed as "vaccines") needs to be replaced with thorough research and disclosure, including some wide-ranging discussion of unknown unknowns. This avoidance is a first-class example of how a sincere and/or corrupted, groupthunk, belief in The Greater Good leads many medical professionals, and the mainstream media, to ignore, to remain ignorant of and to avoid discussion of numerous aspects of vaccine-caused harm because they believe that to research and acknowledge these harms would reduce the Greater Good which results from widespread acceptance of vaccines to an unacceptable degree.
The quasi-religious, Greater Good based, faith in vaccines led directly to the DEFUSE-related research into vaccines to immunize wild bats, all over the world (with a live, infectious, gain-of-function engineered virus to be sprayed on bats as they enter or leave their roost caves) against coronavirus viruses which have the potential to infect humans. [https://jimhaslam.substack.com] The resulting virus escaped the lab, became SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic, disastrously mismanaged to focus on vaccines to the exclusion of proper vitamin D supplementation [https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/] and early treatments, killed tens of millions of people.
C. Momma "For the greater good." Twitter 2021-10-22: https://x.com/conmomma/status/1451253296132329499.
There was no virus in 2020. Not from bats, not from labs. It was a military psyop.
As for the greater good, it absolutely should not be the principle everyone works by, nor, if widespread good is the goal, can it be. The principle to adopt in order for a society to be both human and civilized is that of individual rights. When people exist for their own sake, when they're not viewed as the means to each other's ends but as ends in themselves, when their rights to life, property, and freedom are considered inviolate and upheld by objective laws, then and only then can they work toward the greatest good they can achieve for themselves, while leaving everyone else free to do the same. The aggregate of those individual efforts is the only way a general, social good can be achieved. But it's as a result of individualism, not as a result of collectivism. The most collectivist societies have always been the most repressive and least free.
"When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals...But 'the good of the majority,' too, is only a pretense and a delusion: Since, in fact, the violation of an individual's rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be 'the voice of society' and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means. If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting 'the common good' as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to 'the common good,' where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population... existed in subhuman misery for over two generations."
There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of research articles on the details of a vast number of viruses. If your statement that viruses do not exist were true, then you could easily establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that every one of these articles, including for instance, this one on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein's structure and complex mechanical behaviour https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-021-00418-x is either a fraud or part of a massive delusion.
Obviously, this is not the case. Viruses exist. The Earth is spherical, rather than flat. The Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth.
Ideally we would not accept the principle of trying to optimise the Greater Good for all people, all living things or whatever, when doing so involves the risk, or certainty, of serious negative impact on individuals. There lies the ideals of communism, which views individuals as part of a mass, and which always leads to tyranny and death, since the ideal is both morally wrong and unsuited to actual people.
However, we are forced to accept this principle, since there is no other way of getting around. If I get in my car and drive somewhere, there is a small chance I will have a stroke, veer into oncoming traffic and injure / kill multiple people. The risk to other people could be reduced by setting a very low speed limit, but then the cost would be to all people, having to spend an even greater fraction of their lives on the road.
I agree with you all you wrote about the evils of societies structured to sacrifice individual rights and happiness in order to create better outcomes for the greater population, however defined.
I am being pernickety - and objecting to the medical profession being expected not to use interventions which carry risks to the patients. The aim of good medicine is to optimise the outcomes for a large number of individual patients, since it is impractical or impossible to know beforehand whether the generally helpful intervention will actually harm each specific individual. This is aiming for the Greater Good in individual patients, in general.
Arguments for vaccination include reduced transmission of the disease in question. This is of no direct benefit to the vaccinee, though it may provide benefits for them in terms of reduced risk of disease for for friends and family, and more broadly contributing to a healthier society. This form of Greater Good argument tends to diminish individual safety and freedoms, and so should be resisted. Those who make it should do so explicitly and with full disclosure of actual effectiveness and the dangers to the vaccinee. In the case of self-spreading vaccines (oral polio and current measles vaccines), the risks extend to other people, as well as the supposed, in general, benefits.
Vaccinophiles are so committed to their cause that they support mandated COVID-19 injections for children, who are at almost zero risk of serious illness from the virus, on the basis that this will reduce transmission and so protect the elderly and otherwise vulnerable people, who for one reason or another cannot be fully protected by the injections themselves.
Vaccinophiles are so unaware of their inadequate knowledge of vax benefits and risks, and so committed to their faith that they don't care to find out the ugly truth, that they can't imagine their zeal is harming and killing children for little or no benefit to anyone. This is the broader Greater Good argument being seen as so important that anything which threatens mass compliance is avoided and denied. Just like communism or any other cult.
The problem with both your comments, with respect, is that you’re straw-manning to the extreme.
A critique of the “greater good” ideology in medicine is neither “don’t weigh up risks / benefits”, nor is it “always let the patient do whatever they want without regard to anyone else”.
The critique is directed at those who seek to (and are clearly succeeding at) gradually whittling away the primacy of the rights of the individual patient, progressively subjugating them to broader societal notions.
Likewise your critique of those who have doubts about the virus model is aimed at those who state (without much more nuance) that “viruses don’t exist”.
For most, the critique of virology is not that fancy machines and measurements don’t “light up” when the scientists expect them to (“hey presto”), but more that the virus model under which the biomedical complex operates (and extracts its trillions out of humanity) is so full of holes its explanatory power is extremely limited.
The first hurdle of proof required for the validation of that model is surely that transmission from those purportedly ill with the illness said to be caused by the distinct identifiable virus to the healthy should be easily replicable by optimizing the conditions which form the basis of the transmission paradigm.
Yet all we have in terms of the history of deliberate transmission studies is a litany of failure.
Hi Jonathan, I agree with you and Ralph about medical professionals, the media or anyone else in a position of power or influence trading off individual rights and benefits for some other purpose, such as improving the health of others, most obviously be reducing disease transmission.
If the medical intervention is justified by its benefits to the recipient, as judged by the doctor and, where possible, the fully informed and unpressured patient, or their guardian, then its a bonus if the treatment also protects others by reducing the transmission of the disease.
One example of the pernicious Greater Good logic which you are criticising is the insistence on vaccinating (or mRNA/adenovirus-vector injecting) children and younger adults who are at no serious risk of harm, to protect other people, such as the elderly and those with even weaker immune systems than is the case today with most people having less than the 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to work properly.
This Greater Good argument used to apply to the initial pertussis vaccines, to protect children who were too young to benefit from vaccination or other treatments. When those vaccines were quietly dumped, because of the serious harm (and I recall, death) they sometimes caused, the vaccinophiles neglected to explain that the new, acellular, vaccines offered no such reduction or prevention of transmission. Their sole epitope is the bacterial toxin. The vaccine reduces the severity of disease symptoms, but as far as I know does not reduce the rate of infection or of shedding the bacteria to infect others. The original scheme was a form of "Greater Good" logic, at least to the extent that people were expected to be vaccinated to protect others - though we were often happy to do so, especially regarding infant family members.
I regard the lack of awareness of the different functionality of the acellular pertussis vaccine as an example of a much larger Greater Good argument which silently, and overpoweringly, pervades mainstream medicine, as well as many other fields such as politics, theology, cosmology and probably climate science.
This overarching Greater Good justification for all sorts of violations of logic, truthfulness and individual rights arises from the widespread conviction of most people involved, including most members of the public, that the best outcomes, for the whole world, depend upon most non-specialists, including all the general public, trusting the judgment, beliefs, policies and conceptual frameworks of the specialists - in this case, doctors, researchers and the pharmaceutical / vaccine manufacturers.
This sets up an industry-wide framework where nothing matters more than seeming to be right. Specifically, even if the experts recognise they were wrong, they are at pains not to admit it for fear that the general public will recognise that their judgement is not entirely reliable.
This does not happens in engineering fields, since, apart from questions of long-term durability and reliability, anyone can test whether an engineered device, such as a piston, an integrated circuit or an entire system such as a passenger jet or laptop computer, works. The feedback loop which corrects mistakes is relatively short and cannot be corrupted by manipulation or ignorance. The device works or it does not. Engineers who design and build things which don't work change their ways or leave the field.
In medicine, many questions regarding diagnosis (and so the whole framework for thinking about health and disease), prevention and cure depend upon complex research projects which take years to complete, and which are often subject to corruption, the groupthunk conceptions of the experimenters and which are evaluate in hard to understand debates.
As far as I can tell, only the most doctrinaire virologists fail to recognise the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. All virologists should recognise this, and should have recognised it early in 2020. Then, every virologist in the world should have spoken as one, in horror that their work had harmed and killed millions. They should have commited their entire field to avoiding all such reckless research.
Collectively, this has not occurred. AFAIK this is largely due to them being entirely dependent on research grants, which should be curtailed in general (we wouldn't need so much virological research if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently for their immune systems to work) and very much more tightly controlled than in the past. The field would shrink and many virologists would need to find other work.
Instead, they let the fiction of zoonotic transfer float on and on, and use it as justification for _more_ virological research, including fascinating, likely productive, but completely reckless, gain of function research.
To keep their careers, for virologists, it is more important to be seen to be right than to be right.
Likewise, in many respects, the whole edifice of mainstream medicine.
Likewise the vaccinophile cult, which involves a likely majority of people worldwide who fervently believe that these priestly concocted and administered substances are just as safe and effective as the industry, and the entire cult, claims.
So vaccinophiles shy away from any evidence of harm or ineffectiveness, and of any argument for less vaccines.
A second example of the Greater Good principle is trading off the rights and safety of some individuals for the perceived (and quite likely real) benefit to most other individuals who wish, for their own perfectly valid reasons, to shorten their life and so avoid purposeless torment.
The availability of such arrangements inevitably leads some individuals to be pressured, or feel a responsibility, to end their life early for the benefit of others.
There's no way of completely preventing such pressures, so euthanasia proponents must argue for the Greater Good if their schemes are to be supported by the state.
Much the same process occurs with medical interventions and risk to the recipient. Its not the Greater Good of other people benefiting, at a cost to the individual. It is the reality that many treatments are sometimes worse than the disease they are intended to cure, just like being killed in a car accident when travelling to or from a medical appointment.
Ideally doctors would communicate the risks to the patient who can make an informed decision. This is not possible in emergencies - and many people lack the mental capacity, or the desire, to be fully informed about complex medical matters.
The danger is that the medical profession, in order to achieve what they think is the best outcome, in general, for patients, downplay, ignore or dismiss the risks of harm from the treatment. This is highly evident in the field of vaccines.
The Greater Good logic which trades off individual rights and benefits for the benefits of others is noxious - and this is what you are discussing.
As part of a field where it is more important for many doctors to be seen to be right than to be right, I see this as closely related to the avoidance of proper knowledge or recognition of the potential harms to the recipients which are caused by treatments, including especially vaccines. However this is probably stretching the discussion away from your core concern.
The only people I have seen proclaim that no virus was involved in the COVID-19 crisis were those who denied the existence of all viruses. So I responded to Fager 132 as if he or she was denying the existence of any virus.
I don't know enough about your beliefs, but perhaps you too believe there is no such thing as a virus. You wrote https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/why-i-have-asked-for-my-name-to-be of the COVID-19 crisis: "Any and all harms observed and reported can be explained by a combination of: mistreatment, maltreatment, non-treatment, neglect, abuse and data fraud."
I can't imagine how anyone could believe that at least some viruses exist and deny the existence of a causative virus in the people who were hospitalised, with their lungs filling with fluid, due to massive levels of self-destructive, inflammatory, cytotoxic immune responses which damaged the pulmonary endothelium and caused the blood to be hyper-coagulative. This pattern of death by suffocation and/or by micro-embolisms and larger clots damaging the lungs, heart, brain etc. can only have been caused by an infectious agent. The pandemic response, with all its avoidance of proper nutrition and early treatment, and focus on reckless "vaccines" and anti-virals, can't hospitalise and kill people like this.
"I think it is a mistake to expect anyone, including especially medical professionals, to avoid evaluation according Greater Good criteria. Diagnosis and treatment generally involve significant risks, and if the clinician is literally required to "do no harm", then they would not be able to do anything in the majority of situations.”
In my understanding, practitioners avoid a charge of battery if they obtain informed consent. In this way they are able to treat the individual. The greater good is not achieved by treating individuals as a collective, subordinate to a group of humans who assume God-like knowledge and authority. Rather, the greater good is more likely to be achieved by respecting us all as individuals.
Thanks for mentioning him. I did an article myself back in April last year on him. He is seriously deluded. With a name like Marsh that makes him a swamp creature!
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/killing-granny-henry-marsh-neurosurgeon?utm_source=publication-search