RADICAL SYMBIOSIS PART 2: SHOULD I GET VACCINATED?
SHOULD I GET VACCINATED?
Benjamin Bratton writes in his new book The Revenge of the Real about a post-COVID world. This seems optimistic, to say the least. It is three decades since the onset of the AIDS/HIV virus and in 2019 690,000 people died of the condition (for some reason the 2020 figures are still unavailable). Anthony Fauci has been in charge of the response to AIDS/HIV since the 1980s. Has Fauci been successful after approximately 33 million AIDS/HIV deaths worldwide? And what does Bratton mean now, in 2021, when he writes of being already after the fact of ‘COVID-19’?
In some quarters, it is as if not only COVID but the decision to be vaccinated is already over and done with. We are—so the implication goes—either vaccinated or about to be. We are either ‘jabbed’ or waiting out the hours and days until this ‘jab’ becomes absolutely mandatory and we have no choice (this is already happening of course). However much the decision itself is approached with concern or even calculated indifference, its logical stakes remain relevant and difficult if not impossible to fully metabolize.
It might be better put this way, how can anyone fully know, given the ubiquity of increasing pharmacological corruption and state manipulation, whether one should be vaccinated or not, regardless of circumstances and age and desire? That is, even if I am already ‘double-dosed’, how do I know that I made the right decision, or even any decision at all, in submitting myself to the vaccination process? Will I ever know? Does it matter, given so many other accelerated forms of social pressure? Why focus on this?
AN IMPOSSIBLE DECISION
The decision about vaccination is impossible in the best and most robust sense. It is impossible in the sense of being very real and very hard to predict the consequences of, but it is nonetheless viable to describe with summary precision some of what this means.
Consider a sample of the background information for any vaccination decision either already taken or to come. To be clear, this is merely a sample:
Antibiosis may not be for life. First of all, it is not at all certain that the decision to get vaccinated is a decision for life at all—either my own life or the lives of others. Namely, even though antibiosis broadly speaking appears to be pro-life in the short-term, this decision itself (about what is and is not for-life) can only take place absent crucial information (now increasingly embargoed as ‘disinformation’) about long-term effects of antibiosis on the immunological whole. One way of expressing this is as follows: antibiosis always threatens to be in terminal conflict with radical symbiosis.1 We can easily underestimate the long-term impact of mass antibiosis on symbiotic survivance.
Pfizer is a criminal entity. Second of all, take at least one of the companies offering vaccination. In the case of Pfizer, we are receiving life-and-death help from a company that has paid the following amounts in settlement and corruption charges over the last two decades: $2.3 Billion, $10.75 Million, $60 Million, €90 Million, $430 Million, $142.1 Million, $20 Million, $45 Million, $75 Million, and $50 million. The arena of commercial pharmacology is that of acute product liability and yet, if someone refuses to take a Pfizer vaccine simply on the basis of this litany of pay outs, such a decision cannot merely be coded as ‘vaccine hesitancy’ or ‘anti-vaxx disinformation’. It would be easy to argue that Pfizer should already not exist as a company at all never mind offer universal healthcare solutions.
No choice. Insofar as different nation states explicitly or implicitly have targets for population percentages that need to be vaccinated, these nations are already in the business of coercion and, by implication, forced vaccination (forced vaccination simply masquerading here under the name of ‘voluntary vaccination’ subsequent to which a slow but sure drift to the ‘mandatory’). Such targets imply some undisclosed contract with a third party, as well as teleologies of vaccinated ‘deliverables’. Even if this pressure to be vaccinated (through the increasingly real spectre of ‘vaccine passports’ or lottery tickets and donuts) is not backed by actual force, immersion in an atmosphere of no-choice can be equally affecto-totalitarian and crazy-making. For example, if 80% is taken to be the perceived level required to reach ‘herd immunity’, this fails to factor in naturally acquired immunity and those who have already had COVID, all of which all told is presumably already above that figure!2 In addition, it looks like that ‘target’ will soon be officially designated to be 100%—indicating nothing but the vaccination of every living being on earth (including animals),3 with the idea of ‘choice’ slowly disappearing from view.
9 new COVID billionaires. We may also wish to keep in mind that according to figures recently released by The People’s Vaccine Allowance, the ‘COVID’ virus has created no less than 9 new billionaires in the past year. These 9 include Moderna (MRNA) CEO Stéphane Bancel and the CEO of BioNTech (BNTX) Ugur Sahin. Both CEOs are now worth around $4 billion. Surely a perfectly human reaction to the idea that this degree of individual wealth is being created by pharmacological companies would be the refusal of vaccines at a personal level at least until further information is gathered.
57 patents 20 years ago. Perhaps most disturbing of all—in this highly abbreviated list—is information gathered together and presented by Dr David Martin in a panel with Reiner Fuellmich on 9 July 2021. If we assume this information to be at least partially true, the implications are radical: it may be the case that ‘SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’ does not exist as a new phenomenon at all, that it was created and registered intentionally as far back as 2000, that there are 57 patents to demonstrate this, and that the whole lab-leak/natural cause debate is classic limited hangout. Martin also makes the point that not only were multiples patents registered for ‘SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’ two decades ago but that the equivalent vaccine patents were also snapped up around the same time. This would help to explain the worldwide suppression of the oral ‘wonder drug’ Ivermectin as detailed in Michael Capuzzo’s article ‘The Drug that Cracked COVID’. In other words, it is as if the space for Covid vaccines was already controlled two decades ago in preparation for something like a Bio-Tech coup when the time came.
Suffice to say that, even considering this small cross-section of information and concrete speculation, it is inconceivable that many millions of people would not be largely sceptical of the idea of anything like enforced or even simply recommended vaccination with ‘Big Pharma’ injections. Extreme distrust may well be the underyling norm here.
ARE ALL DECISIONS FINITE?
Making decisions is perhaps always a finite business. Although we should have all the time in the world to make the right and most informed decision, this is hardly ever the case. Even if we know all of the above and more, it may not bother us. In the same way that we can use Amazon Prime everyday even though we know this act has catastrophic repercussions all the way down the supply chain, taking any vaccine is a highly imperfect decision in the world as it is.
One might say that the very issue of vaccine decisions means acknowledging the limits of the human capacity for engagement beyond certain scales in space and time, and beyond the spheres of immediate identification and empathy. This limit would be effectively—practically speaking—inexorable. We cannot take or not take vaccines for history, presumably, but only for ourselves and loved ones.
Just as we often have no choice in our day-to-day interactions but to let heuristic ‘folk psychology’ take over, the immediate conceptions of oneself and others as mortal and threatened and in need of medical ‘aid’ and ‘control’ will override the viewpoint of radical and naturalistic ‘science’.
No doubt many people simply go ahead and get vaccinated precisely as a compromise: their decision is not a real decision at all, one might say, but an acknowledgement of finitude. The decision indicates the difficulty of processing the overwhelming amount of information available (only hinted at above) as well as the acceptance that all such decisions in the contemporary world are severely compromised in any case.
Yet, at the same time, this realist account also implies an absolute coincidence between the willingness to go ahead and be vaccinated as a compromise and the willingness to take into one’s body as decision a bio-logical Gestell that is, potentially, extremely anti-life. Which is to say, antibiosis itself may be extinction primed in ways we are only starting to glimpse.
What we really get injected with is perhaps a decision-Gestell that is entirely infected. A historical moment of compromise becomes pharmacologically decisive and unstoppable. Despite all appearances to the contrary, the vaccine drive turns out to be a civilizational euthanasia jab stick and ultimately this has to be felt on an intimate level.
WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR OPENNESS?
A more speculatively evolving way of looking at the current situation might be affirmed under the banner: symbiosis, not antibiosis. Whether one is vaccinated or not, it is still possible to have an attitude of radical symbiosis. That is, we can imagine someone who is ‘double jabbed’ and yet still entirely sceptical about the uses and meanings of the vaccines. One may commit to symbiosis even when plagued by technologies of drugged correction and antibiotic coercion.
In Avital Ronell’s 1993 essay ‘A Note on the Failure of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update)’, we find her writing as follows:
Diseases are not provoked by a pathogenic environment that would be merely destructive, but against it, by a patient who is defending herself. These immunopathological actions directed against the pathogenic environment constitute efforts to conserve life. Illnesses are the ‘natural defence’ of the living and not a message from the dead, which is in effect the only object of biological research.
Far from a literal embrace of non-vaccination broadly, this way of looking at things nonetheless suggests that disease is first of all a form of defence. Illness, we can say, is not at all organised against us, that is, merely on the side of death. Rather, illnesseses are messages from and to the living about the living. They give us vital information (the opposite of disinformation, as it were) about where life is, what it wants, and what it needs to do to go on.
The question therefore becomes, what does a disease want, and does it ever have a pure form? And would we even understand what a disease wants if it spoke (think of Wittgenstein and the lion), and is it not already speaking loud and clear now, that is, about the finitude that is signalled through it, and isn’t it decided in advance we won’t listen? Which is to say, how do we know and decide that we know what it wants? In other words, isn’t it possible that ‘COVID-2019’, as we have insisted on calling it, wanted something that we don’t yet know or understand? Are our assumptions themselves, and even the very act of naming a ‘disease’ before we fully understand it, always ways of perpetuating without being able to know it pathogenic destructiveness? How does a Bio-Technics of ‘scam’ relate to the extinction-charging of a viral saturation drift and acceleration? Wouldn’t this only lead to cosmographic rage of new proportions?
One may recall an increased openness to questions of all sorts during ‘early lockdown’, when there was a certain opening and clearing of consciousness, a willingness to ask questions that wouldn’t normally be asked. There was a kind of immunological Lichtung (opening) in our so-called first encounters. Less seemed to be taken for granted. As if we at the time were saying, ‘perhaps nature knows best and this suspension of conditions and activities is what we have always waited for.’ But what was that ‘nature’ except an impossible to analyse bricolage of decades-old state bio-drops and extinctological symptomology? At this late stage of pathology, how to tell these apart? And now that wonder vaccine persuasion has become an avatar of suppression, exactly where is the mal d’archive going with regard to isolated decisions?
It would be tempting to say that in general terms this opening has now all but closed. The curiosity and intellectual daring that briefly appeared ‘in early lockdown’ has been replaced on many fronts by a willingness to conform with the desire of the state, eagerness to be able to travel abroad, to get back to normal at any cost. All of this falls under the rubric of what takes place after COVID, of the development of a positive bio-politics before the illness itself has been thought or felt. It involves a subtle aesthetics and cascades of the ‘normal’ itself as a malaise of beautiful excuses.
WHAT IS RADICAL SYMBIOSIS?
Coming back to the passage from Ronell’s essay, what is she actually saying, and is it sayable, or bearable, right now? In essence, the passage contains a definition of radical symbiosis that is hard to take. Insofar as antibiosis is generally understood as a striving to kill a disease, which therefore makes possible a return of the immunologically repressed (‘variants’), we seem to be assuming several things about disease itself:
First of all, disease is the enemy. And as the enemy, it has nothing good to say or tell us. It needs to be attacked and obliterated. As Fauci put it recently, referring to his own wartime role using an inevitable metaphor, ‘Your entire life you trained as a general to lead an army in a big war.’
We are, therefore, in a war. If disease is the enemy, this means that the current situation is best characterised as pharmopolemological. It involves antibiosis as war-like assumption, with almost no room allowed for the possibility of radical symbiosis, which is to say, of working with disease and even openness to dying. Witness the media as a frenzy of crafted speech-shutdown, a medical ‘cancel culture’, the terror of the illness turning out to be niche finality beyond all trillion dollar treatments.
The disease has to be killed. The further connected assumption is that obliterating the disease (short-term, ‘for me’, ‘in me’, ‘for my loved ones’) is always the sole good. Or, put otherwise, that my own decision with regard to vaccination is naturally limited: I can only do so much, I cannot be responsible for the logic of the living itself, I can only act in a short-term way since I am only one small human being. I have to kill it within myself. Let’s get on with ‘life’.
But perhaps our decisions can instead be infinite. One might say nonetheless that whether I take the vaccination or not the continuity between my own bio-logical sphere and a larger bio-spheric domain remains the same. I may restrict my sensing of my own organism and feel its limitations (what can one human do? what am I supposed to do? must I simply give in for the sake of my life?) but this does nothing to diminish the fact that the consequences of my actions are, in principle, without limit (they are bio-logically connected, sensuous, infinite).
By accepting antibiosis we threaten infinities of linguistico-organic diversity. Antibiosis threatens the very possibility of all ongoing symbiosis and, whether I like it or not, what appears to be good for a life is not what is good for life. Being vaccinated does not make us well now for anything like the duration of a ‘good’, and this is something we are now being told. At some level, we all know this.
WHAT TO DO THEN?
Let us try out a small thought experiment, remembering that it is in the nature of such experiments to be just that: possible only in this moment, not necessarily binding, inconclusive.
Let us imagine opposing antibiosis so completely and so thoroughgoingly that we start with refusing the name ‘COVID’ itself, since we will assume that our own suppression (our own lack of freedom) begins with a forced name, a forced naming. (The name is a decision taken before me, just like a decision to vaccinate. The problem begins, in this sense, with this name: ‘COVID-19’.)
Names are a cover. This is something we all know about names. I am no more my name than the biological sequence called ‘COVID-19’ is the supposed virus itself. By calling ‘COVID’ ‘COVID’ we go along with an ‘expert knowledge’ that is not our own, a bio-logic that may, for all we know, have little interest in life itself as survivance. By giving into this name, pure symbiosis may be ignored in principle forever.
Everytime we say ‘COVID’ or even ‘vaccine’, it is always possible that we are not following any kind of logic of the living at all. We are, instead, mouthing a message from the future extinct which simultaneously ignores the extinct, shutting them out and down. No wonder ‘free speech’ is taken to be a differend in this and related zones.
But not only that, when we name a ‘disease’ with a name given to us by linguistically aberrant corpocratic entities, we may from the point of view of radical symbiosis be doing the actual work of extincting as an illness and alibi. To give your name for and to this process, for example on a medical passport, means entering into a war with and for one’s own future name in general as a kind of organic diversity. It means siding with extinction in the form of an invisible syringe. It means the cancellation of infinities.
See, for example, ‘Mass vaccination during pandemic a historic blunder: Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier’.
ADDED: for example Ezra Klein writes here, ‘I’ll be honest about the question behind my question. I want to know if there’s an endgame here. In San Francisco, where I live, 70 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, and 76 percent are partially vaccinated. These are the kinds of numbers we were once told would carry us to herd immunity. Now the hope of herd immunity appears to be gone, and even in San Francisco we’re back to universal indoor masking.’
lol depends
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