The man from the government tells the truth. “Just two weeks to slow the spread,” he says reassuringly. “The Russians did it.” He looks sincere. “They’re just peaceful protests.”
There’s a reason trust in government has eroded nearly to single digits. There’s a reason government-adjacent entities—media, universities and research centers, nongovernmental organizations, and others—are no longer widely treated as reliable sources of information.
And there’s a reason COVID-19 vaccines have been refused by over a third of American adults. There are many rationales, of course—the lack of long-term safety studies, the low risk of hospitalization and death from the virus itself, or the anecdotal evidence of negative reactions—but the reason is unitary.
Anthony Fauci, embodiment of the decline in public trust, recently called vaccine skeptics “horrifying.” “It is almost inexplicable,” he remarked, “why people, when they see the data in front of them, don’t get vaccinated.”
But it’s not inexplicable or even very complicated. A large segment of the U.S. populace is simply opting out of the government’s latest experiment. Even if the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 Response Team knocks on every unvaccinated family’s door, I predict this segment will continue opting out.
Yet while the bureaucracy-minded scramble for ways to raise public trust in government, I’d like to see it drop even lower. Suspicion of a government that experiments with no accountability is healthy.
After all, reckless government experiments have been harming Americans long before Operation Warp Speed. It makes no sense to protect your bloodstream from mRNA while exposing your children’s education, your food supply, your livelihood and very way of life to the fatal conceits of government experimentation.
While only 65 percent of Americans will acquiesce to vaccination, between 80-90 percent of school-age children attend public schools—the ultimate progressive experiment and source of proven widespread harm. Parents all over the country have revolted against local school boards enforcing critical race theory (CRT) curriculum and teachers’ unions’ ongoing and oppressive virus restrictions on students. Public-school enrollment took a three percent hit this year, but tens of millions of families still choose to remain a test group in the “great experiment”—perhaps hoping CRT bans will actually be faithfully upheld by teachers, or that factory-style education just needs more money thrown at it to be successful. Vaccines may not yet have long-term trials, but public schools do, and the results are sobering.
Universities are even worse. American college students emerge with four-year degrees confronting severe physical and mental health problems, dis-educated by censorious thought control and woke zealotry, owing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. Thanks to government subsidies and student aid, college costs continue to soar and compliance with federal mandates and accreditation agencies becomes higher education’s guiding star. Many freshmen are accepted without being able to read or write at a junior high level. Now that the public has been desensitized to lockdowns, many students pay full tuition to sit at home on Zoom. If a government vaccine experiment can generate skepticism among 35 percent of the population, where is the skepticism of the obligatory college degree?
The same could be said for America’s experiment with its government food monopoly. No, the feds don’t seize the nation’s harvests and redistribute them like the Soviet Union. But federal regulations and subsidies that favor corporate farms and factories have consolidated most food and beverage production under four or five companies—and antitrust laws are ignored. Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department classifications and oversight are under the complete control of the industrial food lobby, and have been for years. As a direct result of this corruption, experimental nutrition programs like the “food pyramid” and “plant-based diet” have supplanted the traditional American cookbook.
The result? Americans are fatter, weaker, and sicker than ever before. We’re being killed by the great experiment of replacing natural fat and protein with high-carb, high-sugar “health food” and fake products like soy “meat” and margarine. The resulting conditions like insulin resistance, inflammation, low testosterone, and metabolic syndrome are responsible for all but one of the nation’s top 10 causes of death.
This has been a government-led, multi-decade physical and mental health debacle—with plenty of long-term studies and data exposing the truth. Skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines is a healthy start, but where is the skepticism of our morning ritual of Wheaties and fat-free milk?
The list of government experiments goes on. “Let’s give mass immigration a shot—what’s the worst that could happen?” The results were in by the 1990s at the latest, but our national experiment has been gaining bipartisan momentum for several decades. “What if we tried outsourcing all manufacturing to China?” Clearly, it’s time to stop letting our central planners use us as test subjects.
The logic of vaccine skepticism boils down to “consider the source.” In a time of universal deceit, that’s a great motto to avoid ending up a statistic. Thirty-five percent of Americans distrust this government experiment—they should reassess their faith in all the others.