Essays in Idleness

There is a fortune to be made on Batflu vaccines — perhaps the most profitable department, currently, of the pharmaceutical industry. I knew this when a company executive said he thought a fourth booster would be necessary (even when some doctors said no), and looked forward to mandated boosters — every autumn in perpetuity. He is in what marketers would call an enviable position, for the government — whether Trumpian or Bidenesque — undertakes to foot the whole bill, in addition to its own bells and whistles.

We should not expect honest accounting for the cost of whole Batflu, in the many currencies of money or in the lives abridged in a thousand different ways, any more than we should expect a figure for sand molecules from the world’s beaches. If we had a number, it would defy comprehension.

Big Guvmint and Big Pharma — two of the richest and most powerful obscenities in our public life — are allied in the cause of the medicalization of society. For the cynical, it is an easy matter to assemble the supplementary moral arguments. These great agents are, they will claim, on the side of good health and longevity (against unknown agents on the other side). They are the processing bowels of science. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t know what to do with our freedom. Think how our freedoms are diminished, as Big Guvmint absorbs Big Pharma.

The very cynical judge that the medical establishment seeks, like a virus, to make everyone sick, but ideally no one die while they can still sell them medicine. It “evolves” with the times, until everyone lives well past one hundred, and can be prescribed emergency life-saving drugs from just prior to the moment of birth.