After our last article about Jay Bhattacharya and his incessant abuse of the "Covidian" insult, deployed even to declare vocal support for neo-Nazis, it's worth expanding on this topic of "cults" and "Covidians" even further. From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of insults have been thrown about recklessly by the anti-vaccine movement in their crusade against public health to attack anyone who didn't blindly embrace the SARS-CoV-2 virus as harmless, and even beneficial to one's own health - "infection builds immunity," claimed UCSF's Vinay Prasad, now known for little more than being an abrasive & thoughtless RFK Jr. dickrider, in an attack on pediatric COVID-19 vaccinations. This sort of anti-vax argument has been around for centuries - including in defense of smallpox as "a necessary operation of nature."
The problem is that none of the anti-vaccine cranks who spew this insult of "cultist" actually know what it means. Well class, letโs unpack this dialectical debacle.
Just What Is a Cult?

As a tabletop "Game Master" with years of experience designing campaigns, storylines, and scenarios, the Cult is an incredibly useful framework for building narratives, locations, factions, characters, and encounters for players to get lost in. The mecha-dominated universe of Battletech has the Word of Blake: the splinter cult of the religious telecom which keeps the space phones running. In the wargame Necromunda, a science fiction take on gang warfare, Chaos Cultists are an exceptional outlier: embracing the Chaos Gods and ritual sacrificing captured hoodlums, transforming them into unholy daemonic Chaos Fiends to unleash upon the criminal gangs of the Underhive. For the RPG system Dark Albion, Cults of Chaos is a dedicated sourcebook for helping you design your own cult, with their own culture, lair, rituals, leaders, and other features for a glorious evening of dark and brooding adventure against (or embracing?) the arcane forces of darkness, such as War, Death, Famine, and...oh, right - Pestilence.
Review with Forrest MacNeil also had an especially insightful episode (S02E04) about the logistical follies of starting your own cult. Something that could never happen to me, because I live a Six-Star Lifeโข thanks to the enlightenment of drama teacher and Cosmic Mother Mrs. Greenfield. One-Two-Three-Four-Five-Six! According to America's leading Life Reviewer Forrest MacNeil's personal assistant Lucille, what are the four steps to building an effective cult?
Find Some Vulnerable People
Isolate Them
Exploit Them for Money
โฆRivers of Blood.
Over a million Americans have died of COVID-19 since 2020, and many of them because they listened to contrarians you can easily find on monetized outlets like Sensible Medicine, which features โexpertsโ like UCSF's Robert Marine and Vinay Prasad, who insist that the COVID vaccine is useless & embracing SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 would provide you with lifelong immunity.
Unfortunately, outside of their fantasy realm, actual scientists in reality from around our world have produced a steady stream of medical research showing that COVID-19 has long-term negative pacts all over the body (PAI) - including your brain, heart & even reproductive organs. A vascular, multi-system disease; not a mere respiratory bug which goes in one lung & out the other. Instead of accepting the responsibilities that come with being medical professionals, Sensible Medicine has chosen to withhold this fact from their paying subscribers, exploiting their followers for money.
On the other hand, the alleged "covidian" cult has embraced a centuries long tradition of fighting the spread of disease with engineering and medicine, following in the footsteps of such "zealots" like Florence Nightingale and Ignaz Semmelweis - the latter of which is having their legacy exploited (Dr. Jonathan Howard, SBM) to defend the worthless, completely unscientific online petition which is the Great Barrington Declaration. These "cultist" solutions not only include the COVID-19 vaccine and updated boosters, but also engineering solutions such as N95 respirators, HEPA air filtration, and even FarUVC solutions to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Ask yourself this question: does this look like some sort of arcane ritual of heretical mysticism, or hard technical science at work?
Branding the entire field of PPE engineering as unscientific cult behavior is not something a serious, mature adult says. Yetโฆ
โฆprotecting yourself from a deadly & disabling virus, and preventing yourself from spreading it to others, is considered โcultlikeโ behavior to anti-vaccine cranks. The branding of medical and engineering science as "cultish" rituals is utterly depraved projection, when almost every single COVID-19 death is the result of human-to-human transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. By definition, a cult is one which demands that you reject science, medicine, and engineering in order to embrace their fictional beliefs. In America, the cult of Scientology has a significant bodycount and extensive history of violent abuse. In medieval Europe, cult members marched upon Jerusalem in service of an elaborate fantasy that God told them to occupy the "Holy Lands," carrying out unspeakable and unforgivable atrocities. This was considered so "normal" for the time, that at one point, children engaged in the fun. (Wikipedia)
A Torrent of Isolating Language
The term โcovidianโ mirrors many other cults in their practice of inventing a slur for non-believers: Infidel, heretic, Suppressive Person, and so forth - a wide spectrum of people which includes doctors, scientists, and those protecting themselves from SARS-CoV-2. These โoutsidersโ are smeared as dangerous, unwell people who are refusing the โnormalcyโ of repeated COVID-19 infections - as these pestilence cult leaders shield their followers from experts & critics who can collapse their devout faith in a supposedly benevolent virus with an arsenal of scientific facts.

"Normalcy" has been a wedge deployed time and time again to justify abandoning COVID-19 mitigations and embracing the virus. โNormalโ is a fictional societal concept that has frequently shifted throughout civilized history - In a minor European country in the 1930s-40s, it was considered "normal" to execute what we have now branded as "the vulnerable," including those disabled by the 1918 pandemic. The doctor Semmelweis was committed to a mental asylum and beaten to death for going against "normalcy" and suggesting that doctors shouldn't spread pathogens to patients in hospital settings, while in the modern day, cranks like Vinay Prasad of UCSF Hospitals screeches that workplaces like his own shouldn't lift a finger to prevent transmission of airborne viruses, even after nosocomial COVID-19 has already killed a significant number of patients. Nobody has ever gone to the hospital because they needed to "see smiles," contrary to what quacks like Shira Doron claim.
In 2020, Jay Bhattacharya and his fellow travelers' blind faith in COVID-19 being "mild" and protective to one's health was so devout, that he was brave enough to rewrite the entire scientific definition of "herd immunity," erasing the entire history of previous pandemics. In real-world cults such as Heaven's Gate, cult leaders prioritize isolating their members by redefining their words and how they speak. The modern anti-vaccine movement, and other cults such as the "Twin Flames Universe," have exploited social media networks to spread their message and recruit new followers like never before, amassing serious profits by selling ever increasingly harmful lies to vulnerable people looking for answers.

Much like the "Twin Flames Universe" cult has produced an unyielding amount of droll, borderline unwatchable propaganda to isolate and indoctrinate lonely women merely looking for help finding a romantic partner, the "Great Barrington Declaration" and like-minded cranks have spent the past five years producing a leviathan of media; a constant stream of nonsense that often contradicts itself in the service of elevating the profile of their High Priests, reinforcing a devout loyalty to viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1, and stoking the flames of a zealous fury against public health - which has often led to abuse, death threats, and violence against doctors, scientists, and public health officials. None of which have been condemned by Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, UCSF's Vinay Prasad, or other pestilence sycophants - in fact, they're happy to feed into this. (SBM)
Rivers of Blood
What these pestilence cult followers don't understand is that, like every other cult throughout history, they've been exploited this entire time, led to slaughter like lambs in the same flock as the "covidians" they pretend to be superior to, all to further a larger political agenda.
The second Trump administration is planning to place federal public health authority in the hands of a gaggle of notorious pestilence cultist grifters, from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to Mehmet Oz to Jay Bhattacharya, empowered by institutional cowardice, to forward an anti-vaccine agenda that will lead to disease outbreaks which will hit America's children hardest. This is by design: the new bi-partisan consensus in Washington, D.C. is that the federal government is not responsible for keeping your children from getting horribly sick, a side-effect of a mismanaged pandemic response in which the Biden Administration oversaw the mass infection of tens of millions of unvaccinated American children with a brand-new virus. Increasing population-wide illness creates vast new opportunities for profit growth: from over-the-counter medicine to prescription medication, to hospitalizations, to long-term-care, to unregulated supplements, to explicit snake oil scams.
America will pay a heavy price in blood to re-learn basic lessons about government's role in public health in a modern, civil democracy. If you're a heretical "covidian" who is still donning a respirator in public and protecting yourself from SARS-CoV-2 and a potential H5N1 pandemic, you're already well prepared for the challenges that lie ahead. Whatever opposition party exists to retake the halls of power in 2028 is going to have to prioritize rebuilding the fundamentals of public health and regulatory authority for a nation in crisis on Day One, as well as bringing down the hammer on the scam artists & anti-vax grifters, casting them out of the public square and back to the shadows. Nothing less is acceptable.
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