Foreclosing on Your Child's "Immunity Debt"
Rebranding Pestilence as Health
Heading into our fifth year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we have returned to where it all began: There is an outbreak of serious pediatric illness in China. China tells the WHO this is due weakened immunity as a result of population wide COVID-19 infections. The WHO and the pandemic punditry complex have declared them stupid, and in fact, their children are suffering "immunity debt," a fictional concept that news media in the West broadcasted widely.
I. The Factory of Fiction
In the advertising industry, we spend a great deal of time convincing people to spend money on things they don't need, and developing nonsensical concepts like "brand loyalty," i.e. the non-zero percentage of the American population that considers themselves "Apple fanboys" and insist on buying every product they put out as soon as they're released - buying the newest iPhone for mild, iterative improvements over their current iPhone, which works just fine.
The liquor industry has been infected with a wave of celebrity brands, from Dwayne Johnson's "Teremana" tequila, to Ryan Renolds' "Aviation" gin, to whatever blended slop that Irish national embarrassment Conor McGregor is assaulting elderly men in pubs over. Fried chicken covered in cheap edible gold sheets sold for an outlandish markup. In the videogame Call of Duty, you can pay a premium for "cosmetics" that do things such as replacing your generic special forces soldier with Nicki Minaj and covering your tactical automatic shotgun with marijuana stickers.
Americans live in a bloated consumerist society that is inundated with nonsensical garbage to burn money on, utterly detached from logic & reason. What does a classless MMA meathead possibly know about what goes into a quality whiskey? What is the benefit gained from making your opponents in a competitive videogame mildly irritated by seeing that they were defeated by a player dressed up as a popular rapper? Does food exist solely to be posted on Instagram in a vapid performance of wealth as an aesthetic of excessive consumption?
Many public figures in the medical field during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have seemingly convinced themselves that they are in fact actually creative directors at an advertising agency contracted by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We've profiled some of them over the past year, from the Brookings Institute's Leana Wen, to the UK's Alasdair Munro, to drunkard UK government advisor Francois Balloux, to aggressive contrarian Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco.
There's been an extensive multi-year rebranding campaign deployed against the public to convince them that COVID-19 is actually somehow beneficial and refusing an infinite stream of endless COVID-19 infections is in fact a detriment to your health. This is not a new concept - the anti-vaccine movement dating back hundreds of years has repeatedly championed illness and "natural immunity" over safe and effective vaccines as well as disease prevention standards in general.
Now, countless years of medical research has made it clear, and especially when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, that this dog simply don't hunt. A fictitious narrative that society should have taken out behind the barn like Old Yeller years ago, has instead found the Holy Grail in the COVID-19 pandemic when certain public health pundits should frankly know better.
Tens of millions of people around the world have died from the COVID-19 infection that was supposed to benefit them. Countless more have been disabled by their bout with SARS-CoV-2 and are struggling to get the benefits and support they need as a newly disabled person. Many children among them. There is a growing mountain of scientific research of the many different harms that SARS-CoV-2 can leave on the body, including brain damage and even reproductive tissue damage.
Where there is smoke, there is typically a fire. As a wildfire of pestilence blazes, these pandemic pundits are lobbying to ram the toxic smoke down your child's lungs and insist these constant illnesses are doing your family a favor.
II. Decoding "Immunity Debt"
Since COVID-19 first made waves in New York hospitals in Spring 2020, wealthy interests have lobbied non-stop to combat any & all public health measures to prevent needless death and disability from the pandemic; most notably the "Great Barrington Declaration," funded by the Koch family of oil billionaires who also lobbies against preventing climate change disasters and astroturfed the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Manchurian candidate; amplified by Donald Trump.
Emily Oster is an economist who published fraudulent data on Substack, funded by sadistic billionaires like Koch, rightoid vampire Peter Thiel, and the uncanny valley abomination that is Mark Zuckerberg, to lobby for mass infecting unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2 - now she's on the board of Michelle Obama's child juice company and has her own fashion line as a reward for mislead parents about the dangers of a deadly and disabling virus to their children's health. It pays to get children killed in American society, unfortunately.
In 2021, the term "immunity debt" was imagined into being, and pediatric trainee Alasdair Munro made a name for himself promoting the concept, to the point of actually mansplaining it to actual female immunologists. Blocking anyone who corrects his nonsense, he's created quite the echo chamber for himself to profit vis-à-vis Substack revenue.
The mythology of "immunity debt" is this: your immune system functions akin to a muscle - you go to the gym, you pick up heavy objects and put them down, thus breaking down your muscles and training your body to develop new, stronger muscles to adapt to this need for physical strength. Transferred to immunology, the ideal is that infections and disease are somehow beneficial to your health - akin to the "natural immunity" myth that has plagued anti-vaccine mythology for many years - including in children's books like "Melanie’s Marvelous Measles."
On May 12th, 2023, Epidemiologist Michael Mina via Twitter claims that "Immune system is exactly like a muscle to build up. W muscles, when you exercise there is damage and repair comes and makes them stronger...It's how immunity works." In reality, you can overt exert yourself during physical exercise and seriously injure or possibly even kill yourself. The potential that perhaps we are harming children's immune systems with an endless stream of COVID-19 infections is never considered by pro-viral advocates like Mina and Munro.
This talk also opens the door to deranged, eugenicist ideals that those who died or have been disabled by COVID-19 were simply "weak" or deserve to suffer. If you were to make these sorts of arguments of “immunity debt” or “gap” in an Immunology 101 course, you would be flunked immediately for your scientific illiteracy.
"Immunity debt is an attractive as a concept, absolving us of precautions and giving hope there's an end. Mental gymnastics of how lockdowns from 2020 and 2021 are impacting infants today are impressive! #2023hopium" -Clinical Immunologist Samira Jeimy via Twitter, November 26th 2023
Dr Jeimy and Sabina Vohra-Miller, a pharmacologist who together co-host the Unambiguous Science podcast, wrote an excellent explainer in 2022 on how your immune system actually works and different types of immunity - cellular immunity, adaptive immunity, innate immunity, and passive immunity. You should absolutely read it and share in your circles. Simply put:
"There is no evidence that [immunity debt] is real. In the absence of infections, the immune system does not lie dormant & weaken. We are constantly exposed to & co-exist with trillions of viruses, bacteria & fungi. Lack of infections does not weaken the immune system. But some infections, like measles and COVID-19, can." -Sabrina Vohra-Miller, November 4th 2022"
The mountain of evidence that COVID-19 is harming immune systems continues to pile up even now in December 2023. However, this myth of "immunity debt" is a convenient scapegoat to posthumously justify the absolutely terrible decision making behind lifting public health measures.
III. Repetition as Mythmaking
In advertising, we often abuse the tactic of repeating certain phrases or ideals to get them lodged in people's heads. Going back to Dwayne Johnson, he once starred in the DC Comics film Black Adam, an utterly forgettable snoozefest of CGI slop, middling acting, and poor storytelling. When promoting this garbage, Dwayne would constantly claim that "The hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change." Black Adam is the frequent nemesis of Shazam, however Dwayne wanted to skip this feud and go right ahead to challenging Henry Cavill's Superman - even bringing him back for a post-credits teaser.
The utterly forgettable snoozefest bombed like a rock and the epic computer generated slapfest between Cavill and Dwayne would never materialize, with both men being booted from their respective roles in director James Gunn's reboot of the embarrassment that was the DC "Cinematic Universe." Dwayne was in fact correct; the hierarchy of power did change. Just in the opposite manner that Dwayne desired.
After the "immunity debt" campaign of 2022, a year later with a massive wave of pediatric illness in China, SARS-CoV-2's most dedicated influencers decide to reboot the "immunity debt" campaign and play it all over again - even after it's been thoroughly debunked. Without an ounce of pushback by the media, the same chronically incorrect "experts" like Francois Balloux and Leana Wen are at it again. Now to be clear, Chinese officials have stated "the increase of people with flu like symptoms is due to a new winter bug that has taken over due to Covid lowering immunity to common viruses." Obviously, Chinese scientists are stupid, and the WHO alongside the chronically incorrect pandemic punditry is hard at work correcting them. Behold!
• Allysia Finley, a rightoid creep with zero scientific or medical background writing for the Wall Street Journal, publishes an article titled "Why Covid Lockdowns and Mask Mandates Made Children Sicker," claiming that "it's no surprise respiratory viruses are infecting children sheltered by years of lockdowns." In early 2022, she claimed that infections plus vaccinations would confer "super immunity," a completely debunked concept.
• For The Independent, self-described "drunken shitposter" Francois Balloux declares this a wave of pediatric hospitalization in China is simply a "phenomenon of lockdown exist waves of respiratory infections is sometimes referred to as immunity debt. Since China experienced a far longer and harsher lockdown than essentially any other country on Earth, it was anticipated that those lockdown exit waves could be substantial in China."
• In the Washington Post, Leana Wen writes "China only emerged from lockdowns last December. That means this will be its first full winter since ending 'zero covid,' so it shouldn't be surprising that the country is now experiencing a jump in respiratory illnesses...Experts believe that surge was a result of reduced immunity resulting from earlier mitigation measures that protected not only against the coronavirus but also other pathogens." Now, Leana does not name experts or provide evidence for these claims, a common habit of hers. On the other hand, there is a growing mountain of evidence that proves that COVID-19 is not simply a respiratory illness that goes in one lung and out the other, harmlessly - and causes harm to the immune system.
Now, there is a small problem here with the claim of an “immunity gap” as the cause of this wave of pediatric respiratory illness in China, specifically Mycoplasma Pneumonia. One small flaw here, that should be cause for serious concern regarding the alleged expertise of laptop class pandemic pundits:
Mycoplasma Pneumonia was detected in Switzerland just days after China. It was detected in the Netherlands. It was detected in South Korea. It was detected in Denmark. It was detected in Ireland. It was detected in France. On November 30th, it appeared in the United States thanks to an outbreak out of Ohio, as well as Massachusetts. Is December 2023 the "first full winter since ending 'zero covid'" for the Chinese states of Ohio and Massachusetts?
In this zealous crusade to rebrand mass pestilence in children as beneficial to their health, pandemic punditry has become fully detached from tangible reality.
Advertising is the industry of fantasy & fiction, not science. Viruses remain no friend to children, no matter how many times laptop class pundits try to rebrand them.
