Corporate Pharmacy Racketeers Love Your Shots
A report from the trenches seems to indicate a growing excitement by CVS, and presumably other corporate pharmacies like Walgreens and Walmart, to up the shot count. One immediately wonders how much they’re getting reimbursed per stab.
CVS corporate manager: “How many shots did you give today?”
Pharmacist: “You mean COVID?”
Manager: “No, I mean all of ’em. We want to be doing multiples in each patient. COVID, COVID boosters, flu, shingles.”
Yes, I’m creating a conversation based on hearsay. But the source is impeccable because she’s one of those folks who actually went into healthcare to help people. She ran COVID vaccination clinics for several months. And she sees this entire vaccination rollout as the fiasco it had to be, an outcome of a system designed like a Ponzi Scheme, a multilevel web of racketeering. That they somehow insist on telling us is health care.
Legal Definition of racketeering (From the Merriam-Webster Law Dictionary)
1 : the extortion of money or advantage by threat or force
2 : a pattern of illegal activity (as extortion and murder) that is carried out in furtherance of an enterprise (as a criminal syndicate) which is owned or controlled by those engaged in such activity
Pharma as Racketeering
Note the reference in this definition to extortion of money or advantage. The behavior of both corporate pharma and corporate pharma-dispensary qualify on both counts as they: 1]acquired from feckless governments quasi-monopolistic vaccine manufacture and dispensing advantage and plenty of profits from running this through this casino we call healthcare. But what about the threat or force aspect of the legal definition? Sadly, the threat is real and many of us have experienced it. Fear. Fear of illness, fear of dying. There are no greater threats to the narcissistic creatures we’ve become. These threats, our fears, form the substrate for extraction of vast sums of money from the system, creating debt as the system always does.
And mainstream media does its part in fanning the flames of that fear. It’s exemplified by the headline of a Guardian article of August 31, 2021: “What is C.1.2, the new Covid variant in South Africa, and should we be worried?” Shit, of course. Worrying is good for business! Expect no other angle from corporate media.
For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron. When profits become primary, as they must in the scheme of corporate values, medical ethics go out the window.
Hence, I believe the accurate characterization of this enterprise fits my prior description as a multilevel web of racketeering.
The Immunological Ripoff
mRNA vaccine technology was developed with public tax dollars (NIH funding). The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were based on years of prior research in publicly funded university labs. Yet when these corporate-pharma giants sold us their vaccines, they felt no responsibility to release ALL available data. Nor did feckless governments like the US, UK, and many others demand the data for review by independent biologists. Data such as:
- the success or failure of the vaccines at evoking what’s called mucosal immunity a invaluable arm of immunity protecting against viral transmission (see for example https://vinlopresti.medium.com/are-covid-vaccines-not-as-socially-protective-as-they-could-be-715d3a902b65 ).
- data about the duration of immunity, how long an effective concentration of antibodies remained in people’s blood. This would require longitudinal studies that in the cramped time-frame of vaccine development were either not done or not published.
- most importantly, data about immunological memory: how fast, how effectively will the immune system of a vaccinated person respond to subsequent encounters with the virus (SARS CoV-2). While there couldn’t be human data collected in light of that compressed time-frame, there should exist data from the animal studies that led to the mRNA vaccines. The fact that none of these studies are being touted hardly confers confidence in what the response might be to this concern about immunological memory. Since all antibodies turn over, disappear from blood after a time, this memory aspect is critical, answering the question, “can more of those antibodies (and other defenses) be produced rapidly when needed?”
While I have always been positive about vaccines as potentiators of our body’s own innate immunological competence, this experience has soured my outlook. I said from the beginning that I’d prefer one of the vaccines made by more traditional vaccine technology. In a very real sense, the folks who’ve been protesting about being guinea pigs for a new biomedical technology have a point.
We’re now facing a situation in which there is great concern about the duration of immunity and the efficacy of immunological memory. This is evidenced by the fact that the pharmacist in the above reconstructed conversation has recently tested positive for the virus. And sure, she’s had a high level of exposure to many patients both during vaccination clinics and otherwise. But the assumption of her employer was that she’d be okay. Because she’d received her two doses and was always masked. This in turn assumes that corporate structures give two farts about their front-line employees, a rather tenuous assumption based on the experience of several of my ex–students in their dealings with corporate pharmacy giants like CVS.
Duration of Immunity and Route of Stimulus
Here’s the bottom line. Immunologists have known for almost 40 years that duration of immunity and immunological memory are greatly influenced by exactly how a stimulus (generally called an “antigen”) is presented to the immune system. The mRNA vaccines present that stimulus in a novel way, not previously used in existing vaccines like the ones for polio or measles, which confer very long-lasting immunity. Usually, lifelong in the case of polio.
We now find ourselves in the twilight zone of COVID uncertainty. It’s a somewhat frantic place to be, a place of corporate totalitarianism. Having no more influence than anyone else with sociopaths, my only recommendation is to keep pushing for a universal-coverage system. A system whose primary motivator isn’t corporate profit, but rather improved health, what originally sent my genuinely motivated students into five or six grueling years of pharmacy school. To them, I send abundant love and respect. To the rest of us, I say good luck with remaining as healthy as possible in what is often called “the richest country in history.”
Because when I hear that phrase, I reflexively think “ you mean most corrupt”? The Mafia is likely envious of the efficiency with which these racketeers siphon away our resources. After all, it’s only business, right? Isn’t that the catch-all justification?
