Covid in Austria: Establishment Rudely Curses 'Anti-Vaxxers' as Gov't Tries to Placate Angry Voters

Austria, it appears, is the only country that gets dumber with experience, yet, this episode shows why the establishment doesn't like 'anti-vaxxers': it's about obedience, stupid!

For background, please check my recent postings (here and here).

Exhibit A in this sorry farce comes in the form of a letter to the editor to Vienna’s leading upper middle-class newspaper, Die Presse. Founded as a bourgeois-liberal paper in 1848, its current incarnation is a weird combination of right-wing economics and the more traditional ‘big gov’t knows best’ so widely diffused among elites before WW1.

Strangely, the editors actually permitted the below letter to be published, which caused quite a stir earlier this week, at least among those who don’t think that discriminating against citizens based on their choice with regard to bodily autonomy is a bad thing (count me among them).

So, here’s the original, with Marcus Franz’ tweet reading: ‘rude letter to the editor in Die Presse—its author is a Ministerialrat [a dep. section head] and as such high-ranking public official he works for the entire (!) people, not merely for the vaccinated. (Guess which Ministry he works at…?’ [the Green-led Environment ministry of Leonore Gewessler who, when she accompanied president Van der Bellen to Bratislava on 31 Jan., took a plane to fly to Vienna—a flight of 60km or roughly 40 miles…]

Marcus Franz @M_T_Franz

Rüder Leserbrief in ⁦@DiePressecom⁩ - der Mann ist Ministerialrat und als solcher Beamter der Republik und dem gesamten(!) Volk verpflichtet, nicht nur den Geimpften. (Welches Ministerium das wohl ist…?)

Here’s my translation, followed by a few bottom lines:

---

No Apology for Anti-Vaxxers

Three reasons why opponents of vaccination do not deserve an apology:

1. The ostentatious rejection of vaccination has massively damaged trust in science. There were and are hardly any arguments for doing so, but a whole bouquet of nonsense that has either been invented, dressed up in the worst ideological way, or disproved long ago. [evidence for any of these claims? zilch]

2. Anti-vaxxers have proven to be enemies of evidence-based decisions by state institutions. They thus also reject state institutions with democratic legitimacy and, to a considerable extent, our form of government, liberal democracy, itself. [ah, my good ol’ friend of deductive reasoning; at least there’s a method to this madness]

3. Opponents of vaccination behaved in a way that displays a lack of solidarity. The fact that vaccination only provides limited protection against being massively infected or transmitting the virus (to a limited extent) could only become apparent after observing and evaluating the effects. Nevertheless, they always rejected vaccination and proved themselves to be morons

Apology? Certainly not.

---

Bottom Lines

Of course it would be easy to dismiss this as the disgusting burp of a committed shill for Big Pharma (which it is). Heck, I could even cite research conducted by the George Soros-financed Central European University (isn’t that ironic?) that was published in—wait for it—Nature: read the paper by Bor et al., Nature 613, 704-11 (2023), which holds that

vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals at a level as high as discriminatory attitudes that are commonly aimed at immigrant and minority populations.

So, refugees are welcome, but whoever favours bodily autonomy, informed consent—thereby rejecting the primacy of medical tyranny enshrined in the Nuremberg Code—and the sovereign individual does not ‘deserve an apology’.

I’m not sure I’d even want one from these people.

Yet, who is this guy, by the way? The author of these lines, one Thomas Jakl, PhD, served as Chairman of an EU authority from 2006-10 and published repeatedly in leading Austrian media. According to Wikipedia, he is an expert on ‘legislation on chemical substances at the national, European and UN levels’:

Jakl is one of the most influential thinkers on the subject of sustainable chemical management, and the foremost propounder of Chemical Leasing. He is the co-author of ‘Chemical Leasing’ and ‘Chemical Leasing goes Global’. He has pioneering contributions to the fields of scientific and technical risk assessment of substances and products, best practice diffusion for the production and application of chemical products as well as ‘Circular Economy’.

In other words: this guy isn’t just a political hack and quite able lobbyist for the chemical industry. He has quite a standing among the Eurocracy and is certainly not a nobody.

Yet, the nonsense is palpable: we could, then, also point to the dramatic gaps in his ‘knowledge’ (such as it appears), from the difference between absolute vs. relative risk reduction; the fact that even Pfizer has now admitted never to have checked things, such as prevention of transmission or infection; or the framing as any kind of dissent as far right-wing that is so common among the establishment, both in legacy media and among leading politicians.

Yet, there’s one curious sentence, tucked away in the middle of Jakl’s letter, which betrays the kind of totalitarianism that ran amok in the past couple of years:

Anti-vaxxers have proven to be enemies of evidence-based decisions by state institutions. They thus also reject state institutions with democratic legitimacy and, to a considerable extent, our form of government, liberal democracy, itself.

See the sleight-of-hand? It’s not about being against these injections (it probably never was); what Mr. Jakl is so vehemently opposed to is, in fact, that the rabble got a bit too uppity.

Of course, if you’re a righteous bastard, such as Mr. Jakl, you don’t like it when the hoi polloi declares one’s body to be beyond the reach of the ‘state institutions’.

It would appear that these green-ish pseudo intellectuals have much more in common with the more deplorable totalitarians of the past, albeit, as Marx stated famously in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this time, it’s farcical, albeit no less dangerous.

For the mindset of these ‘Green’ hacks, please see:

Covid Futures: Austrian Green MPs Call Parliamentary Oversight by the Opposition 'Abuse' and 'Harassment'