I believe that the great ideological confusion of the moment comes from a new phenomenon, which took our conceptual apparatus of short pants. We look to the 20th century and we can discern the villain there, the great statist dictator. The communist is the easiest to square with statism: a Red Czar, like Stalin, had the power of life and death over every Soviet. The entire production chain, from food to parts of the space race, was orchestrated by a planning bureaucracy submissive to the Czar who owned the state. The Soviet model inspired dictatorships around the world, especially in less industrialized countries. This was the case in Eastern Europe, Africa and China. For our neighborhood, Cuba became the beacon of the foolish: the island of magic where a paramilitary dictator gave everyone quality health and education, in exchange for some restrictions on freedom.
Communism Soviet is a simple and easy idea to process. That’s why it aroused vehement supporters and detractors: those who believed in the omnipotence of state planning were communists and that was it; anyone who didn’t believe was anti-communist and that was that. A contemporary phenomenon was more difficult to name and understand. What if we are against total planning and defend the existence of private companies? What is the appropriate boundary between state and corporate action? And if we defend a concertation between a charismatic dictator and a handful of large subsidized businessmen, protected against foreign competition or their fellow small entrepreneurs?
Then we had fascism, Nazism and a lot of dictatorships that started communists – including China. And, removing the dictatorial character, we had Social Welfare, which makes the government a secure source of income for big business. If we take a rich state and say it’s responsible for buying eyeglasses for everyone, only a very large company will win the bid, and soon it will be very interested in holding an eyeglasses lobby or sponsoring malicious bidders. The little artisan who made lenses or glasses is out of work, but the state gives him his subsidized pair of glasses.
Formation of anti-statism
Of turbulence lived in England there is an equivalence between right and anti-statism, with Thatcher raised to the status of icon. The Brazilian history was very different from that of England until the redemocratization process. Our anti-communism was not anti-statist – on the contrary. The longest period of the military regime used the state as an inducer of development. It worked with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) – thanks to which we have the fertile Cerrado –; it didn’t work out with a mountain of state-owned companies.
The thing starts to change with the Constituent Assembly, in , when Brazilian society starts to believe in Social Welfare. Everything becomes an obligation of the State and a right of the citizen. Public health is amalgamated into a new form; the SUS appears as a copy of the NHS and a symbol of the Democratic Rule of Law itself. And it must be one of the few things that remained constant on the left between and 2019: with the pandemic, a lot The good guy who uses health insurance went to social networks to post “Viva o SUS” because of Covid’s vaccine. People who uncritically support the transfer of huge sums from public coffers to Big Pharma. In other times, at least patent infringement would be discussed, as Brazil did together with India when José Serra was Minister of Health. Today, the Social Democrat and the pseudo-communist order the government to hand over any sum to Pfizer, while it says that only when everyone is forced to take a thousand doses, their experimental vaccine may perhaps work.
But we were in anti-statism. With Social Welfare, England’s culture came to equate right-wing and anti-statism. Perhaps the phenomenon is widespread in English-speaking culture, as the Progressive Era in the United States was also statist and, although it had representatives between Republicans and Democrats, it was easier to identify with today’s Democrats (In this regard, see the racial obsession, so pointed out by Thomas Sowell).
In Brazil, as we move on to
an ideal of Social Welfare, it is not surprising that, three decades later, the equivalence between right and anti-statism has also emerged in our political culture, even though we are of Iberian origin and not Anglophones.
Private power neglected
Friedrich Hayek, who fled Nazi Austria and into Social Welfare enthusiast England, wrote The road to serfdom
to warn that concentration of money was concentration of power, and that is why socialism would inevitably lead a people into serfdom, as it would concentrate political and the economic in one hand. Your lesson is still valid, but circumstances have changed. The concentration he feared, given the 20th century setting, was concentration in the hands of the state. In the 21st century, we have seen Western politicians and judges tear down laws and human rights to do what the pharmaceutical industry wants. Together, the oligopolists undoubtedly have more money than a lot of the national state, and it is possible for them to buy the authorities, plunder public coffers and kill or cripple part of its population with experimental drugs, avoiding risks.
The State is no longer the problem of the 21st century. It is the capture of state power by economic power. They are unelected people with police power over us.
Read the headlines on childhood vaccinations: Pfizer is the one who announces the success of its own experiments on children, as if there were no conflicts of interest . As if we were forced to entrust our lives and the lives of children to the good faith of a company that is making stratospheric gains from the vaccine. It is impossible to force us to trust, but the police force us to act as if we did.
The conflict of interest in the pharmaceutical industry is a serious problem in rich countries that has now slipped to the entire world. I leave the recommendation of the documentary The Bleeding Edge (2018), by Netflix, which shows the symbiosis between the FDA (the US regulatory agency), the healthcare industry, and academia. When funding for medical research is almost entirely private, from the industry itself, it is no wonder that all kinds of aberrations pass. If Bayer finances Bayer to say that the device invented by Bayer is good, the average Anglophone and Brazilian will find it beautiful, because Bayer is a private agent, while the State is the real bad guy.
Absurd absurdity
Last month, even before there was talk of childhood vaccination on a national level (but already with a health passport for children in Bahia), I heard a father awesome. His twins are four years old and he knew that Pfizer would soon release the vaccine to children as young as five. He and his wife didn’t want to give the kids the vaccine.
If I went back not to 2019, but to April 2020, when you were still in that small talk about flattening the curve, this situation would be unbelievable. Who would have believed, at the beginning of the pandemic, that parents would be forced to see their children vaccinated with a dubious safety substance?
Here I want to disagree with my friend Eli Vieira. In the text whose title seems tailor-made for this absurd situation (“Avisa authorizes vaccines for children. Which is safer: Pfizer or Coronavac?”), Eli says: “It’s important to pause and think about the ambiguities of the term ‘experimental’ ‘ in this context. While, in the Nuremberg Code, the term refers to scientific experiments, this is not necessarily the meaning contained in the resolution – in which ‘experimental character’ could be replaced by ‘tentative character’, especially in light of the context, which is to give a response to an emergency.”
The Nuremberg Code, written in the light of Nazism, requires the consent of the test subjects. The definition of Eli in the above passage is Byzantine. We need to objectively decide whether a given drug is experimental or not. The figure of the “attempted drug” does not exist. We need clarity of terms to say that a given person has decided to undergo the use of experimental drugs. Even when a person does this, it is usually due to considerations relating to their own body, not to the supposed good of society.
What is gained from the proposed semantic change? If we say “So and so made tentative use of an experimental drug,” we describe something that the Nuremberg Code allows. If we say “So and so was coerced into making tentative use of an experimental drug in the name of the common good”, was the Nuremberg Code really respected?! The most I had ever heard on this podcast was a doctor saying it was wrong to call us “guinea pigs” because we are “subjects of experimentation.” It did not convince any of the other participants.
Furthermore, the Nuremberg Code is not composed of a single article. The first, most alluded to, is the one that prohibits coercion in participating in experiments. The fourth repeats the Hippocratic ethic, commanding that “all unnecessary suffering and harm, whether physical or material, be avoided.” Read the Code here.
We cannot cover the sun with a sieve, nor with excessively subtle distinctions. We are witnessing the compulsory inoculation of experimental drugs into human beings. This is nonsense and needs to stop. I hope that bringing clarity to the discussion will help us with this.
