Trust The Science

Deacon Blues and Karen Berger are correct to point out that there’s something “off” about the way that the words “effective” and “efficacious” are employed in these clips — typically coupled with intensifiers/ superlatives such as “highly “/ “impressive”/ “Extraordinarily”/ “virtually 100%.”

But it’s not really an issue of “true” or “false”; of the empirical support for these claims or their internal logic. This type of media narrative is not dialectic — it’s purely rhetorical. Specifically, it’s reification via simple associative conditioning. “Authoritative,” “respected” figures constantly repeat the terms “COVID vaccine” and “[insert intensifier here] effective” in a serious tone, while displaying what appears to be intense concern for your health. This technique is more effective when a specific word — rather than various words referencing the same concept — is employed. Do it enough times, and “highly effective COVID vaccine” becomes a “thing,” not just in your vocabulary, but in your worldview.

Yes, in an important sense it is “gibberish.” But the bottom line is that it works — especially when conveyed in the form of visual propaganda, which hacks your social instincts more effectively than does the written word. When it becomes clear that the vaccine is in fact rather “lowly effective”… just blame the lack of efficacy on COVID vaccine skeptics, using a similar technique. No problem.

If you look at the “other” side of the media narrative with respect to COVID vaccines, a comparable term might be “vaccine hesitancy.” You’ll almost never see the term I used above, “vaccine skeptic.” Why? Someone who is “hesitant” has not really stopped, let alone reversed course. They’re just waiting to be nudged — and if that fails, coerced. But their eventual vaccination is inevitable. Also implicit in the choice of this term is that its targets have no rationally-based critique of the vaccine, or of its forced administration to the entire population. Am I reading too much into a single word? Let’s do an image search for “hesitancy” — just that single word, without “vaccine” or “COVID”:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hesitancy&t=h_&ia=images&iax=images

Huh. Yeah that looks like an entirely emergent phenomenon. Definitely not any sort of centrally-mandated propaganda campaign….

This technique for reification can also be used in reverse — what (((Frame Games))) referred to as “unthinging.” There’s some truth to the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

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