This year some of the star-studded audience at the Golden Globes 2019 were faux vaccinated with flu shots. What was behind this publicity stunt?
To wield needles amid la crème de la crème of the entertainment industry and make it appear part of a grand spoof is comparable to a Hunter S. Thompson psychedelic trip gone wrong. But it goes much deeper than that.
PR stunts ultimately boil down to a need to control the opinions of scores of people. What better way to do that then with celebs. But in the case of the Golden Globes 2019 stunt, it smells like the desperate act of a mad king, whose empire is faltering.
Empires of yesteryear thrived by mastering the art of divide et impera, or divide and rule. Romans applied selective taxation and uneven treatment of its offshoot colonies to make sure that the general sentiment wouldn’t go against Rome, but against each other. This way the colonies would take care of the squabbles themselves, requiring minimal intervention. The same control principle works today, just with different type of empires.
Modern empires are run by corporations whose colonies consist of consumer segments. Imagine being the head honcho of a pharmaceutical giant, responsible for managing the belief systems of millions of customers. Running your empire involves an agenda and a dilemma. The agenda is to sell your product to the people, regardless of their needs or beliefs. The dilemma is that most of your product portfolio is somewhere between hazardous and questionable to health.
Most pharmaceuticals dampen or mask symptoms but don’t deal with root causes or try to heal them. Many are addictive or toxic. Pharmaceuticals also kill more than 300,000 people per year, estimates Dr. Bruce Lipton, the father of epigenetics and the leading developmental biologist in the world. New pills can cost up to a billion dollars to develop, license, and release to the market.
So. The pharma’s main challenge is to sell questionable junk to millions while silencing the ones who yap about the hazards.
For this to happen successfully, the conversation needs to be controlled. And control often involves division. The blowback of this tactic is what we are witnessing in the mainstream and social media today. Behold the manufactured narrative between the “rational” and the “tin hats.”
Rem Acu Tetigisti
Provaxxers will tell you that vaccines have saved millions of hundreds. That here is no study that proves damage from vaccines. And if you find such a study, it is bound to be non-conclusive, or suffer from severe anti-vaxx cognitive dissonance.
Anti-vaxxers will point you to the preservatives and impurities in vaccines that cause brain damage. They will talk about formaldehyde or how even the “preservative free” flu shots also happens to contain a neurotoxin. They will show studies of mercury-containing thimerosal which preceded formaldehyde but was removed after too many studies linked it with autism. The provaxxers will tell you that all this is hogwash.
And so on. On and on. Do you see the opportunity of control in this dialogue?
The division of viewpoints leaves no middle ground for objective analysis. You’re barely given time to breathe after you make a pro or con statement before you’re shut down by the opposite. The groups stay vehemently suspicious of each other, with one clear, permanent majority. Rome.
Anyone who breaches the grey zone is banished from the capital and wind up in a leper colony known as the anti-vaxxers.
One recent example is doctor Daniel Neides, the former Medical Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. Neides dared to question the use of a neurotoxin in flu shots when he promptly got sick after taking the “preservative free” flu shot. After making the event public in a letter, he was instantly demoted into the leper colony.
More characters like Dr. Neides have been popping up on the radar lately. Doctors, celebrities, mothers, and fathers. Family members are easy to handle as they have no voice. Doctors have few followers and dread to lose their jobs. If they have the guts and financing to release independent studies, the papers can magically vaporize from the internet. A comprehensive 2017 study by a well-known provaxxer that compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children disappeared shortly after publication because the results turned out to be too far in the grey zone (the study can be found here today).
Celebrities are a much bigger headache for pharma because they often have millions of followers. Selma Blair, Kirstie Alley, Jim Carrey, Alicia Silverstone, Rob Schneider, Erin Brockovich, Bill Maher, and Juliette Lewis often speak out about the safety of vaccines. Celebrities have been making enough noise lately, for Rome to respond.
Shots! Shots! Golden Globes 2019
The Golden Globes 2019 stunt was Rome’s response. To refresh everyone’s memory that either you’re for or against vaccines. Observe Andy Samberg, the co-host of the show, shouting, “If you are an anti-vaxxer, just put a napkin over your head and we will skip you.”
How many put the napkin on their heads? Zip. Because the grey zoners are terrified.
The grey zoners are a rapidly growing colony. Many of them stay silent because they can’t afford to lose their jobs or credibility. Who can? But they can only wonder how far the mad king will go next, to protect his junk.
