Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist.  He's not against vaccines per se but is a skeptic of the ones for COVID.  He's also a proponent of using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine regimens for preventing and treating COVID.  For that, YouTube demonetized his broadcasts. 

From that vantage point, Weinstein has an interesting take on how game theory applies to public health in the time of a pandemic such as we're in now.  It goes something like this. 

During a viral pandemic, the public health authorities may conclude that the best policy is to vaccinate as large a percentage of the population as possible, provided that a vaccine is available.  Once a threshold of the vaccinated is reached, the thinking is that herd immunity will kick in and eventually drive the virus to extinction.  Here's where game theory comes in. 

The health authorities view vaccination as being for the overall good.  However, many individuals will refuse to take it as all vaccines have risks associated with them to one degree or another.

In Weinstein's hypothetical example, the non-vaxxers are relying on others to assume the risk of vaccination while they "free-ride" on herd immunity.  But if enough people free-ride, the desired threshold of the vaccinated is never reached.  To counter this, the health authorities feel they must do what they can to get as many people vaccinated as possible.  This includes using blatant falsehoods and scare tactics.  The authorities feel justified in lying, putting out misinformation, and censoring opposing views.  It's all for the common good, they tell both themselves and their political master.

Deception like this can fall in the category of the "noble lie."  A good working definition of a noble lie is that it is an untruth deliberately propagated by the elite to maintain social order or to advance an agenda.  With the current Wuhan virus pandemic, the noble lie is looked at by the powers that be as a prerogative of the government and public health officials to be employed in emergency situations.  Even if you accept that for the sake of argument, Weinstein notes a further problem.  The entire premise of a noble lie falls apart when outside interests have captured the institutions of public health and use this prerogative to deceive to advance their own selfish agendas unbeknownst to the public. 

To my eye, this is the situation we're in.  Big Pharma and other outside money sources like the Gates Foundation have unduly influenced (corrupted) organizations like the CDC, the FDA, and the WHO.  This has been going on for decades.  Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, is perhaps the most prominent of the noble liars to the point of being near pathological.  But are Fauci's lies actually noble and intended for the public good as he tells himself?  Or are they a cover for his role in clandestinely funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?  If so, Dr. Fauci's fingerprints are all over the pandemic he's supposed to be impartially and professionally addressing. 

The fundamental problem with the noble lies now being told is that the truth will out.  When it does, public trust and confidence in the public health organizations will drop.  This lack of trust is a contagion that could easily spread to the rest of the medical establishment, as it too was all in on the deceptions.  This is the last thing the country needs.

Faith in government and our institutions is already hovering near record lows.  The damage of these noble lies is especially severe when the lies did not advance public health but instead caused incalculable damage in terms of lives and livelihoods.  Here I'm thinking of the needless lockdowns, the insane mandates for masks, the overt exaggeration of the lethality of COVID, the demonization of effective COVID treatments, and inflating the infection and death rates from COVID for the purpose of scaring people into taking risky vaccines.

Taken together, all these noble lies add up to a drastic loss of freedom in America.  The ultimate ramifications of the COVID noble lies will have long-term adverse effects on the country that will dwarf even those from the Afghanistan fiasco. 

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.