An antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, from the already-existing (and probably valid) scare campaign against the overuse of antibiotics.

I saw a very strange and telling rant by a friend on the left about a year ago, comparing COVID vaccines to antibiotics. There are a lot of very clueless things on the internet not worth commenting on because they’re little more than gibberish, and I kept putting this post off because separating the gibberish from the interesting parts was painful.¹

But his rant about antibiotics highlights three very important facets of how the left works, how they treat science, politics, and the new hate.

My friend’s post suggests that we need to start a campaign to make those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine also hesitate to take antibiotics.

I’m all about aiming an anti-antibiotic campaign tailored straight for the anti-vaxers. Use their words, make them imagine themselves heroes set upon in an egregious age, and let them die of a routine infection. Not so much murder as assisted suicide, and for the greater good.

He wants the unvaccinated to die. The arguments that he suggests would make the COVID vaccine hesitant also stop taking antibiotics include:

Antibiotics are Anti-Life

It’s right there in the name! And that’s only ONE of the reasons people should avoid antibiotics:

2. You need to be careful what you put in your body.

7. People give cows antibiotics, and just look at them. Fuckin’ herd animals.

The most obviously fascinating aspect of his plan is that I’ve seen all of these arguments before. These points are already used by the medical community. He doesn’t seem cognizant of the already-existing campaign against the use of antibiotics by doctors and health professionals. Do a search on “antibiotic overuse” and you’ll find just what he’s suggesting—but against everyone, not just those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine. That is, many in the medical community already think we are abusing antibiotics.

The Mayo Clinic has Antibiotics: Are you misusing them?. Rutgers has Why People Overuse Antibiotics. The NHS has gone all in, and “no longer routinely [uses antibiotics] to treat infections” due to their “side effects”. Read Healthline.Com’s 5 Frightening Consequences of Overusing Antibiotics for a quote by CDC director Tom Frieden about “nightmare bacteria” caused by overuse of antibiotics—and a list of anti-antibiotic arguments far more frightening than the mild problems thought up by my friend.

The medical community is right to discourage the use of antibiotics as a general panacea. They should only be used by people who need them. And, further, if people use them too often, it reduces their effectiveness.

Antibiotics are indeed anti-life. Antibiotics don’t target “bad” microbes. They target all microbes, even the good ones we need to survive. Even if there were no other reason to avoid antibiotics except in targeted situations for those who specifically need them, that reason alone would be enough. Almost all medicines are a compromise between healing the patient and hurting the patient, and between healing the patient and making the disease more dangerous in the future. Antibiotics are possibly the best example of this tradeoff, but there are no medicines for which it isn’t true to some extent.

Part of the CDC’s campaign against antibiotic overuse.

That includes vaccines. It is especially true of of our flu vaccines and our COVID vaccines. Unlike vaccines against, say, measles, our annual flu vaccine and our multi-annual COVID booster shots are not guaranteed or even expected to stop either influenza or COVID. These viruses mutate regularly, and moreso under pressure. We already know that flu and other viruses mutate under pressure from vaccines.² All vaccines have side effects. All vaccines involve tradeoffs. For some, such as measles shots, the benefits are so huge we don’t bother worrying about them. But the tradeoffs become much more important for less effective vaccines.

Flu vaccines, for example. And so we focus our efforts to fight the flu. We target for those who need flu vaccines: the older and more vulnerable. We don’t waste time and effort making the flu vaccine universal.

Just like we do with antibiotics.

One of the critical requirements for being a mask and vaccination fanatic is a complete lack of any sense of even the most recent history. For decades the medical community, or at least the medical community that appeared on the mass media, ridiculed people who wore masks during flu season. Then, in March 2020 there was a nearly 180-degree turnaround; masks became essential, and those who didn’t wear them were ridiculed. Everyone noticed this; some people responded by losing trust in the public medical community. Others responded by taking up the new pro-mask crusade.

They did the same to ivermectin. The left literally used my friend’s seventh hypothetical argument against one of the most effective antiparasitics available to humans, especially in developing countries. They didn’t just claim that ivermectin was useless against COVID. They claimed it was only “horse medicine” and unfit for humans. It was a blatant lie and required denying everything we already know about ivermectin.

Is the same thing about to happen with antibiotics? Like using masks to stop viruses, antibiotic overuse has been ridiculed for almost as long as I can remember. That medicines should be targeted to specific patients and diseases is at the heart of the long-existing campaign to discourage antibiotic overuse.

But this rant is also interesting because of how succinctly it encapsulates the problem the left has with people who haven’t yet taken the COVID vaccine, or who did choose to take the COVID vaccine but have given up on endless booster shots.

In the beginning, the left predicted a “summer of death” for the unvaccinated. They gleefully awaited the culling of the unvaccinated. But the summer of death never happened and it seems to have broken them. Certain aspects of the mask and vaccine fanaticism look a lot like a religion, and seeing all these unvaccinated people going about their life normally was a challenge to their faith.

If their beliefs were science-based, they could see the failed prediction of a summer of death as having falsified a theory. They might even have celebrated that there was no actual summer of death. But because their beliefs are faith-based, they need those deaths.

The biggest problem the left has with people who don’t take the vaccine is that they aren’t dying. So they fantasize about new ways to kill the unbelievers.