Another one from my WordPress blog, this time from eighteen months ago:
I spotted a few of the above stickers in Leamington Spa (though in the past eighteen months they have since been removed). They are not mine, though I am not averse to using stickers on street furniture for getting a message across. In fact I have done so to protest against all the authoritarian measures implemented under the pretext of the largest lettering on this sticker and some of the handiwork that I put up during the Autumn of 2020 and Winter of 2020/21 is still around. There are a number of things that I dislike about the message on this sticker, mostly is that it is using fear to get the message across for a plant-based diet. Rather than using a positive selling point, it is alarmist, so that it reads that if you don't go plant-based, you're gonna die! After more than two and a half four years of continuous fearmongering in the mainstream media about COVID19 most of us are fed up with it. It became obvious by the end of 2020 that the vast majority of fatalities attributed to COVID19 were from another primary cause or combination of them. People whose health was already poor were finished off by a seasonal respiratory illness as happens every Winter and into early Spring. Worse than that, many fatalities were fraudulently attributed to COVID19 on the basis of the person having had a PCR test up to 28 days beforehand but having died from a completely unrelated cause.
Secondly, this sticker claims that these are all ‘zoonotic diseases’ that are ‘caused by farming and eating animals’. Stating farming would indicate that a proximity to animals is considered a risk, but there is no proof of this (and it would also extend to companion animals such as guide dogs, for which the training school is located in Leamington Spa, it being common to see the dogs walked around town by their human trainers). Note that I am not advocating that farming animals is morally acceptable. As a vegan I strongly oppose it, but I am uncomfortable with a message such as that on this sticker making unfounded claims. It will create a backlash against a plant-based diet and hence against ethical and dietary veganism. Incidentally, only an exclusively plant-based could be considered as vegan. On the point regarding eating animals as a causative factor in those diseases, it makes good copy from the perspective of vegan propaganda, but there is no substantive proof. Even most omnivores would recognise that drinking bat soup from a Chinese ‘wet market’ isn't a great idea.
Moving on, HIV is not a disease, it is the virus that is attributed with causing AIDS, though not all people who are HIV positive go on to develop those symptoms; and there are people who develop the symptoms of AIDS without having been confirmed HIV positive. However there is no proof that either HIV or AIDS bears any relationship to not having a plant-based diet. Historically, the development of AIDS originated in the gay nightclub scenes in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles among regular clientele who took nitrite inhalents (poppers) and other recreational drugs, as well as otherwise being in poor nutritional health (which is where there is a dietary link). AIDS has also developed among drug addicts sharing syringes, as per the film Trainspotting, set in the late 1980's when Edinburgh had become the ‘AIDS capital of Europe’ for that reason. The fearmongering associated with AIDS, a disease that I first heard of in 1984, when I was 17, has been utilised more recently with a certain Dr Anthony Fauci having been one of the principal villains then as now. It was also in 1984 that Dr Luc Montagnier claimed to have ‘discovered’ HIV.
COVID19, for which a massive media campaign of fear has been built up since early in 2020 is a collective term for various strains, or ‘variants’ to use the recent parlance, of influenza which have been attributed to the SARS-COV2 virus. As with all respiratory illnesses, including Swine Flu and Bird Flu, two ‘pandemics’ that weren't, the major causes of disease are age and obesity. Diet clearly plays a role in the latter and until recently one would expect that anyone with a plant-based diet would be at lower risk by virtue of having a BMI within the normal range, when in the British Isles (as per the USA) the majority of the population are overweight. However, it has been noticeable throughout the COVID19 'pandemic' that the major supermarket chains have each developed a range of plant-based processed foods as meat substitutes. Read the labels of the ingredients on these and they are not necessarily healthy. Their fat content and energy value may be comparable to the meat that they are intended to replace. Similarly, as I put on a previous blog post, McDonald's, Burger King and Krispy Kreme have moved into the ‘plant-based’ market, abetted by both the Vegetarian and Vegan Societies awarding their respective trademarks; for the Vegan Society its trademark is its largest annual source of income.
However, if one takes this sticker at face value, then an entirely plant-based diet would offer protection against these diseases; and if they are solely ‘caused by farming and eating animals’ then how can they then be contagious between humans? Super-fit tennis champion Novak Djokovic has an entirely plant-based diet (though he doesn't claim to be a vegan). He has sensibly declined any of the pharmaceutical treatment, ‘vaccines’, on offer for COVID19 because he understands that for him it is an illness that poses a negligible risk and that the potential risk to his health from those pharmaceuticals far outweighs any benefit that could be derived from them; this is the case for everyone who keeps themselves fit, healthy, has no co-morbidities, is not already immuno-compromised and is roughly below the age of seventy. The pharmaceutical treatment neither prevents infection from nor transmission of COVID19, which begs the question whether it and indeed other respiratory diseases are contagious. This is a subject covered in the book Virus Mania referenced below.
On the subject of pharmaceutical treatment, the relevant industry is one that ethical vegans have long campaigned against due to its use for animals in experiments. Even if a particular product has not been tested on animals prior to being tested on humans and if that product does not contain animal-derived ingredients, all the major pharmaceutical companies insist that they must retain the ‘right’ to do that. The latest (as at October 2022) product for COVID19, a ‘booster’ that will have the completely opposite effect on the recipient's immune system, has been tested on eight mice. This hardly proves that it is either safe or effective to be used on people, only trials on human volunteers can do that and ideally the volunteers should be the researchers themselves or others in the allopathic medical industry who support the development of vaccines and other drugs. The products are after all drugs intended to be taken on a seasonal basis.
It is plausible that some vegans who have voluntarily taken the pharmaceutical products for COVID19 may believe that by becoming experimental subjects themselves they are helping to prevent animal suffering, such that large-scale tests on humans will result in future tests on animals being scrapped. If so, it displays a naively benevolent view towards the companies involved in the research, manufacturing and marketing of these vaccines / drugs. However, normal drug testing usually involves three phases with human volunteers in any case and any vaccine or other drug needs to have successfully gone through these in order to gain approval, as I detailed in July 2021 on my old blog. Note that those for COVID19 had not done so, but were implemented globally on the basis of a supposed ‘emergency’ that is not and never has been. Because of this, there are people with authoritarian tendencies, including a great many who identify as ‘left-wing’ or ironically as ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’, who believe that everyone should be mandated to take the pharmaceutical treatment for COVID19. Sorry to say that a lot of vegans fall into this category, which may be due to their having a collectivist (possibly statist) world-view, a belief that everyone is equally at risk, irrespective of pre-existing health and that the disease is contagious among and between vegans and non-vegans alike. Given the ‘Protect the NHS’ message on this sticker, it wouldn't surprise me if the person who has placed these stickers is one of those people.
Suggested reading:
Virus Mania - Torsten Engelbrecht, Dr Claus Claus Köhnlein, MD, Dr Samantha Bailey, MD and Dr Stefano Scaglio, BSc MD. Independently Published, originally in September 2007, updated to include an additional chapter on Corona Mania, April 2021.