Pseudoscience
Medical Fascism
Scientism—the belief that science is the only, or at least the primary, source of objective truth and value—was invoked by 20th-century fascist regimes to legitimize their ideologies, dehumanize targeted groups, and justify authoritarian control. (It echoes some of the dehumanizing online rhetoric aimed at anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists today.) Rather than using genuine science to understand reality, fascism often relies on a corrupted, dogmatic version (pseudoscience) to enforce a rigid, hierarchical worldview.
The reaction to COVID was medical fascism. While public health authorities would never admit to being fascistic, when we examine the evidence—which could fill libraries—it cannot be doubted that the COVID response consisted entirely of fascist examples.
This is mainly evident in the pseudoscientific responses.
It was claimed that everyone needed to stay home until a vaccine was developed. And no matter what you said to try to correct that assumption, you would be called racist and even fascist. The irony.
These were not vaccines in the traditional sense. They were what Robert Malone previously referred to as transfections in his early papers on this technology. Why did they stop calling them transfections? Because it would reveal that there was nothing particularly new about the technology. mRNA (as it was renamed), or gene technology, had been around for a long time and was considered a failure in many contexts. But in order to convince everyone that they needed to take one of these shots, proper terminology was ignored, as this would provide too much information—the opposite of informed consent.
With the arrival of these transfections came the claim that people who did not allow themselves to be injected with this experimental, previously failed technology should be kept away from those who did participate in the experiment. This was purportedly to reduce spread and save lives. Somehow it was claimed that everyone who could take one needed to do so in order to protect those who could not, yet anyone who could not take one could rarely find a way to get an exemption. So it had nothing to do with protecting vulnerable people who could not take the shot.
Later, many public health figures admitted that this was not the actual purpose. It was more of a carrot-and-stick situation: you would be rewarded for complying and taking the vaccine by being allowed into restaurants or grocery stores.
However, let us examine how most people saw it—they truly believed it was to protect people and stop spread. If this was genuinely the case, then why did we stop at transfections? There are other factors involved in preventing spread. In particular, one important factor is body mass index (BMI).
A 2022 hospital study of healthcare workers (218 cases) showed that obese workers (BMI > 30) were 9 times more likely to infect coworkers (OR 9.29, p=0.001; adjusted OR 10.89). Only 3% of lean staff spread the infection to 2 or more people, vs. 25% of obese staff.1
And lockdowns fattened everyone even more: during the first wave of 2020, 11–72% of people gained weight (average +1.57 kg in many reviews); in Massachusetts, 46% of women and 41% of men piled on pounds quickly. 2Yet this wasn’t the full picture—while the majority packed on pounds from sedentary isolation, stress eating, and easy access to processed foods, a significant minority (often 18–35% in U.S. surveys, and up to 36% in some datasets) lost weight, sometimes drastically and unintentionally. This stemmed from heightened food insecurity—job losses, supply disruptions, and economic strain forcing skipped meals or reduced intake—which carried its own dangers: malnutrition, weakened immunity, muscle loss, and long-term metabolic harm (as seen in studies linking severe calorie restriction during the period to potential cardiovascular risks even after recovery).3 Losing weight due to food instability was hardly a health benefit; it was another form of collateral damage from policies that disrupted access to basics while claiming to safeguard public health.
So if everything that happened during the period of severe restrictions was truly scientific, we would have seen a very different reaction. We would have seen people encouraged to maintain healthy nutrition and activity levels in a balanced way, with targeted support for vulnerable groups to prevent both obesity spikes and insecurity-driven malnutrition or harmful weight loss. The food-insecure and those facing shortages should have been prioritized for access to restaurants, grocery stores, and good, delicious, nutritious food—not punished by the very disruptions that caused their plight. Instead, the exclusionary logic applied elsewhere (stay home, comply, or be shut out) ignored these realities, allowing processed junk to flow freely while real nourishment became harder for many to obtain.
Since lockdowns made people more obese on net (while harming others through unintended thinness and malnutrition), clearly this had nothing to do with science. Authorities did not restrict processed foods or convenience takeout. Ice cream remained available in stores the whole time. And people who wanted to go outside to exercise were harassed by authorities.
Correlation between body mass index and COVID-19 transmission risk
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-022-01215-y
Impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic lockdown on weight status and factors associated with weight gain among adults in Massachusetts
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8250379/
Dietary behaviours during COVID-19 among households at risk for food insecurity
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-nutritional-science/article/dietary-behaviours-during-covid19-among-households-at-risk-for-food-insecurity/E3941B084F76E113AE739F783C660F1A