Re: <nettime> Technopolitics of the future

[mp <mp@aktivix.org>]

On 24/10/2022 12:56, podinski wrote:
> re: mRNA developments
>
> One really shouldn't be surprised by these dismal achievements to " hack
> the body" and " under the skin surveillance"

Was/is mRNA a scientific achievement or a political measure, bypassing 
already/anyway rather weak (read: corrupt) approval procedures of medicine?

Anyone saw or read Dopesick? -- "Double the dose" sounds an awful lot 
like "booster campaigns".

Here's a Cambridge University science outreach programme writing in 2018:

"...There is still a lot of work to be done before mRNA vaccines can 
become standard treatments, in the meantime, we need a better 
understanding of their potential side effects, and more evidence of 
their long term efficacy..".

https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines

How do you build "long term evidence" in less than three years? Is the 
scientific breakthrough a time machine?

Here's Adam Fejerskov's angle on paradigmatic changes, in:

'The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the New Experimental 
Movement', Oxford University Press 2022

https://www.diis.dk/en/experts/adam-moe-fejerskov

Page 2:

"...Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main protagonists, 
together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists, 
economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the 
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and 
rad­ical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to 
alter social norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what 
they see as ob­ject­ive models of change emerging from experiments, 
reducing the messy real world to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have 
moved their experiments with new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that 
provide abundant human subjects ready to partake in clinical trials to 
overcome diseases for which they often cannot afford treatment, pushing 
both experimental methodologies and stabilizing experimental practices 
as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise conduct randomized 
controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in from the natural 
sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems, driven by 
similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of 
logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private 
charities and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as 
radical and innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and 
emergencies through new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big 
data, to the ­registration and ordering of refugees through biometric 
data, iris scans, and blockchains- this is an introduction of emerging 
technologies that essentially functions as experimentation...".

The book was written before and during the pandemic, where of course 
"the lab" grew much bigger and the number of experimental subjects is 
now rather large:

"...68% of the world population has received at least one dose of a 
COVID-19 vaccine. 12.76 billion doses have been administered globally, 
and 3.26 million are now administered each day.

22.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose...".

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - 
whoever, wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily 
experiments on subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled 
argument about vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested 
and tried on subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is 
universal and it has become understood and perceived to be a privilege 
to be allowed to donate your body to clinical experiments.




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