Is Russell Brand More Trustworthy Than a CEO???III

Originally Posted to Word Press March 26 2022

We all know that persons with a pecuniary interest in a subject can not be trusted to provide a disinterested dissertation on that subject. But should they be legally restricted in voicing their opinions just because they are pursuing profit?

Hello you 5.2 million awakening lights – yellow and red, looping and swirling and swirling, bright flashes illuminating the horizon. Tickets are still available for Russell’s tour, and pricing includes the “Hug a Sex Pest” portion of the show, where celebrants get to lay hands on Russell, a recovering sex addict, for purely wholesome reasons. Just in time for the next wave of COVID, so be sure to eschew any prophylactics, including social distancing, masks, or vaccines. Still, who’d of thought ten years ago that you’d go to a Russell Brand gig and the infection you’d have to worry about picking up from him was a respiratory one? Am I right, girls?

Talking of infections and vaccines and such, Russell done another YouTube on that very topic, titled “You’re Not Going To Like This” and uploaded on March 20th, 2022. It made a welcome, all be it brief, relief from his Ukraine stuff, which has been pretty toe-curling.

In this video, Russell reacts to Pfizer’s CEO discussing their application to the FDA for approval of widespread use of a fourth dose of COVID vaccine.

He uses three source videos – that are referenced in the video notes. Looks like we’ve got a fan in Russell’s production team!

The first source is from The Hill and provides the main factoid – Pfizer is submitting data on the efficacy of a fourth shot of their COVID vaccine to the FDA.

The second is a New York Times piece from December that talks about Israeli government cogitations on a fourth shot. It references “possible immune system fatigue”, allowing Russell to imply technical and medical concerns against the fourth shot.

The third is an opinion piece from the Guardian, ostensibly campaigning for providing vaccines to the developing world. It contains a critique on Pfizer’s vaccine profits, which Russell gets to throw in the mix to reinforce the message that there are nefarious doings a transpiring.

As usual, there is very little, to no, connective tissue between the individual motifs, just a whole bunch of innuendo. Not altogether sure how the dots are being joined, I just know that dots are, indeed, being joined. What is one to conclude by putting these three things together? That Pfizer has falsified the data it is submitting to the FDA and is also hiding “immune system fatigue” to trick us all into getting a fourth shot so the CEO can make more money?

Before Russell gets too far into it, he feels the need to explain that he is not an anti-vax; he’s not even qualified to offer health advice. He is merely commenting on the financial motives of pharmaceutical companies.

This seems like a good point to introduce the concept of Stochasticism (derived from the concept of Stochastic Terrorism), where a leader or influencer does not directly call for a specific act but instead contributes to an environment where it is statistically likely that a follower will take action. Alex Jones, for example, did not explicitly call for his audience to harass the parents of Sandy Hook victims. He just repeatedly told his audience that the parents were “crisis actors” who had participated in the planned murder of children to promote gun control. Jones did this to the backdrop of his usual content – railing against vague enemies, threats to the 2nd amendment, and warning his audience of a hypothetical need for violence at some unspecified juncture. He set examples for his audience by sending reporters and hosting guests who interacted with the tragedy in real-world settings. And he did this to an audience that already contained elements immersed in the rightwing conspiracy infosphere and therefore primed for this type of thinking.

It was almost inevitable, then, that when Alex Jones doxxed a Sandy Hook parent, at least one of his audience began a campaign of harassment.

Alex Jones is now facing legal consequences for his actions. But it has taken a decade of Jones’s grievous behavior and the determination of victims seeking justice at great personal and emotional cost.

Stochasticism, undertaken “correctly”, renders it impossible to attribute the act to a single underlying trigger because the perpetrator of the act exists in an environment containing a multitude of triggers. Therefore, the bad faith progenitor can avoid detection or, at the very least, sustain plausible deniability.

And so to Russell! He believes he can claim that he’s not “anti-vax” because he has not literally said the words “I am anti-vax”. However, the material he presents is exclusively skeptical of vaccines and adjacent issues (i.e., any “mainstream media” COVID narrative): the vaccine manufacturers are solely motivated by profit; the vaccine regulator is corrupted, vaccine trials were botched; the efficacy of other medicines is being hidden; commentators are being silenced for telling the truth about vaccines; I need to be careful about what I say, or I will be banned/censored; vaccines are “medical procedures”; you can’t trust the politicians trying to protect us from COVID; COVID is being used to take away your liberties; we’re being lied to about the origins of COVID. This content is never offset by any discussion around “positive” vaccine stories, such as the stark difference in infection rates and outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

But, of course, these “positive” stories are all well covered in the mainstream media! The same mainstream media that Russell spends so much time undermining and denigrating to his audience. An audience who will contain elements that almost exclusively consume news from sources similar to Russell, in the same way that Alex Jones’ audience is more likely to consume media similar to InfoWars.

So Russell can happily say words to the effect, “lots of you, my audience, will have the vaccine”, to create an image that he is promoting a balanced and nuanced opinion, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the truth. As can be observed in the comments on his YouTube videos – of the top 10 comments on Brands’ video, five were explicitly vaccine skeptical. The remaining five were general statements supporting Brand’s “truth.” And these themes continued throughout the comments; I gave up scrolling without finding a critical note.

Once we have been satisfied with his neutral stance and bonafides, Russell takes aim at the Pfizer CEO discussing his company’s submission of data to the FDA in support of a fourth dose of the COVID vaccine. Russell places this alongside the fact that Pfizer and their CEO both profit from the vaccine. As I said earlier, Russell doesn’t explicitly state his purpose in juxtaposing these two facts; presumably, the implication is we can’t trust the data submitted to the FDA by Pfizer because of the underlying profit motive? I guess the CEO is lying to us all? The fun thing is that, as an officer of a publicly-traded company, a CEO has to be very careful about what he says in public and to the media.

The CEO and other board members have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners of a company; this means that they must act solely in the financial interests of the shareholders. This would discourage a CEO from making statements that might benefit him personally but ultimately cause harm to shareholders

For example, it would be illegal for a CEO to make misleading statements that inflate share prices with the intent of profiting from selling shares at the inflated rate before the subsequent price crash- a so-called “pump and dump”. This would also fall under the category of Market Manipulation, an activity that resulted in Tesla CEO Elon Musk being charged with securities fraud by the SEC in 2018 after he published “false and misleading” tweets indicating that he had secured funding for a private buy-out of the firm.

Under the Exchange Act, companies, and therefore their officers, are legally mandated to disclose information to the public that ensures a ” level playing field ” between investors and those with specialist technical or insider knowledge. A submission of data to the FDA seeking to license a fourth COVID shot would almost certainly qualify under this rule. As a company traded on NASDAQ, Pfizer must also promptly disclose to the public any information that could impact share values. Failure to divulge information, or publishing false or misleading information can have severe consequences for companies and their executives, ranging from delisting to fines and even jail time.

CEOs, then, face a whole host of consequences should they lie to, or withhold information from, the public. Lanky, washed up, “former celebrities”? Not so much.

Who to trust then? A person whose financial obligations place a legal requirement on them to speak truthfully, or a person who doesn’t even acknowledge their financial entanglements to the issue they’re holding forth on?

After laying his framework, Russell now sets about embellishing on his thesis by his favorite technique – cherry-picking sources. To this end, he recruits the NYT article about debate in Isreal around a fourth vaccine dose. The article references some hesitancy due to concerns of “the possibility of immune system fatigue” in response to a fourth shot. This is the specific cherry that Russell wants to pick, and he wants you to know that saying this “a couple of months ago” would get you banned off the socials – failing to realize that the article was published in December of 2021. As to the claim itself, the article doesn’t really expand or provide a source to this specific concern, and the medical board approves the use of a fourth shot for “those with compromised immune systems”, so I can’t really see how this gels with concerns over “immune system fatigue”. But it’s all grist to the conspiracy mill.

The cherry-picking continues then, when we move on to the Guardian piece, intended by the author to campaign for greater access to vaccines in developing countries (NOTE: it’s always fun to hear Russell describe the famously lefty Guardian newspaper as “neo-liberal”, it’s almost as if he has no idea what those words mean). The article is an opinion piece written by Nick Dearden, director of a non-profit focused on world development. He seeks to frame the vaccine profits made by pharmaceutical companies against their resistance to measures that would make vaccines more affordable and available in the developing world and is a direct call for someone other than pharma companies to take leadership on this subject. The article uses the term “vaccine apartheid” to describe the inequality in vaccine rollout between developed and developing nations, which stands in stark contrast to Brand’s prior use of the word “apartheid” to fearmonger about supposed vaccine mandates.

Russell doesn’t care about the distribution of vaccines to the developing world – he’s not touring there! For someone like Russell, who professes interest in a balanced view of COVID and vaccines and often talks of wealth inequality and the evils of globalization, one would think the hoarding of vaccine resources by wealthy nations would be of interest; low hanging fruit. But, no, he just wants to cherry-pick the bits about big pharma’s profits to undermine the entire concept of vaccination.

I don’t want to give the article itself too much of a hard time – the author is not a professional journalist and is working for a worthy cause. But Russell chooses to expound upon a few topics it raises in passing, including that Pfizer had been the “least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector”. The first assertion is supported by a link to a Business Insider story that is basically a puff piece generated by Reptrak, a company that ranks business based on public reputation. The second assertion – that the pharmaceutical industry is/was the least trusted industrial sector – is not supported, and a bit of browsing through the Reptrak website does find an article stating that the pharmaceutical industry had moved from an “‘average’ to a ‘strong’ score” in 2021 due to the pandemic. Average is hardly “the least trusted industrial sector”. What started as a slightly hyperbolic, off-the-cuff swipe at big pharma has turned into a solid fact at the hands of our Russell.

Another big riff was on reports of the UK’s National Health Service’s (NHS) spending on the vaccine. The article states Pfizer had made £2billion in vaccine profit from the NHS (the underlying source article states that the NHS has spent $2.57bn on the vaccine). While this seems like a lot, a quick google search showed that the NHS’ 2021/22 budget was £190.3bn and that £33.8bn of that was spent on COVID measures. That means that the Pfizer vaccine accounted for 1.3% of the NHS budget and only 7.5% of the spend on COVID measures. If you include the 2020/21 budget of £191bn (£47.1bn COVID spend), then the Pfizer vaccine accounts for only 0.7% of total spend and 3.2% of spending on COVID.

These values should serve to underscore the impact that COVID is having on our society and the importance of vaccines. Spending on COVID over the past two years has accounted for 21% of the NHS’ budget. A relatively small proportion of this was on vaccines, the remaining majority, presumably spent on treating sick people, including palliative care. The fact that there was a 30% reduction in COVID spending from 2020 to 2021 is perhaps, at least in part, an indicator of the decline in infection and severity brought about by vaccines.

When introducing the topic of the NHS, Russell goes off on a tangent. He states that the NHS is a much-beloved institution, that he is considering doing a video on the subject – including underhand efforts at privatization on the fly.

My initial thought was “great!” lend some of your clout to a cause that is actually worth attention, help fight against the erosion of public services and public servants. But then I remember another beloved British institution, the BBC, and how Russell shat all over that. No, on the whole, best leave the NHS alone, Russell.

Besides, the answer to helping the NHS lies, at least in part, in voting the Tories out of office. And as Russell does not support voting at all, I fail to see how he can really provide a valuable contribution. How is a government-run health service even compatible with Russell’s particular brand of spiritual/theocratic libertarianism?

Russell ends his video with an extended soliloquy on the world’s complexity. COVID is complex; a simple soul like Russell couldn’t possibly grasp the full complexity. Yes, there is a pandemic going on, but can’t “other things” also be true? And also the war, yes Ukrainians deserve our sympathy, but aren’t “other things” also true?

Things like vaccines preventing infection from viruses are complex, but rules on corporate disclosures to the public are simple! Supporting civilians being bombed by their more powerful neighbor is “complex”, but wrestling with the legacy of western interventionism is simple! Or, as

Aleksandr, the meerkat, might have said before suffering the ban-hammer from the woke left, “simples”.

But that’s enough mindless boosting of Russian cliches for personal profit! And that meerkat can fuck off as well. What do YOU think?

Is Russell Brand more trustworthy than a CEO? Or a CGI Meerkat, for that matter? If you believe in total personal freedom and autonomy, does that extend to CEOs? And what about meerkat-based advertising mascots? If a CEO has already Greatly Awakened, do we even need to regulate them? What would happen if a meerkat-based advertising mascot was to achieve sentience, could they experience the Great Awakening? How do you vote out the Tories if you don’t vote? Should sentient advertising mascots be given the vote? If you know the answers, why not reply using the comments below (if I can figure out how to make them work)? Failing that, look me up on Reddit and give me some shit there! Or maybe Twitter; I might have a Twitter account.