Raising Hell: Issue 42: Goddamn Anti-Vaxxers
"Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always." - Guy Debord, 1963, French radical, prankster and "national treasure"
For a guy who’s supposed to be in the throes of setting up an Australian vaccine trial, Nicholai Petrovsky sure has been spending a fair amount of time doing the rounds on the podcast circuit.
In the usual telling of the story, Petrovsky is a brilliant Australian scientist whose heroic work to develop a safe, effective vaccine against Covid-19 — named Covax-19 — has been stymied by an oppressive university bureaucracy, Big Pharma and a corrupt government. Over the last six months, he’s appeared on Sky News and been embraced by Spectator Australia as a martyr in the war against cancel culture.
Ordinarily I’m bored by anti-vax stuff, which is almost always a coded conversation about politics that uses vaccines as a proxy for other issues, and my general policy is not to waste my time getting sucked into a vortex of nonsense. However, I decided to take a look at Petrovsky after a friend of Raising Hell sent an amazing deep-dive on the guy, rightfully pointing out that his status as an “expert” has real consequences in the real world — something they had run into themselves with a colleague.
While I wanted to present this research, at the time I sat down to write Issue 42 it looks like I might be helping out on a story taking a closer look at Petrovsky’s whole deal. Without giving anything away, I instead wanted to spend a hot minute analysing how Petrovsky deploys rhetoric because, I believe, that is what makes him effective as a talking head in this disinformation ecosystem.
A good example was a three-hour interview Petrovsky recently gave John-Paul Drake, director of Drake’s supermarkets, about vaccines. Don’t listen to it if you can avoid it — I feel stupider for having done so — and I’ve already thrown myself on that particular grenade. Though I won’t be offering a blow-by-blow fact check on everything that was said, here are a couple of choice moments (and not nearly the most extreme) from around the 36 minute mark so you can get the vibe:
Petrovsky falsely claims mRNA vaccines alter your genetic code and are a form of gene therapy: “it’s a technology developed to put new genes inside people” — fact checked by Reuters here and here.
He also falsely claims that mRNA is a real-time experiment and the vaccines produced using this method skipped animal testing: “completely novel experimental technology that has never been used in humans before” — fact checked by Reuters here.
At one point he cites Rob Malone as an authority who should be listened to - “Rob Malone who filed the first patent on mRNA vaccines in fact, a very serious vaccine developer” — The Atlantic ran a profile of Malone in August sketching a portrait of a deeply sad man.
And on it goes.
What’s interesting about this is the rhetorical blend that makes Petrovsky a compelling figure among this community. His whole shtick relies is one big appeal to authority which relies heavily on his work as a scientist, and is effective for the way it diverts attention from Petrovsky and onto his preferred targets: other vaccine makers, governments, university administrative bodies and, crucially, other vaccines. In this way he works to thread the needle between injecting well-worn anti-vax talking points, and gently pushing back on the most extreme propositions or offering some really quite reasonable contributions. This false sense of balance helps make the world according to Petrovsky feel more truthy to those listening, and in doing so makes him more compelling than, say, this person:
Petrovsky may have a habit of making bold claims before quickly covering his arse in the footnotes, but blink and you’d miss them as the conversation morphs into a kind of gish gallop. Instead the focus is always on Petrovsky as he explains how his company missed out on their share of vaccine research funding. At one point in the interview, Petrovsky spends 15 straight minutes talking about how billions of dollars were made available for research and how his little company was totally snubbed — except for a $1m grant, which he calls “hush money”. In doing so, I believe he reveals more about himself than he intends.
Yet Petrovsky never lets these sorts of contradictions get in his way as according to him, the true injustice lies in how the vaccine he has developed — Covax-19 — is “extraordinarily safe”, unlike the competing vaccines which, in his telling, constitute an “experiment” with “extreme side effects”. Whenever he talks about these competing products, he ramps up the emotional tempo and underlines how his vaccine relies on old, tried-and-true methods — unlike the mRNA-based vaccines the anti-vax crowd love to hate and the naïve have learned to fear.
While he is not exactly gun-shy about suggesting a financial motive behind everyone else’s actions, he curiously never really deals with his own. Listen long enough and it is clear that that in order for his vaccine to be distributed in Australia — and for Petrovsky to make bank— he needs reliable clinical trial data showing it is safe. Getting that data in Australia becomes harder the more people are vaccinated, and especially as vaccine mandates or vaccine policies in people’s workplaces create an incentive to become vaccinated. Though Petrovsky would say his prime concern is human safety, a disinterested observer might reasonably say this also gives the guy a real interest in rubbishing other, competing vaccines and vaccine mandates.
Of course, none of this would be a problem if it was just one man yelling into the void, but Petrovsky’s also gone ahead and set up a GoFundMe to crowdfund his clinical trial. It has so far raised $730k — which is why it is always good to keep in mind a wisdom our great grandparents learned during periods of propaganda and disinformation: believe half of what you read and even less of what you hear.
For the Fortnight: November 24 to December 8
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
Jesus Christ, it’s December. When I set myself a mission to develop Raising Hell into a crib-sheet so we can keep abreast of the latest in rat-fuckery across our fair nation, I had no idea what it would do to my sense of time. While I’ll still be working over the holidays — I have an ongoing contract and I actually need to get to some work done on a proposal for a new book — the holiday period also brings with it a run of family obligations. Because of this, Issue 42 will make for the last you’ll hear from Raising Hell this year.
Barring some unforeseen catastrophe or an apocalyptic, career ending screw up by someone in charge that merits a response (not an entirely unrealistic expectation), we’ll pick things up again from 18 January.
Until then, here’s my hit list from the last fortnight:
‘Environmental activists face ‘fever pitch’ of repression from Australian governments, report says’ (The Guardian, 25 November 2021).
‘Munga-Thirri-Simpson desert declared Australia’s biggest national park after 10-year campaign’ (The Guardian, 25 November 2021).
‘Electric cars averaged more travel than petrol vehicles in Australia in past year’ (The Guardian, 27 November 2021).
‘Adelaide bubble tea chain accused of underpaying staff $186,000 goes into liquidation’ (The Guardian, 29 November 2021).
‘Buzz off: David Attenborough intervenes after Adelaide shopping centre bee plaque misquotes him’ (The Guardian, 30 November 2021).
‘Chalk paint and police raids: why climate activists are under fire’ (The Guardian, 4 December 2021).
‘California will name and categorise heatwaves – should Australia follow suit?’ (The Guardian, 5 December 2021).
Projects
Cracking COVIDSafe - An examination of the machine that made the COVIDSafe app, a piece of software made by people who wanted to hack the pandemic (complete).
Laramba’s Water - Laramba is a remote Indigenous Community in the Northern Territory which has been drinking uranium-contaminated water since 2008. We tried to find out what why (on-going).
‘High levels of uranium in drinking water of NT community’ (NITV, 31 July 2020).
‘Company remains shtum on plans to filter Laramba's contaminated water supply’ (NITV, 21 October 2020).
‘‘It makes us sick’: remote NT community wants answers about uranium in its water supply’ (The Guardian, 18 October 2021).
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Poor Bastards
As most of us prepare for the yearly pilgrimage back home where we will be forced to break-bread with uncles and aunts, whose minds have been melted by Facebook, embracing a sewer of racist propaganda or Covid-19 conspiracy theories, spare a thought for 61 Brits who found themselves trapped in a pub with an Oasis cover band. Heavy snowfall in the Yorkeshire Dales meant the patrons were stuck inside the Tan Hill In, a 17th-century hotel, for three days with nothing to distract them except Wonderwall, on repeat — but hey, at least it wasn’t a Nickelback cover band.
Buy Now, Pay Later
When the ABC followed up a certain story about fossil fuel giant Woodside sponsoring the nippers program in Western Australia, they duly invited company CEO Meg O’Neill on to explain this situation. During the short segment, O’Neill elaborated on how, despite producing a product that is actively contributing to the destabilisation of the atmosphere and causing coastal erosion, drought, and ocean acidification, Woodside was “helping to save lives” with its soft-take over of the Surf-Life Saving WA program. Of course, this concern for others does not extend very far. The company recently announced it would forge ahead on its $16b Scarborough gas development that would contribute to cooking the planet — and when told the news, the Prime Minister responded by “doing a jig”.
I’d Watch This Series
If anyone was in doubt about the contempt that most people in powerful positions feel towards those asking them to do better, enjoy the explosive tale from the ABC about how the semi-privatised government body, VicForests, allegedly spied on and ran disinformation campaigns against anti-logging activists. In one case, the general manager personally drove out a private investor to a forest to conduct surveillance. You love to see it.
Truth To Power, And All That
In a bit of positive news, Senator Andrew McLachlan - the man who replaced Cory Bernardi on the Liberal Party ticket - trolled the living Christ out of corporate Australia and his own party when, after he was invited to give a speech to a group of fund managers, chief executives and students in South Australia, he spoke on the need to rapidly address climate change by quoting Karl Marx and poo-pooing Adam Smith. The address so shocked those present, they immediately informed a friendly scribe at The Australian Financial Review, who wrote up the incident, saying McLachlan had “surgically undermined the Prime Minister” — which, frankly, is quite an endorsement.
I Call This Enemy: The Sun
And if you were feeling uneasy about all that climate change stuff, take heart this holidays knowing that, somewhere out there, trillionaire Jeff Bezos is working on plans to literally block out the sun. Gizmodo reports how Amazon is devoting server space to running the numbers on what might happen if humanity is forced to dim the sun in a last-minute, half-cocked method to stave of an global extinction event that would turn our planet into Venus - presumably because dropping a massive ice chunk into the ocean every now and then is not technically feasible yet.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Having spent the weekend reviewing the case of Nikolai Petrovsky, we here in Raising Hell’s elite satire unit decided to award John-Paul Drake this fortnight’s Failing Upward award for his three-hour long, wide-eyed, soft pedal interview with Petrovsky. Not only was it weird to watch Drake feign naïve wonder at the prospect he was getting at a deeper truth with Petrovsky, we anticipate that should the video be taken down for spreading misinformation, he will immediately claim he has been “cancelled” as part of some great conspiracy, generating headlines and boosting viewership.
While we may love his supermarkets’ deli counter, it does beg the question though: what’s up with Drake Foodland’s vaccine policy?
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
The New Republic have this great read by Jerome Roos on how the weather has shaped human civilisation.
Not quite a good read, but certainly a good watch - and thanks to a subscriber and friend of the Newsletter for suggesting it. Musician Benn Jordan released this 20 minute explainer about how a New York Times journalist grifted over 350 musicians out of a paycheck. The explainer itself is an incredible good explanation for how the grift worked, but what it really makes it worth watching is the statement at the end by Jordan who offers a way to resolve the situation that doesn’t involved everyone suing each other into oblivion.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!