Maternal Instincts

Interview with "Moms on a Mission"

By John Leake

For me, one of the strangest moments in the pandemic occurred when an old friend—a very smart woman who graduated at the top of our high school class and was a star student at an Ivy League university—posted a photograph of herself proudly getting her child injected with an experimental mRNA COVID-19 shot. I wondered is she was aware of Pfizer’s long civil and criminal rap sheet for fraudulently misrepresenting the safety and efficacy of its products. Did she know that in 2009, Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion—a fine that the U.S. Department of Justice described as:

the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.

I suspected that she wasn’t aware of this. For most of her decisions that affected her child, she made a point of being well-informed. However, in the matter of the COVID-19 shot, she accepted the assurances of Pfizer and its U.S. government agency partners on blind faith. How to explain this?

As a finance executive in New York City, it is likely that she believed in U.S. federal institutions partly because they had always served her company (Citibank) and her. After all, Citibank had received the largest TARP and Federal Reserve “Quantitative Easing” bailouts of all the big Wall Street banks. In other words, the U.S. government had always been her generous friend, and she had always succeeded within this institutional framework.

In recent years I’ve often thought that the primary division of the American people lies between those who believe that the U.S. government is acting in good faith for the benefit of the citizenry, and those who believe that the government has become corrupt, overreaching, and predatory. Same government, diametrically opposed perceptions of it.

A few days ago I was interviewed by Miriam Shaw and Julie Woolslayer, producers of the Mom’s on a Mission podcast in Oklahoma. Though they are about the same age as my old high school friend who now lives in New York, they are—in their intellectual posture towards U.S. federal agencies—from a different universe.

Of all social bonds, the maternal is the strongest. Relationships between friends, husbands and wives, and business partners often weaken over time as they are subjected to the vagaries of self-interest and temptation. A good mother’s love of her children is immutable and indefatigable. And unless a mother’s instincts have been distorted by ideology and propaganda, they are reliably accurate. Sensible mothers are skilled at recognizing predators—even virtue-signaling predators in sheep’s clothing.

I greatly enjoyed my conversation with Miriam and Julie, and I believe that our Substack readers will also finding it interesting.