By Dr. Will Tuttle

Our word vaccination comes from the Latin root vacca meaning cow and the derivative word vaccinia, which refers to cowpox disease. Edward Jenner of England coined the word vaccination in 1798 to describe his procedure of taking pus from the lesions of people sick with cowpox, and injecting it into healthy people. His theory was that this would help protect them from smallpox, and this practice of vaccination has grown and spread since then, to the point that it is considered the primary weapon in mainstream medicine’s ongoing and lucrative battle against the decillions of “germs” that live in us and around us all the time.

Whether there is any truth to the efficacy of vaccination is still a hotly-debated topic, though in the current fevered and polarized climate, few dare to question vaccine theory publicly, or the more comprehensive germ theory in which it is embedded. And yet now more than ever it is critical that we understand the source and significance of the prevailing medical narrative. Otherwise, we will find ourselves continuing to be reduced to the status of exploited, medicated livestock.

As I have extensively discussed in my books and essays, the living and virtually invisible core of our culture is animal agriculture, and we are all living in what is essentially a herding society in which the ongoing herding of billions of livestock animals is industrialized, computerized, and for the most part deliberately hidden from our view. Through the well-established and brazenly bigoted narrative of absolute human superiority, we now have massive industries profiting from an unbridled and relentless flood of unconscionable and unnecessary animal abuse. This has virtually completely disconnected us from animals and from the natural world. This alienation from the animals and nature has devastating consequences not just for our physical health, but also for our environment, and for our social, psychological, and spiritual health as well.

In fact, while our routine abuse and consumption of millions of animals daily brings wealth to the large animal food-based corporations like Smithfield, Cargill, and McDonald’s, it brings even more wealth to the chemical-pharmaceutical-medical complex which is also more desperately dependent on animal agriculture for its massive profits. Profit margins in the food industry are much tighter, and because people have to eat, these corporations are increasingly diversifying and profiting from plant-based foods as well as animal-based ones.

In contrast, the pharmaceutical industry requires a reliable torrent of sick people dependent upon its products, and its profit margins are much larger, making it not only the most lucrative and criminally corrupt of all industries, but also the most anti-vegan as well. It rakes in enormous profits on the over ten thousand drugs, hormones, antibiotics and other chemicals approved to be inflicted on the billions of animals imprisoned and exploited for meat, dairy, and eggs. Then, billions of dollars more in sales of pharmaceuticals to the people who eat these toxic foods and need relief from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, liver disease, arthritis, and the many other physical and psychological afflictions linked with diets high in animal-based foods. With these massive profits, Big Pharma buys and controls the medical narrative. Its worst nightmare is a world of healthy vegans who take responsibility for their health and thus have little need for their poisonous products. Neither my wife nor I, for example, have bought anything from a drug store for any medical condition whatsoever in over 45 years, and there could easily be many more like us.

Big Pharma spends more than any other industry in lobbying federal, state, and local governments, and in public relations, advertising, and “philanthropic” campaigns as well, in order to completely dominate governmental policy, medical education of scientists, doctors and nurses, and media’s narratives and public discourse. It markets fear in all its forms, and thrives best when people are stressed, unhappy, disconnected, exposed to a wide variety of chemical toxins, misinformed, and unable to effectively take responsibility for their physical, mental, and spiritual health. Big Pharma carefully cultivates narratives, such as the germ theory, that guarantee that people will interpret sickness incorrectly, and not see it as a manifestation of the body’s marvelous self-healing and cleansing capacities, but rather as an attack by what it proclaims are innumerable invisible enemies that are constantly threatening us and trying to harm us.

One could hardly imagine a more toxic and disempowering narrative than the germ theory, but it fits in perfectly with animal agriculture and our herding culture’s essential orientation. We ourselves are the invisible killers and harmers of billions of animals, and our deeply-rooted shame, fear, and psychic numbing that’s caused by the hideous violence of our daily food rituals resonates profoundly with the victim mentality of seeing ourselves in an ongoing war against nature, animals, and the web of life in which we are embedded. Nothing could be more harmful and pathetic. The living web of the microbiome of bacteria and viruses is the blessed foundation of our life and makes our life possible, and yet the pharmaceutical-medical-chemical-herder narrative turns celebration into violence, joy into fear, life into death, health into disease, and harmony into war.

This is the lucrative way of a tiny minority amassing phenomenal wealth at the expense of humanity, animals, ecosystems, and future generations. Just as the last thing the Pentagon desires is peace, and so it constantly works to increase conflict and tension to boost its perceived need of funding, the last thing the medical-pharmaceutical complex wants is healthy people, and it promotes its fear-based narrative constantly through the mainstream media it has completely captured, and works with its partners, including Big Agra, Big Food, Big Medica, and Big Chema, as well as the CDC, WHO, NIH, GAVI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and many other “philanthropic” and “educational”  institutions, to increase its power and wealth by controlling the narrative.

Big Pharma sells chemicals, and as such, it is a branch of the petrochemical industry, which also depends on animal agriculture for its profits. For example, the National Academy of Sciences has reported that if we switched from the Standard American Diet to a plant-based diet, the amount of land required to feed us would only be about ten to fifteen percent of what we’re now using. A full 85 percent of land currently being doused with toxic pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers could be returned to forest or grassland, providing much-needed habitat for wildlife and a massive healing for our ecosystems: rivers, aquifers, oceans, climate, air quality, and so forth. This would mean an immediate 85 percent reduction in the amount of carcinogenic chemicals ending up in our water, air, food, and bodies, and thus a huge drop in the amount of toxic pharmaceutical chemical medications we’d be swallowing and injecting into our bodies.

Going further, and taking positive and proactive responsibility for our health, and eating only organic and whole, unprocessed plant-based foods, preferably grown in our own gardens or purchased through local markets and co-ops, we could easily further slash our consumption of disruptive, harmful chemicals, upgrade our health significantly, and drastically reduce the vast wealth and power of the pharmaceutical-chemical-medical complex, and its devastating capacity to dominate the conversations we are having to its own self-aggrandizing advantage. As a vegan activist for over forty years, it has long been obvious to me that the two industries that most bitterly oppose the liberation of animals are the pharmaceutical-medical industry and the chemical industry.

Both industries devastate the essential foundation of health and life for us and for all life: the community of microorganisms known as the microbiome. The soil microbiome is ravaged and destroyed by pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and chemical fertilizers, and residues of these toxins in food, water, and air attack the community of microorganisms in our gut, which is also attacked by antibiotics and pharmaceutical drugs. Only in recent years have we begun to understand the critical importance to our physical and mental health of these microbiome communities in the soil and throughout our body, but of course this understanding is suppressed and ignored by the pharmaceutical/chemical industry’s fear-based, fire-and-brimstone preaching of its germ theory, scaring us into believing that these microorganisms are a terrible threat to our health, so they can sell and spew more toxic chemicals throughout both the inner and outer terrain, guaranteeing further profits from disease and damaged soil.

Animal agriculture brings out the worst in us, individually and collectively. It forces us to harden our hearts and view beings as mere commodities. It lays the essential foundation for the inevitable materialism of our culture that reduces animals, nature, and even ourselves to mere marketable material objects. As I discuss at length in The World Peace Diet, it is also the hidden driving force behind the most obvious characteristics of our culture: a wealthy elite class that dominates the vast majority; the two defining institutions of slavery and war; the domination and exploitation of the sacred feminine dimension of life; and the arising of centralized corporate power structures that parasitically control economic, political, familial, educational, scientific, and religious institutions. These corporations were created to provide wealthy individuals with immunity from accountability. They are an unavoidable outcome of herding animals over many centuries.

There are three necessary dimensions to animal agriculture: enslaving the animals, killing them, and sexually abusing them: impregnating them and masturbating them against their will, and killing their babies. The horrific depths of depravity to which humanity plunged when we began herding animals required us to numb our natural feelings of empathy, to disconnect from our basic intelligence, wisdom, and decency, to create elaborate narratives of superiority and religious and scientific rationalizations of many kinds. All were desperate attempts to avoid accountability for our violent actions toward beings with interests as important to them as our interests are to us.

Now we are seeing everything come full circle. The corporations that the herding culture created to escape accountability for its heartless abuse—of animals, nature, and human beings—are increasingly treating us humans as mere livestock.

Because we have failed to take responsibility for our food, our health, our education, our relationships, our intelligence, and our information—but have surrendered our responsibility to corrupted financial, medical, media, and governmental institutions—we are being enslaved like we ourselves enslave livestock. This is the unyielding dilemma we face, which is also our greatest blessing, and I am encouraged that increasing numbers of people seem to be realizing this basic truth: whatever we sow in our treatment of animals, we reap in our human lives.

I’ve been saying for several decades now that when we insist on confining, tracking, force-medicating, abusing, and exploiting animals, we create the conditions for the same thing to unfold relentlessly in our human lives. The pharmaceutical-medical-petrochemical complex and those who run it and view humanity as mere livestock to be exploited are, in a perverse way, our blessed teachers, revealing to us the potency of our similarly unnecessary mistreatment of billions of animals. When we reduce the magnificent sovereign beings we refer to as cattle, for example, to mere livestock property, we reduce ourselves to cattle, mere livestock property without purposes other than being exploited as material objects.

A magnificent future of freedom, truth, and harmony is beckoning and is available to us at every moment. It requires that we question the official narratives of fear and domination, embrace our inner wisdom and empathy for others, and honor our true nature by respecting those who are at our mercy. It is absolutely critical that we all work to liberate animals and cultivate the understanding of deep veganism that helps us pierce the constantly-broadcast veils of deception, and also that we do our best to share this understanding with others.

Vegan living is refusing to comply with the prevailing cultural oppression of animals, and this must include human animals as well. Silence is complicity. Going along to get along is complicity. Only through liberating animals and allowing them freedom from being livestock will we have a solid foundation for our own freedom, and the possibility to discern truth from the flood of false propaganda of fear that is turning us into vaccas – livestock. With this discernment, we can take back our authentic power and thus derail the unfolding vacca-cination of humanity that will enslave us and our children. We are called to summon our individual and collective spiritual wisdom that honors the sacred life-force and the eternal awareness that vivifies all of us, and flowers in our human lives as loving-kindness, harmony, and the understanding of our true nature.

Thank-you for saying yes to this monumental challenge, and to making the effort to embody and exemplify the positive transformation called for during this unprecedented war against humanity and all life. Our predicament is a direct result of our hideous abuse of animals, and we absolutely have the power to liberate ourselves by liberating them, and doing our best to exemplify the peace, justice, and compassion we yearn to see in our world.