Lord Sumption: the monstering of a lockdown sceptic - "There is something really frightening about the unhinged mobbing of retired Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption... Sumption appeared on BBC One’sThe Big Questions to explore whether lockdown was ‘punishing too many for the greater good’. In the course of the debate, he entered into an exchange with Deborah James, who has stage-four metastatic bowel cancer. Sumption said that the life of his grandchildren was worth far more than his own because they had ‘much more of it ahead’. James, who hosts the BBC’s You, Me and the Big C podcast, said Sumption was wrong to say that therefore her life was ‘not valuable’ as she had less life ahead than many others. Sumption responded by saying, ‘I didn’t say it was not valuable. I said it was less valuable.’... ‘every policymaker has to make difficult choices. Sometimes that involves putting a value on human life. It’s a standard concept in health economics.’ He was making the point that healthcare necessarily involves deciding on what, or rather who, to prioritise. Doctors make such difficult judgment calls every day. This is not controversial... To pretend that this is a non-issue is to fail to engage with one of the central moral questions raised by the pandemic... Yet an interesting thing has happened since he made these remarks. Instead of interpreting what Sumption said in good faith, instead of engaging with the moral complexity of the debate, there has been a concerted effort to read the worst possible motivations into his remarks. His views have been distorted and called ‘abhorrent’. He has even been compared to a eugenicist. Piers Morgan, who interviewed Sumption on Good Morning Britain, went so far as to claim that Sumption had argued that ‘old people have no value’. It was crazy to watch. All Sumption could do was calmly explain that he had never said any such thing. There is, naturally, a nuanced scientific debate going on about the risks and benefits of lockdown which will no doubt continue for years. But there is also a concerted, bad-faith effort among certain members of the commentariat to monster persuasive advocates against lockdowns. It is an intellectually dishonest attempt to present them as morally repugnant and beyond the pale. This is why Sumption is a key target. He is one of the great legal minds of his generation, and he has spoken consistently about the dangers lockdowns pose to our freedoms... Sumption has been a robust and compelling opponent of government policy over the past year. Maybe you disagree with him, maybe you agree. But it cannot be right that public intellectuals are thrown to the wolves for disagreeing with government policy. We have to curb this McCarthyite hectoring of lockdown sceptics and embrace open and frank debate about the way forward."
From 2021
The witch-hunting of lockdown sceptics - "We have entered a new era of demonology. The hunt is on for heretics and witches who might be held responsible for our current predicament, for the plague of Covid. As in pre-modern times, sinful speakers and thinkers, those who dare to bristle against the political or scientific consensus, are being demonised and publicly shamed as assistants of the plague, as Covid’s willing helpers. They have ‘blood on their hands’, the lockdown fanatics cry, blissfully unaware of how similar they sound to those who in earlier times of disease would drag eccentrics to the stocks in the warped belief that those eccentrics either brought the plague or at least aided its spread. It is hard to think of any other political constituency in recent times who have been as thoroughly demonised as lockdown sceptics. Climate-change sceptics are up there, of course. Deniers of the cult of genderfluidity have had a severe hammering, too. But that all pales, if not into insignificance then at least into the background, in comparison with the war of barbs and defamation against anyone who questions whether lockdown is the right response to Covid-19. These people are branded ‘Covid deniers’. They are ‘dangerous’. Their words kill. They have blood on their hands. They have a ‘hell of a lot to answer for’, says chief demonologist Neil O’Brien, Tory MP for Harborough, inflaming the idea that these people and their sinful speech benefit the plague and directly help to cause injury and death... The demonisation of lockdown sceptics intensifies daily. They are branded ‘agents of disinformation’ (the Observer) who are ‘dangerous’ (the New Statesman). They are killing people, we are told. The reason Covid-19 is spreading again, and killing large numbers, is ‘because this metropolitan clique of elites put forth falsehoods and misinterpretations’, says one columnist (my italics). This is, to be frank, unhinged. It is unreasonable in the extreme to blame the spread of Covid on sceptics who have very little influence in public discussion... we are now in the realm of fantasy, or at least of pre-modern fear and panic, not the realm of reason. The shaming of lockdown sceptics as friends of the plague eerily echoes past outbursts of hysteria during times of transmissible illness. Witchcraft panics exploded during times of plague. As one historical study of witch-hunts in the 1500s and 1600s says, it was often ‘the profound dislocation and mortality produced by the plague’ which created the social conditions for witch-hunting. Plague provided ‘the essential background for the growth [of witch-hunts]’... Indeed, witch-hunts often ran side by side with ‘plague-spreader panics’. These panics, especially prevalent in urban areas, were fuelled by a conviction that certain people, usually those possessed of incorrect, non-Christian beliefs, were assisting the plague... Heresy itself came to be viewed as a kind of plague. The 1645 pamphlet Heresiography branded heresy an ‘infectious and contagious malady’. Heresy was seen as a worse problem than disease itself. ‘The plague of Heresie is greater’, Heresiography declared, ‘and you are now in more danger than when you buried five thousand a week’... The impulse back then was to try to offset the terror of the plague with ritualistic denunciations and in some cases executions of plague-assisters. A similar impulse has gripped the UK today. The seemingly out-of-control nature of Covid-19, the patent failure of three lockdowns to ‘flatten the curve’, has generated instability and even flashes of hysteria in the mainstream. They need someone or something to blame. They need demons. They need engraisseurs. The witch-hunt, once again, becomes a displacing function of the fearful, morally disarrayed governors of society. One commentator – Paul Mason at the New Statesman – has taken the heresy hysteria to its logical conclusion. He has fantasised about which circles of hell lockdown sceptics will be placed in. ‘[T]he final circle has to be reserved for prominent lockdown sceptics… celebrity right-wing opinion-formers with no scientific credentials… It is thanks to them, and their media backers, that the Tory handling of the pandemic has lurched from incompetence and hubris to catastrophic mismanagement.’ In short, their heresy kills, and they must be silenced. Pure medievalism. Stalinism meets Dante."
From 2021. Given that we've known for a while that lockdowns don't reduce covid deaths...
The World Health Organisation is putting us all in danger - "The World Health Organisation (WHO), the body charged with finding how a virus from central China killed many millions of people and upended the world economy, has dropped the ball. An article appeared in Nature magazine this week, headlined, “WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of Covid-origins investigation”. It quoted one of the WHO’s scientists, Maria Van Kerkhove, as saying that “there is no phase two… that plan has changed”. A day later, the WHO insisted it had been misunderstood and would continue investigating. Such confusion is what we have come to expect from this unaccountable, premium-travel-addicted, Geneva-based bureaucracy. In 2020, the WHO took a year to even begin investigating, only then sending a team on a brief trip to Wuhan in early 2021. That ended with a farcical press conference in which, to general incredulity, the WHO seemed to endorse the Chinese regime’s view that a lab leak was extremely unlikely and would not be investigated further, while treating the ridiculous possibility that the virus arrived in Wuhan on frozen foods from abroad as entirely reasonable. The WHO then backtracked and promised a further investigation. Two years on, and we are still waiting for any news from their work. To call this progress sluggish would be an insult to molluscs. If millions of people had died from an industrial or nuclear accident, we would not spend three years shrugging our shoulders and saying that we may never find out how it happened. The excuse is that Beijing refuses to provide full details of what happened in Wuhan’s hospitals or its virology laboratories. Not that the WHO, which often kow-tows to China, will put it that way. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” is as close as Dr van Kerkhove gets. Of course, we know why this is happening. The Chinese authorities, having failed to find infected animals in the local seafood market, having failed to fool the world with a red herring about pangolins (whose virus was different), and having seen their frozen foods theory ridiculed, are running out of alibis to exculpate the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For years, that laboratory experimented with coronaviruses – an area of much controversy within the scientific community – and has since been reluctant to share its virus database. This is not the first time, moreover, that the WHO has proved unfit for its mission. In 2014, it initially turned away warnings that Ebola was getting out of control in west Africa, for fear of upsetting national governments. In 2015, it told the world that climate change is the greatest threat to human health in the current century, suggesting that it might be neglecting the day job of preventing pandemics. To this day, it demands bans on vaping, despite evidence that vaping can save lives by reducing smoking... The failure to investigate Covid’s origins leaves the world vulnerable to the next pandemic"
The left finally wakes to authoritarian nature of COVID lockdowns - "Cooper and Navarro-Genie cover the science, politics and economics of the lockdowns, but they also spend many pages tying the lockdowns to authoritarian impulses to use fear to trigger interventions, an argument supported in part by references to a long line of philosophers, including Hanna Arendt, the 20th century political writer whose most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, deals with the use of “fear” to drive expanded government roles in society... Canada’s COVID sets the lockdowns into a grand sweep of ideological history from Karl Marx to Immanuel Kant to Alexis de Tocqueville. Cooper and Navarro-Genie argue their case against the COVID lockdowns from what would be considered the right-wing conservative view of the world. But a new critical thread leading to the same conclusions is emerging on the left. Three Canadian academics have just published a paper calling for major new research from “the academic left” to probe what the authors consider to be political abuse of pandemic fear and the use of “catastrophizing” to justify the imposition of authoritarian policies. “We need a sustained collaborate research effort that investigates why the Academic Left lost sight of established anti-authoritiarian thinking,” say the authors. Published January 23 in a scholarly Swedish journal, the paper is titled “The academic left, human geography, and the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic.” It was written by geographers Dragos Simandan of Brock University and Claus Rinner and Valentina Capurri at Toronto Metropolitan University. The hope of the three Canadian geographers, as “habitually critical, progressive academics,” is to “spur the growth of a new wave of anti-authoritarian Leftist geographical thinking that reaffirms the centrality of human rights and civil liberties to make the world a better place.” They too site Arendt: “That the deliberate spreading of fear was often a key governmental manoeuvre for increasing population compliance should have been an early red flag for geographers and social scientists familiar with the nefarious politics of this emotion, as exposed by luminaries such as … Hannah Arendt.” But the academic left fell mostly silent through the lockdown fear mongering. In scathing language and supported by detailed references to the academic world’s response to the emerging COVID repression, the paper thoroughly documents its case. Their objective is to “call attention to the emerging literature critiquing the authoritarian excesses of the COVID-19 pandemic response.” What, they ask, might have led to a failure of the academic world to challenge the rising authoritarian bent of pandemic policies? “A distinctly worrying possibility, we argue, is that the anaemic critique of the authoritarian dimension of the pandemic response might reflect or harbinger the rise of authoritarian attitudes and practices within the Academic Left and human geography themselves.” A strong accusation, but one that comes with hundreds of bits of evidence piled up through the pages of the paper, dense with references, citations and quotations, including this one from a pair of Radical Marxist scholars in a 2020 paper that describes the bizarre corner in which the Left painted itself. “The left’s newly discovered love for state authority and organs enforcing these measures, a love in the name of the ‘vulnerable,’ precisely reflects a radical indifference towards the precariat and ‘underclass.'” In a January 25 public Substack post on the paper — Calling on the Left to do What’s Right — co-author Claus Rinner summarizes the challenge he and his colleagues faced to get their paper published, fully peer-reviewed, in the Swedish journal. Challenges with other journals included delays, fiddling, calls for rewrites, length reductions, all leading to nothing. How did the world end up with the pandemic lockdown crisis? Rinner summarizes the paper’s conclusions. “For answers, we refer to disproportionate and sensationalist media reporting, social media feedback loops, ‘groupthink’ among decision-makers, manufactured consent, and other social and psychological mechanisms leading to calls for more, rather than less, authoritarian measures. We deplore the abandonment of freedom and individual autonomy as shared values by the Left. The politicization of many aspects of the COVID response resulted in further defensiveness within camps and a ‘fear of guilt by association’ with the ‘wrong side.'” In specific terms, the paper often reflects the same issues raised by critics on the conservative/libertarian side of the lockdown crisis. One of their shots is taken at the lack of “cost-benefit” research prior to the imposition of health regulations — issues raised at length by Douglas Allen, a Simon Fraser University economist whose two papers for the Fraser Institute summarize the failure to study risks created by the lockdowns. In one paper, Lockdowns: A Final Assessment, “All of the lockdown efforts amounted to almost nothing”... anti-lockdown commentary on the left is global and reaches back to the early days of the pandemic but has been suppressed, often by others on the left. A good example is Giorgio Agamben, a famed 80-year-old Italian philosopher described not long ago in the International Socialism journal as a complex but valued philosopher who “offers an analysis from which Marxists and indeed all revolutionaries can learn.” But that was in 2013. In early 2020, Agamben denounced the application of emergency lockdown measures that stifled democracies and freedom. He blogged about “The Invention of an Epidemic” and in a paper Agamben said the issue “is nothing less than the creation of a sort of ‘health terror’ as an instrument for governing what are called ‘worst case scenarios.'” For this and other writings, Agamben was heavily criticized by leftists writing in Slate and The New York Times. Last October, a student lecture at Stanford University by Agamben on lockdowns was cancelled and his views subsequently condemned by the organizers."
Meme - Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield: "This is where the calls for amnesty fall short for me; some of these policies were absolutely inhuman, utterly unnecessary, and it would be nice to have assurances that they will not happen again"
PoliMath @politicalmath: "people died alone, without their families, without their spouses. my neighbor was torn from her husband's side during his heart attack and not allowed into the hospital until he had already died. it's good to know there are doctors laughing about it"
AndyAF @CactusAndy: "They're still raging mad they couldn't get haircuts or go out to brunch for 3 months in 2020.."
Noha Aboelata, MD @NohaAboelataMD: "*laughing and crying* Yes, and they had to miss pilates to babysit their own children."
Johns Hopkins professor: US gov't was the 'greatest perpetrator of COVID misinformation' - "Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Dr. Marty Makary called out the U.S. government on Tuesday at a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus pandemic for misleading the public. Speaking to the committee, Makary noted, “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government. Misinformation that COVID was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity, that masks were effective. Now, we have the definitive Cochran review. What do you do with that review? Cochran is the most authoritative evidence body in medicine. It has been for decades. Do you just ignore it? Not talk about it?” “That myocarditis was more common after the infection than the vaccine,” Makary continued. “Not true. It’s 4-28 times more common after the vaccine. That young people benefit from a booster, misinformation. Our two top experts on vaccines quit the FDA in protest over this particular issue — using boosters in young, healthy people. The data was never there. That’s why the CDC never disclosed hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under age 50.” “Over and over again, we’ve seen something that goes far beyond using your best judgment with the information at hand. We’ve seen something which is unforgivable and that is the weaponization of medical research itself. The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] putting out its own shoddy studies, like their own study looking at natural immunity, looking at one state for two months when they had data for years on all 50 states. Why did they only report that one sliver of data? Why did they salami-slice the database? Cause it gave them the result they wanted.” Makary also remarked that the lab leak theory for COVID-19 was a “no brainer.”... “The reason [lab-leak hypothesis for Covid origin] is even an issue is that it is embarrassing is we funded the lab.""
To mask fetishists, the most authoritative evidence body in medicine for decades is worthless when it contradicts their religion
"Disinformation" is anything that contradicts the narrative
I thought the Charter would protect our rights during the pandemic. I was wrong - The Hub - "A constitution is meant to demarcate acceptable from unacceptable state conduct, not act as a sort of grab bag of contingent interests. If a right is little more than one norm or interest to be weighed against others, and the government’s reasoning for its actions is deferred to across the board, the Charter is nothing but a lame duck showpiece."
Three Years Late, the Lancet Recognizes Natural Immunity - WSJ - "The Lancet medical journal this month published a review of 65 studies that concluded prior infection with Covid—i.e., natural immunity—is at least as protective as two doses of mRNA vaccines. The most surprising news was that the study made the mainstream press. “Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds,” NBC reported on Feb. 16. The study found that prior infection offered 78.6% protection against reinfection from the original Wuhan, Alpha or Delta variants at 40 weeks, which slipped to 36.1% against Omicron. Protection against severe illness remained around 90% across all variants after 40 weeks. These results exceed what other studies have found for two and even three mRNA doses. This comes after nearly three years of public-health officials’ dismissing the same hypothesis. But now that experts at the University of Washington have confirmed it in a leading—and left-leaning—journal, it’s fit to print. The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern: The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right. The supposition that prior Covid infection could protect against future illness was deeply rooted in immunology before studies bore it out... The concept of natural immunity isn’t scientifically controversial, yet it was disparaged by public-health officials who associated it with opposition to lockdowns and the Great Barrington Declaration in autumn 2020... The public-health clerisy worried that acknowledging natural immunity would encourage people to get infected or discourage them from getting vaccines. The first concern was unsupported, and the second was no reason to deny scientific reality. Public-health officials in the U.S. nonetheless dug in and refused to provide exemptions from vaccine mandates for those with natural immunity, as many European countries did. Meantime, tech companies suppressed discussions of natural immunity... The false denial of natural immunity caused vaccine skeptics to dig in and fueled suspicions that public-health officials were in the pocket of vaccine makers and dishonest about other things as well. The Lancet study could serve a useful political purpose by giving public-health officials cover to relax vaccine mandates, which in turn could reduce resistance to vaccines. But this would require the clerisy to concede its opponents were right."
I still see vaxholes insisting on mandatory vaccination and punishing those who refuse to accept it. So much for trusting the science - it's just an excuse to punish political opponents
Meme - Martian Magazine: "VIRAL
AH-HEM. THANK YOU FOR HEARING ME TODAY. I'VE COMPILED MY RESEARCH ON THIS PANDEMIC AND THE RESULTS ARE VERY CLEAR. IT'S YOUR FAULT THIS VIRUS IS SPREADING! YOU DID THIS! YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO THE SCIENCE, YOU DIDN'T PROTECT YOURSELVES. YOUR DISGUSTING, SELFISH BEHAVIOR HAS ONLY MADE THINGS WORSE!!"
"AIDS Walk. Fight 4 a cure!"
The White House Covid Censorship Machine - WSJ - "Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance... President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign... These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines."
So much for private companies doing it not being government censorship
Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics - "The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health."
NIH director Francis Collins wanted a 'take-down' to stifle Covid-19 debate - "emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others. At the time, Americans would have benefited from a broad debate among scientists about the available policy options for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, and perhaps a bit of compromise. The emails tell us why that isn’t what we got... We needed “a Covid policy response that engages with people who hold views and perspectives different than our own,” I wrote then. What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue. Collins’s day job does not make him arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion — as we all are — but his is just one opinion of many. When it comes to lockdowns or school closures, the answer to the question of whether the benefits exceed the harms and, if so, under what conditions, is far from certain, and scientists will continue to study this for decades. As a good scientist, Collins should have recognized the massive uncertainty around these policies. Collins’s response to a memo signed by thousands of scientists should not have been to call for an immediate and devastating take down, but to use his pulpit as NIH director to hold a series of public discussions and dialogues. In a world where scientists were trapped in their own homes for months, a series of dialogues — even virtual ones — made available for the broader scientific community, policy makers, and the public would have benefited us all... One tenet of the Great Barrington Declaration was that schools should reopen immediately and broadly. In hindsight, it is now clear that reopening schools could have been done safely, as was done in many European nations in 2020 and in the U.S. in the fall of 2021, even before vaccines became available for children... A dialogue might also have led to better strategies for nursing home residents, the group most decimated by Covid-19... Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, and I called for dialogue and debate among scientists without demonization in April 2020. I’m disappointed to see a few months later that the NIH director, a man uniquely positioned to foster such a debate, had actively sought to thwart and discredit scientists with alternative ideas to the pandemic response. His ad-hominem comment that the authors were “fringe” was unnecessary and unhelpful. In the weeks that followed, more and more mud would be slung against the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as against scientists who held alternative policy views, and favored more and stronger restrictions. The vitriol ensured that the country would not have the dialogue it so desperately needed... Had Collins, a man who has contributed greatly to science, chosen dialogue instead of contributing to animosity and combativeness, we might have been in a better place today."
Emails show Dr. Fauci commissioned a February 2020 paper to disprove COVID leaked from a Wuhan lab - "Newly-released emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic show the former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases both commissioned and had final approval on a scientific paper which claimed it was 'improbable' that the virus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China. Just a few weeks later, he stood next to then-President Donald Trump at a press conference and cited that very paper as evidence that the idea of a lab leak was implausible - without admitting he commissioned it. Many media outlets then started to dismiss the idea, only to later suggest the lab leak theory is possible as new evidence arose supporting the claim... Fauci commissioned and edited a paper entitled The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 before he cited it as evidence that COVID did not originate from a lab in Wuhan. It was written just four days after Fauci, and his NIH boss Francis Collins, held a call with the authors to discuss reports that COVID may have been leaked from a genetic testing lab in Wuhan and 'may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.' And in the emails, Dr. Kristian Andersen admits that Fauci 'prompted' him to write the paper with the goal of 'disproving' the lab leak theory."
America' COVID Response Was Based on Lies - "Almost all of America's leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as "learned" or "new evidence." Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology. The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns' critics, alongside absurd denials of officials' own incessant demands for them... Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History's biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise. The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history. In a democracy, indeed in any ethical and free society, the truth is essential...
Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:
1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.
2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.
3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.
8. Teachers are at especially high risk.
9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.
None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable"
Canada Nixes Plan to Bring Extra Michigan Vaccines to Border Tunnel - The New York Times - "The Canadian government has blocked an Ontario mayor’s plan to vaccinate residents in a tunnel on the U.S. border, using some of Michigan’s surplus, soon-to-expire Covid-19 vaccine doses... It was an ambitious idea: Since Canadian officials wouldn’t allow U.S. vaccines into the country, American pharmacists would come to the edge of the U.S. border inside the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, and jab the vaccine into the arms of Canadians on the other side."
From 2021. This underscores how political covid policies were
Singapore Should Have Closed Borders More Aggressively at The Beginning of Covid - Bloomberg - "Singapore should have closed its borders more aggressively once it appeared Covid-19 was spreading globally, a government report found, hinting that it will act faster in future pandemics."
The disastrous circus is going to repeat itself