The Coronavirus Lab-Theory Cover-Up: When Truth Serves Prejudice | National Review - "Why, one might ask, was someone such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin — a woman who couldn’t tell a pangolin from a giraffe — so extraordinarily invested in the idea that the coronavirus had come from animals? Like almost all of her fellow eye-rollers, Rubin is not a virologist or an epidemiologist or a zoologist; she is a journalist, whose only real-life experience has been in enthusiastically changing her mind. On closer inspection, though, the reason for this investment comes clearly into view: that, like the people who openly root for a shooter to be of a particular color or political persuasion, Rubin and Co. believe that the answer to the question, “Where did the virus originate?” is much less important than the answer to the question, “What will Americans make of the answer to the question, ‘Where did the virus originate?’” Or, put another way: What has really mattered to those who have been scornful of the “lab leak” theory was not the underlying scientific question of whether it is true, but what the people they dislike might think and say as a result of its being discovered to be true. And, indeed, if it is true that the COVID-19 outbreak was the result of an accident at a laboratory in China, we might well come to reevaluate some things. We might come to see virologists both as the villains and the heroes of the piece. Western criticism of the Chinese Communist Party — which far too many left-leaning Americans have decided represents “xenophobia” — might increase. There might be a great deal of justified anger aimed at the handful of people who have caused this much suffering and damage. We might have to acknowledge that Tom Cotton was right about something. And we might end up less worried about Donald Trump’s having called it the “China virus.” It is certainly not a coincidence that the people who have been the most dismissive of the lab-leak theory are the people most desperate to avoid these eventualities. A long time ago, when Barack Obama was president, the blogger Ace of Spades complained correctly that substantive politics had given way to a focus on “Macguffins.” What mattered to the press, Ace suggested, was not the detail of a given policy or aim, but who wanted that policy and who opposed it. If Barack Obama hoped to achieve something, Ace argued, that became the story, and everyone else in the saga was placed according to that fact, with those who agreed with him playing the role of the good guys and those who stood in his way playing the role of the bad guys. It is impossible not to have noticed this trend throughout the recent coronavirus pandemic, during which everything that Republican governors did was met with eye rolls at best and charges of homicide at worst, while Democratic governors were held up on pedestals even when they were responsible for precisely the sort of “Neanderthal” decisions for which their counterparts had been lambasted. It is impossible, too, not to have seen it in the discussion around the “lab leak” theory, which has seen the skeptics reflexively cast as outré in defense of a theory that has always been little more than a guess. Rarely in the history of human discourse has the press corps been so dismissive of something about which it knew so little. Rarely has it been so obvious what it was doing."
From 2021
Vaccine Hesitancy Is On the Rise — & Experts Are Sounding the Alarm
Actual Antifascist on Twitter - "The subtext is that Pharma and the CDC [pardon the redundancy] created millions of *actual* antivaxers through their deceit on Covid jabs."
The Kids Are Not Alright: Growing concerns - "Something is happening with B.C.’s youngest students — those who spent some of their most important formative years during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers are seeing it in their classrooms, parents are living with and dealing with it at home, and now it is the focus of an in-depth CityNews investigation, The Kids Are Not Alright... Knibbs and other primary grade teachers who spoke with CityNews describe Grade 1 and Grade 2 students who are far behind peers in previous years when it comes to social and emotional skills, things like problem-solving, and negotiating conflict. There are also higher levels of anxiety and disruptive behaviour in the classrooms... Kang says in 20 years of practice and working with the school system, she has never seen such burnout and stress among teachers who are dealing with both children’s and parents’ anxiety."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "while the media was alarmed over Trump’s support for unproven, though relatively harmless therapeutics, they’ve been relatively silent over the many missteps by the Biden administration regarding the response to Covid."
Epic Fail: Vaccination Rates Now Lower Than When Biden Took Office – Issues & Insights - " While there’s no evidence that his call for mandates has accelerated vaccination rates, it appears that Biden’s dictates are contributing to the labor shortages – including in hospitals – that are plaguing the economy, disrupting supply chains, and pushing up prices... A poll by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 90% of its members say it will be difficult to implement Biden’s mandate"
From 2021
We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole - "Martin Kulldorff: I am aligned with the Left when I defend the COVID-19 strategy in my native Sweden. But here in the United States, when I defend very similar strategies implemented by the Republican governors of South Dakota and Florida, I am perceived as being aligned with the Right. It is a little weird. Among my infectious disease colleagues that favor an age-targeted strategy rather than lockdowns, most are left-wing progressives, while most of my Twitter followers are on the Right. As a public health scientist, it is my duty to fight for public health independently of partisan politics. I hope that people from across the political divide can come together to end a lockdown that is so damaging to public health, and instead advocate for age-targeted counter measures that properly protect high-risk individuals. After all, we live in this world together, sharing both its beauties and its viruses... An age-targeted strategy protects all older high-risk individuals until herd immunity is reached, whether rich or poor, while keeping schools open for our children and letting young low-risk adults live their lives and support their families. For more information, I recommend reading a fantastic interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University. In my view, she is the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist.
Katherine Yih: The responsibility needs to be shared. Progressives need to reject the unquestioning lockdown approach, which is simply inappropriate unless and until hospitals and other health care facilities are in danger of being overwhelmed... The moralistic finger-wagging must also stop. It makes no sense to try to shame or, worse, expel from college young people who go to parties or bars. My colleague Julia Markus has written persuasively about how counterproductive this attitude is. Infectious diseases will spread, and exposures in young, healthy people contribute to the herd immunity that will ultimately benefit all. Progressives should be advocating for a sustainable, communitarian approach that is informed by the knowledge that the virus will spread until herd immunity is achieved, acknowledges the need for stringent protections of the vulnerable in order to minimize deaths, and recognizes the harm caused by crude across-the-board lockdowns and their disproportionate impact on workers and people of color."
From 2020. Despite the provocative headline (it's from Jacobin, after all), this was a great interview. It's a tragedy the wisdom was not heeded
Boy, 13, turned away from B.C. walk-in clinic because he isn't vaccinated - "Seeking a break from the wildfire smoke at home in Falkland, Kate Stein and her kids were spending the day with her parents in Enderby on Monday when her son fell off his skateboard... After hearing the boy hadn’t been, she was told to take him to the emergency room at Shuswap Lake General Hospital in neighbouring Salmon Arm. “I was flabbergasted,” she said. “The doctor wouldn’t see us. He was only accepting fully vaccinated patients.” Stein said she isn’t opposed to vaccination. “Both my husband and I are fully vaccinated. But my son just turned 13 and we didn’t want to rush into it. We’re still figuring it out.” Stein eventually drove her son to Salmon Arm. But she’s worried other people might not have that option, particularly in remote communities where there are fewer places to see a doctor, or transportation to another community might be impossible. “What is happening in our province that health care is now optional?” she said. “If people can’t access health care, I think we have a problem.” On Monday, the B.C. government announced new rules requiring citizens to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination to get into non-essential businesses and events, such as sporting events, nightclubs, restaurants and movies, beginning Sept. 13. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association called the plan, which doesn’t apply to health care, faith services or to children under age 12 who aren’t eligible for vaccines, “arbitrary and illegal.”... Mario Devault said he had a similar experience at the Enderby clinic on Tuesday... “I sat in the waiting area and the doctor eventually came out and immediately started yelling at me to get out,” he said. Devault said he also saw an elderly woman turned away while he was waiting... A sign posted on the door to the walk-in clinic Tuesday said the clinic was closed until further notice and advised people to travel to emergency rooms in Vernon or Salmon Arm for medical attention. Both the B.C. College of Physicians and Surgeons, which regulates the practice of medicine under provincial law, and Doctors of B.C., the association representing doctors, are clear that doctors can’t discriminate based on vaccination status."
From 2021. Of course, the media never fixated on how awful vaxholes were, only on alleged "anti-vaxxer" "crimes"
Review - Pulling No Punches (Switch) - WayTooManyGames - "Living in a pandemic wasn’t easy for anyone. We were locked in our homes, not knowing when we would be able to get out ever again, fearing for a disease which could be spread to our loved ones, and, to make matters worse, seeing those who weren’t taking the situation seriously carelessly walking around and spreading misinformation in various selfish ways. We have all had heated arguments with more ignorant family members, started reconsidering some friendships, and changed our lifestyles for a while. In short, we were feeling frustrated. We were getting angry, whether we wanted to or not. Pulling No Punches, a small beat ’em up made by indie Brazilian studio BrainDead Broccoli, is almost like a cathartic representation of our anger in game form... Pulling No Punches basically offers this specific demographic a very cathartic means to vent out these inner frustrations with a decent, albeit short and tiresome beat ’em up, where the objective is simple: beat the living hell out of denialists and other corrupt officials. Think of it as a Final Fight/Streets of Rage clone with some gross-out humor and animations. Instead of gang members, you are punching pandemic denialists, far-right bloggers, televangelists, flat-earthers, and people infected with hydroxychloroquine... Bosses were funny representations of the ones who made our lives miserable over the past years"
Covid hystericists are still batshit insane. And we still get so much gaslighting about "misinformation" (among other things). Ironic, given that covid hystericists did so much of that. All the same, the review (and game, too) demonstrate perfectly the left's politicisation of covid - they just need(ed) scapegoats and someone to heap stigma on
Meme - "Do you not understand ??? We do this to protect your health. Remember *Police brutality at lockdown protest*"
Japanese adult company offers 200 titles for free amid Covid-19 outbreak, site crashes same day - "The country’s adult video company Soft On Demand (SOD) has announced that it will give away 200 of its titles for free to those who have to remain at home throughout the month. The campaign, which will run until March 31, will allow fans to view titles featuring popular porn actresses on SOD Prime at no charge... Apart from giving out 200 free titles, SOP is also announced that they will hand out SOD Basara masturbation aids to the first 200 registrants."
From 2020
After Coronavirus, Government Will Have to Shrink - WSJ - "In the response to the coronavirus pandemic, leftists see a model for the future... All this intervention has been economically ruinous. No amount of money can fully compensate for social-distancing actions whose effect is to shut down large segments of the economy. Tens of millions have lost jobs, and many thousands have lost businesses. In most cases, compensation from the state is a fraction of what they were earning. Many of the measures are necessary to combat Covid-19, although we will be able to evaluate them with any certainty only after the crisis. Yet there’s little doubt that the economic damage is staggering. Anecdotal data suggest that drops in global gross domestic product exceed in scale and speed what happened in the 1930s. The underlying assumption—that the economy can be restarted later as quickly as an idle automobile—is dubious... There is another reason to expect a shift to less government: Public-sector balance sheets will be an unholy mess. Even before this crisis, public debt levels were dangerously high. The IMF estimated that 2019 concluded with a global public debt-to-GDP ratio of 83%, amounting to a total indebtedness of about $70 trillion... “Modern monetary theorists” will prattle on about how with low interest rates and monetary expansion this does not matter. Their core belief—that governments can never really run out of money—is nonsensical. Mexico faced default in the 1990s, and Canada came close. The global financial crisis resulted in multiple sovereign debt crises a decade ago. This time will probably be much worse. Governments began this episode with poorer balance sheets, and central-bank actions effectively nationalized much corporate debt. Unless we experience a period of astronomical global growth, simple arithmetic dictates that many governments, both national and subnational, will experience debt crises or at least severe pressures, in the years to come. If they fail to practice mild austerity proactively, a brutal kind will be thrust on them. One lesson from 2008-09 is that a crisis, as bad as it seems at the time, is actually the easy part for those in public office. In the short term, spending initiatives or tax breaks are always popular, especially when the public wants to see quick action. The inevitable spending cuts and tax hikes later—even those that end temporary measures—will encounter serious resistance. Despite the unsustainable nature of today’s spending, opposition this time may even be stronger. Many workers have been reduced to limited stipends by government-ordered shutdowns, leading to renewed calls for a “guaranteed minimum income.” And that’s the lesser problem. Those laid off in public institutions have generally received full pay. Their experience of a guaranteed maximum income will feed the delusion that current economic and fiscal management is somehow viable"
From May 2020. Prescient. But many leftists still believe covid showed that money printing is no problem, of course, and inflation is due to corporate greed
Meme - Rory Cooper @rorycooper: "They sued to keep schools closed. They staged mock funerals in front of children. They said lazy parents wanted teachers to die and kicked them out of school board mtgs. They told kids school wasn't a safe place. They falsified data to justify it. And now they're lying, again."
Randi Weingarten @rweingarten: "Glad I had the chance to set the record straight on the fact that since April 2020, the @AF Tunion's agenda was the opposite of wanting to keep schools closed was to reopen them safely."
The Cult of the Vaccine - "it took less than 24 hours for the drug — barely tested, let alone released yet — to be accused of prolonging the pandemic. By the third day, mentions of molnupiravir in news reports nearly all came affixed to stern reminders of its place beneath vaccines in the medical hierarchy, as in the New York Times explaining that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who initially told reporters the new drug was “impressive,” now “warned that Americans should not wait to be vaccinated because they believe they can take the pill.” Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings, which is why whenever we read anything now, we almost always end up fighting through nests of phrases like “the debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab” in order to get to whatever the author’s main point might be. This lunacy started with the Great Lie Debate of 2016, when reporters and editors spent months publicly anguishing over whether to use “lie” in headlines of Donald Trump stories, then loudly congratulated themselves once they decided to do it. The most histrionic offender was the New York Times, previously famous for teaching readers to digest news in code (“he claimed” for years was Times-ese for “full of shit”) but now reasoned a “more muscular terminology,” connoting “a certain moral opprobrium,” was needed to distinguish the “dissembling” of a politician like Bill Clinton from Trump’s whoppers. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” could be mere falsehood, but “I will build a great great wall” required language that “stands apart.” The key term was moral opprobrium. Moralizing was exactly what journalists were once trained not to do, at least outside the op-ed page, but it soon became a central part of the job.. This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law...
COOPER: Mr. Vice President, President Trump has falsely accused your son of doing something wrong while serving on a company board in Ukraine. I want to point out there’s no evidence of wrongdoing by either one of you.
The phrase, “no evidence of wrongdoing,” was a mandatory add last year in all coverage involving Ukraine, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden, from the Guardian (“No evidence the younger Biden did anything illegal”) to CNBC (“There is no evidence that Trump or Giuliani has produced which shows that Hunter Biden was engaged in wrongdoing”) to Newsweek (“Although there is no evidence of illegal wrongdoing by the Bidens in those dealings”) to NBC (“No evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Biden”) to AP (“There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the vice president or his son”) to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Axios, and countless others. The language was absurd on multiple levels, beginning with its incorrectness — unless they were talking purely about a legal definition, the issue of whether or not there was “wrongdoing” in Hunter Biden accepting a no-show $50,000-a-month job from a crooked Ukrainian energy firm was a matter for readers to decide, not an issue of fact. Still, a lot of people not only swallowed it, but vomited these and other terms back up again, over and over, on social media, or to their friends and family, or to anyone at all, in what became a new way for a certain kind of person to relate to the world. As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect. We’re similarly becoming a nation of totalitarian nitwits, speaking in a borrowed lexicon of mandatory phrases and smelling heresy in anyone who doesn’t. This cult reflex was bad during the Russiagate years, but it’s gone into overdrive since the arrival of COVID... News flash: the instinct to armor-plate even unrelated news subjects with layer after layer of insistent vaccine dogma is not for the non-immunized, who mostly don’t watch outlets like CNN or read the New York Times. Outlets apply that neurotic messaging for their own target audiences, who’ve been trained to live in terror of un-contextualized content, which everyone knows leads to Trump, fascism, and death. I’d be the last person to claim there aren’t dumb people out there in America, but at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them. The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person. They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even. Which is nuts. Right? It is nuts, isn’t it?"
From 2021
Opinion: We should be questioning the global suppression of early treatment options for COVID-19 - "While I would imagine it is common knowledge in the medical community that early treatment for any ailment greatly improves the chance of a favorable outcome, why is there a virtual blackout of information surrounding the global conversation of early treatment protocol in order to AVOID hospitalization and death? Controlling the healthy with masks and social distancing and now vaccines, and then Herculean efforts involving the critically ill, have taken up all of the air, while the person in their first two weeks of the infection suffering at home is all but ignored by the medical community. Dr. Peter McCullough, vice chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and the most prolifically published academic physician in his field of heart and kidneys in history, has testified several times lately that there is a shocking suppression of early treatment for COVID-19 in medical literature. A review of several of his communications resulted in this summary of his findings. He calls this effort to suppress any hope of treatment, extraordinary... in Australia doctors were threatened with a 6-month prison sentence if they dared to prescribe the antiviral, Hydroxychloroquine. This move is unprecedented. The use of Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 is off-label they said. But off-label use of older medicines for new uses occurs every day. In fact, 20 percent of all prescriptions in the U.S. are written for off-label uses when a doctor thinks a medicine will benefit a patient. Apparently, the list of what not to use is long and broad within the treatment recommendations. We are 16 months into this thing and as-of-yet, there are zero trials of multidrug therapies. There is no national or global panel of doctors in charge of early treatment protocol. Why? Maybe it’s because a vaccine is only allowed to be produced if there are no effective treatments. The conversation around building up one’s own immune system is also nearly nonexistent in medical and mainstream circles. A study conducted from March-June 2020 including 191,000 patients in the US found that Vitamin D deficiency increased the risk of acquiring COVID-19 by 54.5 percent. Additionally, 80 percent of people with COVID-19 didn’t have adequate levels of the vitamin in their blood. This is a wildly important piece of information that doctors should be shouting from the rooftops. Zinc is also critical as it helps block the virus from multiplying... the sole focus today seems to be on a one-size-fits-all vaccination campaign, instead of on strengthening one’s immune system and finding effective treatments. All of the eggs in the proverbial COVID-19 basket seem to be filled with only one treatment – the vaccine. Dr. McCullough testifies that there is no scientific rationale to vaccinate anyone under the age of 50. The individual risk outweighs the individual benefit. Also, there were several groups that were intentionally excluded from the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine trials in 2020; COVID-19 recovered, suspected COVID-19 recovered, those with COVID-19 antibodies, pregnant women, and women of childbearing potential that couldn’t assure the use of contraceptives. Pregnant women as a rule of best medical practice are always discouraged from coming in contact with anything pathogenic. The COVID-19 vaccine produces a pathogenic protein. Why then, are pregnant women being given the shot? The existing scientific data simply does not ensure that it is safe for this group... What we are witnessing now is tremendous coercion for everyone to receive this vaccine, no matter the individual risk/benefit analysis... Schools are offering vaccine clinics around the world, some without requiring the consent of parents. There simply is no significant evidence that children are at risk of spreading or becoming sick or dying from this virus. To me, these actions are nothing short of criminal."
From 2021
Meme - Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING NEWS: The Biden Administration issues a new eviction moratorium, putting a stop to many looming evictions, in order help stop the spread of the COVID Delta variant. It applies to America's high risk areas - and will last until Oct 3. RT if you support Biden's decision!"
Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING: A large Florida landlord announces that he will begin requiring all new and existing tenants to provide proof of COVID vaccination, saying, "You don't want to get vaccinated? You have to move, and if you don't, we will evict you." RT IF YOU SUPPORT THE LANDLORD'S MOVE!"
"Dems trying to figure out if they're supposed to evict or not evict:"
Comment: "Not surprised these are the same people that claim healthcare is a right but only for the vaccinated."
Addendum: Ahh... When Occupy supports big companies in crushing individuals!
S'pore attracted S$140B thanks to successful COVID-19 handling
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. But this is Michael Petraeus after all
Gorsuch Condemns 'Breathtaking' COVID Emergency Powers - "Justice Neil Gorsuch says all three branches of government share some of the blame for what he calls the "breathtaking scale" of emergency powers wielded by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. "While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent,"... Gorsuch's sweeping and powerful statement was attached to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, one of several cases dealing with the Title 42 orders that allowed federal immigration authorities to expel migrants seeking asylum in the United States... "Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale," Gorsuch wrote before rattling off a list that included stay-at-home orders, school closures, attendance limits on churches, a federal ban on evictions, and the Biden administration's attempt (blocked by the Supreme Court) to impose a national vaccine mandate via a federal workplace safety regulator... "Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat," he wrote. "We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes." This is, as Gorsuch also notes, not a new lesson but one that has been part of the story of democracy since ancient times. Even so, it's a lesson worth revisiting in the aftermath of the pandemic. If there is one thing that ought to change, it's probably the general understanding of what constitutes an emergency in the first place. By definition, it is an acute, immediate crisis. But during the pandemic, that definition was stretched to include adjacent policy issues that had nothing to do with the immediate public health situation. An eviction moratorium never made much sense as a response to a viral outbreak, at least not after stay-at-home orders were lifted. Neither did cross-border travel restrictions after the pandemic's earliest days when it was hoped (wrongly) that such barriers could keep the disease at bay. "The point of an emergency is that it's a sudden, unforeseen, urgent kind of scenario," says Jonathan Bydlak, director of the Governance Program at the R Street Institute, a right-of-center think tank. Bydlak, my guest on this week's episode of American Radio Journal, compares it to a car accident: a situation where the normal rules might have to be suspended—an ambulance can run red lights, for example, to respond to the call. Months later, however, when an accident victim might be on his way to physical therapy, he doesn't get to bypass the red lights. "Sometimes people conflate the initial crisis—the initial instigating event—with this broader question and say 'just because something important is going on, it must be an emergency' and that's not necessarily the case," says Bydlak. That's exactly what happened over and over during the pandemic... Emergencies may sometimes require that the lawmaking process be temporarily short-circuited, but it's imperative that state legislatures, Congress, and courts at all levels tighten up the circumstances in which emergency powers may be invoked. Gorsuch is right: When officials take shortcuts to make policy, civil liberties are often the cost."