Roger Simon: Do you trust your doctor anymore?

ROGER SIMON: Do You Trust Your Doctor Anymore?  (h/t/ Instapundit)

Do you trust your doctor anymore? Honestly?

I don’t mean Dr. Anthony Fauci. How can anybody trust him, with all the prevarications, constant shifts in policy and deceptions, not to mention hiding American taxpayer support for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Virology Lab and other aspects of the doctor’s dark past revealed in great detail in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book?

I’m talking about your own personal doctor, the man or woman who has been your friend and trusted counselor for years, maybe decades. How do you feel about that person? Has it changed?

What many are perceiving as a growing mistrust of physicians is one, among many, of the tragic fallouts of the pandemic.

How that happened is not that difficult to trace.

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I was not talking about all doctors, obviously. Many are brave, not just the well known signers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other eminent physicians interviewed here at The Epoch Times, quite a few local doctors as well, including some who practice something known as “functional medicine.”

But the great masses of doctors have melted under the pressure of the government, following the party line on the pandemic. If you mention hydroxychlorquine and ivermectin or some other therapeutic or even, in some cases, the apparent superiority of natural immunity, they either don’t hear you or respond condescendingly, then point to the necessity of the vaccine.

At that moment, they are thinking of themselves, of their families, their incomes, their medical licenses, their relationship to their hospital or clinic, medical systems entirely dependent on cooperation, financially and legally, with the ever-changing diktats of the CDC and FDA.

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Full story is here (free, but you have to sign up).

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COVID-19 lockdowns are the “biggest public health mistake”

 

Meme via Patriot Post

This report is from Matthew Impalli at Newsweek:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the "biggest public health mistake we've ever made...The harm to people is catastrophic."

Several U.S. states have started to ease their COVID-19 restrictions over the past few weeks.

Bhattacharya, who made the comments during an interview with the Daily Clout, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that calls for the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, claiming that they are "producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health."

As of Monday, the Great Barrington Declaration has received signatures from over 13,000 medical and public health scientists, more than 41,000 medical practitioners and at least 754,399 "concerned citizens."

During the interview last month, Bhattacharya said that the declaration comes from "two basic facts."

"One is that people who are older have a much higher risk from dying from COVID than people who are younger...and that's a really important fact because we know who his most vulnerable, it's people that are older. So the first plank of the Great Barrington Declaration: let's protect the vulnerable," Bhattacharya said. "The other idea is that the lockdowns themselves impose great harm on people. Lockdowns are not a natural normal way to live."

He continued, "it's also not very equal. People who are poor face much more hardship from the lockdowns than people who are rich."

More of the report is here.  

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The COVID-19 denouement

 

Jeffrey A. Tucker at American Institute for Economic Research has some predictions about the COVID-19 denouement:

There is a sense in the air that the pandemic is winding down, and the toxic culture of division, fear, and hatred along with it. Cases are down dramatically. Deaths too. Hospitalizations are no longer irregular. Restrictions are being repealed. You can follow all the action daily at the CDC’s new and unusually competent landing page on the virus (it only took them a year to build this). 

Despite all the talk of a new normal and infinite mandates, there is hope that it could all unwind quickly, pushed by force of public impatience and frustration with restrictions, and a political scramble to avoid responsibility by running away from all that they did for the last year. 

The list of signs and symbols could be made very long. 

• ·         The politicians who overreached are suddenly being held accountable, with both Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom on the hotseat. Calls for governors and mayors to resign consume state and local news. There is clearly major political tumult building. 
• ·         The Great Barrington Declaration scientists can hardly keep up with the requests for respectful interviews, now that it is becoming clear that they were right all along. 
• ·         The experience in open states like Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, and so on, makes it impossible to ignore the grim truth that the lockdowns achieved nothing for public health but did harm health, businesses, liberties, law, and civilized life. 
• ·         The push to open economies, by the same people who locked down the economies, such as Boris Johnson in the UK, is an implicit repudiation of the nonsensical ZeroCovid movement. Everyone seems now to agree with what AIER has been saying for a year: humanity must deal intelligently with pathogens and stop pretending that political forces can control them. 
• ·         AIER visiting senior fellow Naomi Wolf had a hit just last evening on the Tucker Carlson show, and they spoke as allies in the reopening efforts after years of ideological sparring. 
• ·         There is growing weariness of Anthony Fauci’s daily word salads that have massively mixed up the public health messaging for a full year, to the point that Meghan McCain has called for his firing. 
• ·         A year ago, Slate was making sense until the virus became political and they joined the lockdown mob. Now the publication is back to making sense again, with this excellent piece. 
• ·         British medical journal The Lancet is publishing excellent short pieces on the cost of lockdowns, including this riveting letter from Martin Kulldorff. 
• ·         A prestigious European journal of public health has published a blistering attack on the very idea that a power government should ever be trusted with virus mitigation. 

The people who have committed their careers and lives to this pandemic and the policies surrounding it might soon need to find a new raison d’etre. Then the clean up begins – how did this happen, who did it, how to make sure it never happens again – and does not end perhaps for decades. 

The full article is here.

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The Great Barrington Declaration says to end the lockdown

 

James Arlandson at American Thinker reports:  

Over 18,000 (and growing) medical public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, pleads with the various governments around the world to end the lockdowns and open the economy. As of right now, over 166,000 members of the general public have also signed the petition.

Here are some key points: 

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. ...

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed. ...

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. ...

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal ...

Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching.

Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. 

Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.  

Restaurants and other businesses should open.

Follow the science? Everyone knows why the democrat states continue the lockdown, long past the curve being flattened back in April, which was the original goal.

Read the rest here.

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