Dr Scott Atlas: A Plague Upon Our House

 

Wendi Strauch Mahoney at UncoverDC summarizes some of the shocking politics inside the Trump White House's COVID Task Force: 

According to a book by Dr. Scott Atlas, Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the Trump Administration, controlled most of the messaging and communication coming from the Coronavirus Task Force to the American people and governors. In his book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” he describes his time as an advisor to the President starting in late July 2020. He resigned at the end of November of the same year.

During his brief tenure, Atlas was a lone voice against Birx’s absurd fixation on COVID cases rather than infection rate fatality data as a metric to justify the widespread lockdowns that destroyed the lives of many Americans for almost three straight years. He and many others believe the lockdowns probably did more harm to the American people than the virus itself.

Atlas is a neurologist and a Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. His expertise in public policy far exceeded others on the task force, including Birx. Atlas served as a dispassionate, apolitical, and objective voice in the White House. His many relationships with respected scientists outside D.C. also served him well.

The conclusion:

It is also well understood that there was an unstoppable governmental apparatus in place that would frustrate the ability to get new information to the American people. To be clear, these thoughts are not to badger but to prepare. It is critically important to recognize that life-saving information was and still is available to those who want to see it. Just know that the apparatus of control has not disappeared. A refusal to acknowledge the truth will almost certainly ensure the pandemic of 2020 or, worse, will unnecessarily control you again.

The rest of the coverage is here, and it’s not fun to read.  And while Dr Atlas faults the COVID task force for resisting President Trump’s initiatives, he faults Trump for not replacing members of the task force who blocked him.

# # #

Neil Oliver on media failures: questions never asked

 

Sundance has posted Neil Oliver’s latest monologue, this one on the corrupt media.  He starts off:

I’m telling you now – if you’re still getting your latest news from the traditional Mainstream media, then it’s not news. It’s not investigation in search of the truth.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a limp attempt by outfits compromised by complicity with years of misuse of the people, desperate to find a quiet off-ramp from the Road to Hell they’ve been enthusiastically barreling along.

Even now, with everyone getting so excited watching rats running for the lifeboats, the MSM is still working within the same old narrative, still talking about masks for school children and testing for Covid-19, still asking the questions we already know the answers to.

How can it be, that after all this time, the MSM is still failing to ask the most important questions about so much that happened? After all this time, how can they still miss the open goal so completely? . . .

Click here to watch the video or to read the full transcript.

# # #

 

Monkeypox: is it a real threat?

 

Mark A. Hewitt summarizes what is known about the dreaded monkeypox scare:

We live in a time of disinformation conceived and issued by the Democrat party and the media.  The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now want to leverage their latest midterm virus into another round of pandemic fear porn.  Since you cannot trust the FDA or the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or their spokespeople today, it might be a good time to review what the official research conducted for the military indicated before today’s liars at the CDC and the FDA get crazy again and mandate unwarranted and ineffective masks and lockdowns for monkeypox.

Mr. Hewitt then presents some tables and charts, before concluding:

If today’s reporting is accurate, monkeypox appears to be limited to gay men and those in close contact with gay men.  It is rarely fatal.  It is treatable with monkeypox and smallpox vaccines.  Regardless, Democrats, the media, and blue states will shift into fear porn overdrive.  The rest of America will ignore them.

You can look over the tables and charts here.

# # #

Follow up: monkeypox in the news

 

Stephen Green (Mr. VodkaPundit) is suspicious about the recent appearance of monkeypox. (This blog linked on the subject yesterday). Here’s some of his “Insanity Wrap” column from today at PJ Media:

Who needs to worry about monkeypox? “Everybody,” said Presidentish Joe Biden in Korea on Monday. “We’re working on it, hard, to figure out what we do,” he said.

Would it be too bold to suggest that they already have a plan?

Lockdowns, shots, school closures, masks, and stimulus checks.

. . .

Washington and the Global Panicmonger Industry just won’t give up trying to scare us, will they?  So we’re all going to die. If we don’t follow orders, that is.

. . .

But who is this “everybody” that Biden insists should be all aflutter over the pox?

These people:

As of Saturday, the World Health Organization reported there were 92 cases in 12 countries, and a further 28 suspected cases under investigation. The U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Portugal and Netherlands have all confirmed cases.

Maybe 120 cases, mostly restricted to a small subset of the populations of a dozen countries with more than half a billion people — and they basically have to be doing it to get infected.

I refuse to worry about monkeypox unless we find out that those wacky Wuhan scientists have been monkeying around with it.

Oh, wait: The Infamous Wuhan Lab Recently Assembled Monkeypox Strains Using Methods Flagged For Creating ‘Contagious Pathogens.’

At this point, things are starting to feel less like Groundhog Day and more like a reboot of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, but with biological weapons instead of nukes.

Maybe it’s time we learned to stop worrying and love the plague.

But whatever happens: No. More. Lockdowns.

Stephen Green is obviously skeptical.  JD Rucker considers more insidious scenarios here.  insidious but not that far-fetched. 

# # #

Pushing back against the masks and mandates

 

same question for the masks

Dr Joseph Mercola continues to push back against mandates and lockdowns.  Dr Mercola’s column is at Uncanceled News.  Here’s the bullet point summary:

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• In a literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality, researchers revealed lockdowns had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality
• The Brownstone Institute compiled more than 400 studies showing that lockdowns, restrictions and closures failed to do what was promised
• A team of 12 researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, the University of Oxford and other institutions outlined key reasons why COVID-19 shot mandates have been counterproductive and harmful
• COVID-19 injection mandates could lead to reactance and entrenchment, cognitive dissonance, stigma and scapegoating, and distrust
• If you don’t agree with COVID-19 restrictions and mandates in your area, now is the time to speak out in peaceful protest

Scientists the world over have done a deep dive into the unprecedented lockdowns and injection mandates that characterized the COVID-19 pandemic response. Over and over again, the results confirm what many instinctively knew all along — that these totalitarian schemes didn’t work and may have caused more harm than good.

Despite the writing on the wall, health officials and academics continue to defend the Draconian measures. It’s difficult to admit wrongdoing, especially of this magnitude, but sooner or later it will become widely known that, as Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, put it, “these interventions turned a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe.”

Full column is here.  Any one of us can take small steps; yesterday I had two appointments, one at a dental office, the other at a law firm.  And I rode public transportation.  There were mandatory mask signs in all three.  So ---no mask for me.  Resistance baby steps.

# # #

It’s official: Lockdowns were useless

 

Eric Lendrum at American Greatness has shocking news: 

A newly-released study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University revealed that the sweeping lockdowns in response to the Chinese coronavirus had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was conducted through an analysis of 24 different studies that all focused on government mandates ordering the closure of various aspects of everyday life, including school and business shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and stay-at-home orders, among others.

The comprehensive review, conducted by Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, determined that these measures collectively reduced the rate of COVID fatalities in America and Europe by a mere 0.2 percent.

When the studies were narrowed down to individual types of lockdown measures, such as stay-at-home orders alone, the survey revealed that stay-at-home orders actually slightly increased the number of deaths during COVID. ...

Shocking!  Full report is here.

# # #

COVID: 30 Facts You Need To Know

 

Mark Wauck at MeaningInHistory has a summary via ZeroHedge and The Off Guardian:

Covid: 30 Facts You Need To Know

The piece under the above title appeared at The Off-Guardian and is gaining attention. I’m mostly pasting in the 30 points, but under each point at the original (or at Zerohedge, if you like the formatting better) there is a short exposition. Mostly I don’t include the explanation—with relevant links. In some cases I add content. You can scan the content here, decide whether to read the entire original, or selectively look up certain topics.

PART I: “COVID DEATHS” & MORTALITY

1. The survival rate of “Covid” is over 99%. Government medical experts went out of their way to underline, from the beginning of the pandemic, that the vast majority of the population are not in any danger from Covid.

[Yes, he really said that, and it seems he was right—the numbers bear him out. Do you think he was just mouthing off without having a clue what he was talking about? No, he was repeating what scientists all knew when this first started. The[n] The Memo came out that changed the narrative … ]

2. There has been NO unusual excess mortality.

3. “Covid death” counts are artificially inflated. Countries around the globe have been defining a “Covid death” as a “death by any cause within 28/30/60 days of a positive test”.

4. The vast majority of covid deaths have serious comorbidities. In March 2020, the Italian government published statistics showing 99.2% of their “Covid deaths” had at least one serious comorbidity.

These included cancer, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, kidney failure and diabetes (among others). Over 50% of them had three or more serious pre-existing conditions.

This pattern has held up in all other countries over the course of the “pandemic”. An October 2020 FOIA request to the UK’s ONS revealed less than 10% of the official “Covid death” count at that time had Covid as the sole cause of death.

The other 26 points are here.  It’s a handy and reasonably comprehensive overview - especially good to have at hand when your well-meaning friends and family try to persuade you to get the "vaccine."

# # #

The Melbourne Tinderbox and Why Americans Should Pay Attention

photo credit: theaustralian.com

As usual, Sundance is on the story while most of the media lag behind.  I am posting an extract from his report, and click here for the full story, with photographs.  Also, check out the comments below the report.  From Conservative Treehouse:

The Melbourne Tinderbox and Why Americans Should Pay Attention

An inflection point has been reached in Australia with the government COVID-19 lockdowns, forced vaccinations and now, vaccine passports. What is happening today in the state of Victoria, specifically the Melbourne metropolitan area, is an outcome of more than a year of heavy-handed government rules and regulations deaf to the voices of the average man, woman or family. There is a middle class & blue-collar backlash taking place, and Americans would be wise to pay attention.

Things recently came to a head when the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, began outlining the rules and regulations for opening society back up after almost a year of total lockdown. The always futile attempt to block the COVID-19 virus through a policy known as “COVID-ZERO” was abandoned. The new approach is to open up society and the economy by forcing everyone to take the vaccine, and then allowing only the vaccinated to participate in the economy as varying percentages of the population are double-vaxxed, and admittedly, later, booster-vaxxed.

Vaccination passports will be required to work, shop, attend events and essentially live in the New World Order Premier Andrews has created for the citizens of Victoria. The day after Andrews outlined the new rules – the working class, who have been locked down and compliant to this point, finally had enough.

. . .

The vaccination passport methods, processes and procedures being tested right now in Australia are soon to arrive in the United States. Electronic check-ins and QR codes deployed to track the movements of vaxxed and unvaxxed are being tested right now in almost all states in Australia. We The People in America are only a few weeks or months away from having to make the same decisions that middle-class Victorian workers are faced with right now. This is why you should pay attention to what is happening there.

The population of Australia (26 million) is small by comparison to the U.S. (350+ million), and as a result, the dynamic will be exponentially more explosive when it arrives here.

Socially, Americans are more geographically spread out than Australia, as most of their major population centers circle the coastline. Factually, the population of Florida or Texas is essentially equivalent to the entire population of Australia. The economy of the U.S. is also substantially larger and more diverse than down-under. However, those points only emphasize how significantly more explosive the same scenarios may become when the Biden regime attempts to follow the oppressive process now being witnessed in the Melbourne region.

Here again is the link to the full report.  

# # #

Delingpole: features of the New World Order

 

image credit: veteranstoday.com

Breitbart contributor James Delingpole is a favorite of mine.  Although he specializes in coverage of climate hysteria, yesterday at Breitbart, he reported on the draconian measures taking place right now in the formerly free country of Australia. 

As readers of Cleveland Tea Party blog know, I have posted frequently on developments with the COVID virus and the flip-flopping restrictions and mandates issued by Fauci et al at the CDC.  In recent weeks, as I have been following these developments, another word popped into my mind -- and that word is “sinister.”  Mr. Delingpole chose the same word.  I am posting part of his report below, because what is happening in the Antipodes is viewed by a few other analysts, incl. Sundance at Treehouse, as a beta test for the New World Order (also known as The Great Reset, previously billed as Agenda 21). [In 1992, a Senator named Joseph R Biden Jr wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal headlined ‘How I Learned to Love the New World Order’.]  So, is this a conspiracy theory?  Or is it actually coming to a theater near you? 

Here’s part of Mr. Delingpole’s “Creepy Australian Officials Start Using “New World Order” as a Talking Point”:

Two senior medical officers have, shockingly, said out loud what a lot of ordinary people already noticed: Australia is sliding inexorably towards a ‘New World Order.’

New South Wales (NSW) Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant (pictured) used the sinister phrase during a Thursday press conference, in response to a question about reopening after the interminable lockdowns imposed by various Australian states.

. . .

Australia has some of the most draconian lockdown policies anywhere in the world right now. Indeed, as this Twitter thread from Maajid Nawaz suggests, the land they once called ‘the Lucky Country’ is now starting to look like a very unlucky totalitarian tyranny.

Among the scary features it has introduced in the last 18 months are:

• Quarantine camps
• CCP style surveillance in the form of “Forced” facial recognition & geolocation scanning sent to the government within 15 mins of a text
• Legally accessing your data & taking control of your online accounts
• Putting quarantine signs on people’s doors as if they were Medieval plague victims
• Denying [healthcare] services & “locking out” the unvaccinated to “protect the health service”
• And, the final insult, deciding how much beer you are allowed to drink in your home prison…

This is really happening.  Now.  Full report with video and screen shots of Twitter threads is here.  Exit question:  Is last month's Afghanistan catastrophe part of the New World Order strategy? 

# # #

Updates: COVID, vaccines, government overreach

Via Conservative Treehouse:

Sundance posted these stats after reporting on the draconian measures being imposed in New Zealand -- on the basis of ONE new delta variant COVID case.  His take: something else is going on.  NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's extreme protocols in the name of protecting against COVID are not rational.  In the U.S., government overreach at the federal and state levels should be of even more concern, given this additional context.

If you are interested in the latest from Dr. Robert Malone on vaccines and variants, Mark Wauck at Meaning in History has the update;  click here.

# # #

This Is 1938: First, They Came for the Unvaccinated

 

Wayne Allyn Root at FrontPage compares America in 2021 to Germany in 1938 (“This Is 1938: First, They Came for the Unvaccinated”).  Alarm bells?  He does not exaggerate.  Here are some extracts:

It's time for alarm bells. It's time for me to play the part of Paul Revere: "The communist tyrants and dictators are coming! The communist tyrants and dictators are coming!" They're coming first for unvaccinated Americans.

This is 1938. . . . It was the pre-Holocaust. It was the time before the nightmare, when the foundation was being laid to destroy the freedom, free speech, businesses and lives of millions of Jews.

Everything happening today to the American people ... to the U.S. Constitution ... to freedom ... and particularly to unvaccinated Americans reminds me of 1938. This is only the beginning. It gets much worse from here.

First, "the papers." Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are just like 1938, when the Gestapo demanded papers from every German.

. . .

Now Democrats want American citizens, not illegal aliens, not criminals, but patriots born in this country, to produce papers 24/7. We'll need papers to enter restaurants, bars, nightclubs, concerts, casinos, conventions and hotels and to board a train, plane or bus. We'll need papers to enter a supermarket, or we'll starve to death. All for the crime of being unvaccinated against ... wait for it ...

The flu.

All for the crime of being unwilling to inject an untested, rushed to production, experimental, "for emergency use only" shot into our bodies.

. . .

By the way, this isn't about vaccines. If you want the vaccine, take it. I'd never stop you. I'd never limit your freedom, your choice. This is about vaccine mandates — forcibly injecting Americans who don't want it. That's 1938.

But there's much more in common with 1938. Mask mandates. If you're scared, wear them. I'm not scared. I don't want to wear them. Mandates are about forcing individuals to lose their freedom, choice, individuality and human rights. That's 1938.

Lockdowns are a match with the Warsaw Ghetto. Jews were locked down. Jews couldn't work. Jews couldn't travel. Jewish businesses were labeled "nonessential."

If government can force us to close our businesses, to kill our jobs, to decide who is nonessential, then this is 1938.

. . .

Media and social media as the public-relations wing of the government. That's called propaganda. Remind you of 1938? Back then, the Jews' books were burned. Today, it's those of conservatives, patriots and specifically the unvaccinated. We are silenced. Our facts are labeled "misleading." Only the facts that agree with big government's agenda count. That's 1938.

. . .

Unless we stop it now. Unless we take a stand now. Unless we draw a line in the sand now.

First, they came for the unvaccinated. Trust me: Next, they're coming for you.

Mr. Root’s full article is here.  And it’s why I’ve been linking to Sen. RandPaul’s video/transcripts to Just. Say. No. to more mandates and lockdowns. 

# # #

Sen. Rand Paul says NO to more mandates and lockdowns

 

Brodigan at LouderWithCrowder is encouraged by Sen. Rand Paul’s call-to-arms to just say no to more mandates, lockdowns, and other harmful policies; there’s a video by Sen. Paul with excerpts from Paul's video (in italics) and commentary:

. . . You know Joe Biden is going to push more lockdowns, no matter how many times the White House clarifies or denies him saying so. Senator [Rand] Paul has a simple message for the American people when the government tries locking down again: Nope.

. . .

They can't arrest all of us. They can't keep all of your kids home from school. We don't have to accept the mandates, lockdowns, and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and bureaucrats. We can simply say no, not again.

. . .

Children are falling behind in school, and are being harmed physically and psychologically by the tactics that you have used to keep them from the classroom during the last year. We won't allow it again. If a school system attempts to keep the children from full-time, in-person school, I will hold up every bill with two amendments. One to defund them, and another to allow parents the choice of where the money goes for their child's education.

This would be interesting. Because the pandemic has done wonders for exposing parents to what public schools really are. Here's the common ground. You get your mask mandates in public schools. We get a voucher that's equal to what we pay in school taxes to send our kids elsewhere. Conservatives would take that deal in a heartbeat.

I think the tide is turning as more and more people are willing to stand up. We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children? Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not? Not this time. I choose freedom.

Click here for the full report plus video. Sundance weighs in on this one also;  click here.  Lara Logan has it figured out:

# # #

Doctors on vaccines & COVID-19

 

Tired of the seemingly endless headlines on COVID and the vaccines?  They are not going away anytime soon.  In the current issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D. provides an overview of why she is skeptical:

COVID-19: A Weapon to Fundamentally Transform America

An old Russian operating room joke says: Did you know that in Russia tonsillectomies are done transrectally? No, why? People are afraid to open their mouths!

Sadly, this joke could be describing the new America. What has happened? Why have we collectively lost our minds? And what has COVID-19 got to do with it? While Americans have been asleep at the wheel, the power brokers were manipulating us into constant societal unrest, with dwindling individual liberties and growing dependency on the government and big corporations. COVID-19 has been a handy justification for left-leaning politicians to promote and solidify their ideology. What many Americans were led to believe was well-intentioned concern for our safety and health has turned into a morass of ever-changing rules designed not for our health, but to accustom us to government control of our lives.

The collectivist political philosophy that has been simmering in America for years may be coming to fruition. We will recover from the COVID-19 disease, but will we recover from the attendant malignant policy changes?

. . . 

The full article is here.  It is quite long but worth the time.  In a related story, Allan Stein at the Epoch Times reports:

An internet survey by a non-partisan physicians’ association found that most respondents have not been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or plan to get the shot.

In the June 16 online survey by the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) in Tuscon, Arizona, nearly 60 percent of over 700 both retired and practicing physicians said they were not fully vaccinated and would decline the shots based on their assessment of risk.

“This contrasts with the claim by the American Medical Association that 96 percent of practicing physicians are fully vaccinated. This was based on 300 respondents,” the AAPS stated in a press release.

While neither survey represents a random sample of all U.S. physicians, the AAPS survey shows that doctor support for the mass injection campaign “is far from unanimous.”

“It is wrong to call a person who declines a shot an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” AAPS Executive Director Jane Orient said in a statement. “Virtually no physicians are ‘anti-antibiotics’ or ‘anti-surgery,’ whereas all are opposed to treatments that they think are unnecessary, more likely to cause harm than to benefit an individual patient, or inadequately tested.”

The survey also showed that 58 percent of the practicing physicians who responded were aware of patients suffering a “significant adverse reaction” after receiving a COVID vaccine.

Orient said most unvaccinated physicians had made their decision based on their assessment that the risk of taking the shots exceeds the risk of the disease, with many responding that they had already contracted COVID-19.

Other reasons for declining the shots included unknown long-term side effects, use of fetal cell lines for vaccine testing, the experimental nature of the injections, other effective early treatments, and reports of deaths and blood clots.

. . .

More at the Epoch Times here.

 # # #

The lockdowns simply didn’t work

 

Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:

We Just Got Even More Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired

A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.

Life under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.  

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline. 

The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key. 

The results aren’t pretty. 

“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.

 

. . .

Read more here.

Flashback:  In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”;  click here.

# # #

The Tyrants Among Us

The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights gives us fair warning on returning to normalcy:

 Of course they’re not going to let a crisis go to waste.

   . . . 

There’s a natural progression from the pandemic lockdowns to restrictions on freedom in the name of saving the sky from global warming. But the tyrants among us won’t stop there. We find it useful here to quote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international affairs analyst, who realized more than six months ago that “the virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.”

For instance:

• President Joe Biden and his party hope to saddle Americans, through undisciplined spending, with debt and a de facto tax (inflation) that can be repaid only by mortgaging the future and bondage to the federal monster.
• There is a core on the left, not even the hard left, that is resisting a return to normal. It wants liberty-shackling rules in place in perpetuity.
• Our freedom to speak will continue to be abridged.
• Our ability to make independent and individual health care decisions will be curtailed further.
• Second Amendment rights will be in danger of being rolled back because of “public health” needs.
• Expect to be forced out of our fossil-fuel-burning automobiles and herded into mass transit.
• Protests and rallies will be put down as insurrections – unless they are in service of the “right” groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Once lost, freedom is difficult to regain. “Be warned,” says author Michael Walsh. “If you think the petty tyrants currently making your lives miserable are going to willingly relinquish their illicit powers, think again. They’ve got a taste for it now.”

So intoxicated from their deep swig of power are they that they no longer see boundaries, just opportunities to subjugate. Fight back, or lose in a few years what has made America unique and great for more than two centuries

The entire editorial is here.

# # #

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.  

# # #

COVID-19 and risk

 

Guest post by PatD:

CDC recently updated estimated infection fatality rates for COVID. Here are the updated survival rates by age group:

0-19: 99.997%

20-49: 99.98%

50-69: 99.5% 

70+: 94.6%

Remember also that 94% of the fatalities had other morbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, according to the CDC. 

If you are old like me, or our overweight President, you face a greater risk, but, for most people the chances of dying from COVID-19 are minimal. Yet, we are destroying the lives of children by keeping schools shut down for most of the year. We are destroying countless small businesses for a virus that is less deadly than the flu. We have shut down live sports and entertainment for no good reason.

We all know of people who have died with COVID-19. But we know of far more people who have died from other causes, such as traffic accidents, drowning, murder, cancer, heart disease and so on. The problem is we not balancing out the risk factors.

For example, we lose 37,000 people a year in traffic accidents. From 1899 to 2013, it is estimated 3.6 million people died in traffic accidents. Unlike COVID-19, people will continue to die in traffic accidents for the foreseeable future. If we cut the speed limit to 15 mph and require vehicles to be limited to a top speed of 15 mph, we would just about eliminate those deaths. But society won't do that. The convenience and time savings from much higher speed limits outweigh the risk of dying in a traffic accident.

The treatment the President received was little different from that received by most hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The only difference was that he was given an experimental therapeutic that is not yet approved for general use. Our healthcare system has learned a lot since March and the death rates are dropping as better therapies are used to treat patients. 

# # #

Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Heather Mac Donald on government failures: lockdowns and riots

                       

One of our free subscriptions is to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  In the latest issue, Heather Mac Donald just published “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance” and it is now available online.  She is addressing the unnecessary and arbitrary shutdown due to COVID-19, as well as the passive, not to say complicit, government role with the Black Lives Matter-fueled rioting. 

Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.

Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.

This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.

On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.

Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.

Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.

If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.

. . .

The full essay is here.  [Note: my only criticism of MacDonald’s essay is that she implies that the behavior of the police officer who restrained George Floyd was “grotesquely callous and contrary to sound tactics.” However, based on the police complaint, the medical examiner’s report with toxicology report, and reasonable analysis by Clarice Feldman, Floyd died of a heart attack while in police custody; the neck restraint was consistent with police training in Minneapolis when an officer is trying to prevent a suspect exhibiting drug-related “excited delirium syndrome” from inflicting injury on himself.]

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