Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator

 MATT TAIBBI:

 Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator: He institutionalized the purposeful lie, suppressed critics, mastered emergency politics, even sold himself as a sex symbol. Anthony Fauci gave the next monster a playbook.

Actually, our press had the playbook, he just gave them an excuse to run with it. And though Taibbi may not be ready to admit it, they ran that playbook with Obama, too.

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Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

 YES, IT WOULD HAVE: 

Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

Each technological age renews the fight over speech infringement. If given an inch, government censors inevitably take a mile. In July, pushback came when a federal court issued a temporary injunction against federal bureaucrats leaning on social-media companies. The decision takes particular trouble to note the bureaucracy’s campaign to silence dissenters to its Covid policies. Many of those policies are now seen to have been ill-advised.

A plaintiff in the lawsuit, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, recently made an arresting admission in an interview with the Hoover Institution. Dr. Bhattacharya was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, that still-vilified October 2020 challenge to Covid lockdowns. He now says the declaration was the “least original thing I ever worked on in my entire life.”

This rang some bells with me. In late January and early February 2020, I channeled what experts were thinking about the then-novel coronavirus. Most infections were mild or even asymptomatic and weren’t being properly counted. The virus was likely already rampant in places it wasn’t yet detected, like New York City. It couldn’t be stopped at a cost a sane humanity would be willing to pay. It was also far less deadly than was being reported.

But then things turned weird. This balanced assessment, roughly universal among experts, was shelved in a bandwagon frenzy that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. . . .

Meanwhile, bans on elective medical procedures, forced unemployment, school closures and other extreme measures produced their own toll. Among the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, their average age was 74 and they lost 12 years of life. Nobody yet knows the total years lost to younger people due to “excess deaths” from substance abuse, suicide, homicide, accidents, lack of cancer screening and other non-Covid causes. Only with the arrival of the Biden administration did it become expedient to acknowledge a truth known from the start: The virus was something we would have to “live with,” not defeat with indiscriminate social and economic curbs.

This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence others. Fighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position.

Well, the thing to remember is that it wasn’t about getting a better pandemic outcome, but about securing political advantage.

 Fauci: A Very Dangerous Man

Anthony Fauci’s Deceptions

A trove of emails, Slack messages, and other documents reveal Fauci’s behind-the-scenes involvement. ‘Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories.’  

Lockdowns (The great Taboo) - Cause for disillusion/mistrust of all Institutions

Our Institutions : The Great Cloud of Disrepute 

A dark cloud of disrepute hangs over all official institutions in the developed world. It affects governments most but also all the institutions that cooperated with them over three and a half years, including media, the biggest corporations, and tech companies. The cloud covers most all academia, medicine, and experts in general. 

Climate Strategy Plan - COVid Lockdown II

 BIDEN’S NEW CLIMATE STRATEGY: STAY HOME.

The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t all bad, a new Biden administration plan to fight climate change argues: It at least “highlighted major opportunities” to reduce travel demand and lower carbon emissions through “remote work and virtual interactions.”

The plan—which President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency and Energy, Transportation, and Housing departments released in January—aims to “eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas emissions” from the transportation sector by 2050, mostly through a transition to electric vehicles. Also included in the plan, however, is a controversial call to reduce “commuting miles” through “an increase in remote work and virtual engagements,” including in education.

Make sure you read the last part of the final sentence of that excerpt carefully. Yes, they’re talking about working remotely and using Zoom calls or similar technology to hold meetings. But they added the phrase “including in education.”

Has anyone on Joe Biden’s team been paying any attention to the news for the past year? The school closures during the lockdown were disastrous for students. (And they were pretty hard on many parents as well, of course.) Students’ educational achievements cratered. Their emotional development was stunted. High school grades and graduation rates dropped, along with college admissions.

And now Joe Biden is pushing to have more of that “remote learning” make a comeback in the name of climate change? Have we learned nothing from the past three years? One thing we definitely learned was that children were at the lowest risk of bad outcomes from COVID, so the schools were probably the last places we should have shut down.

I can’t shake the feeling that this brings us one step closer to a declared “climate emergency.” You people can all stay locked down in your homes voluntarily to save the polar bears or we can declare an emergency and lock you down like we did during COVID.

As Stephen Miller asked in February of 2021:  Are you ready for the climate lockdowns? It’s only a matter of time.

111Posted at 5:41 pm by Ed Driscoll   

S

Sweden Wins! Has Lowest Pandemic Mortality in the World

 Sweden Wins - Against Covid

Sweden Wins! Country That Refused Lockdown and Kept Schools Open Has Lowest Pandemic Mortality in the World

THE LOCKDOWNS, MASKING, DISTANCING — IT WAS ALL A MISTAKE: 

Jan 24, 2023

Excess Deaths in Finland and Norway in 2022 Were Higher Than in Sweden in 2020.

Remember back in 2020 when Sweden was the bad boy of the Covid world? Placed firmly on the naughty step by the WHO, the EU and many national leaders, the Swedes bravely, or stubbornly, ploughed their own furrow. However, by the end of 2020, with the excess death rate in Sweden at 758 per million compared to the minuscule or negative rates in the ‘pin-up’ Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark and Norway (each of which followed WHO and EU orthodoxy) Sweden, and their Chief Epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, were firmly on the defensive.

How times change! Here we are in 2023, the pandemic rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But what’s this? The excess date rate in 2022 in both Finland and Norway was higher than Sweden’s in 2020.

Much more at the link, including data on the efficacy of the vaccines.

43Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green   

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COVID Stole More Than a Year From Our Kids

 MARY KATHARINE HAM REVIEWS 

THE STOLEN YEAR:

 “The Stolen Year acknowledges the public schools’ COVID failures but refuses to hold anyone responsible. . . . Twelve years after he was acquitted of murder, O.J. Simpson and a ghostwriter penned a book called If I Did It. I was reminded of that when The Stolen Year arrived on my doorstep. A chronicling of the horrors wrought by COVID policies that kept American kids from their school buildings and childhood milestones for more than a year, this book was written by someone at the scene of the crime, intimate with the gory details, and ultimately uninterested in reckoning with who was responsible for it. This is a whodunnit without a culprit.”

Plus: “It seemed like depraved indifference to children’s welfare.”

27Posted at 8:06 am by Glenn Reynolds   

The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.

And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.

This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?

The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.

Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.

126Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll   

The Covid Plaque - VDH

 The Covid Plaque (VDH)

Covid Plaque Part 1

 Covid Plaque Part 2

Covid Plaque Part 3

Covid After Thought

The Covid Plague.. The Layman’s View VDH

The Covid Plague.   Lessons Learned

The Covid Plague. Part One. The Layman’s View

The Covid Plague. Part Two. The Way Ahead

The Covid Plague. Part Three. Lessons Learned

TWO BRANDONS IN ONE: CDC Hacks Infecting Americans is ok if You're not Americans

 TWO BRANDONS IN ONE: 

The CDC Decides The Science (TM) Says There’s an Emergency In the Skies Requiring Continued Mandatory Masking (But No Emergency on the Ground Necessitating Speedy Deportation of Illegal Aliens, Strangely Enough).

 “One suspects they were not analyzing the ‘science,’ but once again, consulting with ‘stakeholders’ and politicians about the politics of it: Can we afford to piss off the Krazy Kovid Karens, the only cohort in America that still supports Biden by majority numbers? Well, now they’ve gotten a chance to do their homework and they say 

yes, we’re still in an emergency, but only as far as Americans infecting Americans, 

and Americans will have to wears masks on planes, but I guess we can still suspend Title 42 as far as illegal aliens sneaking across the border.”

19Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll   

O

The Conformity Crackup of 2021

 WALL STREET JOURNAL: 

The Conformity Crackup of 2021: From Covid lockdowns to crime and cops, the political-media consensus was wrong.

Only when it is exposed over time as false does the conformity break, and typically only if there are negative political consequences for Democrats. The saving grace is that sometimes reality is impossible to ignore, and 2021 was the year this happened on some of the biggest events of our time. It’s worth recounting a few examples to see how the dominant consensus was wrong about so much for so long.

• The Wuhan Virology Lab origin theory of Covid-19. In the early days of the pandemic, even raising this as a possibility was taboo. Sen. Cotton was vilified for doing so. The Lancet, a supposedly open-minded scientific journal, published a letter in February 2020 “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

This year we learned that the Lancet letter was part of a coordinated effort to quash the lab theory. We learned about the conflicts of interest of Anthony Fauci and others who provided funding for the Wuhan lab. Eventually even the press noticed that China had blocked an honest inquiry, and that no evidence for a natural origin has emerged.

• Lockdowns stop Covid-19. There was no fiercer consensus in the early days of the virus than the belief that locking down the economy to stop the virus was an unadulterated social good. We felt the consensus wrath when we raised doubts, in an editorial on March 20, 2020, about the harm that lockdowns would do to the economy and public health.

Two years later we now know that lockdowns at most delay the virus spread. The damage in lost education for children, lost livelihoods for workers and employers, and damage to mental health is obvious for all to see. Even Randi Weingarten, the teachers union chief who did so much to keep schools closed, now claims she wanted to keep them open all along.

• The supply side of the economy doesn’t matter. The Keynesian consensus, which dominates the U.S. and European media, has long held that the demand for goods and services drives the economy. The ability or incentive to supply those goods is largely ignored or dismissed. Spurring demand was the theory behind the trillions of dollars in spending by Congress and easy money from the Federal Reserve.

All that money did spur demand. But the Keynesians ignored the disincentives to increase supply from paying people not to work and restricting work with lockdowns and mandates. The result was the surging inflation that caught nearly all of them by surprise. Their demand-side models never saw it coming.

• The Steele dossier and Russia collusion narrative. In 2019 the Mueller report exposed the lack of evidence for the claims that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in cahoots. This year the indictments by special counsel John Durham have revealed how Democrats and the press worked together to promote the dossier that was based on disinformation.

Yet for four years nearly everyone in the dominant media bought the collusion narrative. One or two of the gullible have apologized, but most want everyone to forget what they wrote or said at the time.

• Vilifying police won’t affect crime. The fast-congealing consensus after George Floyd’s murder was that most police were racist, as was most of American society, and violent protests against this were justified—even admirable. Woe to anyone who pointed out that the victims of these riots and crime were mostly poor and minority communities.

Police funding was cut and bail laws eased in many cities. Eighteen months later we see the result in rising crime rates and a soaring murder count. A political backlash now has even many Democrats claiming they really do want more funding for police.

To be fair, these people are idiots.

36Posted at 8:46 am by Glenn Reynolds   

Germany Announces National Lockdown for Unvaccinated - RESET

 

Germany Announces National Lockdown for Unvaccinated

BY JACK PHILLIPS

 

December 2, 2021 Updated: December 3, 2021

biggersmaller 

Print

Exiting Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Dec. 2 that Germany will lock down unvaccinated people as top officials also signaled that they would back plans for mandatory vaccinations in the coming months.

Merkel said individuals who aren’t vaccinated for COVID-19 will be excluded from nonessential stores and cultural and recreational venues. The Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, also will consider a general vaccination mandate.

“The situation is our country is serious,” she told reporters, claiming that the new measures are an “act of national solidarity.”

Other new requirements include masks being required in schools, Merkel added. Vaccinated people will lose their vaccination status nine months after receiving their last dose of a vaccine.

“We have understood that the situation is very serious and that we want to take further measures in addition to those already taken,” Merkel, who was slated to leave office on Dec. 2, told reporters. “The fourth wave must be broken and this has not yet been achieved.”

Ivermectin 

Ivermectin, The Drug That Cracked COVID and Treated President Trump

May 29, 2021 | Sundance | 670 Comments

Before going into a fascinating story about a drug called “Ivermectin” and a volume of research studies, successful trials and treatment for COVID-19, there is something to consider that should be forefront

American Press Pushes Ridiculous Comparisons Between Spanish Flu and COVID

 

American Press Pushes Ridiculous Comparisons Between Spanish Flu and COVID

In its race for clicks, the press fails to explore many of the critical differences between the Spanish Flu and COVID.

Posted by Leslie Eastman Wednesday, September 22, 2021 at 07:00am 54 Comments

 

Of course, the American press is quick to push any analogy to the flu epidemic to drive click and panic. Today’s offering is the news that COVID has now officially killed more Americans than the 1918 Influenza.

COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000.

 The U.S. population a century ago was just one-third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the COVID-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to take maximum advantage of the vaccines available this time.

“Big pockets of American society — and, worse, their leaders — have thrown this away,” medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said of the opportunity to vaccinate everyone eligible by now.

However, the press has left out many analysis details that reveal much starker differences between the Spanish Flu and COVID.

To begin with, the population of the United States as of today is 333,368,397. The US population in 1918 was 1/3rd of that amount, registering 103.2 million. Therefore, comparing apples to apples:

 – SPANISH FLU FATALITIES/100K = 665

– COVID FATALITIES/100K = 202

Furthermore, the Spanish Flu heavily targeted young adults. COVID, in contrast, has its most significant impact on the elderly (whose immune system is not as robust as when young). Here is a chart summarizing the age impact between the two diseases.

Furthermore, as a reminder, here is the chart produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing the relative risk of death in each age category compared to young, healthy adults (who were more vulnerable to the Spanish Flu).

The Spanish Flu was deadlier for young adults precisely because it created a cytokine storm, super-activating the immune system.

A cytokine storm is an overproduction of immune cells and their activating compounds (cytokines), which, in a flu infection, is often associated with a surge of activated immune cells into the lungs. The resulting lung inflammation and fluid buildup can lead to respiratory distress and can be contaminated by a secondary bacterial pneumonia—often enhancing the mortality in patients.

This little-understood phenomenon is thought to occur in at least several types of infections and autoimmune conditions, but it appears to be particularly relevant in outbreaks of new flu variants. Cytokine storm is now seen as a likely major cause of mortality in the 1918-20 “Spanish flu”—which killed more than 50 million people worldwide—and the H1N1 “swine flu” and H5N1 “bird flu” of recent years.

 In these epidemics, the patients most likely to die were relatively young adults with apparently strong immune reactions to the infection—whereas ordinary seasonal flu epidemics disproportionately affect the very young and the elderly.

In contrast, COVID causes a cascade of symptoms that include inflammation. For the most part, its effects depend on the diet, weight, and preexisting conditions. If the press were genuinely interested in helping during this crisis, it would strongly urge healthy eating, exercise, and outdoor activities.

Finally, during the Spanish Flu era, doctors could not detect the virus nor had effective treatment options. This differs from COVID, which has many new and potentially new options. The press should be providing trustworthy analysis of effective products instead of highlighting only those with politically approved Big Pharma connections. Early treatment is going to keep the COVID fatality rates low.

The American Press: So much smug self-importance. So little understanding and reliable analysis.

Study in Bangladesh Shows Surgical Masks Limit Covid-19 Infections:

 Study in Bangladesh Shows Surgical Masks Limit Covid-19 Infections:

Inbox

Chris Hansen <cuinohio67@gmail.com>	9:19 PM (2 minutes ago)
to me

Study in Bangladesh Shows Surgical Masks Limit Covid-19n Infectios: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2021/09/01/study-bangladesh-shows-surgical-masks-limit-covid19-infections

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