Category Archives: Covid

How a War on ‘Misinformation’ Led To a Coronavirus Tragedy

As Covid has tragically proven, the war on misinformation, not misinformation itself, is perhaps the greatest threat to our civilization.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” – Richard Feynman

Spectacular falsehoods, deep truths, and Canadian truckers are finally piercing the long-impervious Covid storyline. 

So writes Bret Swanson, president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and chairman of the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS), in a recent article on realclearmarkets.com.

Here are some excerpts:

When Dr. Scott Atlas began advising the U.S. government in August 2020, Facebook erased his videos arguing against widespread business and school closures. YouTube erased the December 2020 U.S. Senate testimony of Drs. Peter McCullough and Pierre Kory, world-class experts in cardiology and critical care, respectively, and demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who were all trumpeting effective early treatments. YouTube also erased the testimony of Drs. Jay Battacharya (Stanford), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) at a forum led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Twitter permanently banned Dr. Robert Malone, pioneer of mRNA and DNA gene therapy technologies.

These acts of censorship were just some of the most obvious. Yet they reverberated far and wide. The erasure and smearing of eminent scientists sent a clear message to thousands of other physicians, professors, medical editors, journalists, CEOs, and influential leaders: toe the party line, or we will destroy you. These rippling layers of cancellation then denied an even wider circle of people in all walks of life the information needed to make sound medical, personal, and political decisions.

Continue reading →

Natural and Unnatural Immunity

An article worth reading

Quote:

Rather, the best health care professionals ask the right questions, think critically, question government and Big Pharma narratives, respect their patients’ choices, and work diligently with their patients to help their patients perform rational risk-benefit analyses.  These doctors and uncertain scientists, some of whom have lost their professional licenses for crime of independent thought and the practical application of the scientific method, include the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, the Frontline Doctors and now the Alliance of Doctors and Scientists. 

Here‘s the rest.

Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

When it could no longer be denied, we heard: "Oh yeah, maybe."

Writes Matt Ridley in spiked-online.com: “In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.”

However, the strong possibility of a lab-leak in Wuhan can no longer be denied.

Ridley concludes:

The emails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’. Francis Collins was pithier, worrying about ‘doing great potential harm to science and international harmony’. Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting science’s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change one’s mind.

In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collins’s National Institutes of Health.

So, once the lab-leak narrative finishes its migration from conspiracy theory to accident (or even conspiracy) fact, who will be made responsible in the end?

Covid measures are driving people towards God

In Austria, they are praying the Rosary for deliverance from their government

It’s not just intellectuals who, perceiving many Covid measures as evil, are (re-)discovering God (see here and here for examples).

At least in Austria, it is also “common people” who are starting to pray. That’s no surprise, as the Alpine country is the country furthest down the road towards tyranny and totalitarianism with regard to the Covid measures. It plans to impose a vaccine mandate for every adult from February this year, enforcement is to start in March.

The only mitigation from the government and the majority in parliament has been to exclude the 15-17-year-olds from this measure, who were originally included.

On the Lifesite News website there is an interview with one of the leaders of the protests, Alexander Tschugguel. The most amazing part of the interview begins about half-way in. Tschugguel reports that many are publicly praying the Rosary, and people are joining these groups who say they have never prayed before. These are grassroots Christians being joined by grassroots non-Christians. I cannot verify this but please judge for yourself when you watch the video whether this man is telling the truth.

Is it Time for Intellectuals to Talk about God?

Another progressive leftist finds religion in the face of the pandemic measures

Naomi Wolf is a well-known left-wing, secular, progressive, human-rights (in particular women’s rights) activist. Or rather, was.

She wrote recently, in an article whose title I have copied for this entry:

I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends. [My emphases.]

Wolf, who is of Jewish heritage, concludes:

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence. [My emphasis.]

This is amazing. After journalist James Delingpole, who was a more or less secular conservative, and Professor Mark Crispin Miller, a (former) leftist secular academic, we have a third more or less well-known public personas who profess that the pandemic, or rather the public reaction to the pandemic, have led, or should one say, driven them to God. Of those three, Naomi Wolf is by far the most famous.

Admittedly, she’s not Christian. She writes in the same article: “As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language — I don’t think forms really matter. I think intention is everything.”

Still, I see a trend, a pattern. Let’s see who’s next.

Planet Lockdown

"A documentary and interview series covering the information needed to understand where we are today."

To be found here on Brand NewTube (1 h 50 min).

From the description:

“For Planet Lockdown we spoke to some of the brightest minds in the world including epidemiologists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, protesters, a statesman and a prince. These brave souls had the courage to speak truth against all odds and inspire us to do the same. We must have the courage to overcome our fears. And once we do, it gets easier every time.”

Here’s their website.

‘Nudge’ has no place in our democracy

Rampant fear-mongering was intentional, admits one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team

Frank Furedi comments in spiked-online.com:

Behavioural science, aka ‘nudging’, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the ‘right’ thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the ‘most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public’.

He continues:

And here we come to the principal problem – namely, that nudging is fundamentally anti-democratic. Behavioural scientists start from the assumption that human beings cannot be trusted to make rational choices. People’s behaviour, they conclude, should be the subject of government management. They treat people’s emotional lives, lifestyles and relationships as legitimate objects of policymaking and professional intervention.

After Covid

We won’t get normality back without a fight

Over at Spiked-online, Brendan O’Neill observes and comments on the rather sudden change in tune in the official and mainstream commentariat regarding all things Covid. He writes:

“Suddenly, everyone’s talking about getting back to normal. After 22 months of restrictions, of going in and out of lockdown, of a suspension of civil liberties that was unprecedented in modern peacetime Britain, all the talk is of ‘moving on’. Let’s learn to live with Covid, politicians say.”

He rightly says that “moving on” won’t be easy.

“As sociologist and SAGE adviser Robert Dingwall said back in May 2020, officialdom ‘effectively terrorised’ the public into believing Covid would kill them if they broke the rules. We created a ‘climate of fear’, he said. The consequence of terrorising the public, rather than galvanising us to pull together to combat the spread of Covid and assist the vulnerable, became clear very early on. Snitching abounded. Neighbours told on neighbours. Venturing outside came to be viewed as dangerous anti-social behaviour. Police forces went wild, clearing people out of parks for no good reason and even sending drones to spy on dog-walkers in scenic country spots. The culture of atomisation that predated Covid was intensified by the terror officialdom deployed in response to Covid. Repairing solidarity will be a tough task.”

“And what about the culture of freedom? Forget, for a moment, the way our legally guaranteed liberties were put on ice during this crisis. That was bad, no question. But a more injurious if sometimes intangible process was taking place alongside this temporary unwinding of our rights. The culture of freedom was undermined. The individual self-confidence and social trust that freedom depends upon, which freedom cannot exist without, was pummelled, day in, day out. We were educated to distrust others, to distrust ourselves.”

His conclusion:

“We hear a lot about ‘Covid denialism’, about those who deny the scientific reality of Covid-19’s impact on human health. Those people are certainly worth challenging. But I would venture that there is a worse problem – cultural denialism; the blinkered belief that lockdown was a simple and straightforward measure to deal with a health crisis rather than something that was also highly influenced by the cultures of fear, distrust and censorship that sadly define this young century. To my mind, this cultural denialism is worse than scientific denialism because it keeps at bay the political reckoning we will need to have if we are ever to restore the human connections and individual self-belief that are necessary to a good society. For nearly two years we’ve been told that protecting health is the highest aim of human society. We now need to make a very different case – that it is freedom that makes life worth living, and that everything should be bent towards making freedom a reality for all people. Let’s fight for that normality.”