Like most of us, I suppose, the shock to our system and way of life during the government’s response to COVID-19 cannot easily be forgotten. It was our taste of ill-considered government tyranny, a public-health disaster. As more information about its origins and how the disease was handled is revealed, it always gets my attention. In sum, banking on helping defeat Trump, the public-health establishment and media suppressed more credible options for dealing with a disease which was not life-threatening to most in order to promote a vaccine then in the works. The vaccine when it was developed and administered was not terribly effective and has itself caused substantial injury. In the process of locking the country down, the health establishment and government caused the very deleterious effects which the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration had warned against. Those opposing less tyrannical treatment of COVID-19 included Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose role in creating COVID-19 is no longer deniable.
At the outset, I’ll disclose my bias. I never believed the lockdowns which destroyed so many small businesses, detrimentally affected student learning, and caused so much mental illness and economic loss was warranted. My hero was not the press hero Dr. Anthony Fauci, it was John Ioannidis, the most outspoken and best positioned to know this reaction was unwarranted.
It began with a March 17 article in Stat [2020] that suggested governments around the world were taking sweeping and potentially harmful actions to limit the spread of COVID-19 without sufficient data. Then came a May 5 white paper he authored which suggested COVID-19 was not nearly as deadly as initially feared, a claim later supported by an NPR report that cited research from Johns Hopkins University showing a fatality risk as low as 0.5 percent. Ioannidis’s latest research on the COVID fatality rate pegs the median COVID-19 fatality risk at 0.25 percent, much lower than previous estimates but still about two and a half times higher than the seasonal flu. [snip] Ioannidis may be no libertarian, but many of the lockdown themes he touches will sound familiar to FEE readers — deadly government policies that prohibited nursing homes from screening for COVID-19, soaring suicide, and widespread economic destruction resulting in millions of businesses wiped out and 40 million jobs lost.
While the costs of the lockdowns are apparent to all, less clear is how effective they have been in limiting the spread of the virus. A recent Bloomberg found “little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.” Norway’s top health official recently stated the lockdowns probably were not necessary. Evidence from a recent JP Morgan report suggests most nations saw COVID infection rates fall after lockdowns were lifted.
Who Done It?
Now that the preposterous wet market origin of the spread of COVID-19 has denies that.
“What happened was that the Chinese lab in Wuhan conducted some mad science experiments.”
“Unfortunately, partly funded by the American government. In fact, by the agency that I can now currently lead. That experiment went astray. It leaked and caused the havoc that we faced for years.”
“For China to now turn around and say well, the U.S. is to blame — well, I mean, it’s ridiculous, it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
He unleashed the truth:
“The Chinese were responsible for allowing these experiments to happen in a low security lab. It leaked. They covered it up. And that’s just a fact.”
Not to deny Dr. Bhattacharya’s point, which is well-taken, but to note that the Chinese work on gain-of-function in Wuhan which he concedes, was partially funded (allegedly illegally) by Dr. Fauci, who then lied about his role to Congress.
Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told Newsweek these documents show “unequivocally” that NIH grants were used to fund controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — something U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has denied. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, told Congress in May that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Ebright said: “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement in Wuhan are untruthful.”
GOF research involves modifying a biological agent, like a virus, so that it becomes more active. For obvious reasons, GOF research on influenza or coronavirus viruses has been “the subject of substantial scrutiny,” by the NIH’s own admission, as it potentially makes the virus more dangerous to humans.
Dr. Bhattacharya was a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration which in October 2020 opposed widespread lockdowns in favor of “focused protection”
It warned that the lockdowns would, inter alia, result in “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health,” and that “we’d see excess mortality for years to come,” burdens the authors warned would be borne largely by the young and the working class. A prediction that unfortunately was proved accurate.
The World Health Organization opposed the declaration despite the prominence of its authors. The censorship began:
[T]here was then being built a vast censorship machinery involving the federal government, outposts at universities such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins, tech companies, and media embeds in all important outlets. It was not only being built but being deployed in order to craft the public mind in ways that would maintain the spirit of fear and the reality of lockdowns until the magic inoculation arrived [snip] Think here of the timing of the Great Barrington Declaration. It came out barely a month before the election, after which the plan from the top was to release the vaccine, presumably after the sitting president was defeated. That way the new president could get the credit for the distribution stage and thus would the pandemic end.
The underlying dynamic of the timing of the release of the GBD… worked utterly to subvert the entire censorship regime. The perception too was that this document would undermine vaccine acceptance. At that point in the great plan, all focus was on molding the public mind toward mass jabbing. That meant cultivating among the population the appearance of expert unity.
“Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” said the document. “As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all — including the vulnerable — falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity… Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
[snip]
Reading those words today, in light of what we now know, we can start to make sense of the sheer panic at the top. Natural infection and immunity? Can’t talk about that. The end of the pandemic is not “dependent upon” the vaccine? Can’t say that either. Go back to normal for all populations without significant medical risk? Unsayable.
You need only reflect on the astounding barrage of vaccine propaganda that began immediately upon release, the attempt to mandate it on the whole population and now the addition of the Covid jab to the childhood schedule even though children are of near zero risk.
[snip]
Even now, therefore, there is every effort being made to keep a lid on what surely ranks as the greatest failure/scandal in the modern history of public health. Some brave experts called it out before the whole calamity unfolded even further.
The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration was not that it was not true. It’s that — unbeknownst to its authors — it flew in the face of one of the most funded and elaborate industrial plots in the history of governance. Just a few sentences sneaking through the wall of censorship they were carefully constructing was enough to threaten and eventually dismantle the best laid plans.
“Safe and effective” Vaccines
Jeff Childers, whose substack Coffee and COVID always brings to my attention thoughtful information I don’t see elsewhere, this week discusses a remarkable study on the disparate health impacts of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The study is reported in MedRxIV. It was put together by Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo and MIT professor of statistics Retsef Levi. The study used the Florida Medicare database to compare the risks of dying and found “a statistically undeniable +40% risk of fatality following the Pfizer jab over Moderna.”
In other words, hundreds of thousands more Floridians died in the 12 months following the Pfizer jab than Moderna, when there should have been no difference at all. Specifically, they found that +230 more people died after Pfizer for every 100,000 jabbed. Not only that, but Pfizer getters died from cardiovascular causes at a rate of +83 more often per 100,000.
The researchers were super careful to avoid leaving room for criticism. They started with known vaccinees, then excluded nursing home residents, the homeless, and people who died from violent causes (homicides and suicides). Then they took out people who got their shots more than six weeks apart (i.e., not as recommended), people who mixed shot types, people who got more than 2 shots, and people whose health records were incomplete (such as unknown gender). Finally, they separated people who died from covid.
Those left over included more than 9 million Floridians. I.e., it was a big sample. Then they matched recipients 1-to-1 based on their location (census tract), avoiding any potential regional differences.
It wasn’t even close.
Politics and the “Pan[ic]demic”
The most outrageous tyrannies under the guise of preventing the spread of the disease appears to have been in Democrat-run jurisdictions and in response to major Democrat supporters. Certainly, that is the case regarding school lockdowns where the American Federation of Teachers pulled its weight in extending school lockdowns and compelled distancing, masking, ventilation upgrades, testing protocols, and other restrictions which only well-funded private schools could afford to comply with or which schools in conservative districts ignored. By July 2020 AFT president Randi Weingarten fought President Trump’s effort to reopen the schools by fall on the ground that such action was “reckless, callous, and cruel.” She even threatened “safety strikes.” Freedom of Information Act requests establish that the Weingarten AFT lobbied the Centers for Disease Control. It’s risible to suggest that this big donor of funds and election volunteers lacked disproportionate influence on the CDC, an organization which itself was demonstrably political. Early on, the evidence established that schools were not significant drivers of the disease. Politicizing the response to COVID and closing schools and masking children, we now know, led to major learning loss and mental health issues in the young. The disastrous impacts are most readily seen in low-income areas which depended on schools for meals and lacked resources for distance learning.
Jesus Christ is King
