Fear of a Microbial Planet

A new book from Brownstone Institute

Fear of a Microbial Planet, a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic. 

For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion. 

Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely. 

Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times. 

If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives. 

The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.  

And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.

But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture. 

Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold. 

To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus. 

Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root. 

How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others? 

It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage. 

Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else. 

Buy it here.

Don’t forget our Conneticut supper club on Wednesday and our November 4 conference and gala in Dallas, Texas.

Here is some content since our last email:

Long Covid Could be Mask Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES) By Daniel Horowitz. Can masks be responsible for a misinterpreted long-COVID-19-syndrome after an effectively treated COVID-19 infection? Nearly 40% of main long-COVID-19 symptoms overlap with mask related complaints and symptoms described by Kisielinski et al. as MIES like fatigue, dyspnea, confusion, anxiety, depression, tachycardia, dizziness, and headache, which we also detected in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of face mask effects in our systematic review. It is possible that some symptoms attributed to long-COVID-19 are predominantly mask-related.

Read the Label! It’s BioNTech’s Vaccine, Not Pfizer’s By Robert Kogon. Whether or not it is the intention, the effect of the incessant raging against Pfizer is to hide what is in plain sight: namely, that it is BioNTech’s product and that it is BioNTech, not Pfizer, that has been the main corporate beneficiary of the creation by government fiat of a massive Covid-19 vaccine market.

Fear of a Microbial Planet by Dr. Steve Templeton By Brownstone Institute. It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage. Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.

The Sad Fallout of Covid Panic in Japan By Bruce W. Davidson. In January, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida gave a speech expressing worry about Japan’s low birth rate and declining population. However, the Covid panic fostered by government officials and others has probably only compounded this problem. People afraid of human contact and unable to communicate well will likely be discouraged from dating, marrying, and child-bearing. There is no national future in the cultivation of a fearful population.

What the Bud Light Fiasco Reveals about the Ruling Class  By Jeffrey A. Tucker. The emergent fissures between the classes – and the diffusions of our ruling class into many sectors public and private – suggest an urgency for a new consciousness of the real meaning of the common good, which is inseparable from liberty. The marketing director of Bud Light talked a good line about “inclusivity” but she plotted to impose everything but that. Her plan was designed for the one percent and to the exclusion of all the people who actually consume the product, to say nothing for the workers who actually make and deliver the product she was charged with promoting.

The Inside Story of Brownstone Institute  By Brownstone Institute. Now only two years since its conception, Brownstone Institute has millions of readers and thousands of backers, people who refuse to go along with whatever they are attempting to build in place of the freedoms we once knew. Our successes are many but the job is far from complete. As we approach the anniversary, we should reflect on our successes but also be realistic about the daunting challenges ahead.

Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth By Alan Lash. Whenever a politician, or an authority, or even a friend tells you that all is known, that there is a model which defines the truth, and that by following the model the future will be known, be skeptical. There are mysteries beyond human understanding that escape even the deepest logical reasoning of man.

One Thousand One Hundred Thirty Five Days By Justin Hart. The Covid pandemic policies have had far-reaching impacts on our society. People now have lowered trust in public institutions, raised worries about privacy and freedom of speech, and the financial ramifications will persist for a long time. As we tally up the damage, it’s vital to draw lessons from these missteps so future responses are more balanced, open, and successful in tackling public health crises without compromising civic rights and public confidence.

The Retreat From the Enlightenment Can be Stopped By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker. The globalist class will continue to burn down the West to prevent their own demise. But while they burn down their own house, we offer hope and joy. We have self-belief, new art, passion, and the huge legacy of the first Enlightenment. On top of that, we have Novak Djokovic.

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous  By Rob Jenkins. Ultimately, what Crichton emphasizes is the importance of rejecting politicized science and insisting that governments and researchers follow the actual science to its honest conclusions, whatever those may be. Doing so will likely not benefit the powers-that-be, which is why they so vigorously resist the idea, but it will certainly benefit the rest of humanity.

The Morality of Language in the Age of Artificial Intelligence By Daniel Klein. ChatGPT and the like remind us that machines are not human beings and human beings are not machines. Machines do not approve and disapprove as human beings do. Machines do not have sentiments. They do not have a conscience. They do not have moral responsibility. We do.

The Three Most Important Lessons from Three Years of Hell By Pierre Kory. Above all, the next public health emergency should be met with more humility and less arrogance. A once-in-a century crisis requires a spirit of open-mindedness. The same so-called experts who have been sneering about “following the science” need to take a dose of their own medicine. Public trust in medical scientists has plummeted to 29% according to Pew Research.

How Did the World’s Smartest People Fail So Miserably? By Toby Rogers. It’s over, that phase of American history, when a bunch of people baptized in the values of the 1960s, could be expected to provide the intellectual framework necessary to move society forward. There is no recovery from what they did, they collaborated with the enemy when the fate of society was on the line. To use their favorite phrase — they became “constitutive of” the predatory system they once sought to critique. Our society is so corrupt that the term “intellectual” no longer has a coherent meaning.

Big Pharma’s Co-Pay Coupon Racket By Marc Ang. Drugmakers rely on shady promotional gimmicks to keep the cost of brand-name medicine high, and you’ve seen them in action. In the many, many, many television commercials you’ve seen for various drugs—and Big Pharma is the second largest advertiser by industry—consider how many mention a coupon the manufacturer offers. In fact, the share of brand-name prescription drug spending that included a coupon rose from 26 percent in 2007 to 90 percent in 2017.