Ghosts of Science Past
Does evidence even matter anymore?
There is still time to sign up for our Wednesday supper club. Hope to see you!
This weekend, under the auspices of Brownstone Institute, two dozen writers and scholars – lawyers, doctors, essayists, scientists – gathered to come to terms with what happened over three years. It was our first fellows/scholars retreat.
At some point, all of us realized that no one in the room is today doing anything like what we were doing three years ago. Most everyone there had changed jobs, moved, adjusted their outlook, and otherwise taken a new direction in life.
It’s happened to countless millions in this country and all over the world. The upheaval has been astonishing to experience and watch, both in its most grim elements but also in the way we’ve all learned to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic era.
We spoke about the future, yes, but we are nowhere near done with coming to terms with the recent past. It seems like a blur, which is a reason why it is valuable to focus in on the details of what we’ve been through. We recounted the silly things (one-way grocery aisles), the brutal things (closed churches and gyms), and the tragic things (friends and family members dying alone in hospitals and buried in Zoom funerals).
Each person had a story of confronting authority in their own realm and being astonished to discover how many people were willing to go along with all the nonsense.
We reflected on the darkest of times but also on how the light has begun to dawn in every area of life today. It’s been painful, far too much and with zero justification, but we are headed now into a new area of reality and truth. As usual, politics will be the last to adapt but adapt it will in time. Meanwhile, there is plenty of work to do in every other area of life to build a new renaissance from the rubble of the last three years.
Here is some content since our last email:
The Ghosts of Science Past BY DANIEL NUCCIO. Many of those who claim to represent science are no longer objective. Science educators teach orthodoxy. Science communicators openly engage in blatant marketing campaigns. Scientific consensuses are manufactured when needed. All of these components in how scientific knowledge is disseminated and how trust in science is built are now tools to advance and support official policy. All have become ghosts of what they used to be.
How New Zealand Dealt with “Disinformation” BY TOM JEFFERSON, CARL HENEGHAN. Cases may not have been active cases, hospitalisations may not be due to SARS-CoV-2, and deaths may be due to various causes related or unrelated to SARs-CoV-2. We will never know for sure. Why? Because the PCR cycle threshold for testing PCR “positive” in Middle Earth was 40 to 45, ensuring that most tested people would test positiveeven in the total absence of contamination (a very tall order).
What Happened at Georgetown Law with Covid? BY WILLIAM SPRUANCE. For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations. The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.
The Unforgivable Sin BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. We must judge the authorities all over the world who relentlessly pumped out panic-laden, often knowingly false propaganda during the past three years, in order to provoke fear and despair, while deliberately silencing and censoring all attempts at promoting a more balanced and healthy view; how they stifled critical thinking. And it is in this light that we must view the disastrous consequences of this conduct, and how it first and foremost harmed the young, the poor; our smallest brethren.
Why Totalitarianism Can Never Be Total BY BERT OLIVIER. Today there are millions of people across the globe (some of them comprising the ranks of those associated with Brownstone Institute) who have chosen to do battle against the technocrats who believe that they are invincible. The latter have miscalculated their anticipated triumph in an irreparable manner, however.
Rochelle Walensky’s Terrible Testimony BY MICHAEL SENGER. These galling testimonies aside, it’s not surprising why Rochelle Walensky was picked to be CDC Director. On the surface, she’s articulate and presentable. So it’s a real testament as to how far public health has fallen over these last three years that someone in her position would be telling these kinds of falsehoods and defending such atrocious policies.
Vaccine Harms Are Biodefense Plan’s Collateral Damage BY DEBBIE LERMAN. All the time, money and research sunk into attempts to develop bioweapon countermeasures caused everyone involved to view Covid as a golden opportunity. In fact, governments, pharmaceutical companies and NGOs invested in biodefense research were determined that the Covid genetic vaccines would “succeed” no matter what. They were not trying to murder anyone, but they also did not plan to stop or slow down, regardless of incidental injuries or death.
An Even Deadlier Pandemic, Warns New York Times BY LORI WEINTZ. Are we going to allow a repeat of what happened during Covid-19, or are we going to exercise critical thinking and our rights as citizens, to put an end to the growing biomedical security state? I choose the latter. We can start by critically examining what we’re being fed by the mainstream media, and by compromised government and public health officials, and refusing to be frightened and manipulated into another over reactive, unconstitutional, disastrous response to a pathogen.
Fall of a Scottish Tyrant BY TOBY YOUNG. It’s clear now that Scotland’s draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 were a catastrophic failure, imposing a massive cost without any benefits. And those costs continue to accumulate, with drug and alcohol addiction soaring, educational attainment plummeting, hospitals bursting at the seams, and the economy in the doldrums. Sturgeon’s hopeless mismanagement of the pandemic, always trying to out-Ceaușescu Boris, has made everything worse.
There Must Be Investigations BY DANIEL NUCCIO. Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers — at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.
Superego, Id, and the Mandated Jab BY ALAN LASH. Vaccine mandates hit hard in the late summer and fall of 2021. Get the jab or lose your job. Health care workers and public sector employees had it especially bad. Somehow it seemed right. If you are interacting with the public in a health capacity, you need to be sure you won’t infect anyone. If you are a government employee, surely the government should be able to tell you what you have to take to make everyone else safe.
Time to Reclaim the Seventh Amendment BY WILLIAM SPRUANCE. Many Republican leaders have publicized their opposition to mandates and demanded accountability for pharmaceutical companies. Now, the GOP has the opportunity to affirm its commitment to the justice of the Seventh Amendment and to demand liability for Big Pharma’s most lucrative products.
Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff BY GABRIELLE BAUER. In the early months of the pandemic, scientists concerned about lockdowns feared “coming out” in public. The GBD partners took one for the B team and did the dirty work. They paid a heavy price for it, including the loss of some personal friendships, but they held their ground. In print, on air, and on social media, Bhattacharya continues to describe lockdowns as “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” with catastrophic health and psychological harms that will play out for a generation.
Unmask the Audiences Already! BY ROBERT BLUMEN. People no longer have an emotional connection while speaking when wearing masks. And we can no longer understand each other’s speech. A venue full of masked people is a place lacking in humanity. It is an artificial world based on virtue-signaling and the elevation of appearance over reality, rather than actual human connection.
Wartime Parallels: Iraq and Covid BY RAMESH THAKUR. First, the resort to emotional arguments and moral blackmail generally implies that they have little reasoned argument and evidence to support their case and are deflecting to bluster instead. Second, whenever we are presented with excitable exclamation marks (Saddam Hussein already has weapons of mass destruction (WMD)! He can hit us with WMD in just 45 minutes! Coronavirus could be more cataclysmic than the Spanish flu! The sky is falling!), it is a very good idea to substitute skeptical question marks instead:
Three Years In, How Did the Lockdowns Go? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The lockdowns did not improve health outcomes. They did devastate economic outcomes. And economics is part of health which in turn is a reflection of the quality of life. The same results pertain however we shuffle the data: adjusting by age, adjusting by population, adjusting by population density. The conclusion is completely undeniable. Lockdowns were a disaster and they achieved nothing in terms of their stated purpose.
The UK Fantasy of 510,000 Lives Lost BY DAVID CAMPBELL, KEVIN DOWD. The 510,000 figure, which turned the world on its head, was a fantasy number churned out by absurd modeling of a zero-probability event. The main way in which Mr Cummings, and in this respect he is a significantly representative figure, is going dreadfully wrong is that, when judging government policy as a response to emergency, he does not see that the reason why the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak escalated into the public policy catastrophe that it became was the fundamentally flawed Imperial College London modeling on which the government based its response.
Covidianism Inverts the Heroic Archetype BY HALEY KYNEFIN. The myth of the hero does not teach us to eradicate life’s pains and risks in pursuit of only comfort and safety. That is the doctrine of the animal. Rather, the myth of the hero shows us that it is necessary to embrace suffering and risk in order to experience life’s miracle; and that, for such a transcendent reward — for such excellence — that is a price worth paying.
Fact-Check This, Facebook BY ROBIN KOERNER. The censorious warnings that are now slapped over posts that contain my original article, How the “Unvaccinated” Got It Right would seem to imply that Facebook is so determined that information presented on its platform does not “mislead” for “lack of context” that it is willing to engage in illegal collusion with the government to satisfy that goal.
The Criminalization of the Ordinary BY RICHARD KELLY. How can we go back to living in just one world? Was it all an illusion in the first place? Is it just that the veil has been drawn back, and now we (or I) see the true horror of reality? What took me so long? How I long for a reconciliation of those two worlds, where there is a shared understanding of truth, where we can at least confront problems together, on the same side. Until something changes, I must try to be a citizen of these two mutually exclusive worlds.
The Covid Coup Attacked the Right to Travel BY WILLIAM SPRUANCE. There was a coup d’état in this country that presented itself under the innocuous banner of “public health.” Our country’s most powerful forces – including information centers, unelected officials, and multinational corporations – worked together to unravel the protections of the Constitution. Among them was the longstanding precedent of the right to travel and its replacement by tyrannical house arrests.
The Tragic End of Laughter BY ERIC HUSSEY.It’s pretty hard to laugh when you’ve been inoculated with fear and isolation. Paralyzing gaslighting was the starting point. But the constant and continuing drumbeat of fear and necessary isolation transcend simple gaslighting. Fear and isolation were beneath the plunger being pushed down hard in the first needle forcibly stabbed into the world’s arms. And, that original fear-and-isolation inoculation of stress provided the opportunity for more tangible inoculations. Denial of natural immunity amplified any justification for, if not providing an outright blessing on many of these outrages.
Inside an Australian Quarantine Camp By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox. The food was terrible. No alcohol allowed. Cell phones and internet were allowed, at least when Jane was there. She said one woman tried to escape, but she was caught and then put into solitary confinement.