The Next Ten Battles

We've only begun this fight...

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Have you heard? Anthony Fauci has declared that the pandemic is over, only days after warning of new dangers around the corner. Now we are left with the disastrous carnage of the response that he shepherded, which is the topic addressed in today’s lead article. 

The Next Ten Battles BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule? 

Elon Musk Conquers Twitter BY MICHAEL TRACEY. All the media/activists who are so infuriated by this can’t seem to specify how exactly they foresee their Twitter user experience being changed under Musk’s ownership. Presumably, they’ll still be able to follow or not follow whomever they choose, block and mute at will, etc. So what’s the problem? Well, the problem should be obvious, and almost doesn’t even need articulating: they will no longer be able to coerce Twitter’s management to accede to their demands.

Silent No More: Voices Against Restrictions and Mandates BY SARABETH MATILSKY. There were MANY of my colleagues who took this vaccine and they did not want to take this vaccine. They took it to keep their employment, to put food on the table, and I would never judge anyone for doing that, but it was horrible, the way they were being pushed into it.

The Attorney Who Won the Mask Mandate Case in Florida: An Interview BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE.  Brant Hadaway, the attorney who represented the Health Freedom Defense Fund in the federal district court case against the transportation mask mandate, is here interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute. He discusses the sketchy legal basis of the federal mandate and his arguments to the judge who ruled against the administrative state. 

The Psychology of Mimetic Contagion BY AARON KHERIATY. Participation in the ritual, which lacks pragmatic advantages and requires sacrifice, demonstrates that the collective is higher than the individual. For this portion of the population, it doesn’t matter whether the measures are absurd. Think of walking into a restaurant with a mask on, and removing it as soon as one sits down, for example.

Revamping Our Dysfunctional Drug Approval Process BY PIERRE KORY. Ending this cycle of perpetual disinformation requires revamping our dysfunctional drug approval process. An independent board free of pharma industry conflicts must be established to oversee trials for re-purposed medicines. Recommendations should be based on trials designed by impartial experts and actual results, not the desired ones, and policymakers or prescribers who ignore the findings should be held accountable.

How Panic Spread: Covid in the Early Days BY SCOTT ATLAS. Over those first several weeks, fear had taken hold of the public. Media commentators and even policy experts, many of whom had no expertise on health care, were filling the airwaves and opinion pages with naive and incorrect predictions. This misinformation was going unchecked, and was indeed repeatedly endorsed and sensationalized.

New Zealand Used Selective Science and Force to Drive High Vaccination Rates  BY J.R. BRUNING. It’s probable that the mountain of legislation produced over the last two years never fulfilled democratic norms of accountability and transparency. For science in a pandemic to be harnessed to serve the public interest, the institutions that set those terms of reference must be guided by principles that protect health. 

Things the CDC Does Not Know BY VINAY PRASAD. There are many things the CDC does not actually know. They did not run the appropriate studies, so they do not have any idea. Let me start with one I have made before, and then move to some new points.

Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the Future of Masking BY IAN MILLER. Whether you agree with that designation or not, there are few people in the United States who would argue for including Philadelphia or Los Angeles on the list of “finest” locations in the country. But their fanatical dedication to COVID policy has taken cities that already struggle with crime, homelessness, poor quality of life or high cost of living and made them even more uninhabitable.

Must We Make a Case Against Dictatorship?  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Very few people really want to live in a world in which the administrative state exercises the sort of unmitigated power that the CDC, the DOJ, and the Biden administration are now advocating as a continuation of how we’ve done public affairs for the better part of two years. That system has led to disaster. To continue it will lead to more disasters still. 

The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine BY JOE WANG.  If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.

Reich (and Fauci) are Wildly Wrong BY DONALD BOUDREAUX. To propose that any government action be immune to judicial oversight – that is, immune to oversight by the formal guardians of the law – is to propose that the officials who perform that action be above the law.

Mask Mania: Interview with Ian Miller BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. Ian Miller is the author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of Mask Mandates. With the topic very much in the news, due to the Florida court decision rejecting the transportation mask mandate, Ian Miller speaks with Brownstone’s Jeffrey Tucker about the lack of evidence for the social benefit of universal masking, and the strange way in which public-health authorities continue to push them regardless.

Math Proficiency Rates Show Impact of Prolonged School Closures  BY JOSH STEVENSON. At some point, the people who did this have to face the music and come to grips with what Covid maximalist school policies have wrought. In this case: outright failure.

Have People Been Given the Wrong Vaccine? BY MARTIN KULLDORFF. Now we know more. If Pfizer and Moderna want to continue to sell these vaccines, we should demand that they conduct a proper randomized clinical trial that proves that the vaccines reduce mortality. 

Covid Policy Tactics Were Borrowed from the Vietnam War BY MARK OSHINSKIE.  Eventually, a consensus will emerge that the Coronavirus response was, like the Vietnam War, a colossal, politically-driven, panic-driven, intergenerationally unjust, deeply destructive overreaction that caused far more harm than they prevented.Often—and certainly regarding both Vietnam and Coronavirus—treading lightly would have been far better than intervening so aggressively and foolishly. Far less would have been far more.

The Meltdown of the Mask Cult BY MICHAEL SENGER. On Monday, major US airlines suddenly dumped their mask mandates after a federal judge struck down the CDC’s national mask mandate for travel. Since then, the Covid cult has been in a state of apoplexy. Below is a collection of some of the most priceless takes.