The Wrong Vaccine, and other latest content

The days of reckoning are here

Brownstone Institute is currently experiencing record traffic, and for good reason: these are the days of reckoning. 

For two years, public-health bureaucracies have exercised vast control over public and private life, and done so without legislative mandate. These powers have been deployed even in the absence of a need to cite the “science” they constantly invoke as justification.

It’s not just a US problem; this model of virus suppression via government force has been global. 

As always, Brownstone is grateful for your support. The fight ahead will be arduous and long but justice and truth requires that it be engaged in the most rigorous possible way. 

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.

Why Is CDC Trying to Put a Mask on Your Face Again? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The mask is a metaphor for all the controls, restrictions, impositions, mandates, closures, and resulting wreckage of the past two years. People hate them because they are so personal. More precisely, they are depersonalizing, which is precisely how the lockdown period of American history has felt the entire time. 

The Federal Government Forces Social Media Companies to Censor Americans BY JENIN YOUNES. The Government is deciding what speech is acceptable and may be heard, and what speech is not acceptable and must be silenced, on the most hotly debated political topics of our time. This strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.

The Mask Studies You Should Know BY JOSH STEVENSON. As we finally move past this massive psychological experiment, we should address the secondary effects that masks have had on our society, especially our children, and one day actually insist that our government and public health leaders commit to risk/benefit analysis instead of blindly following the urge to “do something.”

How Did the States Handle Covid? BY ETHAN YANG. The major conclusions drawn from this working paper are that lockdowns did very little if anything to help mitigate Covid-19 deaths, especially when you account for differences in demographics that give some states an advantage, and some a disadvantage. 

Contra CDC, School Masking Did Not Keep Kids In School BY EMILY BURNS, JOSH STEVENSON. One of the reasons we were told masks were essential for school kids this year was that masks would reduce the likelihood of school closures, by reducing disease incidence. Unfortunately, like so much the CDC has promised, the opposite turns out to be true.

Mass Testing: The Fatal Conceit BY YURI BIONDI. While contact tracing and isolation may be important for some infectious diseases, it is futile and counterproductive for common infections such as influenza and Covid-19. A case is only a case if a person is sick. Mass testing asymptomatic and non-vulnerable individuals is harmful to public health, useless and expensive.

The World Catastrophe Wrought by Covid Lockdowns BY PAUL FRIJTERS, GIGI FOSTER, MICHAEL BAKER.  The propaganda is powerful, but reality is still slowly intruding into this make-believe world. Increased food and fuel prices, general inflation, reducing services, and economic hardship cannot be painted over, and the limits of money printing have been reached. Such are the fruits in developed nations of the Great Covid Panic, just as famines are its fruits in poor countries.

How the Shanghai Lockdown Serves the CCP BY MICHAEL SENGER. China’s leaders visit as much hardship on their people as they want, whenever they want. The global COVID containment system, like the global communist system, is itself propaganda; though the brutality is real, individual human beings are mere set pieces in service to a narrative with a goal that was never obtainable.

Why So Many Middle-Aged Deaths in 2021? BY GENEVIEVE BRIAND. Some thought April 2020 deaths were too high and justified putting our lives on hold, but January 2021 numbers were worse—the percentage death rate in 2021 is the same as it was in 2020. Why the increase in January 2021 deaths? Continued upward trend in deaths due to the increase and aging of the US population? Deaths of despair? Increased deaths due to untreated conditions in 2020? Deaths due to COVID or one of its variants? Vaccine deaths?

More Evidence from the UK that Masks Don’t Work BY IAN MILLER. There will clearly be no end to the push for a return to COVID restrictions among the medical and public health establishments. No matter how many surges arise with strict mandates in place, the pervasive groupthink on masks has infiltrated every facet of the elite decision making process.

The Unmasking of America BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. What lockdowns and mandates have done to society is a painful truth, and one that we will be dealing with for many years. As much as we all just want it to go away, and as much as we all have great cause to celebrate this day, as much as the real of the mask mandate represents a symbolic end, no one should lose sight of the deeper problem: all of this happened to us, and not only to us but to billions of people the world over. 

Lockdown Ideology Is the Plague that Lasts BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL. If this was only a China problem, surely, world leaders would be lining up to condemn the human rights crimes being committed against Shanghai citizens.

Who Among the Fringe Is Dangerous? BY VINAY PRASAD. Bad ideas and poor thinking will always exist, and there are many, varied ways of being foolish and illogical. But what should trouble us all is when illogical people force others to participate in their delusion.

The Mask Mandate Is Illegal: Quotes from the District Court Judgment BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. Countless millions have been threatened, victimized, hectored, barked at, thrown off buses, trains, and planes – with even young children forcibly muzzled – when in fact, it has been the federal government itself that has been violating the law.

Political Loyalties Have Been Blown Up  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The last two years have confounded everyone who believed in the stability of American law, politics, public opinion, and the ideological attachments of both pundits and the general population. It’s all been turned upside down and inside out several times over. Anyone who thinks that we’ve all settled back into some mythical comfort bubbles of “liberals” vs “conservatives” is refusing to face post-pandemic politico-cultural realities. 

Here’s Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden BY JOHAN ANDERBERG. From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing.

The Health Risks of Graphene BY CARLA PEETERS. This public health risk is growing each day due to a sharp rise in malnutrition as a result of the lockdowns undermining a well-functioning immune system and the ability to degrade or detoxify graphene-derived products. 

Is Liberalism a Lost Cause? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Is liberalism a lost cause? Many say so. Many today dream that it would stay gone, forever doomed to be regarded as a failed experiment in a world longing for authoritarian control whether by the right, the left, the technocratic elite, or something else. Demoralized and depressed by so much “shock and awe,” and living in times of ubiquitous surveillance and unrelenting diktat, many others are inclined to give up the dream of freedom completely.

Plagues and the Unleashing of Power BY STEVE TEMPLETON. We can see the long arm of history reaching from the times of the Black Death to modern epidemics, where coercion and state control are accepted by a terrified public and conveniently deemed by a power-hungry elite to be the only acceptable way to combat natural disasters, even at the risk of tremendous and unnecessary collateral damage.

Who Pushed for Lockdowns? 101 Leading Voices BY MICHAEL SENGER. Because of the gruesome spectacle in Shanghai, many who once supported lockdowns have gone silent. Indeed, these scenes are the logical conclusion of the Zero Covid cause, and serve as a grim reminder of the dystopia that could have been our own had they gotten their way.

How Dangerous Are Masks for Children? BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER. We may be faced with catastrophic consequences of what we did to our children over the last two years of unsound Covid restrictive policies, and allowed government technocrats to force these upon them. These are matters too important to nonchalantly disregard.

What Is Motivating the Shanghai Lockdown? BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL. It’s possible that at some point down the line, Chinese authorities became convinced that their Wuhan lockdown actually worked, and that an aggressive level of nationalistic superiority was the reason that China justifies its position as the only country in the world to “eliminate” the virus through lockdowns.

How Virus Spending Became the New Virus BY DAVID STOCKMAN. In a word, the combination of government induced “supply-side” contraction and ultra-stimulated merchandise “demand” has no parallel for folly in the annals of Washington economic policy. It was a destructive eruption in a class all by itself, and the foundation for the runaway inflation now plaguing the American public.