There Must Be Investigations

The last two years cannot be swept under the rug

A few news items to start:

• Please join us for the Brownstone Institute Supper Club, West Hartford, Connecticut, Wednesday June 1, 2020. The amazing authors of The Great Covid Panic – Gigi Foster and Paul Frijters – are here with us to give talks and answer questions. They are signing books too! We start at 5:30pm. As with last time, there is limited space. So please register ahead of time.

• The Brownstone Institute mugs and shirts you asked for are finally here! See our new store. These products are actually great for the brand and the cause. They might cause the right person to search and find out what all the fuss is about. 

• Some elites want to forget about the last 30 months of disaster. But Senior fellow Martin Kulldorff has tweeted that “there needs to be a brutally honest covid commission recognizing all the mistakes made.” Brownstone institute has taken steps in that direction: three reports will appear that present the full range of issues that must be confronted for accountability. 

As always, we need and very much appreciate your support. 

Here is some of the latest content:

Why Did US Intellectuals and Officials Celebrate and Copy China’s Lockdown Model? BY MICHAEL SENGER. It’s long past time for intelligence personnel to start asking why health officials and media outlets have shown such credulity in using information from the world’s worst dictatorship.

Updated Johns Hopkins Study on Lockdowns Debunks the Fact Checkers BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. Some readers may recall the media storm against this paper, driven by some self-proclaimed fact-checkers. The appendix not only debunks all the “fact-checkers” claims but the authors also demonstrate how they were based not on any understanding of the paper (in fact it looks as if the “fact-checkers” mostly never even read it), but rather on superficial and to a large extent irrelevant “criticisms”, repeated blindly by one “fact-checker” and one media outlet after another.

Mask Mandates Back in Philadelphia  BY DEBBIE LERMAN. This should be good news, especially for parents who have been worried about their children throughout the pandemic and teachers who have been worried about exposure to the virus at schools. It’s time to stop worrying. It’s OK to take the masks off.

After Summer, Europe to Target the Unvaccinated BY ROBERT KOGON. The European Commission’s April 27th documents thus clearly invoke a new rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the fall, specifically targeting the hitherto unvaccinated and also children. Moreover, if the Commission gets its way – as it can be expected to – and the EU Digital Covid Certificate is indeed extended, they also raise the specter of this new rollout being combined with exactly the same coercive, discriminatory measures that turned Europe’s unvaccinated into social pariahs for much of the last year.  

The Loss of Trust Is Well Earned BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Human freedom is the public practice of not being trolled by the ruling class, which is forever telling us that life will be better once the most intelligent and most powerful among them are granted all trust to do with our lives and property as they see fit. When we decide that it ends, it ends. 

World Economic Forum Pushes Facial Recognition Technology BY JOHN MAC GHLIONN. The dangers posed by digital IDs cannot be emphasized enough. As the researcher Brett Solomon—a man “who has tracked the advantages and perils of technology for human rights” for well over a decade—previously noted, the mass rollout of digital IDs “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”

The Corruption of the World Health Organization BY DAVID BELL. It appears the WHO’s staff are comfortable with ensuring the people they were charged to support are increasingly impoverished and their rights and health autonomy removed. They are not just resigned to the abandonment of basic public health principles and ethics, but actively working to undermine them.

The Grim Reality of Post-Lockdown Economic Trends BY DAVID STOCKMAN. In short, both the Wall Street and main street economies have been so badly roiled and distorted by lockdowns, the Fed’s money-printing spree, and Washington’s stimmy paloozas that a lot of stuff is going to “snap” as the Fed is forced into a desperate inflation-fighting mode.

Lockdown Is Not Liberalism’s Endgame BY DONALD BOUDREAUX. As summarized by Thomas Sowell, freedom under a truly liberal order “is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”

World Health Organization Deploys Another Disease Threat to Push Global Survelliance BY JOHN MAC GHLIONN. Vaccine passports and contact tracing are intimately tied to surveillance. More specifically, global surveillance. As the draft notes, the WHO will carry out “coordinated global surveillance of public health threats.” This can only be achieved by member states, all 194 of them, expanding their surveillance systems and contributing to “the WHO’s global systems for surveillance.”

School Closings and Violent Youth: A Potential Link BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER. Is this Buffalo teen shooter and the Texas teen shooter the last such shooters? I fear not, as we may have damaged the minds of many people irreparably. There are grave consequences due to lockdowns and school closures, not only from a weakened immune system and the vast economic damage, but also due to the wrecked psyches of many young people. 

The Monkeypox Outbreak of 2003 BY JOSH STEVENSON.  Is this how every rare and exotic new pathogenic threat is going to be treated, now that we’ve got everyone’s attention for 2 years of social/political/economic upheaval? 

When 800 Mainstream US Scientists Warned Against Lockdowns BY EDWARD STRINGHAM.  Back then, hundreds of professors associated with Yale University organized a letter with signatures to send to the White House. The letter was dated March 2, 2020. It was signed by 800 credentialed professionals largely from the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It might have taken us in a different direction than the one in which governments took us soon after it was published.

Shanghai Scientists Have Adapted to Regime Priorities BY JOE WANG. The three doctors are smart people. They know all too well that the Shanghai lockdown is wrong and costing lives, but they have to use all their professional expertise in scientific paper-writing to advance the narrative of their CCP bosses. As opportunists they have chosen the CCP, so they must fulfill their Party obligations.

The WHO Treaty Is Tied to a Global Digital Passport and ID System BY AARON KHERIATY. The thrust of every one of the changes is toward increased powers and centralized powers delegated to the WHO and away from member states.

The Rise of Hepatitis BY CARLA PEETERS. A possible role of the pandemic measures in excessive inflammation in the human body by immune-liver disruptors is realistic. Independently they may each cause problems of the liver. Serious drawbacks of the measures have become most visible in children, the obese and immunocompromised and the poor.

The CDC’s $2.4M Campus Marketing Program BY DANIEL NUCCIO. Why did the CDC believe it was worthwhile to spend $2.4 million trying to convince college students to get vaccinated for a disease that poses little serious threat to most young, healthy individuals? Furthermore, why did the CDC and ACHA feel it was appropriate to peddle a potentially risky drug to young people as if it were a lifestyle brand? 

Germophobes to the Left and Right BY STEVE TEMPLETON. With two years of overreaction to and media obsession with the myriad of ways that COVID-19 can kill or permanently disable people, there’s reason to believe a major subset of the population that was faithfully adherent to public health edicts about non-pharmaceutical interventions will remain mentally scarred.

Monkeypox Was a Table-Top Simulation Only Last Year BY MICHAEL SENGER. The global Monkeypox outbreak—occurring on the exact timeline predicted by a biosecurity simulation of a global Monkeypox outbreak a year prior—bears a striking resemblance to the outbreak of COVID-19 just months after Event 201, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic almost exactly like COVID-19.

Sweden’s Strategy Once Again Proven Correct BY IAN MILLER. France, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain and Italy all had lockdowns, varying levels of vaccine discrimination, mask mandates and strict entry requirements. All fared worse than Sweden. The lockdown and mask apologists simply offered no explanation for this.

Monkeypox: The Next Big Scare BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL. Health authorities in the two continents have thus far identified only a few dozen cases. And while there’s no reason for concern at the moment, here’s what convinced me to put this on your radar. The U.S. government decided to order millions of doses of monkeypox vaccine.