Let the Great Covid Reckoning Begin

Readers of The Pipeline will be familiar with The Great Barrington Declaration, an early (October 2020) response to the Covid pandemic policies of various governments. Here are its conclusions:

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

The authors of that declaration—stunningly correct in its conclusions and widely disparage by the totalitarian Left—have recently re-formed as the Norfolk Group with the mission of investigating Covid responses now widely seen as mistaken.

America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic failed on many levels of government and in many aspects. Certainly, deaths are unavoidable during a pandemic. However, too many U.S. policy makers concentrated efforts on ineffective or actively harmful and divisive measures such as school closures that generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans. As a result, Americans were hard hit both by the disease and by collateral damage generated by misguided pandemic strategies and decisions that ignored years of pandemic preparation guidance crafted by numerous public health agencies, nationally and internationally.

Written by experts in epidemiology, vaccine development, and biomedical statistics at leading medical institutions (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford), the Declaration was a statement of risk mitigation by scientists whose professional lives have been spent doing exactly that in the field of infectious disease. The Norfolk Group is making the reasonable point that, as we do for major catastrophes in every field, we must investigate what “went wrong” in our reaction to Covid. Nowhere in the literature, for example, were national lockdowns for respiratory diseases recommended prior to the outbreak of Covid-19. Even Anthony Fauci noted, in response to China’s lockdowns in early 2020, that, “…historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Unfortunately the Great Barrington recommendations were rejected out of hand, perhaps because they did not advance the objectives of the ruling classes. Consequently, thousands (millions?) of lives were ended unnecessarily, the economy was imperiled, suicide and drug overdose rates skyrocketed, and a generation of schoolchildren had their intellectual and social developments stunted by means of a useless masking and social distancing regime. The negative impacts of these policies are becoming increasingly clear, and will be with us for generations. It's time for some serious payback.

You asked for it.

Ultimately, the Centers for Disease Control begrudgingly and belatedly adopted many of the protocols: focus on the vulnerable, end the lockdowns, and allow those least at risk the freedom our government exists to protect. Masking is now recognized as ineffective (even by the New York Times!), school closures and social distancing of no value, and putting the world under house arrest did nothing to reduce the spread of the virus.

Had the authorities been interested in addressing the pandemic, the declaration at least would have been up for discussion when it was released. Instead, when it wasn't being ignored and its text censored, it was being ridiculed by our public health "authorities." This lack of transparency is among the most-criticized failures of the government's response to Covid. Transparency is at the heart of the mission of the Norfolk Group.

One must wonder whether, had the recommendations of the position paper been adopted, would the mandating of the vaccines that seem mainly to have led to illness, increased cases and deaths and suppressed immune systems, have been considered necessary? Had those not at a higher risk from Covid than they were from influenza been allowed to interact, would herd immunity (which mainstream health authorities are now admitting is superior) have occurred years ago, saving untold lives?

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is urgently called for—minus the "reconciliation," of course. Fauci should be ignominiously stripped of his pensions, the hopelessly inept Rochelle Walensky of the CDC should be summarily fired. The state governors who willfully violated the First Amendment should be recalled (if not gone already) and disqualified from voting or ever holding public office again. But it will never happen.

Why? Because from the perspective of our cultural elites, nothing "went wrong" at all. You got what was coming to you. Now it's time to return the favor.

CDC: 'Suffer the Little Children'

An advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control has voted unanimously to recommend adding Covid-19 mRNA vaccines to vaccine schedules for children aged 6 months and older. Many parents are understandably perturbed by this, and not just those on the right-of-center. After all, the number of young children who are fully vaccinated against Covid is comparatively small, especially when you compare that to the number of adults who've been double, triple, or quadruple vaxxed. The fact that, with exquisite comic timing, CDC directrix Rochelle Walensky has just come down with Covid herself, makes this ukase even more ridiculous.

Contra MSNBC's incessant propaganda, these parents aren't all living in Unabomber-style shacks in the woods. They are regular people who, even if they've gotten the jab themselves, have real concerns about the necessity of introducing a vaccine into their children's bodies which is still experimental; which doesn't prevent transmission (despite frequent claims to the contrary); which has been associated with multiple adverse reactions; and which is meant to combat a virus that isn't particularly dangerous to children in the first place. Not to mention that the edict is yet another albatross being hung around the Democrats' necks as we head into the fall elections.

Attempts to raise concerns about the CDC vote, however, have been met with a familiar claim for all of us who were paying attention during Covid, namely that the only people raising a ruckus about this are right-wing nuts, and anyway, its totally normally and won't effect you in the slightest. Time to move along.

Exhibit A:

That would be the CDC's own Twitter account pushing back on Tucker Carlson's reporting on their vote. Their suggestion is that Carlson is lying, because their agency has no power to force anyone to do anything. After all, "states establish vaccine requirements for school children."

Of course this is technically true. But it leaves out the salient point that most states and municipalities automatically adopt CDC recommendations. And while several states, in the wake of Covid, have begun to make that process less automatic, most American doctors themselves accept and parrot CDC recommendations. Which is to say, their claim here is completely disingenuous. One might even call it disinformation.

Against the Great Reset

Forewarned is forearmed.

At our Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order book launch event in D.C. this past week (get your copy now), Michael Anton pointed out how this type of response was strangely characteristic of the Covid-19 era. When pressed, every government body and elected official would disclaim responsibility for everything that was happening, even as unprecedented restrictions were foisted upon all of us. People would complain to their state reps, congressmen, senators, and governors, and each in turn would say that, actually, the culpability for that particular decision lay with someone else.

Our bureaucracies were just as bad, making frequent moralistic pronouncements that were far outside their competence -- henceforth this should be called "pulling a Fauci" -- but, when pressed, they would get defensive and say that, actually, they had no authority or responsibility for anything that happened anywhere. (This is exactly what Fauci has been saying lately.) And yet the schools and businesses stayed close, gatherings were dispersed by police, and people's lives were ruined. But, amazingly, no one was to blame.

Biden's Energy Schizphrenia Deepens

The Biden Administration’s poor public approval ratings ultimately derives from the fact that Biden and his team cannot escape the dilemma that sound policy and politics is at odds with the “Progressive” fundamentalism that controls the Democratic Party today. At nearly every turn, however, Progressive dogma wins out.

Two recent decisions make this problem evident. First is the decision to appeal U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s ruling striking down the federal mask mandate. By all accounts the Biden White House debated about whether to appeal the ruling, sending mixed signals that they might let the ruling stand. At length the administration decided to appeal the ruling, though it did so behind the skirts of the Centers for Disease Control, pretending that they have an obligation to uphold the legal prerogatives of the CDC.

The face of the CDC: Rochelle Walensky

The only surprise is that the White House debated at all, and it is significant that the Justice Department isn’t taking the typical step of requesting a stay of Judge Mizelle’s ruling pending an appeals court hearing, which would cause the mask mandate to snap back into place immediately. The White House surely took in the spontaneous scenes of celebration on airplanes and elsewhere at the liberation from masks, which have become the MAGA hat for Progressives. Democratic campaign strategists have been warning for months that the lockdown-uber-alles policy of the Branch-Covidians is increasingly unpopular with core Democratic constituencies, especially suburban moms.

So why did the White House not take the convenient offramp that Judge Mizelle provided? Answer: the imperatives of the Administrative State took precedence. It is crucial that the legal authority to impose mandates and other controls through the CDC be preserved, even if the White House decides that we can let the mask mandate lapse.

It could turn out worse. Cynical operatives in the White House might welcome an appeals ruling that upholds Judge Mizelle because it will allow Democrats to demand from Congress what I have been expecting from the beginning of Covid—the establishment of a new cabinet-level agency, a Department of Pandemic Planning and Prevention, with broad new regulatory powers beyond the CDC’s wildest imagination. The model here is the Department of Homeland Security, the bureaucratic mistake the Bush Administration foolishly embraced in 2002. In other words, the White House decision to appeal the ruling might not be as politically dumb as it seems.

The second significant White House decision was rolling back President Trump’s long-overdue reforms of the review process of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This is the statute that anchors the environmental review and litigation process that the Left has used for decades to slow or block development of all kinds. NEPA and similar state-level laws are a major reason infrastructure projects of all kinds in the U.S. are way more expensive to build—if they are built at all—than in any other major industrialized nation.

The surprise is that it took the Biden White House 15 months to rescind Trump’s changes. You’d have thought Biden would have done this on January 20 of last year, with the same pen he used to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. One reason for the hesitation is that smarter environmentalists (I know, that’s an oxymoron in most cases) have come to understand that while the longstanding environmental review process has been an essential tool to block domestic energy development and infrastructure, it has become an impediment to many of the infrastructure needs of their “green” energy dreams. In many cases local environmental NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists have abused the NEPA process to block new wind and solar power projects, as well as the transmission lines necessary to make these green projects feasible at all.

Biden to America: Drop Dead.

Ezra Klein noted this problem in the New York Times last month: “They are, too often, powerful allies of an intolerable status quo, rendering government plodding and ineffectual and making it almost impossible to build green infrastructure at the speed we need. . . Too many of the tactics and strategies and statutes are designed to stop transformational or even incremental projects from happening.” Even Jerry Brown came to recognize this problem in California, calling on the state legislature in his last term in office to reform California’s version of NEPA known as CEQA. Naturally the state legislature, which was considerably to the left of Jerry Brown if you can imagine, declined to do so.

 The Biden White House did deliver one surprise, however. Its new budget proposal earmarks $6 billion to keep open several nuclear power plants currently scheduled to shut down soon. Someone seems awake enough to understand that if you seriously want to decarbonize our energy supply, you need to keep nuclear power prominently in the mix.  Better than a fresh round of subsidies, however, it would be better to remove existing mandates and subsidies for wind and solar power that make nuclear power unprofitable in the marketplace.

This move will not sit well with environmental fundamentalists who refuse to accept nuclear power, no matter how panicked they are about climate change. There are rumors that Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA under Obama and now Biden’s principal “climate adviser,” may resign from her post out of unhappiness at Biden’s purported backsliding on climate, even though Biden’s announcements of support for more domestic oil and natural gas production are mostly hollow rhetoric. Biden’s incoherence on energy simply cannot be masked.

Lies, Damn Lies and Covid Statistics

Though I’ve blogged quite a lot on the pandemic, I want to make it clear, for the avoidance of doubt, that I am not and never have been an epidemiological whiz-kid. Oxford-educated Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London is mostly definitely of whiz-kid pedigree and, together with many of his peers, is particularly prone to hyperbole when it comes to predicting the outcome of pandemics. His inflated numbers even undermined Donald Trump’s instinctive common sense in the early days.

I don’t want to be too critical here. Epidemiologists relied upon by governments when infectious diseases spring up are on a hiding to nothing. There is no kudos to be found in underestimating. While you might be accused of alarmism for overestimating the virulence of a disease that’s so much better than being accused of reckless homicide on the other side.

So, there it is. It is probably wise to divide the dire predictions of epidemiologists by, say, ten at least, to get a handle on the real threat. But, big problem. Politicians too are on a hiding to nothing of the same character as are epidemiologists. Result, unity tickets in overestimating the threat.

Threat level: 50 feet!

Where then do we turn for realism, you might ask? Shucks, that’s where people like you and I come in. People who unfashionably, in these postmodern days, try to find the truth. Who are willing to give non-conformists like Professor Ehud Qimron of Tel Aviv University the time of day. Who don’t necessarily take official pronouncements as gospel. Who are willing to boldly go where no conformist medico has gone before. Sometimes searching for truth takes you on Captain-Kirk-like journeys into the unknown.

Exploring the unknown puts you at risk. In this case of being wrong. Well, I won’t actually be wrong because I’m sitting on the fence. I’m simply asking this question:

How many people with two, three or more serious comorbidities, who’ve closely encountered Covid in its various guises, have been saved by one or other of the vaccines? By saved I mean saved from being placed in intensive care, intubated or saved from dying. And if saved from dying, for how many months.

Dodgy data aside, we have a level of information on the number people who’ve suffered badly from Covid. We don’t know how many people with serious comorbidities, cross-matched with their vaccination status, have escaped relatively unscathed. We don’t know that telling information. We're not told.

To cut to the chase. Do the vaccines provide a protective effect for people with serious comorbidities; the only people at significant risk? This would not show up in big pharma’s clinical trials. Those with serious comorbidities would not be risked in any trial. Ergo, we have no information from the trials on the effectiveness of the vaccines for those whom they might help.

As healthy people are at no material risk from the virus, what the heck does it mean to assert that vaccines offer them protection? So far as I can tell, the only rationale for healthy people and, despicably and deplorably, healthy children being vaccinated, willingly and forcibly, is to boost the profits of big pharma and the lobbying dollars which flow to politicians and political parties.

Threat level: co-morbidities kill.

The CDC provide a long list of comorbidities which might make Covid more deadly. This includes kidney, liver and lung disease, dementia, diabetes, heart conditions, and obesity. I’m going to take a layman’s guess here. These comorbidities are likely to make matter worse whatever peripatetic infection comes along.

There is a strong correlation between falling very ill with Covid and age. However, most if not all of this correlation is likely spurious. I don’t doubt that the very old and frail will be susceptible to infections of most kinds. But the fact is that age and comorbidities are fellow travelers. Is it principally age that downs Covid patients or their comorbidities? This is an important question which I’ve not seen addressed, at least in the popular press. Unfortunately, most journalists no longer seem curious. They’ve largely become amanuenses taking dictation from official sources and rebadging it as factual news.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently referred to a study of over a million people who were vaccinated between December 2020 and October 2021. She commented: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with.” Dr Walensky commented in the way that she did to let vaccinations off the hook. But hang on. Isn’t it people with comorbidities that the vaccines are meant to save? And where is the comparable study of deaths of unvaccinated people. Just maybe, we don’t know, more than 75 percent of them would have had at least four comorbidities.

Among those with serious comorbidities, I’d like to see an apples-to-apples comparison of intubation and death rates between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. I’m not convinced by the official spiel which is constantly rammed down our throats. Show the evidence?

Politicians and their public-health minders make a show of unvaccinated people dying. Only by dragging out the information do we find that they suffered from serious comorbidities. Particularly ghoulish delight is taken in announcing the death of a youngish person. Often only later is it discovered that the person concerned was also very sick to begin with.

These people can’t be trusted. They have an agenda. Florida governor Ron DeSantis referred to their disinformation as “noble lies” when explaining that he intended to tell the whole unadorned truth. He was too kind. Any pretence of nobility was lost with vaccine passports and masking and injecting children.

Back to my question. Without doubting immune responses from vaccines found in laboratories, what happens when the rubber hits the road? To wit, two neighbours, one vaccinated four or five months ago, one unvaccinated, are both equally overweight, have diabetes, high blood pressure and dicky tickers. Having caught Covid, both are prone on their respective couches under instructions from their doctors to call an ambulance upon the onset of breathing difficulties. How much better chance does the vaccinated person have of avoiding hospitalisation, intubation and/or death?

Please don’t say that a larger proportion of the unvaccinated have been hospitalised or have died. That says nothing. It’s quite possible that those at risk of dying because of underlying conditions disproportionately form the same cohort who are reluctant to be vaccinated precisely because they have underlying conditions. Lies, damn lies and Covid stats.

Lockdowns: a Bright, Shining Lie

The results are in: two years of fascism-for-your-own-good and "we're all in this together" globaloney was a complete disaster. From a just-released study by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics of the effects of the unconstitutional and illegal lockdowns the whole world has just suffered through, at the behest of the charlatans at the "World Health Organization," the CDC, Fauci Inc. and their feeble-minded but malevolent running dogs in the governments who promoted and enforced the scam:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

Public health experts and politicians have – based on forecasts in epidemiological studies such as that of Imperial College London (Ferguson et al. (2020) – embraced compulsory lockdowns as an effective method for arresting the pandemic. But, have these lockdown policies been effective in curbing COVID-19 mortality? This is the main question answered by our meta-analysis. Adopting a systematic search and title-based screening, we identified 1,048 studies published by July 1st, 2020, which potentially look at the effect of lockdowns on mortality rates. To answer our question, we focused on studies that examine the actual impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality rates based on registered cross-sectional mortality data and a counterfactual difference-in-difference approach.

Out of the 1,048 studies, 34 met our eligibility criteria. Conclusions Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm that lockdowns have had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%.

Studies looking at specific NPIs (lockdown vs. no lockdown, facemasks, closing non-essential businesses, border closures, school closures, and limiting gatherings) also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality. However, closing non-essential businesses seems to have had some effect (reducing COVID-19 mortality by 10.6%), which is likely to be related to the closure of bars. Also, masks may reduce COVID-19 mortality, but there is only one study that examines universal mask mandates. The effect of border closures, school closures and limiting gatherings on COVID-19 mortality yields precision-weighted estimates of -0.1%, -4.4%, and 1.6%, respectively. Lockdowns (compared to no lockdowns) also do not reduce COVID-19 mortality.

Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.

Read it and weep. Then, don't get fooled again. Never again.

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Fauci—and the World—Agonistes

What are we doing? Policies that we continue to accept from those we hire to represent us and keep us free:

Yet we show no sign of terminating our acceptance of these policies. People refuse to listen to doctors using successful treatments, instead still listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said in 2012 in answer to a question about the risk of a pandemic resulting from his gain-of-function research,

In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.

Dr. Monte in the house.

While the risk to him was and remains near-zero, millions around the world paid the ultimate price for a risk he took with their lives without their knowledge or permission. His policies are still killing us.

And still we listen to him as he not only changes his mind daily on the virus but demands vaccinating all of humanity against the very pandemic his use of our tax dollars created, using vaccinations from which his organization may profit, all the while refusing and rejecting proven, safe, FDA-approved drugs doctors are using successfully to treat it all over the world, but are prohibited from using here. Meanwhile...

NIH, on rejecting therapeutics:  "The NIH COVID Treatment Guidelines Panel reviews available information with an emphasis given to adequately-powered, well-conducted, peer-reviewed clinical trials;"

None of which was done for these "vaccines" that have killed thousands, have killed or permanently sidelined professional athletes in top shape here and across Europe, and of which we have zero knowledge of long-term effects.

Among the complaints about therapeutic drugs is that they are “off-label.” Yet, "an estimated 12 percent to 38 percent of prescriptions are written for FDA-approved drugs used "off-label" (including Botox and Viagra)." Viagra, due to its function of dilating blood vessels, recently is credited with saving the life of a dying Covid patient in England. One might ask, why is Viagra off-label okay, but doctors are losing their license for other FDA-approved drugs being prescribed off-label? And, why? One doctor reasonably asks,

If I'm wrong with the treatment I'm giving, people are still going to die. If I'm right, how many lives have we saved? How many can be saved? Why are we erring on the side of death instead of treatment?

In November 2020, nine months into the pandemic, Dr. Fauci co-authored an article in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Therapy for Early COVID-19: A Critical Need," in which he asserted that "interventions that can be administered early during the course of infection to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed." Treatments, he wrote, "must be safe with few adverse effects, easy to administer, and scalable."

Yet the NIAID, FDA, pharmacies and many doctors dismissed the efficacy of a number of drugs used around the globe for the interventions he requested, causing one doctor to note:

We could have prevented this tragedy for $1. Dexamethasone, 5 cents. Ivermectin, 1 cent. Colchicine, 50 cents. Aspirin, 100 pills for four bucks," he said. "If we had given people aspirin, ivermectin, colchicine, and if they get complicated, a little dexamethasone, we could have saved the world with one dollar.

One dollar.

Do the vaccines even work? Alex Berenson notes:

This absolutely brutal preprint from Denmark shows zero vaccine effectiveness against Omicron beginning two months after “peak” protection, and sharply negative protection three months out. In other words, vaccinated people were much MORE likely to get Omicron beginning about 100 days after the second dose.

A study from Canada is similar.

Other studies are showing the Omicron may be a good thing for the less-vulnerable. Its symptoms resemble the common cold and the recovered wind up with immunity to the full range of Covid-19 variants, rather than just the one part of the spike of the “vaccine.”

Our elites have done all this to us for money & power. By August, we had minted nine new billionaires in healthcare. By November it was 44. We have added billions of dollars to the accounts of already-billionaires Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Bezos for doing nothing but keeping businesses closed and conversations censored.  (Windfall profits tax, anyone?). We have spent on this pandemic more than we spent to win World War II, a war fought for, rather than against, our liberties, a war costing Americans fewer lives than have resulted from this gain-of-function (virus weaponization) research.

The public enemy.

Even knowing as we do now that natural immunity (get it, treat it, get over it = immunity) is broader and stronger than these "vaccines," we still demand “vaccines” that raise the viral load of the vaxxed and turn them into spreaders and have, without exception spiked infections (the most-vaxxed countries are seeing the highest spikes in infections). Many still also demand masks that have been shown useless (and worse) in study after study, and allow politicians hired to protect our liberties instead to destroy them rather than adapt policies to the body of Covid science that has grown rapidly with the pandemic.

It is unconscionable to allow people to die in hospitals when one hundred percent of those “at death's door” receiving ivermectin on the order of a judge have recovered against the will of hospitals whose reason for existence is treatment. Once the first judge ordered the first hospital to provide ivermectin to a dying patient on whom all other treatments had been tried, and that patient recovered to live another day, all future in-hospital deaths of covid patients are on the hospitals refusing therapeutics - not the virus. One day soon this will be recognized by class-action lawyers and hospitals will find that the Nuremberg Defense won’t work for them, either.

Ask yourself why. Why no therapeutics? Why a mandated vaccine? Obviously, something is in play here, and it isn’t our health.

The New CCCP

The consequences of the actions of the ruling Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP), unsupported by the Constitution through which the sovereign States created the federal government (Article 7, “Establishment of this Constitution between the States”) to do specific things for the States as their servant… likely are existential.

Using the phantasm of a “vaccine,” the ahistorical “1619 project” and Marxist Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate our children, and the hoax of Climate Change as the basis of CCCP governance, our health, our prosperity, and our future as a free nation intentionally are being destroyed.

Western governments are proving power-mad, simultaneously anti-data and anti-science, and seem to have decided to bend us to their will when they exist only to serve ours. In America, the Biden presidency “wildly” contravenes our Constitution and laws, destroying our liberty, education and prosperity in the massive fundamental transformation promised by his predecessor.

Did somebody say "handlers"?

Rarely mentioned in the unprecedented number of articles from all sides about the conflicts between the administration and the country regarding Covid, CRT racism, and Climate is the increasingly-common, entirely new construct: “Biden’s handlers."

While clear to thinking people that Joe Biden is not in charge of the federal government, people from across the spectrum don‘t find it at all alarming that the world’s most powerful economic and military nation has no widely accepted chief executive; indeed, is being run by a junta elected by no one, visible to no one, accountable to no one, and doing the bidding of who-knows-whom-but-certainly-not-the-People, while wreaking untold and generational damage on our prosperity, freedom and liberty. That this is not supposed to be how America works is obvious to the citizens who care about America’s future.

This anti-American junta has led, predictably, to the emergence of columns and books about secession. Since we have nothing in common any longer, why pretend that we do, or that we still have a nation in any form but geographic? While secession may be the answer, it ought not be the go-to argument for those supporting the Constitution, the rule of law, and what has come to be called “legacy” (i.e. as-founded) America. This is true for an abundance of reasons. Two stand out:

The first of these is that, as with immigration law (the fourth major area of divisiveness after Covid, CRT, and Climate), it is not correct to say that what is not being tried is “broken.” (How would we know?) And what is not being tried is the enforcement of “the supreme law of the land,” the Constitution. How do we fix this? Simple, really – get governors to recognize that they are not in Triple-A ball awaiting a callup to The Show in D.C.; they – the governors – are The Show.

The States as superior to the federal government; this is how the country was designed to work. It ought to be no surprise that when the nation is not working as designed… it’s not working. And it is not working in executive decrees about climate, Covid, education, immigration, transportation, bathrooms – and a host of other things. A host in which the federal government has neither legal nor Constitutional authority for involvement, yet which is being allowed by our governors.

Look to the statehouses, comrade.

For those worried about five unelected persons in black robes – they are a part of that same federal government specifically limited by the States. Did the States, when creating the federal government, grant authority over marriage? Bathrooms? Medical jabs? Nope. When the SCOTUS branch of the federal government colors outside the lines by taking and ruling on cases outside their authority, the legal and Constitutionally-expected action of governors is: ignore them.

Can we fix this? Do we have governors willing to step-up? More importantly, have we citizens and voters willing to reject the overreach of the feds by electing governors putting their state above federal usurpation, as per the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution?

Based on the Virginia election, the answer is, “Yes.” Governors of eighteen States have said “No” to Biden's unconstitutional "vaccine mandates," suing that the mandate is a violation of federal law. Arizona, the nineteenth State suing the feds has sued the mandate as a violation of the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection clause. Why? Because the federal government has neither the authority nor the legal power to make or enforce rules or laws (or mandates) outside its enumerated powers.

These 19 governors are doing their jobs pretty much as the Founders designed, and as currently accepted. Exactly as designed would be to ignore the mandate and SCOTUS. Asking permission for a right already theirs has no upside; it implies a willingness to accept a negative answer the Court lacks authority to give, as well as making it more difficult to exercise that right in the court of public opinion. States are beginning to take back their reserved powers – and it is about time.

Diversity is our strength.

Let’s use immigration law as the example for the second reason.

The difference between authority and responsibility is that the former can be delegated while the latter cannot. The States delegated the authority to the federal government to deal with immigration. Because America is a union of sovereign States, the responsibility for immigration remains with those who made that delegation: the States. The federal government refusing delegated authority does not remove the responsibility from the States to deal with the issue. In SCOTUS’ ruling on Arizona v. United States, the federal government mistook (by an ahistorical, false assumption that the federal government is superior to the States that created it) its delegated authority for responsibility and unconstitutionally usurped the latter; the States retain the responsibility for immigration and should so act.

If governors followed the Constitution, the fact of a barely-sentient president with incontinence issues. would not matter, nor would a Supreme Court making up whatever it wants. Because they don’t, these do.

If California voters want to die of thirst as they go bankrupt in the dark – that’s their choice. If Blue states want to increase their infection rates, they can vax to their heart’s myocarditis content. If adult states recognize that it is better to treat patients using therapeutic drugs successfully all over the world (and which is how herd immunity is achieved) than to deny therapies, they should use ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibody all they want.

Only governors can make America work again. Virginia is the 20th State to say, “Enough!” and begin working as designed again. Let’s hope we have more to come.

Regarding Covid-19, Public Policy v. Panic

Nothing has better demonstrated to me the impossible clash of true science -- the constant search for and the skeptical sifting and winnowing of empirical evidence -- with public policy than the worldwide response to the Covid-19 virus about which so little was known  when it first appeared.

Science, like the Western legal advocacy system, depends on proponents and opponents clashing and presenting their best relevant arguments for us to decide an issue, but the search in science on any issue must be ongoing, and in law and public policy there are practical and procedural time limits. It would be wonderful if there were some alternative responsible forum to quickly test the assumptions of policy makers (often contradictory and based on little or poor evidence), but there isn’t much leeway to my knowledge.

The Western court systems are generally a reasonable way to test the validity of fact but the timing problems make it almost impossible to do so rapidly enough to matter when it comes to this disease. Good public policy on scientific issues should be made with far greater humility than it presently is, and perhaps the only way to get around the normal strictures is to create a rapid response team of experts critical of the public policy gurus who can file affidavits in support of their findings and persuade courts to issue temporary injunctions pending full expedited hearings. Absent that, the only way to deal with this overreaching is resistance, and -- down the road -- the ballot box. When it's often too late.

The face of the medical bureaucracy: Rochelle Walensky

This week the  CDC announced new guidelines suggesting fully vaccinated people should again mask. Among other things,"It added a recommendation for fully vaccinated people to wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas of substantial or high transmission."

The CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status. Director Rochelle Walensky stated this week that “fully vaccinated people have just as much viral load as the unvaccinated, making it possible for them to spread the virus to others,” so school children should be masked. She should be ignored if it her claim is not supported by equally sound research -- and it isn't. It's based instead on data from a single study in India, where different vaccines were in use, and was so deficient it was rejected in peer review.

She’s not alone, however. There has been a drumbeat to reinstate some of the most loathsome and freedom-destroying diktats we’ve just come out from under. Organizations and businesses are demanding employees be fully vaccinated and some even requiring vaccinated persons to mask. How do these square with the feminist slogan, “my body, my choice,” and the concept of privacy of medical information in HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)? How are these requirements that you prove you’ve taken the vaccine even constitutional?

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On July 18  a U.S. District Court decided preliminarily the first test case I know of against the new restrictions, Klassen v. Trustees of Indiana University. Law Professor Eugene Volokh , a legal scholar worth respect, explains why the Court denied a preliminary injunction sought by the students against being forced to mask, social distance and  vaccinate or qualify for an exemption on religious or medical reasons. 

Under guiding principles of federalism, our Constitution preserves the power of the States, within constitutional limits, to adopt laws to provide for public health and safety. Twice the United States Supreme Court has upheld state authority to compel reasonable  vaccinations. [The court is referring here to Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) and Zucht v. King (1922). -EV] The States don't have arbitrary power, but they have discretion to act reasonably in protecting the public's health.

Students at Indiana University have a significant liberty protected by the Constitution—refusing unwanted medical treatment based on bodily autonomy. The Fourteenth Amendment says no state may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." U.S. Const. amend. XIV § 1. Given this due process protection of liberty, longstanding constitutional law prevents a public university—an arm of the State—from mandating a vaccine for its students unless it has rationally pursued a legitimate interest in public health for its campus community.

Does this mean that it’s constitutional for the university to issue such a mandate? Not exactly. The students sought injunctive relief, not a final decision on the merits. As Volokh notes, the injunctive relief “requires a strong showing that they will likely succeed on the merits of their claims, that they will sustain irreparable harm, and that the balance of harms and public interest favor such a remedy.”

You can always transfer, kids.

But the students have other options which the court had to balance -- they could apply for a medical deferral, take the semester off (the mandate applies only for the coming semester), attend another university or attend online. (In this respect the students have more options and may have had a weaker case for injunctive relief than might some other litigants covered by similar mandates.) And in a request for injunctive relief there is usually no opportunity to fully flesh out that these directives are unnecessary in the public interest, unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional .

In a nutshell here’s the legal problem: testing the reasonableness of the state action would take a great deal of time, given the number of conflicting expert opinions on a scientific matter -- one on which we have so little empirical evidence  and where the evidence seems to be so quickly changing. Adding to that is that the mandates tend -- as here -- to be of short duration so that by the time the issue would be resolved it would likely be moot.

It would be wonderful if it were easier. It would be even more wonderful if the mass media and social media which combined in the Trusted News Initiative  to restrict information contrary to the official public health directives and the latter unable to hide behind the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to restrict diverse views on these mandates. More open discussion might improve state decisions and lessen the impact of scare accounts on judicial reviewers of those decisions. 

In any hearing on the merits here’s some of the evidence I expect the opponents of these mandates would produce;

  1. The mortality rate from Covid-19 in the U.S. has been low (affecting mostly the elderly and those with co-morbidities) and is now at the lowest point .Even the new bugaboo about cases from a new "delta" variant is overblown as the  “cases” are asymptomatic or very mild. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.” He reports: "Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them." With mortality so low, it’s hard to argue that reinstatement of Covid restrictions is reasonable.
  2. Government restrictions ignore the fact that most of the U.S. has natural immunity to the virus. Some 80percent of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64 percent have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed. Only around 10 percent of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection.
  3. At this point we know enough about treatment so that Covid 19 or its variants are easily treatable at home. It should be engaged in its early stages, not when hospitalization is required because no treatment has been received.
  4. Like every other drug or vaccine the Covid vaccinations are toxic at some level in some percent of people as Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the technology behind the mRNA gene therapy (the Covid vaccinations) indicates at the link.
  5.  There is already a cheap, effective, fast treatment in the early stages of Covid-19: Ivermectin.  “The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works both for treating and preventing the disease.”

So, on one hand we have reputable scientists confirming low Covid mortality, broad natural immunity to the virus, easy rapid treatability of the disease at home and seemingly deliberate  underreporting of vaccine toxicity by public health officials. The problem remains how to bring this information to judicial fora in time override the unconstitutional--because unnecessary and unreasonable -- restrictions on liberty.

   

Do Fat Lives Matter? Not to Covid

America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s health protection agency, has declared that obesity significantly worsens Covid-19 outcomes. According to its website, obesity reduces immune function, decreases lung capacity, may make ventilation more difficult, and generally exacerbates the severity of Covid. During the first eight months of the pandemic, the CDC reports, at least three in ten Covid hospitalizations were attributed to obesity. As BMI (body mass index) rises, so do Covid-related risks of hospitalization, intensive care admission, mechanical ventilation, and death. 

These are grim facts, particularly so as the CDC also reports that obesity is on the rise, especially amongst America’s poorest, and has been made worse by lockdowns. The highest prevalence of self-reported obesity is among “non-Hispanic black adults,” at a whopping 39.8 percent percent. Nearly four out of ten black Americans are not just overweight, but obese.   

One might expect that in the name of saving lives, a national conversation about reducing obesity would be underway. The CDC website emphasizes the need for “culturally tailored interventions to address poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and tobacco use.” It advises obese adults to limit calories, choose leaner meats and vegetables, engage in regular activity, and reduce alcohol.

In the Covid red zone.

Yet as Michael Fumento recently pointed out in “Obesity: Covid’s Third Rail,” the average person would hardly know of the link between Covid severity and obesity from mainstream reporting, which has largely either remained completely silent about the connection or even denounced those who point it out. “It seems we’ve seen a backlash to linking Covid-19 to obesity without ever seeing the lash,” he notes wryly. 

Fumento is the author of a book about obesity, The Fat of the Land, that devotes a chapter to the popular myth that one can be fat and healthy at the same time. He deplores the tendency to denounce discussion of obesity as more debilitating than obesity itself, noting that “NBC News devoted a long print story to shaming “fat shamers,” but provided no evidence that they even existed beyond an oblique reference to social media trolls.” 

Thanks in large part to a social justice interdiction against what has come to be called “fat shaming,” it is now unacceptable to address the health effects of obesity. Some health officials even claim that so-called “fat shaming” is worse than being fat. A 2018 article in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMC Medicine targeted weight “stigma” as the main driver of the current obesity epidemic, finding “compelling evidence that weight stigma is harmful to health over and above objective body mass index.” The article’s authors were particularly concerned about anti-fat bias amongst health practitioners. 

Stigma and bias are still acceptable in mainstream discussions, of course—just not against the fat. During a pandemic rife with slogans about being “in this together,” divisive shaming tactics have become standard fare in much reporting. In early April of 2020, the Huffington Post’s Richard Stokoe eagerly fueled evidence-free animus by declaring that “The White Male is the Biggest Risk in Spreading the Virus.” Allegedly, white men’s “privilege” and “toxic masculinity” made them less likely to follow health guidelines or care about the safety of others. 

A year later, the specific issue was different but the scapegoating impulse was the same in an April 5, 2021 New York Times article on “How White Evangelicals’ Vaccine Refusal Could Prolong the Pandemic.” This piece of fear-mongering claimed that due to their alleged anti-science prejudices and other irrational objections—none of which were presented as having even a shred of credibility—evangelical whites posed a threat to American national health. The article skipped quickly over the possibility of vaccine refusal by non-white evangelicals.

Toxicity, thy name is white manhood.

Discussion of coronavirus impacts has often been indistinguishable from invidious identity politics. An April 4, 2020 article in the New York Post, “Why Women are Better than Men at Defeating the Coronavirus” showcased a cartoon image of a Super Woman flexing her muscular body next to a 98-pound male weakling. The article sounded a note of unmistakable crude triumphalism in emphasizing women’s greater ability to fight infection, and lesser chance of dying from Covid, due to their XX chromosome.

The tone was very different just a few days later, on April 7, when the New York Times reported that “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.” The subheading noted that even in the absence of sufficient data to draw firm conclusions, the potential that black people were dying at higher rates than whites was worth discussing with “alarm,” and alleged that black infections and deaths illustrated entrenched social inequalities.

An article on the same day in The Washington Post titled “The Coronavirus is Infecting and Killing Black Americans at an Alarmingly High Rate” quoted Donald Trump calling the statistics “terrible,” Anthony Fauci referring to the racial disparity as “unacceptable,” and Surgeon General Jerome Adams saying it broke his heart to hear about higher death rates in the black community.

Reading these latter articles, one would never know that higher rates of obesity in black communities has certainly played a role in the death figures. For when it comes to talking about obesity, nothing that might remotely be seen to cast blame, or even simply to identify concern, is allowed. At a time when being overweight means undeniably greater risk from Coronavirus, it has become near-impossible to talk about the problem. 

Whom we don't don't about when we don't talk about it.

Fumento notes that obesity “has long been politicized.” But the particular ferocity of contemporary reality-denial would have been impossible without the concerted efforts of activist academics, who bear the largest share of responsibility for our present impasse. Thanks to the social sciences’ craze for extreme constructivism, which denies biology and insists that society “constructs” reality, alongside a cultural-Marxist imperative, fat is now considered a category of oppression rather than a medical condition. 

What began in 1978 with Susie Orbach’s bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, which argued that a sexist society makes women and girls hate their bodies, is now an entire area of identity studies called Fat Studies, complete with its own social justice terminology and a zealously-held ethical mandate to liberate the “stigmatized” from the prison of body-shaming. 

According to the practitioners of "fat studies," bias against fat people is a human rights issue of equal importance to racism, and is expressed in countless micro-aggressions, including even the kindest and least aggressive of warnings or encouragement about weight-related health.

Fat studies’ shocking divorce from reason was strikingly illuminated in a 2016 article by three North American academics with expertise in psychology and health. “Scientific Weightism: A View of Mainstream Weight Stigma Research Through a Feminist Lens,” co-written by Rachel Calogero, Tracy Tylka, and Janell Mensinger, begins from the now-widespread premise that fat stigma, rather than obesity itself, is the real killer. The authors go so far as to deny that there are any negative health consequences of obesity, insisting that although there are correlations between obesity and disease, correlation is not causation. They also deny that obesity is a condition within an individual’s power to control or modify. 

A social-justice issue, in the flesh.

“Weight stigma is a social justice issue,” the authors assert, “because people who are fat are denied their basic civil rights in every aspect of their lives, including their right to be fat and to live free of unfair treatment.” Merely to allege that obesity is medically harmful or undesirable is an example of “unfair treatment” that the authors believe should be outlawed. “It is absolutely essential,” they conclude “that scholars campaign for formal legislation to protect against weight stigma and discrimination.” Such legislation does not yet exist, but a powerful cultural consensus now denounces those who break the taboo against “fat-shaming.”

Even the CDC, though stating the negative health effects (and causes) of obesity unequivocally, has been affected by fat studies’ social justice cant. The website tends to speak about “having obesity” rather than “being obese,” as if obesity were an illness that one could catch unawares. It also frequently soft-pedals the direct connection between individual behavior and obesity, preferring a narrative of group deprivation, as when it alleges that “racial and ethnic minority groups have historically not had broad opportunities for economic, physical and emotional health, and these inequities have increased the risk of getting sick and dying from Covid-19 for some groups.” Such language reinforces the idea that the morbidity of the obese has more to do with oppression by others than with individual choices. 

But at least the CDC actually names obesity as a problem. Many other outlets have remained silent, deliberately rejecting the opportunity to educate the public on a crucial health problem. At a time when many in our society exhibit a near-hysterical concern for safety at any cost, it is bizarre to see our cultural mandarins refusing to provide basic life-saving information. 

The Mask of the Red (Covid) Death

Just this morning I was looking out my window at the esplanade that borders the Fraser River when a couple strolled by and paused for a moment beside the guardrail. They were, of course, fully masked, though as a couple they were exempt from the Covid distancing rules. As they turned to leave, they embraced and exchanged a long kiss, mask to mask, which would have made a charming scene were it not so grotesque, two masks glued together in surreal intimacy.

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam would have felt vindicated. “Like other activities during Covid-19 that involve physical closeness,” she advised, “there are some things you can do to minimize the risk of getting infected and spreading the virus.” The safest strategy is to “skip kissing, avoid face-to-face closeness, wear a mask that covers your mouth and nose.”

Of course, Tam’s counsels were meant for casual encounters, but why stop there? Safety first—and second, third, ad infinitum, the Covid way of life. In fact, you can’t be safe enough. According to this expert, the sexual activity with the lowest risk “involves yourself alone.” Talk about self-isolation! 

Be fruitful and don't multiply.

Similarly, the provincial Center for Disease Control advises people, among the “tips and strategies [and] protective steps” sexual partners should adopt, to “wear a face covering or mask,” which cuts down on “heavy breathing,” or to “use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact.”

One should also consider that “video dates, phone chats, sexting, online chat rooms and group cam rooms are ways to engage in sexual activity” without taking risks. Most important, recognize that “you are your safest partner.” Best to go it alone and avoid close contact with others. However, “If you’re feeling fine and have no symptoms of Covid-19, you can still have sex.” Permission has been granted. 

It is obscene that unelected officials in the sublimity of their wisdom can tell us how and when to perform intimacy. The idea is not only hideous, but on a human level fundamentally alienating, an antidote to the normal expression of human passion and romantic feeling—especially when the risk for younger and asymptomatic people is vanishingly low.

As the American Institute for Economic Research reliably reports, cutting through the panic and the hype, there is “a mortality rate of 0.01 percent, assuming a two-week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1 percent.” Sucharit Bkakdi, a leading microbiologist at the University of Mainz and, unlike Tam, a genuine authority on the virus, gives an estimate “of 0.1 percent-0.3 percent, which is the range of moderate flu.”

No matter. When I venture out for my afternoon walk along the esplanade, I feel as if I’m entering a carnival horror arcade or a grade-C zombie flick. Nearly everyone is masked, not only the elderly who may be in the statistical danger zone, but the middle aged, families, bicyclists, joggers, younger people, children and even toddlers, who are effectively immune.

True, very few are kissing or engaging in indecorous activity, but that is no consolation. The sense of the eerie, of something morbid and freakish this way coming, is deeply distressing, no less than the abject compliance with government mandates in the absence of common sense or intelligent reflection.

A recent IPSOS Reid poll finds that 93 percent of Canadians “say they are doing their best to abide by public health recommendations regarding Covid-19.” The poll reports that more Canadians “are wearing a protective mask than was the case just a few months ago,” and that “support for safety measures remains high.” Support for critical scrutiny and independent inquiry into the facts does not.

Home sweet home.

We are living in the Age of Covid, enjoined or compelled to stay in our “bubble,” to practice “social distancing” (six feet is the officially designated distance, the same as the typical grave depth), and to wear those ghastly medical ornaments, multi-ply masks, over half our faces.

Over time, coercion has turned into willing consensus and self-enforced mutilation of the spirit; a fearful and pliable public has surrendered its autonomy of judgment to a statistical reign of terror practiced by ignorant and power-hungry politicians and their self-serving health officials. People have suffered a mental lockdown, a form of cerebral morbidity. As Stephen Kruiser writes:

The lockdowns ruined far more lives than they’ve saved—if they’ve saved any at all. The data on wearing masks has been kind of all over the place too. Those who’ve been spreading the pandemic panic porn for political purposes treat the masks as if they have super powers. We will more than likely find out that wearing them was all just so much useless theater too.

The mask has become the major symbol of a time when human relationships, what we used to call face to face contact, are relics of a receding past. Facebook was bad enough, when personal reciprocity was replaced by digital transmissions and friendship became “friending.” Now Facebook has become Facemask, eliminating the human smile, articulate speech, normal conversation and personal expressions while transforming sexual and romantic intimacy into a lurid caricature of communion, affection, affinity and warmth—the empty husk of human presence.

In a poem delightful for its insouciant humor, Canadian poet Michael Harris wished to be “among the essential kissers of all time.” The volume, New & Selected, appeared in 1998. He would have had another think coming had he written his poem today.