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.

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.