Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief White House medical adviser, testifying before the Senate Health Committee on Jan. 11, 2022.
In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction. I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being. Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in. Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.
Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,
“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”. Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so. As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science. It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage. As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.
Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change. It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.
Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics. Really? When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics? Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.
“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.
According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.
Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.
Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.
The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during the daily briefing at the White House, Dec. 1, 2021, in Washington. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Going back to March 2020, I lamented the lockdowns and all the other grotesque deformations of the past year or two, unleashing unbounded social, economic, and psychological harm just to show fealty to a new ideology, or theology, called safteyism. The work ethic was euthanized for many. Kids were allowed to cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally atrophy. Labor and capital entered a forced coma; no wonder supply chains are frazzled and inflation is enflamed – it’s more than the Democrats’ and the fed’s overheated money machine. The same people who wrecked community life across the country also wrecked our public square. The streets were set afire in riots and raging crime, and littered with filthy tent encampments, needles, and feces. The year(s) of COVID were made into a dark age.
Assisting in the civilizational collapse, the Biden gang persists in a collective Retinitis Pigmentosa (tunnel vision). All they can see is vaccine, and force everyone, literally everyone, to get it. It’s coercive utopianism. They are fruitlessly forcing a naturally heterogenous population on medical practices into being an imaginary homogeneous one. In the end, 15-25% won’t get it, no matter what, but we’ll be forced to endure the threats, mandates, and the loss of many of the basic functions of life in pursuit of the unattainable. It’s foolish.
An obvious alternative exists. It’s the same one during any health scourge: get vaccinated if you choose, stay healthy, and if you catch the bug, rest at home, see a doctor, and seek many of the prescribed and over-the-counter treatments. Curling up with a couple of glasses of cognac probably wouldn’t hurt.
Thus, therapeutics are a big part of epidemiology if we can escape the mental prison of vaccine-only, and our big wheels jettison their commitment to sucking the air from therapeutics and toward their favorite pet of vaccine-only. Anti-malarial drugs such as Atovaquone show promise. Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck and Biotherapeutics’ Molnupiravir are medications that don’t require the intravenous apparatus of the monoclonal antibodies. But the FDA is dragging their feet in granting them the same emergency authorization that it did for the vaccines.
Resident of Battle Creek, Mi., recieves monoclonal antibody treatment outside a Detroit hospital, December 2021. (photo: Kimberly Mitchell, Detroit Free Press)
Really, let’s face it, the masking, social distancing, and avoidance of crowds should be limited to the vulnerable and frightened. Home delivery, curbside pickup, and Zoom are for them. For everyone else, go to work, got to school, shop, attend a game, see a movie, hit the gym, and pay a visit to grandma and grandpa. Stop forcing all of society to bend to the will of the small portion who can’t physically or emotionally handle it.
One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.
I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.
The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?
MERS virusSARS virusCOVID-19
If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.
When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.
I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” P.J. O’Rourke
Intoxicated with Equity, people in the seat of power have handcuffed police – not criminals – and turned a blind eye to wanton violence. Convinced of their infallibility, they are foisting inflation and destroying our livelihoods stalking a greenie utopia. The four corners of our existence are being upended for a pure ideological fantasy.
There’s more in a blast from the past.
A young Anthony Fauci in the 1980’s.
Remember AIDS of the 1980’s? Doctors Fauci and Redfield, familiar apparatchiks of today, back then ignited an AIDS scare by peddling the idea of a “heterosexual breakout”. Life magazine crowed with a cover, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”. Later, researchers discovered the odds of transmission from vaginal intercourse to be 1 in 5 million. Intravenous drug use and male homosexual activity were the drivers of the disease. Bureaucrats Fauci and Redfield ignored their own epidemiologists to scare Congress into approving bigger budgets. The same culprits are, and were, in charge this time around. (Read about it here in a piece originally from the WSJ)
Life magazine cover from 1985.
The political realm is festooned with people who can warp history, science, and due process to advance rabid zealotry. Our latest case in point: COVID.
Throughout March and the rest of 2020 and into 2021, in the heat of the COVID panic, I condemned the lockdowns and threw aspersions at unbridled masking, school closures, and the decimation of small business. From the beginning, our federal government’s response was a clown car brimming with buffoons, the worst offenders in blue jurisdictions. They imposed the authoritarianism and the death toll continued to mount. Later, the virus receded, probably due to natural factors, the strangulations relaxed, and then the variants appeared, and what didn’t work the first time was brought back with a vengeance. First Delta, now Omicron.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became embroiled in the controversy over nursing home COVID deaths due to his policies.
Biden took over the White House and the worst of California went national. Scapegoating of the unvaccinated is routine. The only thing missing is a yellow star on the lapel. If acts of public humiliation won’t bring them to heel, then mandates will threaten to take away their livelihoods, movements, religious fellowship, and the simplest human interaction. Is forced relocation to walled ghettos next? The administration is a one trick pony: get vaccinated or else.
80% of Americans over 12 are vaccinated with at least one dose. Getting to 100% is like reaching the speed of light in Einstein’s General Theory. The closer you get, the harder it is to go faster till you realize that you’ll never get there. 100% is pie in the sky. 80% is quite probably their max. So, why all the threats and abuse?
Could the answer lie in the totalitarian progressive’s reflexive refusal to accept disagreement? Are these aspiring tyrants so blinded with fury to admit of other approaches? Fact is, being vaccinated is neither a guarantee of not spreading the virus or getting it in any of its variants, unless the goal is to turn the people into 330 million voodoo dolls with needle jabs till kingdom come, not to mention the disordered emotional and cognitive development of our zoomed children.
Vaccines or no, where’s the therapies, i.e., treatments? If you get it in whatever form, we should be in the position to see our doctor, get a prescription, stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids (non-alcoholic), and watch old Law and Order reruns. You’re not going to get 100% of a nine-figure population to fall in line with your singular approach. Grow up, admit it. Treatments for everyone, vaccinated or unvaccinated. We are going to have to do it anyway as the virus spins off an endless chain of cellular cousins to outflank our jabs.
Demand the discovery of more and varied treatments. The vaccine moon shot should be equaled by one for treatments. Unlike the greenie junk and bloated giveaways, Operation Therapies is a real Build Back Better. Lest we forget, it has the additional advantage of making the overwhelming majority of us the incubators of the most powerful immunity, the natural kind.
Vaccines are good, the choking of social and economic life is not, and we should have more than one trick up our sleeves.
A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
Biden’s tail-chasing health team. Clockwise left to right: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Natalie Quillian, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jeff Zients and Xavier Becerra
Have you noticed that some government heavies, mostly in the donkey party, are inching closer to resuming last year’s social and economic straitjacket? They can’t let it go. The virus variants and June-to-July spikes are said to be driving the fervor. But have you wondered that this is beginning to resemble a dog chasing its tail? The evolutionary twists and turns of microscopic bugs have always been with us. The CDC can’t repeal evolution. As soon as we get a vaccine, out pops a resistant strain and it’s off to the races to lockdowns and another “moral equivalent of war” to develop another vaccine. It’s turning into a never-ending cycle, or the dog not quite being able to seize its tail.
We did the lockdowns and the strangulation of social and economic life with the horrendous masking, school closures, home shut-ins, and the social distancing that treats everyone as a plague carrier. What’s all this doing to our psyches? Are we going at this all wrong? Yes, develop vaccines, but work even more fervently to uncover therapeutics. We already have a great head start.
In fact, more money and effort should go into treatments than vaccines. After the equivalent of a moon-shot dash to vaccinate for the current bug, we’re off to another spike facing an up-armored relative. If that is our focus, nothing changes. It would make more sense to make the bug less lethal through successful treatments. For vulnerable groups – and we know who they are – quarantining may be advisable till the danger passes. We should never again smother everyone because certain individuals have heightened sensitivities. We are learning what happens when you try to stop human beings from being human.
Our motto should be “Never again!” Target protections for the vulnerable, develop and maintain an inventory of the requisite therapeutics, work on vaccines, and, for God’s sake, allow us to be human again.
On second thought, keep this in mind: our government doesn’t “allow” us to be human. That’s the shtick of the Castro’s in Havana. They’re all into “allow” and “disallow”. All government actions in our country must be taken within the contours of our God-given rights. Think about that.
Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)
An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.
Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.
The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.
The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.
The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.
I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.
Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.
