With help from the media, social media and police, people were frightened, shamed and coerced into submission and compliance with arbitrary and increasingly authoritarian government edicts. The intense and unrelenting propaganda unleashed on the people by governments using sophisticated tactics of psychological manipulation and enthusiastically amplified by the media was astonishingly successful in a remarkably short time.
The problem is that the CDC evidently believes that there should be no social stigmas. That if one commits a crime, is in prison, is an addict, or is involved in behaviors that most find offensive or are illegal, it is not ok to use a term to directly describe that activity because societal judgement might hurt someone’s feelings.
What’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
There are signs that some pivotal countries might be at tipping points in the dominant narrative of safe and effective vaccines. Eminent British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, an early promoter of Covid vaccines, now describes this as ‘perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime.’
One cannot help but wonder: where are the fact checkers when such levels of misinformation and blatant fear-mongering are published on the front page of The New York Times?
An important new paper documenting that the pre-vaccination case fatality rate was extremely low in the non-elderly population. That means more evidence the Ferguson’s models were wrong (again) and what do we hear from the state-sponsored media? Crickets.
How anyone can look at the Covid vaccination and mortality metrics of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan and still hold fast to the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine narrative is beyond comprehension. Instead, one more initially plausible hypothesis is that the behaviour of the virus is Covid vaccine-invariant, and a second hypothesis is that the vaccine may actually be driving infections, serious illness and deaths by some mysterious mechanism not yet identified by scientists – although some studies are starting to point the way.
Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.
On this evidence it seems we can definitively rule out both an emergence before July 2019 (too many negatives and just one questionable positive) and after November 2019 (too many positives in a number of countries). The evidence is not currently consistent or robust enough to be able to pin it down more definitively than that.
The Evidence COVID-19 Was Spreading Around the World in Late 2019 Read More
The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium.
We should think about each and every suggestion, every directive, even (or perhaps especially) those that come with penalties for non-compliance. The world may have looked very different if we had.
We dare not relent lest the despotism we experienced only very recently be repeated and entrenched. We know now that it can happen, and that there is nothing inevitable about genuine progress. Our job now is to regroup and recommit to living free lives, never again believing that there are magical forces at work in the world that make our role as thinkers and doers unnecessary.
