The great turn from ancient political and economic structures into more modern ones was not only about property rights, commercial freedoms, and the participation of ever greater waves of people in public life. There was also an implicit epidemiological deal to which we agreed, what Sunetra Gupta describes as an endogenous social contract.
We’ve entered into an area of post-truth governance. If they can take away your right to enforce rent collection from your own tenants — and this has been provisionally codified by the Supreme Court — while attempting to replace normal commercial contracts with billions in welfare spending, nothing is off the table.
Market signals plainly never factored into Fauci’s analysis. He made plain that no virus-related risks should be taken, even if it meant economic contraction. Such are the luxuries, but more realistically the negatives of working without marketplace pressures. It’s easy to be wrong when there’s no share price exposing your error.
What If Fauci Had Faced the Discipline of the Market? Read More
Refusal to admit failure is costing us dearly right now, as they added layer upon layer of compulsion as a cover for honestly coming to terms with the appalling mess of the last 18 months.
The answer is not fear, not segregation, not lockdowns, not the imposition of medieval rules and castes. The answer is freedom and human rights. Somehow those institutions served us well over many hundreds of years, during which time the human population has mixed ever more, and has grown ever healthier with longer lives.
Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single disease like Covid-19. It is important to also consider harms from public health measures.
Newspaper reports at the time offer no record of widespread public event cancellations much less forced closures. Sometimes college and high school football games were postponed due to illness absences. Some conventions were cancelled by organizers. But that is all.
They Considered and Rejected Pandemic Closures in 1957 Read More
Some journalists tried to paint us as right-wing libertarians with links to the Koch brothers. These were blatant lies and ad hominem smears reminiscent of the McCarthy era. They are also ironic since one of the Koch-funded foundations provided grant support to pro-lockdown scientist Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College.
Every age has generated some fashionable and overriding reason why people cannot be free. Public health is the reason of the moment. In this author’s telling, everything we think we know about the social and political order must conform to his number one priority of pathogen avoidance and suppression, while every other concern (such as freedom itself) should take a back seat.
What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar Read More
The unscientific nature of this game is summed up in the following realization. The Biden administration is toying with tactics and strategies for disease control that have utterly and completely failed for the 16 months they have been tried. Everwhere in the world! The science as we know it conclusively demonstrates the failure of every bit of the lockdown agenda. And yet here we are, threatened by another round on all sides.
The ancients understood immunology better than we do. If scientific leaders do not acknowledge immunity from natural infection, public confidence in vaccines and public health institutions will further deteriorate, imposing great harm to the public’s well-being.
The lockdowns were the cruelest form of elitism, by far. The implication of the lockdowns was that those who had the temerity to have jobs that were destinations—like restaurants and shops—would have to lose them.
