Articles

Brownstone Journal Articles, News, Research, and Commentary on public health, science, economics, & social theory

The Catastrophic Covid Convergence

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How did my family, friends and neighbors – who I thought shared my liberal, humanist values – turn into a group-thinking, bullying herd? What forces were exerted to erase scientific and intellectual integrity from the minds of literally millions of doctors, scientists, economists, journalists, educators and other normally curious and compassionate people worldwide?

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As Military Ranks are Purged, US Is Unprepared for War

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Shortsighted policies, some recent and some decades in the making, have worsened matters. Even now, before a shot has been fired, the Pentagon is struggling to recruit fresh troops, while at the same time it’s preparing to pitch 60,000 unvaccinated National Guardsmen and Reservists it relies on for routine mission support. 

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Brown University’s Silence on Post-Vaccine Myocarditis

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In March, 2021, two months before enacting its mandatory, aggressive covid-19 vaccination campaign, a healthy 20-year-old male Brown University student was apparently hospitalized for covid-19 vaccine-induced myopericarditis. The University never disclosed this hospitalization, then, till now, ignoring the established ethics of risk/benefit-based informed consent. 

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Proportionality and the Fog of War

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Our representatives and public health agencies have repeatedly violated the rule of proportionality and those who continue to do so without guidance from data on masking, mandates and vaccine effectiveness against Omicron must be called out on this. How many jobs have been lost because of lockdowns and then inappropriate vaccine mandates? 

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Model Misspecification and Grossly Inflated Estimates of Lives Saved

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While generative models are often a useful tool to simulate scenarios that have not occurred, inaccurate assumptions about model parameters can easily lead to model misspecification. In the case of Watson et al. 2022, they can lead to counterfactual simulations that grossly inflate estimates of deaths averted due to mass vaccinations. 

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The Crash and Burn of Credentialism 

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Whatever it is that the World Economic Forum is promising does not look especially impressive by comparison to the normal freedoms we took for granted. Indeed, we let the experts have a go at it and they created a monstrous experience for billions of people the world over. This will not be soon forgotten. 

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The Senior Executive Service: Heart of the Medical Deep State 

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To break up these “public-private partnerships” which compromise the ability of HHS to perform essential oversight duties and truly protect the health of American Citizens from the rapacious practices and disgusting ethics of the medical-pharmaceutical complex (in which they behave as predators, and we have become the prey), we must sever the financial and organizational ties that bind the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex to the HHS Administrative State, and which have been incrementally developed and deployed over many decades.

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The Courage to Dissent…From the Left

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The unprecedented public health response to the pandemic; lockdowns, the censorship by Big Tech of dissenting medical voices and treatment options along with conflicting views on masking, vaccine, school closures and social-distancing policies have all contributed to deep and potentially irrevocable distrust of public health and government. 

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Anatomy of the Administrative State: The HHS 

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Across two administrations led by presidents who have championed very different worldviews, HHS COVID policies have continued with little or no change; one administration seemingly flowing directly into the next with hardly a hiccough. If anything, under Biden the HHS arm of the US administrative state became more authoritarian, more unaccountable, and more decoupled from any need to consider the general social and economic consequences of their actions. As this has progressed, the HHS bureaucracy has become increasingly obsequious and deferential to the economic interests of the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex. 

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Evil In Our Time: Naomi Wolf on the Covid Response

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The Bodies of Others is a personal, deeply empathic and excellently written tribute to the innermost layer of freedom, the very core that defines us as human beings. Or in Naomi Wolf’s own words: “The object of this spiritual battle? It seemed to be for nothing short of the human soul.”

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