Articles

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

How Covid Panic Destroyed Communities: Our Church and My Story

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Shutting down everything couldn’t last indefinitely, and people couldn’t avoid being in personal proximity indefinitely without serious consequences. The virus was going to spread no matter what we did. With too much separation and fear of one another, we would cease to function as a community and couldn’t help others.

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The Medical Objectification of the Human Person

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The pandemic has turbocharged this process of medical objectification. We are no longer individuals, with unique desires, responses, wishes and drives, but rather are primarily considered by policy makers to be infection risks. Once we are primarily objects, rather than diverse human beings, it then becomes legitimate for medical procedures to be mandated, mask wearing to be forced, or our movements to be tracked and traced.

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PCR Tests and the Rise of Disease Panic

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Despite the CDC’s own admission that PCR tests “may not indicate the presence of infectious virus,” its use to do exactly that in the case of Covid was accepted without question. Worse still, the measures taken against calling PCR into question have become progressively more draconian and underhanded since the very beginning.

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Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly

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Simply put, the very best scientific study design currently available to mankind was not used to answer the most important outcomes, and the randomized trials do not support the widely held contention that COVID-19 vaccination using the Pfizer or Moderna brands lowers risk of death. This is unfortunately not the first time that FDA has approved a product based on a less important surrogate end-point rather than the key outcomes of interest. 

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Is YouTube Now Presuming to be in Charge of Science?

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If these rules are strenuously enforced, millions of videos, interviews, television shows, lectures, press conferences, and scientific presentations will disappear. Maybe tens of millions actually. And all in the name of protecting “science” against its corruption, as if YouTube should be the determinant of what constitutes good science. 

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The Life and Thoughts of An Unvaccinated Student in Germany

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My life will be much easier getting the jab in Germany but my heart keeps saying that I should not take it from my ethical and moral standpoint. Perhaps, I will have no choice left in the near future if the governments introduce the general vaccine mandate for COVID. However, I think the western governments should donate these vaccines and support more to the poorer nations instead of vaccinating the children and mandating the vaccines for those who dot not need them. 

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More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions (Lockdowns, Restrictions, Closures)

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What follows is the current totality of the body of evidence (available comparative studies and high-level pieces of evidence, reporting, and discussion) on COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates. There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful. 

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jacobson test

Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates Fail the Jacobson Test

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A careful reading of Jacobson shows that it is not just an automatic consideration allowing the government to do what it wants when a pandemic emergency has been officially declared. Covid-19 vaccine mandates do not satisfy any of the required criteria in Jacobson, let alone all of them.

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Lockdowns vs. Focused Protection: The Debate Between Lipstich and Bhattacharya

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On November 6, 2020, the Journal of the American Medical Association sponsored an important debate between Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Marc Lisitch over the policy response to the pandemic. They have very different points of view, with Jay favoring “focussed protection” and traditional public health measures, while Marc is on the side of the novel “non-pharmaceutical intervention” side, e.g. lockdowns.

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absinthe-green-fairy

The Moral Panic Over Absinthe Lasted 100 Years

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The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans followed by speakeasy indulgence. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech? 

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