With the passage of time, as evidence mounted of the folly of Zero Covid policy and the accumulating harms it was causing, the New Zealand government was trapped in a prison of its own construction and found it difficult to change course, even after the futility of the entire program became obvious in the data.
The state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have filed suit against the Biden administration. Among the plaintiffs are Brownstone Senior Scholars Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty who have experienced this censorship first hand. The case is joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division.
The plaintiffs in the case have now filed their response to the appeal. The decision is expected in weeks. It will likely uphold the previous decision, which amounts to a serious though not fatal blow to the unchecked power of the administrative state, which is arguably the single greatest threat to American liberty and constitutional government that we face.
Pottinger may have simply been overly-trusting of his sources, thinking they were the little people in China trying to help their American friends. But why did Pottinger push so hard for sweeping Chinese policies like mask mandates that were far outside his field of expertise? Why did he so often breach protocol? Why seek out and appoint Deborah Birx?
Instead of conducting and publishing rigorous cost-benefit analyses, departments and ministries of health turned into Covid-only bureaus, health ministers acted like Covid ministers, and governments were almost corrupted into single-purpose organizations pursuing Zero Covid.
According to the models used to justify harsher restrictions in Denmark, about 30,000 people were expected to have died, had Sweden’s strategy been followed. But according to the data, the excess mortality in Sweden over the two years was around 6,000 and in Denmark 3,000, which amounts to the same percentage as the Danish population is about half the Swedish. Thus, the models were off by around 90%.
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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