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.
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.
Government programs need to be rigorously evaluated, particularly when they affect public health and individual rights. The objectives should be clear, whereas in this case they were vague and constantly shifting. And the outcomes data should be straightforward, whereas in this case they depend on complex and variable statistical processing of small samples.
Though many in positions of power would prefer that we forgot, the strict lockdowns that consumed the world in 2020 are extremely well documented. Above all, these lockdowns were a chilling demonstration of just how quickly western officials, policymakers, scientists, journalists, and soon entire populations could be convinced to adopt a degree of totalitarianism in their everyday lives. Until we have real answers as to how exactly they happened, and why, there’s no reason for any thinking citizen to have confidence in the current crop of officials who claim to represent them.
In this essay, written from a broad economics perspective that incorporates an understanding of incentives, institutions, information, and power, we address the following three broad questions: (1) What were the roles and responsibilities of our institutions when faced with a threat like Covid? (2) What were the costs and benefits of the response that transpired? (3) What is the need and potential for institutional and social reform?
My Plan A, in the event of unsavoury political developments unfolding, such as it was, involved writing letters of protest to politicians and others. It wasn’t really a plan, more of a reaction, and an orthodox one at that. In any event, it was a pathetic failure. It didn’t even give me the illusory comfort of a response, let alone a tangible improvement.
It’s morally, legally, and intellectually repugnant that federal officials in the United States have constructed a vast apparatus for censoring legal speech, bypassing the First Amendment—without informing the public—on the pretext that the activities of foreign regimes which have been deliberately permitted on our online platforms have gotten so out of control.
Disinformation, Censorship, and Information Warfare in the 21st Century Read More
They are men and women who possess spines of steel, the ones our fellow citizens can most count on to face an enemy of the nation and not blink. Rather than merely reciting the values of their respective branches of the military, they demonstrated what it looks like to actually live by those values. Many more times their number can only wish to demonstrate that level of courage.
Based on this timeline and history, as well as my own direct personal communication with Dr. Callahan, I strongly suspect that both the gross clinical mismanagement of ventilatory support during the first phase of the outbreak (responsible for up to 30,000 deaths) as well as the stunningly poor management practices of Nursing Home and Extended Care facilities throughout the USA can be directly traced to the influence of Dr. Michael Callahan, DARPAs Man in Wuhan and arguably the top US Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research.
My government, which exists to protect me, arbitrarily removes rights and privileges from people based on false information that it generates. Sometimes they do it indiscriminately (such as during the pandemic); sometimes they pick their targets (such as what happened to me at the airport).
It’s hard not to wonder: what if releasing the virus in China to disrupt the country and see how the world responds could have been some hare-brained scheme cooked up in the deeper recesses of the U.S. biosecurity state?
How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China? Read More
When asked about the possibility of a lab leak in a November 2021 interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Drosten insisted that “I have no personal connection to the people in Wuhan and have never been at the [Wuhan] Institute [of Virology].” The above photo makes clear that he and Shi are not perfect strangers at any rate.
