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.
Once upon a time, we sweated on daily case numbers when the new cases per day were less than 10; now we barely think of them, and they are in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. There’s only one conclusion to be drawn – it was never about public health, and it still isn’t. It was always about control.
Lockdown deaths in 2020 at 194,000 are 42% of total excess deaths. This is a huge amount. With a data lag of a few weeks, the CDC was publishing Covid and non-Covid excess deaths throughout 2020, so policymakers should have been aware of the collateral damage their policies were causing at the time. Governments were given credible warnings about the dangers of lockdowns, but did not listen.
Lockdowns Deaths in 2020 Were 42% of Excess Deaths Read More
Astonishingly, in early September 2019, only three months before the allegedly initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to none other than…Tongji Hospital in Wuhan! The hospital is also known as the German-Chinese Friendship Hospital.
The Other Lab in Wuhan: The German-Chinese “Laboratory for Virus Research” Read More
The long-run power disparity between Taiwan and China is so great that Taiwan simply has no realistic prospect of defending itself against a patient and determined China. And if Chinese history and politics teach anything at all, it is that the authoritarian Chinese can be patient.
