Policy Articles at Brownstone feature opinion and analysis of global policy in economics, public health, public dialog, and social life. Policy articles are translated into multiple languages.
The FDA’s clinical and scientific staff is repeatedly being led astray from its public health mission. It should be obvious to anyone that the cumulative safety profile of mifepristone predicts that the FDA’s political decision to allow mailing of abortion drugs for at-home use will lead to otherwise preventable morbidity and mortality in America’s women.
The DOD mismanaged the Covid mandatory vaccine program, which degraded morale and negatively affected recruitment goals. Now is the time to rectify these abuses and welcome rather than punish those men and women who choose to serve the country but exercised their rights under the Nuremberg Code. Exerting financial pressure, failing to offer administrative services, and ostracizing these service members will discourage enlistments and further erode the public’s confidence in the United States military.
To be sure, this scenario cannot be proven because the entire event – certainly the most dramatic political move in at least a generation and one with unspeakable costs for the country – remains cloaked in secrecy. Not even Senator Rand Paul can get the information he needs because it remains classified. If anyone thinks the Biden approval of releasing documents will show what we need, that person is naive. Still, the above scenario fits all available facts and it is confirmed by second-hand reports from inside the White House.
Some have argued that it was the powerful forces backing the vaccines, without reference to or need for a lab leak, that set the whole Covid disaster in motion. There is also some resistance to the idea that the entire Covid disaster was – and still is – a conspiracy of the international biodefense network. I would contend that the only explanation for the cascade of Covid events is that it began with a lab leak that required a cover-up, and that those involved in the cover-up were those who dictated and benefited from the response.
The puzzle of why there was a worldwide cascading abandonment of a hundred years of accumulated knowledge by scientific and policy advisers will occupy researchers for many years. The result is that old lessons are having to be relearned. Judging by the rush of studies now coming through to contradict key tenets of the 2020–22 narrative, there’s hope that the wall of silence rooted in groupthink and fear of consequences to career and reputation might have been irreparably breached.
Most Washingtonians I meet are color blind to other people’s freedom. At the start of the pandemic, government officials trumpeted terrifying statistical extrapolations of potential infection rates. Thus, they automatically became entitled to lock people in their homes, shut down their businesses, and padlock their churches. The credentials of experts receive infinitely more respect inside the Beltway than Americans’ constitutional rights.
Unlike Tomás Pueyo, it’s unlikely that Balaji’s Twitter prophecies had a major effect on policy—though he did spread a bit of panic to bring these outcomes about. Rather, aside from the uncanny global coordination we observed in COVID policies and propaganda, Balaji’s tweets might be the best evidence so far that this plan to recreate China’s response did, in fact, exist, down to the particular terms and details of how the world would transform.
Freedom to take a walk on the beach? Stop killing the vulnerable! Freedom to earn a living? The economy will recover! The demotion of freedom—that noble ideal of liberal democracy—to a caricature has been painful to observe. Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.
How do we know for sure that Trump was not selling his advisors on lockdowns rather than that reverse? We do not actually know that. The most plausible scenario is that everyone in that hot house of Oval Office power pretension was equally enthusiastic for the most catastrophic public-health decision in modern history.
The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy and covid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fear porn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worry feeds food worry, which makes people clamor for government security. People will accept just about anything if they’re afraid. Does anyone really think human cleverness is going to beat migratory ducks? Really? Think it through and then embrace a more natural remedy: well-managed decentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes.
We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.
Deaths in the US used to be more volatile. but since the advent of penicillin, that stopped. Pre-covid, I do not think there has been a single year in US history since 1945 where the age adjusted death rate exceeded something “normal” from within the five years prior to “pandemic” year.
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