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The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans.
Although my understanding of capitalism and the market order is quite the opposite of Australian socialist Phil Shannon, in this essay Shannon astutely decries the political Left’s disgraceful embrace of what another Australian – David Hart – calls “hygiene socialism. [4]” Two slices from Shannon’s essay:
The Left got off on the wrong foot by misrepresenting Covid as much more scary than what it actually is i.e. a bad-to-ordinary flu season. The Left has joined the lockdown establishment elite in inflating the risk posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus by (1) lumping together deaths ‘with’ and deaths ‘from’ Covid; (2) conflating positive virus test results – including false positives – with actual clinical cases; (3) ignoring Covid’s fatal attraction almost solely for the already-ill elderly whilst being fairly innocuous to everyone else; (4) portraying the virus as a constant menace despite its cyclic behaviour as just another recurring, seasonal, warmth-shunning, mutating respiratory virus which naturally peters out during its summer recess; (5) deep-sixing the fear-quelling concept of naturally-acquired herd-immunity including pre-existing cross-immunity from other coronaviruses, both cornerstones of immunological and virological science; and (6) ignoring the fact that Covid was the plague that never was because it had been circulating globally, courtesy of the vast international Chinese tourist trade, since as early as September-October 2019, with nobody noticing anything statistically out of the ordinary in overall death rates prior to the March Madness triggered by panicky politicians in 2020.
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Lockdown is the central dogma of ‘social distancing’ pseudoscience, a voodoo religion which comes with a host of ineffective, superstitious, magical-thinking, placebo-like, demonstratively ostentatious ‘New Normal’ rituals, all of which the Left has uncritically subscribed to – school closures, quarantining the healthy, smart-phone QR sign-in, Perspex checkout shields, masks, the 1.5 metre rule, test-test-test, track-and-trace, elbow-bumps and fist-pumps, the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder of hand sanitiser use, high-rotation North Korean style ‘public safety announcements’, Stand-Here/Don’t-Sit-There decals, ‘support bubbles’, Covid Marshals, Hallelujah vaccines, immunity-passports, limits on public gatherings, curfews, travel restrictions, border closures …. all of these pointless political and cultural theatrics predicated on a wildly exaggerated fear of a not terribly lethal virus. By also recycling vacuous slogans – ‘flatten the curve’, ‘do the right thing’, ‘save lives’, ‘slow the spread’, ‘stop the spread, ‘stay safe’ – the Covid-deranged Left has abrogated critical thinking for simplistic advertising copy.
We have been discussing erosion of free speech and academic freedom protections at colleges and universities around the United States. Most faculty have been conspicuously silent as their colleagues are attacked, suspended, or even fired for taking opposing views on systemic racism, police brutality, or movements like Black Lives Matter. In Sweden, the response has been quite different after Professor Jonas Ludvigsson, announced that he would stop all further research on Covid-19 after a campaign of abuse and harassment following his study on the low threat that the virus poses to children and teachers. The country is ramping up protections for academics to combat such cancelling campaigns.
Ludvigsson researches and teaches clinical epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. His research is consistent with studies that have long found a low risk to students and teachers. This research was highlighted during the Trump Administration in a call for the resumption of classes but largely ignored by the media. The argument for reopening schools, particularly for young children, was portrayed as political and “not following the science.” Commercial rans that calls to returning to the classroom was tantamount to “murder.” However, the science has been overwhelmingly supportive of such reopening. Indeed, Catholic and other private schools in many states never closed without surges in the virus.
Among the first actual epidemiologists who advised that more information was needed before draconian mitigation measures could be scientifically justified was Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Ioannidis questioned the reasoning used by people like Emanuel and Fauci in an essay published in STAT, where he wrote [8] that the precipitous response to the pandemic was “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” and that decisions of monumental significance were being made without truly dependable data concerning how many people had been infected….
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As for our experts, it’s clear that Dr. Zeke didn’t have a clue. He was wrong about how long it would take to produce a vaccine, and his claims about the necessity of draconian lockdowns were sheer nonsense. Dr. Fauci, when it was possible to get him to commit to a single position two days in a row, was usually wrong. His latest flip-flop has involved school reopenings [9]. Meanwhile, Drs. Ioannidis, Osterholm, and Wittkowski have been vindicated despite relentless criticism from the media and deplatforming. It turns out that “following the science” is much like it was in Galileo’s day.
Mask mandates boil the donated blood of Nicola Lund [10].
Right now, it is breaking my heart to witness one of those less obvious – but no less terrifying – signs of living in hell in the shape of the fear parents are instilling in their children, specifically the fear of humans.
Parents aggressively yank their children towards them when they see another person approach. If that person is un-masked, the terror on the face of the parent is unmistakable.
The aisles are narrow in small local supermarkets. I was distressed this morning in my nearby Co-op to see a child getting a ‘nod’ from a parent as I approached (un-masked, I resolutely refuse to wear one); the child pressed his four or five-year-old self against the shelves and tucked in his tummy and chest, in the way one would when passing a stranger in a confined space.
It was the fact that the child also held his breath as I passed along, with fear in his eyes, that struck despair into my heart.
Just when I thought I had seen it all and I could not feel any worse, the parent told the boy ‘well done’ and ruffled his hair. The child looked pleased that he has earned praise from his father.