Tweet [1]
Eyal Shahar is right that Sweden was right [2]. A slice:
Assuming the excess mortality in 2019–2020 “fully balanced” the mortality deficit in the previous flu year, the true excess mortality in Sweden was less than 1% (about 700 deaths). And if we assume, absurdly, that the mortality in 2019–2020 was not affected at all by the mortality deficit in the previous flu year, then the excess mortality in Sweden did not exceed 4.1% (about 3,800 deaths). Excess mortality of a few percentage points, or more, has been calculated in many countries where life has been severely disrupted. Part of that excess has been attributed to lockdown and panic.
To remind us, the hysterical response to the pandemic was not due to fear of an excess annual mortality of 4% or even 10%. The apocalyptic forecasts, which caused the world to shut down, predicted about 90,000 deaths from the coronavirus in Sweden by the summer of 2020: 100% excess mortality! No wonder policy makers around the world prefer to forget those predictions.
David Hart is justifiably infuriated by the Australian Covidocracy’s continuing authoritarianism [3].
J.D. Tuccille decries performative pandemic panic [4]. A slice:
Now, even with widespread vaccination, mask-wearing remains politically divisive. Some Team Blue partisans retain the coverings [5] just to demonstrate that they aren’t Republicans [6] even after Fauci admitted that the chance of vaccinated people getting infected is extremely low [7], making masks unnecessary.
The situation may have been even worse in the U.K., where public officials deliberately tried to scare the hell out of the public in order to make people more malleable.
“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian’,” The Telegraph reported [8] last month about the tactics adopted by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B). “SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from Covid-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened’.”
Emma McArthur decries Britain’s tyrannical response to Covid-19 [9].
Here’s a recent instance in Massachusetts of the Covidocracy’s tyranny [10].
Roger Watson worries that the consequences of Covid Derangement Syndrome will linger for a long time [11]. Here’s his conclusion:
And there you have it. Everyone is having fun, making up arbitrary rules, bossing others around or being bossed around by others and, if I am not mistaken, enjoying it. To recycle a much-misused expression: “this is how Hitler started.”
Barry Brownstein warns of “Faucism, the fantastical belief that wise and beneficent experts should rule. [12]” A slice:
During the pandemic, brave doctors such Scott Atlas, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya have been vilified. These doctors have not been willing to, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say, live by lies.