Reason‘s Billy Binion reports on an instance of petty Covidocratic tyranny in Washington State.
Our fight today is with different means in a different time, but the threat we face is no less existential. We are fighting for our future and our liberties; and the risks to our personal and professional relations, to our livelihoods, families and children, are very real.
Phil Magness defends Martin Kulldorff:
Kulldorff: “We’re engaged in historically unprecedented ostracism of people over Covid. Ostracizing disease victims is a dangerous ideology.”
Lockdowners: “Nuh uh! We also ostracized gay people over AIDS, immigrants over typhoid, black people over syphilis, Jews over the Black Death, and even people with leprosy during biblical times! There’s nothing new about what we’re doing with Covid, and you just proved that you’re historically ignorant!”
Kulldorff: “Thank you for illustrating my point.”
Perspective – and wisdom that derives from perspective – from James Delingpole in Britain. Two slices:
BRITAIN has just passed the ‘grim milestone’ (copyright the BBC, Channel 4 and every newspaper) of 100,000 Covid deaths.
But I really wouldn’t worry if I were you. The technical term for this fake statisticoid begins with ‘b’ and ends with ‘ollocks’.
The best and easiest way to understand why it’s nonsense is to look at it in the context of overall annual mortality rates. This enables you to find the answer to the only question that really matters: ‘Is the Covid-19 “pandemic” so uniquely, unprecedentedly deadly that it justifies the suspension of civil liberties, the destruction of the world’s sixth largest economy, the crushing of children’s education, the needless deaths of thousands of people with problems other than Covid and the suppression of free speech by the state and its agencies?’
Looking at, say, the ONS figures for ‘Age-standardised mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 of population, England and Wales, 1942-2020’, that answer becomes painfully obvious. Last year, 2020, saw about the same number of deaths per 100,000 people as 2008. But there’s one key difference between those two years. Can you guess what it is?
To help jog your memory, 2008 was the year Britney Spears was stretchered to rehab, Prince Harry was pulled out early from Afghanistan, Beijing hosted the summer Olympics, Wall Street crashed and Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Barack Obama was elected US president, and terrorists launched that hideous attack on a hotel in Mumbai.
In none of that year’s stories, however, was anyone wearing a face mask (except possibly the terrorists); nor were they held under house arrest known as ‘lockdown’; nor were they forced to quarantine for a fortnight when travelling on holiday; nor were they denied routine surgery, treatment for cancer, or, indeed, their school or university education; nor was the entire media utterly obsessed with any of the viral respiratory bugs going round, killing off old people, as viral respiratory bugs tend to do.
This wasn’t just true of the year 2008, by the way. It was also the case with every year preceding it right back to 1942, which is the earliest one in that particular dataset.
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The bigger picture is this: Covid-19 is not a deadly and unprecedented threat to our civilisation. But the overreaction to it is, most definitely.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Personally, I find the plandemic theory deeply implausible, indeed ridiculous. For one thing, I don’t believe that a conspiracy on this grand scale, involving so many officials and politicians in so many countries, would have been possible without someone leaking the news, whether before or during the pandemic. I also don’t think the coronapanic debacle has looked anything like a Great Reset. As economies have reopened, they’ve carried on more or less exactly as before, from an environmental perspective. And some governments didn’t shut their economies down in the first place, or they shut them down and then admitted it was a mistake. Plandemic theorists often say “it’s been the same the world over”, but this is simply not true. There have been similarities the world over, but every country has reacted differently to the coronapanic. The one thing every country has in common is that there was a global panic. A global panic about Covid 19 was bound to have some similar effects across nations, especially when governments were under so much pressure from their own citizens. With a few exceptions, governments didn’t want to be the odd one out. They didn’t want to be seen to be allowing millions of their citizens to die. They copied China’s lockdown because public demand for lockdown spread as the panic spread.
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It’s also worth noting that the atmosphere among socialists generally in early March 2020 was febrile, certainly if social media is anything to go by. On Twitter, I was defending the government’s efforts to keep the country open. I received an almighty backlash from socialists. They were calling me a selfish murderer, and worse. This backlash is relevant because socialists dominate Britain’s public sector and its unions, as well as academia and the media. And the whole principle behind the lockdown was inherently socialist. Socialists told us we should all be forced by the government to pull together in the collective interest to protect the NHS. The idea that individuals should freely take responsibility – whether for their own health, or for supporting each other – has been taboo throughout the coronapanic debacle, because personal responsibility is always taboo on the left. And what a calamity that taboo always is! Without personal responsibility, society falls apart. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the right thing to do – and the government knew it – was for young and healthy people to take personal responsibility, to go out and face the music, to continue working, to keep the country open, and protect the vulnerable. On March 12, the government started advising vulnerable people not to venture out. Boris made this announcement almost apologetically, as though it was a massive imposition on people’s lives. Of course, much much worse was to come.
On March 16, Professor Neil Ferguson published his ridiculous prediction that 500,000 people could die from Covid 19. The media went ballistic, and the panic shifted up a gear.
Bloomberg now reports that (as this headline reveals) “Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot.” (DBx: Phil Magness justifiably asked last night on Facebook, in response to this Bloomberg report: “Remember that time, oh, about a week ago when even the slightest suggestion of this was enough for the Covidian crowd to accuse you of being an anti-vaxxer?”)
James Allan, in the once-free country of Australia, asks: “Are our journalists just lazy? Or dumb?” Two slices:
Take one of the Gladys Berejiklian press conferences I watched last week. The questions the journalists asked were all along the lines of ‘why didn’t you lock down harder, sooner, more despotically, with more checks on citizens’ freedoms, more heavy-handed policing than you did?’. All of the journos – every one of them – asked questions along those lines, even the Sky News reporter. There was not a single, solitary question that came from the vantage of ‘hey, maybe you politicians are being a bit heavy-handed about all this; maybe after a half-dozen brutal lockdowns in Victoria this is starting to look like the triumph of hope over experience’. In short, not a note of scepticism of our lockdownista political and chief medical officer caste. Not a fragment of a scintilla of a soupçon! So to say there is something of a market opening here for good old-fashioned hard-nosed, sceptical journalism would not be over-stepping the bounds of the plausible, would it?
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Remember, the vaccine helps you ward off death. It does little to stop you catching and spreading it. So why do you care if other people have the vaccine? That’s not a rhetorical question either. What, exactly, is it you as a vaccinated person are missing out on when Joe Blow across the street does not get vaccinated. You can spread Covid as much as he can. You can catch it too. Your odds are better of not dying. So I don’t understand the compulsion to tell Joe he has to vaccinate. Or given what’s come out of Britain and Israel, why the government wants to ban the unvaccinated from events, bars, what have you. You can cut down your chances of dying if you get it (mostly for the elderly, obese and otherwise ill). Make that message clear to people and then leave them to make choices. Isn’t that what a John Stuart Mill liberal government is supposed to be committed to?
And why are our journalists so sheep-like, pro-lockdown, and wholly insouciant about the worst erosions of our civil liberties in this country’s entire existence? The universities churning out these journalists have a lot to answer for.
(DBx: In this last sentence – which is the conclusion of his essay – Mr. Allan hints at what I believe to be the best answer to the question of what explains nearly all the media’s utter failure, and not just in Australia, to report and opine reasonably on Covid: ideology. Most people in the media today are collectivists. Reporters, columnists, and editors simply assume that a society of free and responsible individuals is chaotic and dangerous and can be – and should be – controlled from on-high by experts in the government. Most people in the media today worship the state as a higher power, capable of working miracles. These miracles will be wondrously beneficial if the superhuman powers at the helm of the state are angels, but calamitously detrimental if the superhuman powers at the helm of the state are devils. But that superhuman powers are at the helm of the state, and that social and economic order must be designed and created by the state, are propositions that, to most people today in the media, are as obvious as is the fact that night follows day.)
