Tweet [1]
Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter [2]:
Public health has earned the distrust of minority communities by promoting ideas that have harmed minorities differentially like “essential/non-essential”, lockdown, zoom for public school kids, vax passports,… Experts who argued for these terrible ideas should be ashamed.
More from Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter [3]:
It is irrational and cruel to permit the vaxxed to have liberty while forcing recovered COVID patients with better immunity — often poor, minority, and working-class “essentials” — to the shadows of society.
I say let everyone free.
Jeffrey Tucker decries what he rightly calls “the fanatical ideology of ‘zero Covid'” and its viral spread in Australia [4]. A slice:
So what Australia (and New Zealand) attempted was something every scientist has long known to be unworkable in modern times and highly threatening even if it were workable. To be sure, this idea of virus suppression (where does it go?) tempted policy makers the world over. Trump tried something similar in February and March of 2020, and only later came to see the errors of his ways. As bad as the US response has been, we’ve been mercifully spared the fanatical ideology of “zero Covid.”
Not so in Australia. They blocked outward and inward travel. They broadcast all kinds of messages about staying away from people. They closed businesses. Governments monitored social media for anyone straying too far from their assigned area. When they decided to lock down, they went all in. A nation that prided itself on its good government suddenly found itself managed like a vast prison colony.
By the summer of 2020, the country was cheering that they had somehow miraculously defeated the virus. Politicians claimed that Australia was the envy of the world. Their experts had shown the way! The US and the World Health Organization all said that Australia has done a great job. Fauci was full of praise.
That lasted for a few months. The data showing so few cases were helped by a low level of testing. It is actually impossible to know whether and to what extent Covid had been suppressed. Regardless, in the fall of 2020, positive tests began to rise. Then it came to the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney. The politicians took charge, and unleashed hell.
It’s been rolling lockdowns ever since. Protests were at first sporadic, and then more. The Prime Minister got involved and echoed the line of the local governors. The people who are protesting are being selfish, he said. The lockdowns will continue so long as the people are failing to comply, he said, echoing words of a prison guard.
UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers talks with Bari Weiss, who is actually optimistic about the future [5]. Here’s slice from Weiss’s remarks:
It’s become almost comical in how irrational it [the series of Covid restrictions] is. The idea that I need to wear a mask when I walk into a restaurant, wear a mask, as I sit down at my seat, I am told by the restaurant, that I should only remove it when I’m eating and drinking, but then I’m removing it and sitting in a packed restaurant and lots of other people eating and drinking… At some point down the line, I feel like we’ve lost sight of the science here, and it’s become a lot more about signalling what political tribe you’re a part of.
Sir John Key pleads with his fellow New Zealanders to get realistic about Covid [6]. A slice:
Some people might like to continue the North Korean option. I am not one of them.
Public health experts and politicians have done a good job of making the public fearful, and therefore willing to accept multiple restrictions on their civil liberties, which are disproportionate to the risk of them contracting Covid.
Another problem with the hermit kingdom model is that you have to believe the Government can go on borrowing a billion dollars [7] every week to disguise that we are no longer making our way in the world.
Alexis Keenan reports that “natural immunity emerges as potential legal challenge to federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates. [8]” (HT Todd Zywicki [9])