Tweet [1]
There are abundant reasons why our public-health leaders are less than universally trusted. For example, Anthony Fauci admitted to lying about masks early in the pandemic. He also prevaricated — at best — about U.S. goverment funding of “gain of function” viral research. And he seemed intoxicated by his fame, to the point that he often acted more like an A-list celebrity than a scientist.
Beyond personalities, people have noticed that our most prestigious scientific and medical journals have gone woke. This ideological poisoning of “science” breeds distrust in the process and the conclusions published in these journals — as I [3] and others have written [4].
Not only that, but people have also noticed that many in “the science community” seem to relish their newfound power — and want to expand it beyond fighting COVID. For example, Fauci has urged that the U.N. and WHO be strengthened to “rebuild the infrastructure [5] of human existence” to prevent future pandemics. Meanwhile, others want technocrats to be empowered to force policies on the public to fight climate change [6], as they have during the pandemic.
Noah Carl reports that, from early January 2020 through mid-June 2021, Sweden’s excess mortality was negative [7]. A slice:
Sweden has had negative excess mortality. In other words, the level of mortality between January 2020 and June 2021 was lower than the five-year average. If this isn’t a vindication of Anders Tegnell’s approach, I don’t know what is.
Among the recommendations offered by this new paper in BMC Public Health is “Reopen schools now” and “Avoid lockdowns.” [8] (HT Jay Bhattacharya [9])
Freddie Sayers tweets about the newly announced arrival in Austria of the straw man in full [10]:
Well that didn’t last long.
Cases actually started increasing *faster* after the lockdown for the unvaccinated, so Austria is now moving to universal lockdown and mandatory vaccination from the spring.
Fortunately, more Europeans are protesting the straw-man’s current stomping through their countries [11]…. And, because the U.S. media are largely silent on these protests, el gato malo offers this post [12].
James Alexander decries totalitarianism even when it is “nice.” [14] Two slices:
We need to recognise that these are three elements of what we should probably call NICE TOTALITARIANISM. The words ‘social control’ do not quite capture the total significance of what is being put forward by our governments. Every government ever in the history of the world has believed in some measure of social control. To some extent, we define government in terms of its achievement of social control – though this, of course, may be minimally or maximally interpreted. The reason I prefer the phrase ‘nice totalitarianism’ is that it captures the fact that the control now, if not maximal, is a lot closer to maximal than anyone would have expected a few years ago. But there is another reason I prefer it: and this is because it captures the distinctively Western, or specifically, in our case, British, tonality of this totalitarianism: the fact that it is nice.
We are being nice, through ‘saving the planet’ (by sitting down on a busy road or sightseeing wind turbines), ‘making oppressed people feel included and secure’ (by tossing a statue into the sea or signing a petition) and ‘preventing Covid deaths’ (by wearing a mask or getting vaccinated). Who would not want to do those things?
…..
COVID is the name of the threat: it threatens us as individuals, threatening us with suffering and an early death, though our response to it has been interestingly not only collective but coercive. Let us call the response to this threat FAUCISM. (We need a name for the response, to cover the myriad of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. Anthony Fauci’s name may stand for the whole enterprise, as he is more internationally famous than our own Chris Whitty or Patrick Vallance, as well as more determined and more obviously compromised: and he has become the object of a cult in the United States at least.)
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) [15]
William Nattrass asks why, throughout much of the European continent, lockdowns of the unvaccinated have so quickly become the norm [16]. A slice:
It is now common for Covid vaccine sceptics in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to compare the level of state control being exercised against them to the authoritarianism they witnessed in the twentieth century. A regional head of the Czech state healthcare body responsible for enforcing pandemic restrictions recently complained that members of the public were comparing them to the Czechoslovak secret police during the Communist era. [17]
The Covid capers of the last couple of years have clearly highlighted the fact that there is a dearth of good leaders who are able to make, without threat, reasonable and convincing arguments to a largely peaceful and law-abiding population.
The behaviour of leadership has also highlighted another and much more serious problem and that is that there is no longer any faith in the notion of responsibility. Responsibility has long since been replaced with legislation which intrudes into every nook and cranny of our lives. It has become the way society manages itself. The idea that every problem can be solved with a piece of legislation, has taken over as the pre-eminent tool of leadership. We have drifted into a form of legalism which is at odds with true democracy.
If there is a good thing to come out of the pandemic it is the highlighting of the divisive nature of this form of societal management.
Megyn Kelly talks with Scott Atlas: