One Taylor Dysart recently opined in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest. In her poorly written gusher of much goofiness she favorably shared a notion from one Tyler Stovall: “The notion of ‘freedom’ was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness, as historian Tyler Stovall has argued. The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy.” In response to this nonsense, el gato malo asks:
if “a belief in one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of white supremacy” then why did all the people who were slaves want freedom so much?
because unless our textbook is super wrong, i’m pretty sure they were not white supremacists!
(DBx: The far left has perfected the art of self-parody.)
In response to this report of some of the handiwork of Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
Drawn straight from the playbook of modern public health, asset seizures are a tactic guaranteed to gain the confidence and trust of the whole public.
Brilliance from the Babylon Bee.
Steve Cuozzo reports on the wokes’ addiction to public hysteria. A slice:
Propelled by propaganda about infrequent, short-lived instances of “overwhelmed hospitals,” the fear factor gave cover for every woke pipedream. Normally sane people were so scared, they put up with locked-down stores, offices, restaurants, schools and still off-limits subway toilets. The government, without resistance, seized control over business, our social lives and even the number of inches between masked-up school kids.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo went so far as to limit movie theater capacity to exactly 33% even though he sent thousands of elderly COVID victims to certain deaths in nursing homes. This wasn’t “following the science.” Cuomo was, like his fellow power-hungry Democrats, high on public paranoia, issuing edicts based on whims. Biden even embarked on a $3 trillion remaking of American society — all in the name of a Covid “emergency,” of course.
Harry de Quetteville reports, in the Telegraph, on a new book by British epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse. Four slices:
Whatever happens, one thing is certain: we will be told that lessons will be learnt. But which lessons? In politics, wise old hands talk about the importance of learning from mistakes, of knowing history and acting accordingly. But the wrong lessons, as epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse shows in a devastating new assessment of Covid lockdowns, can also lead us terribly astray.
British scientists and politicians were primed to respond disastrously to Covid-19 long before the virus was even heard of, he argues in his book The Year the World Went Mad – and precisely because of their experience with previously known diseases.
First of these was influenza, on which our pandemic preparation was based. That was why Covid models included schools, which are key drivers of flu transmission, but not care homes – with catastrophic consequences.
The second diversion was a specific outbreak of flu – the swine flu epidemic of 2009-10, largely forgotten because it killed fewer than 500 people. Those who do remember it are sure to include the parents of around 70 British children who died. “Many more [children],” as Woolhouse, 63, a father of one daughter, points out, “than died from novel coronavirus infection in 2020.”
Yet schools stayed open then. “It seems that our collective assessment of the balance of harms changed dramatically over the intervening 10 years.”
…..
Lockdowns, Woolhouse says, emerged from the idea that Covid could be eradicated. And the idea that Covid could be eradicated emerged from a third misleading encounter with disease – that other coronavirus, Sars, which in 2002 was confined and ultimately crushed in one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The problem is that there was a critical difference with Sars. It was almost exclusively transmitted by patients who were obviously sick. “Isolating symptomatic cases stopped most of the spread,” says Woolhouse. But Covid spreads asymptomatically, too, making eradication effectively impossible. Yet convincing those in power to give up on the dream of killing off Covid proved impossible.
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid.
…..
“The first good data on this started to emerge in late February 2020,” he says. And as Britain endured the first Covid wave, this data was borne out in the facts. Those over 70 had at least 10,000 times the risk of dying as those under 15 years old. “This is a highly discriminatory virus,” Woolhouse says, still exasperated today. “It’s ageist, it’s sexist, it’s racist. And we certainly knew [that] before we went into lockdown.”
Yet the Government decided that telling half the population that they were at extremely low risk would dilute adherence to the harsh rules it was imposing, and instead ramped up the threat warnings. “We are all at risk,” noted Michael Gove in March 2020. “The virus does not discriminate.” But it did then, and it does now.
“I heard [the official] argument caricatured as: everyone died, but at least no one was saved unfairly,” notes Woolhouse. Policy became a form of epidemiological communism, with imposed equality, even if it was equality of misery. “BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm,” notes Woolhouse.
…..
The result was the worst of all worlds – a reaction that failed sufficiently to protect those who were at risk while imposing hugely damaging lockdowns on those who were not.
“Sadly, the virus itself – particularly the variant Omicron – is a type of vaccine. That is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity. And it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.” – Bill Gates
Sadly?
