Tag: covid

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national politics & policies too much government

No Federal Solution

Joe Biden, covid, masks, vaccines, federal, state

In a virtual meeting, online, the National Governors Association talked with President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., last week. The biggest issue? COVID.

About COVID tests, “I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion two months ago,” Mr. Biden confessed. 

While serious people are taking this seriously, blah blah, the truth may be that tests do more harm than good. There have always been problems with the tests: too many false positives; they induce panics at mere “case” levels, thus feeding propaganda and unworkable government “solutions” to the “crisis.”

About which Biden now admits he’s got … nothing. 

Having run against Donald Trump and his alleged lack of a plan, boasting how the Democrats would conquer COVID, Biden now declares defeat: “Look, there is no federal solution.

“This gets solved at a state level,” acknowledged the president, “. . . and it ultimately gets down to where the rubber meets the road and that’s where the patient is in need of help, or preventing the need for help.”

That last phrase is odd. 

“Preventing the need for help” sounds like he might mean patients taking control of their health care and their own immune systems. Could Mr. Biden be alluding to Vitamin D, Vitamin K, zinc, HCQ, Ivermectin, and many other immune system boosters and virus blockers?

Or Biden could merely be fumbling. He’s made much of the Omicron Variant, including at the governors’ meeting. But instead of addressing the actual trend of the latest iteration, politicians and propagandists push the idea that Omicron is deadly, when the evidence is clear: it is much less deadly than previous variants. 

The great danger of COVID remains the governmental response.

Including, alas, Biden’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

The Pivotal Issue

Hitler, baby

A recent video about vaccination passports brought to mind an old parlor game: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Hitler?”

Most civilized people realize the moral problems of this thought experiment. Sure, Baby Hitler grew up to be Nazi Führer Hitler, a mass-​murderer worthy of assassination. But young Adolf wasn’t a monster. Yet. 

Moreover, every step on the way to becoming a monster was accompanied by situations in which civilized people could have stopped the coming horrors without murdering a child:

  • World War I was a choice (or set of choices).
  • The Versailles Treaty was a choice.
  • The Weimar Republic hyperinflation was the result of bad decisions.

More interesting than Killing Baby Hitler would be a parlor game about who could have stopped each horrific event that went into the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. What decisions could they have made that would have changed history?

The point of these counterfactual exercises? To learn how to make better policy.

Such as in a pandemic, when governments are expanding their power over citizens with lockdowns and business shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. While in America many such mandates are being struck down as unconstitutional, beyond the authority of officials, in Germany and Austria vaccine passports are going into tyrannical effect. 

We need to take seriously the warning in the video mentioned at top, This Pivotal Moment. Stop vaccine mandates. Reverse the mandates in effect. Abolish internal passports. Resist this tyrannical notion of a two-​tier society.

In Europe, masses of people have taken to the streets in defiance.

Open defiance is also necessary here … in “the land of the free.”

That’s how you stop Baby Hitler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

The Big Lesson

lab rat, Covid, lockdowns, freedom

“Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic,” wrote J.D. Tuccille last Friday. “Now they want their country back.”

On the same day, Matt Welch concluded his somewhat more caustic piece, “They Just Keep Closing Schools and Mandating Masks,” with a warning: “If you think Tuesday was a bad day for Democratic busybodies, let them keep trying to squeeze the walls in on this rat cage of an American life.”

The main theme of these two Reason pieces is about right. Americans got snookered into giving up too much; the only silver lining is that we may have learned a few things.

One lesson? People who talk up “follow the science” are least reliable at relaying scientific findings, much less “following” those findings … or sticking to scientific method.

During the pandemic, the Science Pushers lied to us, hid truths, spun us helter skelter, pushed government force willy nilly, and stuck out on limbs with less reason than the hokey pokey.

But, through all the deception, fear-​mongering, and downright bullying, one thing became clear: elite pharmaceuticals, bureaucrats, politicians and corporate media shills nurture interests wildly at variance of the American people’s. 

For those who have read the economics of Public Choice, X‑efficiency, and old-​fashioned “political economy,” this is hardly a shocking lesson. It is as familiar as a well-​worn slipper.

Yet this lesson, pretty clear to most sane folks, needs driving home. Repetition will help it really sink in.

It’s too important to forget, for it was liberty that Americans surrendered, power being what was unconstitutionally expanded and exercised — making the limiting of government the proper response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

One Against the Mandate?

Daily Wire, law suit, Covid, vaccines, mandates

“President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health,” declares Jeremy Boreing, co-​CEO of The Daily Wire. “They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”

Quoted by Alex Swoyer in The Washington Examiner, Boreing is explaining why his company — best known for its platforming (as we say these days) of commentators Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh, but also for its burgeoning news service and mini-​entertainment empire — will not comply with “the Biden administration’s COVID-​19 vaccine mandate for private employers.”

It is “suing in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the company announced Thursday,” Swoyer reports.

Though we’ve been hearing about these “requirements” for over a month, they were published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) just yesterday. Folks at The Daily Wire had been talking up their challenge ever since Biden first dropped his bomb, and had their legal response ready.

OSHA’s mandate, Swoyer explains, “directs large companies to require employees to get vaccinated by Jan. 4, or else pay for them to get tested weekly,” and also requires those tested-​but-​unvaccinated employees “to wear a face mask.”

Note that the tests for the coronavirus are not reliable, tests for antibodies are not even mentioned (and also not reliable), and face mask utility has not been demonstrated to anything approaching certainty, as I’ve discussed.

Grounds for challenge are legion.

Other affected companies should join The Daily Wire with parallel lawsuits, or at least amicus briefs.

The president’s mandate must not stand. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption Regulating Protest

De-​Licensing the Opposition

Scott Jensen

Scott Jensen is a family physician and a candidate for governor of Minnesota who opposes counterproductive lockdown measures.

His medical license is being officially investigated — for the fifth time — because of complaints about . . . well, what, exactly?

He has produced a video on the theme of “if it can happen to me, it can happen to you.” Here’s the kind of complaints that instigated the latest fake investigation:

  • Dr. Jensen challenged the validity of President Biden’s national vaccine mandate. Guilty as charged, he says.
  • Dr. Jensen is not vaccinated. “I’m not. I have a plethora of antibodies, because I have recovered from COVID.”
  • Dr. Jensen has opposed mandatory masks for school children. “Last I checked, school boards are making those decisions. I have my opinion, and I’m entitled to it.”
  • Dr. Jensen has promoted the use of ivermectin. “That’s a decision between a patient and a doctor.”
  • Dr. Jensen has “inappropriately” promoted the benefits of natural immunity. “I can run for office if I so choose.”

On the other hand, all this is pretty damning, isn’t it? Dr. Jensen has done perhaps the worst thing that any American can do: uttered opinions. 

Publicly.

I hope, Gentle Reader, that you yourself have never articulated an opinion in mixed company while also being licensed to do whatever it is you do to earn a living. Apparently, in the eyes of some people, these two things don’t mix.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Settled Science

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, covid, gain of function

Remember the blow-​up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-​of-​function research? 

Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-​laden, made-​for-​Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-​pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right.…”*

Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”

Might? 

Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function. 

Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.

NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported … in April 2018.”

“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

Is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-​19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R‑Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google. 

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