Tag: covid

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Accountability national politics & policies

Look Who Took a Mile

Deborah Birx, CDC, covid

Sometimes our dear leaders confess their lies just to prove to everybody how smart they are as grand strategists.

“Look at us! We out-manipulated, outfoxed everybody with our gloriously sophisticated strategy. Yes, we lied and provided political cover in order destroy the ability of so many people to walk around and make a living. This was the plan from the start. But we couldn’t say so. . . .”

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Deborah Birx, former CDC official and former Coronavirus Response Coordinator, clearly explains her give-us-an-inch/we’ll-take-a-mile method. “No sooner had we convinced the Trump Administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that.”

And: “The White House would ‘encourage,’ but the states could ‘recommend’ or, if needed, ‘mandate.’. . . The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.”

And: “Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to [avoid the] appearance of a full Italian lockdown. [But we had to match] as closely as possible what Italy had done — a tall order.”

Etc.

I disagree with those who say that Brix et al. should be tarred and feathered. But let’s not put them in charge of any future pandemics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom judiciary too much government

Hollowed-Out America

covid, freedom, hysteria

While Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s comments in Arizona v. Mayorkas are worth studying in full — the case is about immigration — his thoughts on the late pandemic panic stand out.

“Since March 2020,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes,” and the judge goes through a long list of decrees, including:

  • Closing churches but not casinos
  • Threatening violators with both civil penalties and criminal sanctions
  • Surveilling church parking lots, recording license plates, and issuing warnings against attending even outdoor services.

And he adds that the federal government got in on the tyrannies.

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces,” he notes. “They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” Gorsuch acknowledges this is not exactly a revelation: “Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

There is a deeper problem, though, for the “concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.”

All the way through the pandemic, and even now, we have been barraged by messages about “misinformation and disinformation” about the disease and the treatments (proactive and reactive) against it. And the people in power — bureaucrats as well as politicians — were called “experts” while actual experts (along with earnest amateurs) were hounded, their ideas suppressed. 

Now we know that much of what was then held as good information was in error, even lies. 

Very unsound governance: Gorsuch characterizes it “a shell of a democracy.” 

“Hollow.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly national politics & policies

On the 1197th Day…

flatten the curve

Yesterday, the COVID crisis ended. Officially.

That is, on May 11, 2023, the “public health emergency” expired, following the termination of the “national emergency” over a month earlier.

Jordan Schachtel, writing at The Dossier on Substack, did the math and noted that this “marks an incredible 1196 Days To Slow The Spread.” 

“That’s right,” Mr. Schachtel elaborated. “Almost three and a half years of engaging in peak absurdity in the name of stopping [the] virus. And yet, the ‘experts’ don’t have a single thing to show for it.”

Remember why our leaders wanted to “slow” that “spread”: not to save lives over all. They admitted that the gross numbers of the affected couldn’t be affected by the half-a-month lockdown and mask mandates that Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump pushed. They argued merely that lockdowns might “flatten” the distribution of cases and personal crises over time to alleviate a bottleneck — crowding — for a brief, initial pandemic period in the nation’s hospitals.

That was it.

That was the rationale.

But after the 15 days were over, almost none of the emergency pandemic units set up by the military had been used to take hospital overflow.  Either (a) the 15 days had been enough, or (b) it had all been unnecessary. The answer is (b).

Everything else was just politics — the extended lockdowns, mask mandates, suppression of alternative treatments, the massive subsidies and vaccine mandates and passports and much else. What it sure seemed like? A vast jury-rigged scheme to get people to take the experimental “vaccines” then being rushed through the regulatory process.

Indeed, one thing was very clear from Day 16 onward: a “national” policy made no sense, for the pandemic hit regions of the country at different times and to different degrees. New York got hit hard in 2020, but the Pacific Northwest’s hospitals were mostly empty during the pandemic — causing a very different “beds” stressor. 

Yet our politicians pushed a national policy of emergencies that lasted, at the very least, 1181 days too long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Back-Pedaling at the Speed of Lies

Dr. Fauci, covid, blame

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” challenges Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times last week.

We sure are a long way from the heady days when he proclaimed, “I am the Science.” It’s more like in the book of Genesis, where Cain asks the great rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In other words, Fauci’s trying to set the record . . . crooked.

For Fauci was the Authority that bolstered all the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere, urging mask mandates and lockdowns and what-have-you.

Now, he is doing more than back-pedaling. He is shifting blame. Blame for failed policies.

But he’s not alone in this. For The Epoch Times, Petr Svab notes another famous back-pedaler: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Watch Ms. Weingarten declare on C-Span, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” but click that link and read the Twitter crowd-sourced fact-checks, showing how that’s . . . deceptive:

We still argue about how much COVID leaders lied during the heat of the panic. I advised, at the time, to give them a little leeway.

Regarding policy, that is.

Not lying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom property rights

Rent-Free in Oakland

Covid, rental, eviction, moratorium

The city council of Oakland, California just voted 7-1 to end the town’s pandemic-rationalized moratorium on eviction for nonpayment of rent.

But it’s not over yet.

The moratorium will linger on until July 15. Three years is supposedly insufficient time for tenants to gird themselves to again honor the contract with the persons who provide them with shelter.

And then it still won’t be over.

The council’s slow-walk phaseout comes with a permanent new limitation on what landlords can do. This explains the lone dissenting vote, that of Council member Noel Gallo, who says that the rights of landlords are still being insufficiently protected.

As the text of the legislation passed by the council makes clear, its revision of the city’s “just cause” ordinance further violates the property rights of landlords. In part, the new ordinance provides that any failure to pay rent during the last three years which a tenant can plausibly attribute to the pandemic is sufficient to prevent an eviction, even if not relieving the tenant of the obligation to pay that rent.

Will the reprieve be too late and too little for property owners like John Williams? For the last three years, Williams has been stuck with a freeloading tenant who has been financially able to pay rent but who has refused to do so and refused to move.

The tenant, occupying half of the duplex where he also happens to live, owes him $56,000. And Williams is facing . . . foreclosure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Bioweapon

China, covid, virus, responsibility, bioweapon

Back in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton informed a Fox News audience that “just a few miles away from that food market [initially proposed as the epicenter of the outbreak] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

The Senator’s mere suggestion that the fast-spreading virus might have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs — which were (a) known to be sloppy, and (b) doing U.S. funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was immediately labelled a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” by The Washington Post (which has since corrected its story).

Some scientists and pundits also expressed outrage — erroneously — at Cotton’s “implication” that China had unleashed a bioweapon. In Cotton’s defense, he never said any such thing. 

Hmmm?

When the lab leak theory made a comeback — after a year or more of Fauci & Co. colluding to snuff out the very thought — it seemed the one thing “we” somehow “knew” was that it certainly wasn’t a bioweapon.

Yet, unsure of its precise origin, how can we know that? 

“It matters little whether it was intentionally leaked from a lab or not,” Brian T. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, explained at a recent Hillsdale College speech, “what is clear is that they allowed it to spread throughout the world knowing the harm it would cause.”

The Chinese rulers did this both by covering up human transmission for many weeks and by knowingly allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel throughout the world spreading the new virus. That’s why Kennedy calls it “a biowarfare attack against the United States.” 

In his book, No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West, Andrew Small writes about a well-placed Chinese friend who told him in January of 2020 that “the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.”

With friends like China . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Censored Under Pressure

censorship, Twitter, Covid, free speech, freedom of the press

Journalist Alex Berenson is suing members of the Biden administration — and others, inluding Pfizer officers — for pressuring Twitter to ban him for what he wrote about the COVID-19 vaccines.

The best-known of his heretical tweets says, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

In the months since August 2021, when Twitter expelled him “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules,” such hardly intemperate observations have become less controversial. Vaccine proponents have retreated, typically claiming, at most, that the putative vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness and death.

Berenson first sued Twitter to challenge its ban. The suit succeeded; eleven months after Twitter banned him, it reinstated his account.

But Twitter had not been acting independently; it had succumbed to a lengthy campaign by the Biden administration to censor Berenson. Any such actions by government officials are, of course, unconstitutional.

The defendants in Berenson’s new lawsuit include President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, and former White House official Andrew Slavitt (“at the center of the conspiracy”). Two Pfizer officers are also named: board member Scott Gottlieb and CEO Albert Bourla.

Berenson’s detailed complaint alleges that “after months of public and secret pressure, Defendants succeeded” in getting Twitter to ban him.

The private pressure is attested by internal documents released by Twitter and government documents produced during the course of Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit against censorship by the Biden administration.

In defending his rights, Alex Berenson is helping us all retrieve freedoms we lost in the pandemic panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom national politics & policies too much government

It’s Over But It Isn’t

Covid, emergency, Dr. Fauci

Is the pandemic over?

On March 29, House Joint Resolution 7 passed with a 68–23 margin in the Senate: 47 Republicans and 21 Democrats voting Yea. Earlier this week, Joe Biden signed it into law.

But, as The Epoch Times explains, that resolution “states that the pandemic national emergency ‘is hereby terminated,’” but “does not impact the public health emergency, which is still scheduled to terminate on May 11.” 

But that lag — why terminate one (“national”) emergency footing and leave the other (“public health”) to linger for another month?

It’s worse than that, though. Back in September, President Biden told 60 Minutes that the pandemic was over, noting then that “no one’s wearing masks; everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

The administration offers bureaucratic rationales for the lagtime. But its impact on you and me is said to be zero: “To be clear, [the] continuation of these emergency declarations until May 11 does not impose any restriction at all on individual conduct with regard to COVID-19,” explains a January letter from the Biden administration to Congress.

Repeat that: the continuation of the emergency declarations does not impose any restriction at all on individual conduct. Which should have been true from the beginning, for the Constitution does not provide any powers to the general government over individuals on these matters.

Does public health really need another month of crisis . . . after acknowledging there isn’t a crisis anymore?

At least, there is a May 11th at the end of the tunnel.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Time for Truth Is . . . Now?

China, Covid, FBI

The “kooky” conspiracy hypothesis that in 2019 a Wuhan laboratory that had been rebuilding viruses to make them better, stronger, faster then somehow unleashed the COVID-19 virus on the world has been gaining traction lately.

Three years ago, such a thing was declared to be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. After all, the Chinese government itself, which always tells the truth, had repudiated this explanation, even going so far as to conscientiously refuse to cooperate with investigations into the origin of the pandemic.

Many policy makers and media mavens in the West nodded vigorously. No need to inquire further.

But the dam has been breaking in recent months. Now, even U.S. government agencies — government agencies themselves! — are saying yeah, probably a lab leak.

The FBI has hopped on the probably-lab bandwagon and, according to its director, has been on the wagon a while.

FBI director Chris Wray says: “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

Quite some time now? And kept quiet?

Author James Kunstler wants to know if the FBI knew during all the time that fey Wray “was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google . . . to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.”

It’s hardly “kooky” to inquire as to what the FBI was thinking, simultaneously believing something to be true and, yet, in contravention of the First Amendment, working to suppress that very belief.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Imprudent Skeptics?

Covid origins

“For nearly three years, anyone asking whether COVID-19 originated as a lab leak outbreak was silenced and branded as a conspiracy theorist,” stated Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo), on Monday. “Now these prudent skeptics stand vindicated.”

While I enthusiastically support the bill he and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, may I be excused if I get caught up on that term “prudent skeptic”?

Apparently Hawley means “skeptics” such as himself. But who are the imprudent skeptics? 

What would Hawley say should they be vindicated?

The bill, unanimously passed the Senate, would require the Biden administration to “immediately declassify all intelligence reports pertaining to the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Hawley insists that we, the people, “deserve to know the truth.”

But is it a mere curiosity that neither he, in his above-quoted statement, nor The Epoch Times, in its article on the bill, finger any likely entity other than the Wuhan Institute for Virology and the Chinese government?

For, as noted here many times, the evidence of culpability for conducting dangerous gain-of-function bat coronavirus research in China does not point merely to the Chinese. 

It points to the U.S. Government, the offices of Dr. Anthony Fauci, specifically.

Hawley doesn’t mention that evidence, nor does The Epoch Times.

This is not to let China off the hook for the pandemic, a Debacle At Best. (I’m not known for being “soft on China.”) I bring this up because of the implication: we skeptics of the Zoonotic Origin Theory have not been pointing only to the Chinazis, but also to our own governmental conspirators.

Surely it’s not imprudent to be skeptical of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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