Tag: covid

It’s Over But It Isn’t

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?

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?

“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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Lessons Not Yet Learned?

When will we learn to distrust big government?

While readers of this Common Sense have been tracking the Wuhan Lab Leak story for two years now, most people are still behind the curve. Fortunately, another government agency has weighed in on the Lab Leak side, as reported by Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel in the Wall Street Journal: “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.”

No wonder there’s disagreement and confusion, though: “The Energy Department made its judgment with ‘low confidence,’ according to people who have read the classified report,” Gordon and Strobel explain.

There remains much we do not know, of course. But we should understand that is largely because China’s totalitarian regime has purposely hidden information from the world. With the full assistance of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Government Science in the U.S.… and evasive coverage by our media.

Then consult Brett Stephens’ “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” in The New York Times last week.

Now, many of us embraced masks early on, when little was known, bascally advising mask wearing as a signal of hope. We can do something. But soon the masks themselves masked something other than hope: the raw powerlust of the elites in their lockdown tyranny over the masses.

But for actual reduction in the contagion of a virus, Stephens reports, masks are useless. Citing an Oxford epidemiologist with the great name of “Tom Jefferson,” not even N‑95 masks do the trick: “Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.

What about those studies we were informed proved the case? They were “nonrandomized,” “flawed observational studies.”

Yet lots of politicians and bureaucrats — including “the mindless” Centers for Disease Control — keep pushing masks.

It’s not that we cannot learn. It’s that they don’t want us to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

The 2021 Spike

The graph is startling. It shows VAERS reporting numbers in Florida from 2006 through 2022.

VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Little blips of data run along the bottom of the graph through 2020, a year in which there were 2466 reports of negative effects.

And then came 2021, the year in which mRNA and viral vector vaccines were rolled out in the United States, pushed heavily by the federal government and All Responsible Opinion, subsidized per the dose to the drug companies, as well as by lifting the burden of liability for … adverse effects.

The number of Floridians reporting such adverse effects soon after taking the vaccines spiked to 41,473.

The next year it subsided a bit, but to an otherwise walloping high of 9,104.

“In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period,” Florida Health tells us in the online “Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety,” of February 15. “The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.”

“Just publish the data; give us the facts,” Dr. John Campbell stated in his online talk on the report. He’s appreciative of the Sunshine State’s newfound transparency: “Well done, State of Florida.”

But nearly all other governments have failed to acknowledge such data much less act on it “in meaningful ways”: “badly done, other 49 states. Badly done, the UK; badly done, Europe; badly done, Canada; badly done, New Zealand, Australia.”

Quite a spike in government “badly dones.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability media and media people responsibility

A Question Best Left

“One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of a congressional subcommittee,” bemoaned David Quammen last month in The Washington Post. “The question is this: Where did the virus that causes covid-19 come from?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

Science writer Quammen admits “the origin question is a seductive one,” but argues it is a “mystery” these congresspeople “will be least likely and least qualified to solve — and they should focus their mission elsewhere.”

While our career congresspeople do not, on the whole, sport the credentials best suited to the investigation, I’m sure they’ll invite some real-life scientists to testify. Moreover, the idea of telling folks — even politicians — not to worry their pretty little heads about an issue causing them concern … well, that might understandably rub you the wrong way.

The “science journalist” says it’s “a scientific question best left to scientists.”

Though also not a scientist, Quammen seems somehow to have settled upon the answer to the question … that he doesn’t want Congress asking.

He calls the origin of COVID-19 a “not-quite-solved mystery” since most “experts say they believe this virus almost certainly reached humans by natural spillover — that is, from a nonhuman animal host.”

Not via a lab-leak, mind you.

Yet, “almost certainly” doesn’t sound scientifically very certain at all. It does, however, fit well with Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

You decide whether Quammen’s prose is inspired by science or politics:

Consider one implication you might draw from a lab leak: We need less science, especially of the sort that fiddles with dangerous viruses. And from a natural spillover: We need more science, especially of the sort that studies dangerous viruses lurking in wild animals. From a lab leak: It was those foolish scientists in a Chinese lab who unleashed this terrible virus upon us. Suspicion, accusation, presumption of guilt and even a tincture of racism may therefore inform our relations with China, not an effort to encourage transparency and scientific exchange.

Catch that? It’s important that COVID’s origin be as Big Science says … or the racists win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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