Brownstone Institute
Enough With These Dangerous Calculations
From the Brownstone Institute
Now that there is more open talk about vaccine injury, we are continually assured that overall these vaccines were worth it even so. The thought always occurs: it has not been worth it for the injured. Nor is their injury lessened by the knowledge that others were helped, if they were.
What precise metric are we going to use to determine costs and benefits population-wide? Many millions were forced to take experimental injections that they did not want nor need. Many were injured and with no chance of compensation. This is gravely unjust. You don’t need to take recourse to fancy philosophical conjectures (The Trolley Problem, The Lifeboat Dilemma, The Fat Man on the Bridge, etc.) to do the utilitarian calculation.
And yet, such calculations are precisely what the defenders of society-wide pandemic interventions are citing as evidence that we can and should do it again. The costs are high, they now admit, but worth the benefit.
Well, maybe not. It’s hard to say but they will keep working on it. They will decide in due course.
This is the argument of Professor John M. Barry. His book on the 1918 flu pandemic kicked off the entire pandemic-planning industry once George W. Bush read the book flap in 2005. Barry’s new article in the New York Times raises alarms about the Avian Bird Flu, the same as the whole pandemic industry is doing right now, and makes the argument that the interventions last time were just great overall.
“Australia, Germany and Switzerland are among the countries that demonstrated those interventions can succeed,” he claims even though all three countries have been torn apart by the pandemic response that is still rocking politics and showing itself in economic decline “Even the experience of the United States provides overwhelming, if indirect, evidence of the success of those public health measures.”
What is that indirect evidence? This you won’t believe: that flu deaths dramatically fell. “The public health steps taken to slow Covid contributed significantly to this decline, and those same measures no doubt affected Covid as well.”
That’s a heck of a thing. If you burn down the house to kill the rats and fail, but happen to kill the pets, surely you have some bragging rights there.
There is indeed a big debate on why seasonal flu seems to have nearly disappeared during the pandemic. One theory is simple misclassification, that flu was just as present as always but labeled Covid because PCR tests pick up even slight elements of the pathogen and financial incentives drove one to displace the other. There is surely an element of this.
Another theory relates to crowding out: the more serious virus pushes aside the less serious one, which is an empirically testable hypothesis.
A third explanation might in fact be related to interventions. With vast numbers staying home and the banning of gatherings, there was indeed less opportunity for pathogenic spread. Even if granting that is true, the effect is far from perfect, as we know from the failure of every attempt to achieve zero Covid. Antarctica is a good example of that.
That said, and even postulating this might be correct, there is nothing to prevent the spread among the population after opening except with even worse results because immune systems are degraded for lack of exposure.
Barry concedes the point but says “such interventions can achieve two important goals.” The first is “preventing hospitals from being overrun. Achieving this outcome could require a cycle of imposing, lifting and reimposing public health measures to slow the spread of the virus. But the public should accept that because the goal is understandable, narrow and well defined.”
Fine, but there is a major glaring error. Most hospitals in the US were not overrun. There is even a genuine question about whether and to what extent New York City hospitals were overrun but, even if they were, this had nothing to do with hospitals in most of the country. And yet the grand central plan closed them all for diagnostics and elective surgeries. In major parts of the country, parking lots were completely empty and nurses were furloughed in more than 300 hospitals.
Overall, that scheme (and who imposed this?) didn’t work too well.
The second supposed benefit you can predict: shutting down buys time “for identifying, manufacturing and distributing therapeutics and vaccines and for clinicians to learn how to manage care with the resources at hand.” This is another strange statement because authorities actually removed therapeutics from the shelves all over the country even though physicians were prescribing them.
As for the supposed vaccine, it did not stop infection or transmission.
So that scheme didn’t work either. There is also something truly cruel about using compulsory methods to preserve the population’s immunological naïveté in anticipation of a vaccine that may or may not work and may or may not cause more harm than good. And yet that is precisely the plan.
The most alarming part of Barry’s article, even aside from his incorrect claim that masks work, is this statement: “So the question isn’t whether those measures work. They do. It’s whether their benefits outweigh their social and economic costs. This will be a continuing calculation.”
Again we are back to benefit vs costs. It’s one thing for a person confronting a true moral or personal difficulty to make that calculation and live with the consequences. Every philosophical problem listed above – Trolly Cars and Lifeboats – involves personal choices and single decision-makers. In the case of pandemic planning and response, we are talking about groups of intellectuals and bureaucrats making decisions for the whole of society. In the last go-round, they made these decisions for the entire world with catastrophic results.
Many hundreds of years ago and following, the Western mind decided that giving such power to elites was not a good idea. The “continuing calculation” about what costs and benefits are experienced by billions of people from compulsory impositions is not something we should risk, not even with AI (which Barry says will solve the problems next time). Instead, we generally decided that a presumption of freedom is a better idea than empowering a small elite of scientists with the power to make “continuing calculations” for our supposed benefit.
Among many problems with the scientistic scheme for elite rule in the realm of infectious disease is that the population as a whole has no way to evaluate schemes and claims made to them by the government itself. They told us terrible population-wide death would come from Covid but it turned out to be exactly what others said back in February 2020; a disease impactful mainly on the aged and infirm.
Similarly, with the bird flu, we’ve been through a quarter century of claims that half of humanity could die from it. So far, every jump from animals to humans has resulted in reparable maladies like conjunctivitis.
But let’s say the bird flu really does get bad. Should the scientists who ruled us last time be trusted to do it again? That’s Barry’s plea: he demands “trust in government.” At the same time, he wants government to have the power to censor dissent. He falsely claims that last time, “there was no organized effort to counter social media disinformation” despite vast evidence of exactly this.
More information is actually what we need, especially from dissidents. For example, Barry celebrates that dexamethasone worked against Covid. But he fails to point out that the “experts” said in February 2020 that dexamethasone should not be used. Indeed, if you followed the Lancet, you would not have used them at all. In other words, Barry’s article refutes itself simply by showing the experts were desperately wrong in this case.
And, honestly, he knows this. Every bit of it. I have no doubt that if we met for cocktails, he would agree with most of this article. But he would also quickly point out that, after all, the New York Times commissioned the article so he can only say so much. He is merely being strategic, don’t you know?
This is the problem we face today with nearly all ruling-class intellectuals. We don’t actually disagree that much on the facts. We disagree on how much of the facts we are in a position to admit. And this puts Brownstone in a very awkward position of being a venue to say publicly what most people in the know say only privately. We do it because we believe in doing so.
All of which underscores the more general point: government and its connected scientists simply cannot be trusted with this kind of power. The last experience illustrates why. We forged our societies to have laws and guaranteed liberties that can never be taken away, not even during a pandemic. It is never worth using the power of the state to ruin lives to fulfill anyone’s abstract vision of what constitutes the greater good.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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