Brownstone Institute
Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff
From the Brownstone Institute
If you express any misgivings about the Covid policies, people are quick to retort: OK, so what’s your solution? How do you propose we should have handled the pandemic instead? Three experts came up with an answer, which they put into writing and co-signed in the Massachusetts town of Great Barrington on October 4, 2020.
[This is an excerpt from the author’s new book Blindsight Is 2020, published by Brownstone.]
Nobody could fault their credentials. A public health expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya doubles as a health economist. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiology professor at Oxford University, specializes in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, ended an 18-year run as a Harvard University professor in 2021.
The strategy they proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) flowed from a unique feature of the coronavirus: its unusually sharp and well-defined risk gradient. By the end of summer 2020, studies were confirming what the staff in every hospital already knew: “The risk [of dying of Covid] climbs steeply as the years accrue.” The CDC published an infographic that put this sharp gradient into relief: if you contracted the virus at age 75-84, your risk of dying from it was 3,520 times higher than if you caught it at age 5-17. Chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes also bumped up the risk, though not nearly as much as age.
So here we had a virus that posed a significant risk to some people and a very small risk to others. At the same time we had lockdown policies that, for all their egalitarian pretensions, divided people rather neatly along class lines. To the professional couple with a chef’s kitchen and a subscription to four streaming services, lockdowns represented a chance to reconnect and revel in life’s simple pleasures, like home-baked olive bread and Humphrey Bogart movies. To the newly landed foreign student, dizzy with loneliness under his basement ceiling, not so much. Essential workers, for their part, were expected to bear the risks deflected by the laptop class.
This confluence of circumstances made it impossible not to consider the question: Might we give low-risk groups back their freedom while protecting more vulnerable people? That’s exactly what the GBD proposed. I’ve reproduced it here in abbreviated form:
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Outside the context of Covid, there was nothing radical about the proposal. It aligned with pre-Covid pandemic guidance from such organizations as the WHO and CDC, which advised against blanket restrictions and put a premium on minimizing social disruption. It also capped off a growing unrest throughout the summer of 2020, when groups of experts in several countries began calling for a less aggressive approach to Covid—from Balanced Response in Canada to New Zealand’s Covid Plan B—and exhorting their governments to restore a more normal life for the lower-risk majority. The GBD emerged as the culmination of these rumblings, the anti-lockdown appeal that finally got the world’s attention. Quiet academics on the eve of its launch, Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff now had the global spotlight on their faces.
When the trio posted the document online, they invited supporters to co-sign it. The signature count grew very quickly for a few days—I know, because I watched the changing digits—and then screeched to a halt. The backlash began just four days after the GBD came out, when Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, called it the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” in an email to Fauci and other high-ranking colleagues. Evidently concerned about the media buzz surrounding the Declaration, he requested a “quick and devastating take down [sic] of its premises.”
Collins got his wish when an article by Yale University epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves appeared in The Nation that same day. We’re not going to follow “some notion of the survival of the young and the fittest,” Gonsalves wrote—a rather elastic interpretation of “protect the vulnerable.” A few days later, the Lancet published a GBD rebuttal statement known as the John Snow Memorandum. Fauci himself described the GBD as “nonsense” and “dangerous.”
With Fauci’s blessing to bash the GBD, media pundits and online warriors happily obliged. Outrage flared up in print and on social media: Murderers! Covid deniers! They don’t care about the vulnerable! (Never mind that the whole strategy revolved around shielding the vulnerable.) “I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats,” Bhattacharya recalls. Rumors that the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) was using the GBD trio to advance a libertarian agenda began to circulate. In fact, “AIER was kind enough to provide the venue for the meeting that led to the Great Barrington Declaration, but played no role in designing its content.”
Jeffrey Tucker, AIER’s senior editor at the time (and founder of the Brownstone Institute), explained to me that the group was “hoping to catalyze a discussion around the Covid policies. We had no idea where it would go or how big it would become.”
The term “herd immunity” acquired dark undertones, with everyone forgetting that respiratory pandemics have ended with herd immunity throughout history. The misreading of the term as a callous and individualistic concept continues to puzzle Gupta, who notes that “herd immunity is actually a deeply communitarian idea” because broad societal immunity “is what ends up protecting the vulnerable.”
Suddenly personae non gratae, the GBD partners sought vainly to defend themselves to an audience that had already blocked its ears. Gupta, a life-long progressive, was relegated to publishing her thoughts in conservative news outlets. “I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail,” she admitted in an article she wrote for the newspaper shortly after the GBD came out, adding that she was “utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.”
I had the opportunity to chat with all three members of the GBD team on separate group video calls. For the record, I cannot imagine a more sincere and gracious trio—the types of people my late mother would have called mensches. Had their critics spent an hour with them over nachos and craft beer, I’m confident the smear campaign against them would have fizzled right out.
Sometimes, a single word can make everything fall into place. The word “unpoetic,” which Gupta used to describe the Covid response, had this effect on me. It was the word I had been searching for all along, the key to what the stay-home-save-lives people were missing. It’s probably no coincidence that Gupta wears a second hat as an award-winning novelist, giving her mind a respite from the biomedical world view.
“It’s a crisis of pathos,” she said when I asked her to elaborate. “It’s a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional crisis. I call it an unpoetic response because it misses the soul of life, the things that give life meaning.”
If Gupta found the pandemic response lacking in poetry, she also decried its esthetics. Sitting at a restaurant table, breaking bread with your unmasked friends while the masked server grinds fresh pepper over your linguini…the “unbearable feudal aspect of it” offended her egalitarian sensibilities. “It echoes the caste system, [with] all sorts of rules about who can receive a drink of water from whom—all these completely illogical and highly unesthetic rules that are there to demolish the dignity of individuals.”
That same word, feudal, underpins Tucker’s analysis of the Covid restaurant closures. In one of his numerous essays, he notes that “the tavern, the coffee house, and the restaurant had a huge role in spreading the idea of universal rights.” The restaurant closures represented “a return to a pre-modern age in which only the elites enjoyed access to the finer things”—what Tucker calls a “new feudalism.”
As the pandemic progressed, Gupta continued to delight me with her insights—like the notion of shared responsibility for viral transmission. “It is fruitless to trace the source of infection to a single event,” she reflects in The Telegraph. “In our normal lives, many die of infectious disease but we collectively absorb the guilt of infecting them. We could not function as a society otherwise.”
Such a lovely way of putting it: we collectively absorb the guilt. Nobody has to worry about “killing grandma” because nobody is killing grandma. A pathogen enters our world and we divide its psychic weight among us, the burden made lighter for being shared. (It goes without saying that deliberately infecting someone falls into a different category, though I have yet to hear of anyone who seeks to do that.) But Covid culture “concentrated the blame that should have been dispersed within the community upon an individual,” Gupta says. And for individuals like Gupta, who spoke out publicly against a strategy sold to (and bought by) the public as necessary, the blaming and shaming culture knew no pity.
I had some idea of what Gupta and her GBD collaborators were going through, having received my share of invective when discussing Covid policies online: Go lick a pole and catch the virus. Have fun choking on your own fluids in the ICU. Name three loved ones you’re ready to sacrifice to Covid—do it now, coward. Enjoy your sociopathy.
None of these missives came from anyone who knew me personally, but after receiving enough of them I started to wonder if the shamers knew something I didn’t.
“What if the lockdown lovers are right?” I asked Dr. Zoom on one occasion. “What if I am a sociopath?”
“You’re not a sociopath.”
“How do you know?”
“A sociopath wouldn’t ask the question—plus sociopaths don’t introspect and you do nothing but introspect. You’re the queen of introspection.”
“Why do you think I do that? Is it a defense mechanism or something?
“See? You’re doing it again.”
I wrote an article about my experience with Covid shamers, which prompted people from all over the world to email their own stories to me. Many of them had it a lot worse than I did, their heterodox views having cost them jobs and friendships (and in one case, a marriage). Kulldorff tweeted a link to the article with an accompanying assertion that “shaming never is, never was, and never will be part of good public health practice.”
Also: it doesn’t work. Calling someone a troglodyte for opposing a mask mandate does not bring about a change of heart. It just invites resistance—or drives people underground, as Harvard epidemiologist Julia Marcus points out: “Shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes people want to hide their behavior.”
Amid all the shouting and shaming, some public health experts asked reasonable questions about how the GBD architects proposed to shield the vulnerable from a virus allowed to spread freely in society. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff had answers to that, but the time for a fair hearing had come and gone. The window of opportunity to explore a focused protection strategy, pried open for a week or two by the Declaration, slammed shut again. It wasn’t long before Facebook censored mentions of the document.
This was not a healthy state of affairs. As Harry Truman remarked in 1950, “once agovernment is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures.” Likewise, the dismissal of the GBD as a “dangerous idea” would not have impressed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote that “the essential character of a political community is both revealed and defined by how it responds to the challenge of threatening ideas” and that “fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech.” Is it just me, or were decision makers smarter back then?
With neither a Truman nor a Brandeis to defend them, the GBD creators no longer stood a chance in the public arena. Bhattacharya and Gupta turned their attention to Collateral Global, a UK charity devoted to documenting the harms of the lockdown policies, and Kulldorff joined the Brownstone Institute as a senior scholar. Which doesn’t mean they forgot about what happened. In August 2022, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, along with two other doctors, joined the State of Missouri’s lawsuit against the federal government for quashing debate about Covid policies. In the court document, which begins with George Washington’s warnings against censorship, the plaintiffs accuse the US government of “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” With any luck, the case will rattle some closet doors.
In the early months of the pandemic, scientists concerned about lockdowns feared “coming out” in public. The GBD partners took one for the B team and did the dirty work. They paid a heavy price for it, including the loss of some personal friendships, but they held their ground. In print, on air, and on social media, Bhattacharya continues to describe lockdowns as “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” with catastrophic health and psychological harms that will play out for a generation.
It’s no longer unfashionable to agree with them. A National Post article written by four prominent Canadian doctors in late 2022 maintains that the “draconian Covid measures were a mistake.” A retrospective analysis in The Guardian suggests that, instead of going full bore on the lockdown strategy, we “should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable.” Even the sober Nature admits that lockdowns “exacerbate inequalities that already exist in society. Those already living in poverty and insecurity are hit hardest”—exactly the key takeaway from the Australian Fault Lines report released in October 2022.
Kulldorff captures this sea change in one of his tweets: “In 2020 I was a lonely voice in the Twitter wilderness, opposing lockdowns with a few scattered friends. [Now] I am preaching to the choir; a choir with a wonderful, beautiful voice.” The landscape has also become more hospitable for Bhattacharya, who in September 2022 received Loyola Marymount University’s Doshi Bridgebuilder Award, awarded annually to individuals or organizations dedicated to fostering understanding between cultures and disciplines.
Perhaps the concept of focused protection simply arrived too early for a frightened public to metabolize it. But the idea never died down completely, and after the paroxysms of moral indignation ran their course, it slowly grew a second skin. By September 2022, the tally of GBD co-signatories had surpassed 932,000, with over 60,000 of them from doctors and medical/public health experts. Not bad for a dangerous document by a trio of fringe epidemiologists. And would it be churlish to point out that the John Snow Memorandum maxed out at around 7,000 expert signatures?1
The GBD didn’t get every detail right, of course. Nobody could have anticipated, back in the fall of 2020, all the surprises the virus had in store for us. While reasonable at the time, the Declaration’s confidence in herd immunity proved overambitious. We now know that neither infection nor vaccination provides durable immunity against Covid, leaving people vulnerable to second (and fifth) infections. And for all their effect on disease severity, the vaccines don’t stop transmission, pushing herd immunity still further from reach.
Be that as it may, the GBD creators wrote a crucial chapter in the pandemic story. They planted seeds of doubt in a locked-in narrative. After all the insults were thrown, the seeds took root in our collective consciousness and may well have shaped policy indirectly. And as research continues to document the dubious benefits and profound harms of the maximum-suppression strategy, yesterday’s shamers and mockers are inching back toward the question: Could we have done it another way? Might focused protection have worked just as well, or better, and with considerably less damage?
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From the Brownstone Institute
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
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