Brownstone Institute
If It’s Over, Why the Continued Emergency?
An 11th renewal of the federal government’s emergency declaration is ludicrous. Is this about midterm elections? Is this about Presidential elections in 2024? Is this purely politics now and the drive to hold onto accrued power amassed with the lockdown lunacy?
Omicron as the current dominant variant and its subvariants (clades) is very mild for most people, even many high-risk people. They can adequately handle the infection and cope with it. The reality is that while Omicron can still present a challenge (as does seasonal influenza and common cold and a range of respiratory illnesses) to elderly persons and especially those with comorbidities (as well as obese persons, immune-compromised persons), it is revealing itself to be no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so.
Moreover, we have used repurposed therapeutics (as prophylactics and treatment) effectively and we have availability. We also know who is the at-risk group and how to effectively manage, and hospitals were given hundreds of billions of dollars in PPE, PPP, and COVID relief money to prepare. They are prepared.
The data clearly showed very early on after the COVID vaccine rollout that there was no difference in terms of viral load between a vaccinated and an unvaccinated person. Thus the policy was punitive and nonsensical, and not just for nurses, but for all employees subjected to it without any scientific basis. Hospitals and workplaces should take these employees back and pay them all lost wages. Do all they could to make them whole.
Moreover, a large portion of the vulnerable population in the developed world is already protected against severe disease. Importantly, we have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and as mentioned, there is a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient e.g. elderly in a nursing home or similar congregated setting or private residence, become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease – already low before Omicron – is minuscule. This is the data. This is the evidence across global nations.
Even in places with strict lockdown measures, there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered Omicron cases daily and countless unregistered positives from home testing. Measures like mandatory masking and distancing have had negligible or at most small effects on transmission.
Large-scale population quarantines only delay the inevitable. Vaccination and boosters have not halted Omicron disease spread; heavily vaccinated nations like Israel and Australia have more daily cases per capita than any place on earth at the moment. This wave will run its course despite all of the emergency measures.
There is simply no justification for maintaining emergency status. So why would HHS move to renew it an 11th time? The lockdowns, the school closures, the shielding-in-place, the business closures, the personnel firings and shortages and school university disruptions have done at least as much damage (and certainly more) to the population’s health and welfare as the virus.
The American population and most global nations that engaged in lockdown lunacy etc. have been crushed, devastated; economies and their peoples. We harmed and caused deaths of our populations by the lockdown lunatic policies and especially our poorer minority populations and women, who could not afford to shield.
We catastrophically shifted the burden of infection and illness from the café latte, laptop, ‘Zoom class’ to the poorer in society who could not shield as they had to maintain front-facing employment to survive. They could not ‘remote work.’ Many business owners, laid off employees, and children in America committed suicide due to the lockdown restrictive lunacy.
The state of emergency is clearly not justified now, and it cannot be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe infection at some unknown hypothetical point in the future. We just cannot operate public health policy this way. If a novel severe strain or variant were to occur and it seems unlikely from Omicron (though we are placing the spike antigen under relentless selection pressure with suboptimal vaccinal antibodies, mounting suboptimal immune pressure, and in the midst of massive infectious pressure) then that would be the time we discuss a declaration of emergency.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley has weighed in on POTUS Biden’s declaration that the pandemic is over, indicating that it is most certainly going to be cited
“in a variety of briefs in cases challenging emergency powers and policies used by the Administration. It was just a year ago, in September 2021, that the President imposed such rules to “ensur[e] the health and safety of the Federal workforce and the efficiency of the civil service.” President Biden announced a similar requirement for federal civilian employees. Exec. Order No. 14,043, 86 Fed. Reg. 50,989 (Sept. 14, 2021). One such example could be the appeal now being considered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The issue of the sweeping pandemic authority being claimed by the Biden Administration is now going before the full court in an en banc rehearing.”
Turley went on to argue that since POTUS Biden is declarative that the pandemic is now at an end just as the Justice Department is defending pandemic policies in various courts, then this will pose tremendous challenges to the Justice Department in terms of defending the policies and mandates. “Even if one were to argue that the policy should be reviewed as supported at the time, the continued viability of the policy can now be questioned in light of the President’s own statements.” Turley further notes “if the pandemic “is over,” some may question the continued uncertain status of military personnel and federal employees on vaccine status as well as lingering mask mandates being used in some states and by certain businesses.”
Americans have sacrificed enough of their human rights, their dignity, liberties, and of their livelihoods for two and a half years in the service of protecting the general public health. They have been attacked, demeaned, ostracized, castigated, and ruined financially in many instances given they were prevented from earning a living. Americans lost people to the virus, vulnerable people and no one can deny that. COVID was punishing, especially the earlier strain (variants) on the vulnerable elderly and this happened largely because the government, the medical establishment, and medical doctors refused to recognize the value of early treatment and their actions ended up costing thousands of lives.
But America lost most lives due to the lockdowns and school closures, and we lost above all, our freedoms. It is time to allow America to be unshackled from these COVID policies. Completely. Living life freely once again, taking reasonable precautions, unfettered by government’s failed COVID lockdown policies whereby not one has worked!
The current emergency declaration must be canceled. It is time. It is time to bring this COVID pandemic to a full closure and to move on to proper public legal inquiries as to the decision-making that went into the COVID response, particularly the rollout of the ineffective and safety untested COVID shots.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
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
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