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COVID-19

The Media Wants a Return to 2020

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8 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

By Ian Miller Ian Miller 

They’re never going to stop.

We’re a few months away from the end of 2024, four and a half years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a truth that should clearly be universally acknowledged by now, that the pandemic policies enacted by global governments were a catastrophic failure.

Mask mandates were pointless, harmful, and completely ineffective. School closures were one of history’s biggest mistakes, causing learning loss among young people that will set them back an entire generation. Business shutdowns achieved little except for hurting small business owners at the expense of massive corporations and necessitating a rolling series of money printing leading to rampant inflation.

Then we witnessed the formerly unimaginable emergence of vaccine passports.

Regardless, those policies have generally, and thankfully, come to an end. Overwhelming evidence, data, and scientific studies have confirmed that the Anthony Fauci-CDC doctrine was based on nothing, and accomplished less. But among the fearless media columnist set, there’s a desperation to return to the glory days of pandemic restrictions. The latest example coming from an opinion article published over at The Hill, complete with the usual misinformation, poor reasoning, and willful ignorance of current realities.

Continuing the trend that Fauci started.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky on December 27, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Media Personalities Can’t Let Go of Bad Covid Policies

The column by Aron Solomon presents several absurd arguments, blaming a “recent surge” on “new variants” and saying we “need to take stock of where we are” with the virus.

“The recent surge in COVID-19 cases has disrupted summer travel plans, overwhelmed healthcare facilities in certain areas, and left many Americans dealing with the familiar symptoms of fever, cough and fatigue,” Solomon writes. “The summer months, typically associated with lower respiratory virus activity, have instead seen a significant uptick in COVID-19 infections.”

This is factually inaccurate.

The summer months have traditionally been associated with higher respiratory virus activity in certain parts of the country. The South and Southwest have consistently seen higher Covid spread in the summer months, corresponding with past flu patterns. Even the extremist public health agencies such as the one that dictated their edicts to the city of Los Angeles have acknowledged that summer surges have happened every year since 2020.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what the data shows, summer increases in Covid spread, decreasing over time as population immunity grows and testing decreases.

But Solomon’s run of misinformation wasn’t done there.

He then blames the “relaxation of public health measures” for the increased Covid spread this year.

“Second, the widespread relaxation of public health measures has created an environment conducive to transmission,” he writes. “Mask mandates, social distancing guidelines and restrictions on large gatherings have all but disappeared. This return to normalcy, while massively psychologically and economically beneficial, has provided the virus with ample opportunities to spread.”

The pointless mask mandates disappeared years ago in many parts of the country, which is just as well as they conclusively did not matter. Comparing regions with and without mandates has consistently shown that areas with mandates have the same Covid rates, if not worse. Even in California.

It just doesn’t matter, because masks don’t work.

Solomon then advocates for the return of pandemic restrictions and a “commitment to public health” to combat the summer 2024 surge.

“While much progress has been made in terms of vaccination and treatment, the current surge is a stark reminder that complacency is not an option. The road ahead will require a renewed commitment to public health, both from government leaders and from individuals.

We all need to prepare for not only the possibility of continued disruptions but for another new normal that might be a little closer to 2020 than how we’ve recently been living. That means preparing for future waves and the long-term implications of a world in which COVID-19 remains a persistent, if manageable, threat.”

Beyond the absurdity of demanding restrictions that have already failed, Solomon is ignoring that there was effectively no “surge” in summer 2020, in any meaningful metric. Getting sick, unfortunately, is a part of life. People will have colds, flus, Covid, and their resulting symptoms forever. No matter what we do.

But what matters is whether these waves lead to a substantial increase in associated deaths. They conclusively have not. Per the CDC’s Covid Data Tracker, Covid-associated mortality is essentially near all-time pandemic lows.

Roughly 1.8 percent of all registered deaths across the country were even tangentially associated with Covid. Those massive peaks though? Those came with the strictest restrictions of the pandemic, the restrictions Solomon wants to return.

Even the massive increase in 2021-2022 came after vaccines and boosters were widely available.

But a combination of immunity across a wide swath of the population effectively ended the pandemic. It had nothing to do with any pandemic policies from governments here or abroad. The fact that this is even remotely up for debate is a testament to the power of media misinformation and a willingness from people like Solomon to ignore contradictory information.

There is no emergency, there is no need to reinstate restrictions of any kind to deal with Covid. Especially because those restrictions are useless anyway.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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armed forces

Judge dismisses Canadian military personnel’s lawsuit against COVID shot mandate

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan rejected a lawsuit from more than 300 past and current members of the Canadian military who lost their jobs or were put on leave for not taking the experimental, dangerous COVID shots.

A Canadian federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 330 past and current members of the nation’s military who lost their jobs or were placed on leave for refusing the experimental COVID shots, because she alleged that their lawsuit lacked “evidence” that the jabs were harmful.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members had sought some $1.3 million in damages from the government for having their charter rights violated due to the military’s 2021 COVID mandates, according to their lawsuit.

In a November 13 ruling, Edmonton-based Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan ruled in favor of the Trudeau government, and thus military’s COVID jab mandate, to strike down the case. Coughlan remarked that the plaintiffs’ case lacked “material facts” along with “evidence” and was filled with “vexatious language.”

READ: Canadian father files $35 million lawsuit against Pfizer over son’s jab-related death

“The only indications of bad faith are found when the pleadings baldly assert that, among other claims, Canada failed to carry out safety and efficacy testing for the vaccines, and that the Directives were premature and ‘promoted the fraudulent use of the biologics’,” she wrote, overlooking reports of thousands of injuries due to the shots in Canada alone.

As a result of the lawsuit being tossed, all plaintiffs are now on the hook to pay some $5,040 out of pocket in legal costs.

As reported by LifeSiteNews in June, documents obtained by LifeSiteNews show that the number of jab injuries in the CAF rose over 800 percent in 2021, with the most being credited to Moderna’s experimental COVID shot.

The CAF members’ lawsuit was filed in June of 2023 and overall sought some $1 million in damages, along with an extra $350,000 in general damages. The lawsuit also had a condition that there be a declaration made that mandating the COVID shots for military members was a violation of their charter rights.

READ: Israeli boy featured in COVID vaccine campaign dies of heart attack at age 8

Under the CAF’s mandate, hundreds of military members were fired, or one could say, purged for not getting the COVID shots. This is in addition to the thousands of public servants fired for not agreeing to take the COVID shots.

The CAF eventually ended its COVID mandate in October 2022, which was months after the federal mandate was lifted, but members are still “strongly encouraged” to take the experimental shot.

The federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that its federal COVID shot workplace mandate would be dropped in June 2022, as would the mandate requiring domestic travelers have the shot to board planes and trains.

In November of 2023, a CAF member who spoke to LifeSiteNews under the condition of anonymity observed that the military considers members who refuse the COVID jab “a piece of garbage.”

READ: COVID shots have 200-times higher risk of brain clots than other jabs: new report

In March, LifeSiteNews reported on large personnel losses causing the CAF to consider dropping its remaining requirements altogether.

Although Canada has a Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) program, active members of the CAF, as well as veterans, are not eligible for the civilian program. According to Christensen, this leaves many COVID jab-injured CAF members and veterans with no recourse other than Veterans Affairs Canada.

COVID shot mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as heart diseases, stroke, and death, including in children.

The shots also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.

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Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

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

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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