Brownstone Institute
The Vaccine Narrative Is as Leaky as the Vaccines
Let’s start with two simple questions. If regulators had the information available to them of the leakage between Covid-19 efficacy rates in controlled trials and their effectiveness in the real world, would they still grant emergency use authorization? Would their legal framework permit them to do so?
Remember, all laws serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they are permissive and enabling, granting powers to do certain things. On the other, they are limiting and restrictive, ring-fencing what may lawfully be done even by the state.
Second, is Denmark being ruled by an anti-vaxxer government and health authority? From July 1 Denmark, which has an excellent health infrastructure including data collection, banned under-18s from being vaccinated and in mid-September the ban was extended to boosters for under-50s, other than in exceptional circumstances for immunocompromised and high-risk individuals in both cases.
The explanation offered by the health authorities is interesting both for what they said and what they did not say. They anticipate a rise in Covid-19 infections over autumn and winter and “aim to prevent serious illness, hospitalisation and death.” This risk applies to 50-year olds and above and not those younger. Because the vaccines are not meant to prevent infection, they will no longer be offered to the under-50s.
However, governments don’t ban products merely because they are not beneficial. Bans apply only to products that inflict harms. So the unstated reality is the benefit: harm ratio is no longer favorable. The really interesting question therefore is: why don’t they say so? The empirical data from around the world demonstrates negligible to negative vaccine effectiveness for healthy under-50s and greater risk of serious adverse events. Denmark’s decision marks official if implicit acknowledgment that harms are greater than benefits.
Baffling Origins of Lockdown
The lockdowns across the Western world remain, to me, inexplicable and baffling. The abandonment of a century’s worth of cumulative scientific knowledge and global and national pandemic preparedness plans were based neither on new science nor emerging data.
Rather, they were based firstly on apocalyptic modelling using flawed assumptions and secondly on dubious data from China whose authoritarian policies played to innate instincts in our own health bureaucrats and politicians, cheered on by the mainstream media. In a further nod to anti-scientific groupthink conformism, critical and contrarian voices within the health and political establishments were silenced and exorcised. Outside government, they were vilified and expelled from the public square in active collusion with the social media tech giants.
In February 2020, when the cruise ship Diamond Princess docked in Yokohama with 3,711 people on board, Kentaro Iwata, an infectious diseases expert at Kobe University, described it as a “Covid-19 mill.” Outbreaks seed easily on cruise ships because of the high numbers of susceptible elderly passengers living and socializing in confined quarters.
Even under these worst possible conditions, under one-fifth of the captive population was infected, a small number of the infected died and 98.2% recovered. Using age-adjusted data, Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine estimated the infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.5% and a case fatality rate (CFR) of 1.1% on the Diamond Princess and, as of March 26, 2020, a global IFR of approximately 0.20% (compared to the seasonal flu’s 0.1% and the Spanish flu’s >2.5% which killed mostly people in the 20–40 age bracket). Reassuringly, even for the over-70s without comorbidities, the IFR was below 1%.
All this ‘bullet proof’ data was thrown out in favor of completely unreliable data and fake videos from China that were then fed into mathematical modelling to produce apocalyptic scenarios that in turn were treated as forecasts by the media and governments. Madness.
India’s Experience: Vaccines Are Not Necessary for Beating Back Covid
India’s experience in mid-2021 proved that vaccines are not necessary for rapid mass recovery from a virulent Covid wave. Anyone who has followed the Covid narrative will remember the horrific pictures in spring-summer 2021 with bodies floating ashore on riverbanks and piling up in cremation grounds. The gradient was broadly similar during the curve’s ascent and descent, with the death rate reaching 1.06 per million people on April 20, peaking at 2.98 on May 21 and 23 and falling back to 1.00 on June 24 (Figure 1). On those three dates India’s full vaccination coverage was 1.26%, 2.96% and 3.53% of the population, respectively.
People questioned the reliability of the data, openly asserting a vast undercount in order to cushion the political embarrassment. Knowing something of India, I disagree and noted more than a hint of racism in the coverage. No matter. Even if the authorities deliberately suppressed the rising numbers of dead, it would be absurd to suggest they did the same with the downward numbers. The symmetrical rise and fall is consistent with the experience of most countries with successive waves of the virus. Whatever else might explain the fall, it certainly wasn’t high vaccination coverage. Herd immunity to the then-dominant Delta variant through a mix of uncontrolled infections and modest vaccination, possibly.
Another contender for the explanation is the widespread use of ivermectin. Mid-crisis in May last year, the state government of Uttar Pradesh (India’s most populous state with 200 million people!), boasted it had been the first to authorize large-scale prophylactic and therapeutic use of ivermectin against Covid-19 in May–June 2020. Studies were confirming that “the drug helped the state to maintain a lower fatality and positivity rate as compared to other states.”
A meta-analysis by Andrew Bryant and Tess Lawrie in the American Journal of Therapeutics of 24 randomized control trials (RCTs) in 15 countries (one of which was subsequently pulled as possibly fraudulent) concluded that ivermectin significantly helps to prevent and treat Covid-19 and, with a 62% mortality reduction, can potentially save millions of lives. They published a follow-up analysis in the same journal that removed the suspect study and the results still showed robust ivermectin efficacy.
An analysis of seven RCTs, covering 1,327 patients, by Swedish physician Sebastian Rushworth found “a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among Covid patients treated with ivermectin.” A recent large-scale study from Brazil published on August 31 found that, compared to regular users, non-use of ivermectin increased the risk of Covid-related mortality by 12.5 times and dying from Covid by seven times.
Yet for some strange reason, Western health bureaucracies would neither recommend ivermectin – a low cost, off patent and no profit drug for Big Pharma – nor fund a rigorous but fair (that is, not designed to fail) clinical assessment of its efficacy against Covid. It had morphed into Voldermectin: the drug that must not be named.
Global Experience: Vaccines Are Not Sufficient to Beat Back Covid
My earlier articles show why Australia’s Covid numbers this year demonstrate that vaccines are not sufficient to prevent mass infections, hospitalization and deaths either. Steve Kirsch alerted his Substack subscribers on September 17 to an internal report for the governing Liberal Party of Canada back in June. It makes for depressing reading that will come as no surprise to all of us who have grown increasingly cynical about public health authorities and governing elites. The report draws on official Ontario data, is informed by wide international scholarship and emphasizes that the empirical results are in line with trends in other Canadian provinces and countries.
The fully vaccinated show rise in hospital admissions within 5-6 months; the boosted, within two weeks and rising thereafter for several months. Immunity through natural infection can last up to 20 months. Vaccination shows considerable benefits to over-70s and some benefit to over-60s but virtually no benefit to under-60s with respect to hospitalization and mortality rates. By contrast, adverse events are concentrated in the 18–69 age groups, and especially, in order of most to least, in the 40–49, 50–59 and 30–39 age groups.
Because the “abundance of data” demonstrates that vaccines do not prevent infection, transmission, hospitalization and deaths for the under-60s, “public health policy tools such as, mass vaccination campaigns, mandates, passports and travel restrictions need to be re-evaluated for relevance.” Factoring in also “known adverse events and unknown long-term effects,” the “empirical evidence investigated in this report … does not support continuing mass vaccination programs, mandates, passports and travel bans for all age groups.” The government has sat on this report since June – what a surprise.
Meanwhile there continues to be very little evidence in the real world that countries with high rates of multiple vaccine doses suffer correspondingly lower rates of Covid-19 mortality (Figures 2 and 3). In the two charts, Chile has both the highest booster rollout and the highest Covid-related death rate per capita, while India has the lowest booster coverage yet the second lowest mortality rate.
Some experts point to a worrying trend of rising excess mortality among under-14s in 28 European countries. An article in Vaccine – downloaded more than 110,000 times in preprint – seems to suggest, albeit tentatively, that added risks of serious adverse events are 2.4 and 4.4 times higher than the reduced risk of hospitalization for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, respectively. Cautioning that the harm-benefit ratio will vary with populations at different Covid risk profiles and in different time periods from the Moderna and Pfizer studies they analyzed, the authors conclude with the need for large, randomized trials to come to robust conclusions. It would help if Moderna and Pfizer would release the granular, individual level data in their possession.
In a follow-up note on Substack, two of the study’s authors note that the normal rate of adverse events for other vaccines is 1-2 per million. The swine flu vaccine (1976) was pulled after it was associated with Guillain-Barre Syndrome at a 1 in 100,000 rate. By comparison, the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials show 125 adverse events per 100,000 vaccinated people, while preventing between 22-63 hospitalizations.
Another new study of almost 900,000 5-11-year-old children in North Carolina, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to concerns that vaccines don’t just lose their effectiveness in just a few months; they also destroy natural immunity against reinfection severe enough to put them in hospital.
Panels C and D (the study’s authors use “Panel” rather than “Chart”) clearly show that among people infected by the Delta variant, protection against reinfection of the unvaccinated lasts longer than of the vaccinated. The former’s effectiveness was still above 50% eight months later in May 2022 while the latter’s had fallen to zero (Figure 4). But with the Omicron variant, the previously infected are slightly better off vaccinated than unvaccinated after two months (94.3:90.7%) and much better off after four months (73.8:62.9%). The likely, albeit not definitive, explanation is that the vaccines themselves are destroying the protection provided by natural immunity.
Three comments about Panels E and F (Figure 5). First, while the x axis for Panel E is in weeks, Panel F’s is in months. So the first visual impression is misleading. Second, the maximum effectiveness of a vaccine against a reinfection severe enough to require hospital admission is around 88%, reached approximately four weeks after the first dose is administered. By contrast, the initial effectiveness of a previous infection is 100% and remains above 95% (remember the vaccine’s much-touted 95% efficacy rate?) until seven months later.
Third, the effectiveness of a previous infection against reinfection requiring hospitalisation does not decline to the same level as the vaccine’s peak effectiveness until nine months after infection. This is the reality that the CDC denied until recently and used as the justification for discriminating between the vaccinated and unvaccinated for access to public spaces.
Three conclusions follow:
- The risk of severe outcomes for children from infection by current Covid variants is low;
- The risk of severe adverse reactions from vaccines is higher, meaning vaccination is a net harm for young children – exactly why Denmark has banned them for children;
- Exposing healthy children to the risk of infection may be better for both individual and herd immunity than mass vaccinating them.
The FDA is not likely to restore its credibility as the US regulator with the widely ridiculed revelation that the new bivalent boosters were authorized on the basis of trial results from eight mice. Professor Marty Makary from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health tweeted his concerns about this and also about the announcement of an annual Covid vaccine that is not data-driven and ignores natural immunity as well as the risks of immune imprinting (where the immune system remembers its initial response to infection or vaccination in a way that usually, but not always, weakens the response to future variants of the same pathogen) from a multi-dose vaccination strategy.
From mRNA Vaccine Hesitant to Anti Vaxxer
The Financial Times – as mainstream establishment as they come – recently warned that the US decision to roll out new booster shots without clinical testing on humans – already dubbed the mouse vaccine by some – risks undermining public trust and deepening vaccine hesitancy. “We already have a trust problem in this country and we don’t need to make it worse,” Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said. Yet, even while bemoaning the loss of public trust in health experts and institutions, Topol just couldn’t help himself and smeared the Covid vaccine hesitants and sceptics as “anti-vaxxers, anti-science” people.
He thereby demonstrates precisely the pathology so beautifully described by Julie Sladden in an article in Spectator Australia on September 8. The Tasmanian doctor, “Having probably received more vaccines than most, given I am both a doctor and fairly well travelled,” used to begin her apology for refusing the Covid jab with “‘I’m no anti-vaxxer!’” However, after two years of “government-endorsed segregation and dehumanisation of those who exercised their right to refuse the jab,” she has changed her mind.
If an “anti-vaxxer” is someone who cannot give informed consent to a “vaccine” that fails to prevent infection or transmission, has alarming safety signals, must be taken to earn back the right to live and work in society, for a disease that has a greater-than 99 per cent survivability rate, then “yes,” I’m an anti-vaxxer… My government made it so.
To this we should add the very high likelihood of crossover vaccine hesitancy to other vaccines. In my own case before the pandemic I have dutifully gone in for the annual flu shot strongly recommended for my age demographic. Not any more. The Covid experience killed my trust in the medical and public health establishment and, having done my own research, I now politely decline the annual pre-winter flu shot.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.
It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.
Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.
Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.
The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”
By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.
“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”
The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”
In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.
Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”
This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.
The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.
The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.
From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.
Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”
The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.
These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:
“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”
Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:
Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.
The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows: “While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”
(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. 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.”)
In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.
Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
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