Evidence-based medicine might sound like a tautology — what kind of medicine isn’t based on evidence? I’m afraid that you’d be surprised. Massive decisions are often taken on misleading, low-quality evidence. We see this all the time. In the last pandemic, the swine flu outbreak of 2009, I did some work asking why the government spent £500 million on Tamiflu: then hailed as a wonder drug. In fact, it proved to have a very limited effect. The debate then had many of the same cast of characters as today: Jonathan Van-Tam, Neil Ferguson and others. The big difference this time is the influence of social media, whose viciousness is something to behold. It’s easy to see why academics would self-censor and stay away from the debate, especially if it means challenging a consensus. Academics who are tenured, like me, don’t have to worry so much about people pulling strings above us. This is the importance of tenure; it allows academic freedom. In a crisis, when tempers run so high, you need a variety of views more than ever.
Tag: lockdowns
Covid-19 vaccine STILL does not mean you can ‘eat and drink indoors’, Fauci says, prompting Rand Paul to call him a ‘petty tyrant’
White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci is once again facing pushback after advising those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to still avoid normal activities, like eating and drinking indoors.
“Fauci continues to ignore 100 years of vaccine science,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) wrote about Fauci – with whom he has feuded before – in a Monday tweet slamming the infectious disease expert as a “petty tyrant.”
The comments came in response to a Sunday evening interview in which Fauci encouraged vaccinated individuals to continue taking precautions and not resuming normal activities just yet.
Asked if eating and drinking inside restaurants and bars is “okay now,” Fauci replied in the negative.
“For the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamic of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” he said. “Like just yesterday there were close to 80,000 new infections and we’ve been hanging around 60, 75,000.”
Even if vaccinated, individuals need to “remember that you still have to be careful and not get involved in crowded situations, particularly indoors where people are not wearing masks,” according to Fauci.
“His only real theme is ‘do what I say’ even when it makes no sense,” Paul, a physician before he entered the Senate, wrote about Fauci. “If you’ve recovered or been vaccinated – go about your life. Eat, drink, work, open the schools.”
YouTube Censors Coronavirus Roundtable Hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
Google-owned YouTube took down a video of a roundtable conference hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), featuring former White House coronavirus task force member and medical scholar Scott Atlas, and the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
The Great Barrington declaration argues that blanket lockdowns and mask mandates are counterproductive, instead advocating for a targeted approach focused on protecting vulnerable segments of the population.
The three co-authors, who attended Gov. DeSantis’ roundable, are Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor of epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.
Florida’s revenge…
Say it with me…
Why The Push Is On To Make Pandemic Life “Permanent”
One year after Americans were ordered to close down society for “two weeks to flatten the curve,” Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth warned, “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic.”
Because new variants of SARS-COV-2 are impervious to existing vaccines, says Kluth, and pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop new vaccines fast enough to keep up, we will never be able to get “back to normal.”
“Get back to normal” means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.
Covid-19 certainly wasn’t the beginning. Americans were told “the world changed” after 9/11. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the “new threat of terrorism.” Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probable cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest.
“Keep us safe,” they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.
Perhaps seeing how willingly the public rolled over for the political right during the “War on Terror,” authoritarians on the left turbocharged their own war on “climate change.” Previously interested in merely significantly raising taxes and heavily regulating industry, they now wish to ban all sorts of things, including air travel, gasoline-powered cars, and even eating meat.
Since Covid-19, however, even the freedom to assemble and see each other’s faces may be permanently banned to help the government “keep us safe.”
Campaigner Calls For 2 Year Lockdown, Government Permission to Leave House
A campaigner on Twitter is calling for the UK government to impose a lockdown that lasts for a minimum of 2 more years as well as a law where citizens would have to apply for government permission to leave their homes.
Yes, really.
The account came to attention yesterday after a bizarre post that also called for a 24 hour curfew during winter and only “one essential shop trip allowed by law” per week.
Bloomberg Op-Ed: “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic”
Bloomberg has published an article by Andreas Kluth which argues that new variants of COVID-19 mean the pandemic will be “permanent” and that there will be an “endless cycle” of restrictions.
Kluth says that the idea the world will at some point go “back to normal” is “almost certainly wrong” and that SARS-CoV-2 will become “our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse.”
The author cites “the ongoing emergence of new variants that behave almost like new viruses” which means that “we may never achieve herd immunity” because current vaccines are “powerless against the coming mutations.”
“If this is the evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2, we’re in for seemingly endless cycles of outbreaks and remissions, social restrictions and relaxations, lockdowns and reopenings,” says Kluth. “At least in rich countries, we will probably get vaccinated a couple of times a year, against the latest variant in circulation, but never fast or comprehensively enough to achieve herd immunity.”
Despite the fact the global population has been hit with worse pandemics which at the time it had far less medical expertise to deal with and eventually got over them, Kluth somehow thinks that won’t be the case with COVID.
Kluth is by no means the first to suggest that the pandemic won’t end for years if ever.
In his book Covid-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum globalist Klaus Schwab asserts that the world will “never” return to normal, despite him admitting that coronavirus “doesn’t pose a new existential threat.”
A senior U.S. Army official also said that mask wearing and social distancing will become permanent, while CNN’s international security editor Nick Paton Walsh asserted that the mandatory wearing of masks will become “permanent,” “just part of life,” and that the public would need to “come to terms with it.”
After a Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive the Tyranny of COVID-19?
“The remedy is worse than the disease.”—Francis Bacon
One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.
It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 afflictions.
Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.
Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.
LA court orders power cut at restaurant that defied COVID rules. So the owner bought a generator.
Tinhorn Flats refused to abide by a temporary restraining order issued March 8 that required the restaurant to remain closed because the restaurant violated COVID-19 restrictions, KTTV-TV reported.
But the restaurant continued operations in defiance of the order.
In response, a Los Angeles Superior Court said Friday that Burbank officials could disconnect power at the restaurant.
In a statement issued by the city, officials hinted they may seek to lock the doors of the restaurant if the owners continue to operate their small business.
The statement said:
This morning due to Barfly Inc., Tin Horn Flats, continuing to remain open in defiance of the Temporary Restraining Order issued on March 8, 2021, the Los Angeles Superior Court authorized the City of Burbank to disconnect the electricity to Tin Horn Flats’ property after giving 24-hours’ notice. The court did not provide permission to padlock the doors at this time but continues to reserve such a remedy as a last resort.
Did the court order stop the restaurant?
Despite having no power, the restaurant has continued operations undeterred.
“The owner says they will continue to stay open and are currently using a generator as a power source,” KTTV reported.
Indeed, the restaurant said in a Facebook post on Sunday, “We are open and we will NOT comply.”
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.