Tag: pandemic

The New Normal: “Covert Moral Enhancement” for “coronavirus defectors”

Happy Pills in our water to make us proper cooperative citizens? “Covert moral enhancement” to produce “superior post-persons”?

That is literally “Soma” from Huxley’s Brave New World. It can’t be satirized or exaggerated. It is the very zenith of dystopian horror. And it is being seriously suggested by research scientists in apparently respectable publications.

This may be just one article in a comparatively small (and murkily funded) magazine, but that’s how it starts.

Of course, it also further feeds into the stream of propaganda which seeks to dehumanise those who express dissent.

We’ve already been told that “defectors” are more likely to be narcissists or psychopaths, and seen them subject to police brutality with total impunity.

New Zealand are setting up “quarantine centres” where you will have to stay “indefinitely” if you refuse a to be tested.

And now it’s being seriously posited that those who refuse to comply should be subject to covert medication to render them more malleable to the “public good”.

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Coronavirus pandemic leading to depression and drinking, CDC says

Americans are struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic after months of harsh lockdowns, widespread disease and economic suffering that has fallen disproportionately on the young, minorities and those who are most vulnerable to financial shocks.

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finds the number of Americans reporting adverse mental health or behavioral changes — like drinking or drug use — on a perilous rise in recent months.

About a quarter of Americans reported symptoms of an anxiety disorder, three times higher than what a similar survey found a year ago. Those reporting depression has quadrupled, to nearly a quarter.

About 13 percent of Americans said they were drinking or using drugs more because of the stress of the pandemic. And almost 11 percent said they had seriously considered suicide in the last month, including more than a quarter of those between 18 and 24 years old.

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Hydroxychloroquine works in high-risk patients, and saying otherwise is dangerous

As of Wednesday, some 165,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19. I have made the case in the American Journal of Epidemiology and in Newsweek that people who have a medical need to be treated can be treated early and successfully with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and antibiotics such as azithromycin or doxycycline. I have also argued that these drugs are safe and have made that case privately to the Food and Drug Administration.

The pushback has been furious. Dr. Anthony Fauci has implied that I am incompetent, notwithstanding my hundreds of highly regarded, methodologically relevant publications in peer-reviewed scientific literature. A group of my Yale colleagues has publicly intimated that I am a zealot who is perpetrating a dangerous hoax and conspiracy theory. I have been attacked in news articles by journalists who, ignorant of the full picture, have spun hit pieces from cherry-picked sources.

These personal attacks are a dangerous distraction from the real issue of hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness, which is solidly grounded in both substantial evidence and appropriate medical decision-making logic. Much of the evidence is presented in my articles.

To date, there are no studies whatsoever, published or in pre-print, that provide scientific evidence against the treatment approach for high-risk outpatients that I have described. None. Assertions to the contrary, whether by Fauci, the FDA, or anyone else, are without foundation. They constitute misleading and toxic disinformation.

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