So You Want To Believe The So-Called 'Experts'?

 From the market ticker.

A point by point refutation of all what you have heard about the virus... 

So You Want To Believe The So-Called 'Experts'?

Let's go down the list.

• This virus was newly discovered in January of 2020. FALSE; Judicial watch has now proved that Fauci and the NIH knew that Covid-19 was diagnosed no later than December 2nd 2019 in Wuhan.  This was deliberately concealed under confidentiality agreements between China and the NIH.  In short Dr. Fauci and the NIH knowingly and repeatedly lied about the time of first discovery and diagnosis and it is documented that this was known in February and early March and not disclosed.  We also now know with scientific certainty that the virus was in the US no later than the second week of December of 2019 because antibodies were found in about 1.5% of blood donations from that time.  This, along with the sequencing back-computation I performed in early 2020 places the latest the virus entered the US as sometime in October of 2019 and from the blood bank data it is scientifically proved it had infected about 1.5% of the population, or roughly 4 million people in the US, by the second week of December 2019.  This in turn means that we had widespread disease which was blamed on something else. Indeed we handled all 4 million of those cases just fine up until the hysteria started, didn't we?  You didn't even know those 4 million sick people, and those who died of it, existed prior to the hysteria being ginned up.
  
  
• 15 days will slow the spread. "If we all stay home and minimize contact for 15 days -- including closing businesses, schools and not traveling -- Covid will be under control and we can trace infections and stop it."  FALSE and we now know impossible because the virus was already all over the country on an uncontrolled basis by that time and the NIH knew the virus had been circulating for at least a month earlier than they admitted at the time.  It is true that if you immediately slam your borders shut 100% you can trace and quarantine yourself out of a transmissible epidemic -- at the cost of essentially all external trade, travel and tourism.  But Fauci factually knew when we started that this was impossible because the virus had been spreading here for at least two months at the time and we hadn't done a thing about it for those two months.  We were later to learn it was four months and perhaps longer.
  
  
• If you give us 30 more days (remember, this is now six weeks to slow the spread) it'll work. FALSE AGAIN for the same reason; the NIH and Fauci knew there was no possible way to contain the virus when the original 15 days expired as he knew, factually, that the virus had been uncontained for at least three months.
  
  
• But the lockdowns and restrictions worked to save lives! Nope; this is called the "exception fallacy" and now a peer-reviewed journal entry demonstrates it.   We knew this early on too; indeed for five decades we've had "pandemic response plans" that make clear that once you have widespread community dispersion of an infectious agent attempting to lock down people or impose any other sort of non-pharmaceutical intervention is futile and causes harm.  We ignored said decades of hard-won experience -- intentionally.
  
  
• We don't have enough ventilators!  FALSE; not one of the DPA-produced ones was ever needed; NY's Governor lied and had plenty of them, as did everyone else.
  
  
• Ventilators not only are needed they will save lives.  FALSE; they killed nearly everyone put on one then, and still do.  We knew they didn't work in February as they killed 95% of the people put on then in Wuhan and this had been reported out by March.
  
  
• This is mostly a community-spread disease in places like stores, bars, restaurants, churches, concerts and the local city street.  FALSE; the CDC itself documented that more than half of all transmission was happening in homes and the next largest, and only other statistically material spread was occurring in industrial (e.g. meat packing) plants and health care settings.  Nashville suppressed the fact that they could only trace about one percent of infections to social businesses such as bars and restaurants and now the CDC itself has stated that less than 1% of spread is traceable to such public venues as restaurants and bars.  In other words we knew by late spring of 2020 the restrictions, including business closures, school shutdowns and masks couldn't work as that's not where the virus was spreading; we couldn't shut down the industrial plants without starving the population and destroying both energy production and sanitary services leading to an immediate societal and economic collapse.  Nor could we invade every house and forcibly segment positive-tested people either; we had neither the resources nor would they get away with it without the cops and government goons being turned into swiss cheese.  And when it comes to health care we could have segregated Covid-19 facilities and the people working in care homes but intentionally did not.
  
  
• Asymptomatic transmission is a major risk.  FALSE.  Over millions of contacts traced in China not one was ever proved to be from an asymptomatic person.  There has never been scientific evidence that asymptomatic spread has been material in any pandemic through history and there is no documented evidence of material asymptomatic spread for Covid-19 in the US or anywhere else.  Worse, symptomatic persons least able to afford to call out sick due to lack of paid sick time or even the threat of being fired are those in low-wage and high-contact jobs such as fast food, grocery, meatpacking and other "essential" service industries never mind care home employees who are poorly paid and often moonlight in home health care among extremely vulnerable people.
  
  
• We had no way to stop the nursing home deaths and did the best we could.  FALSE.  I pointed out immediately after Kirkland occurred that isolating the employees from all general public interaction, effectively creating a bubble, would stop nearly all of the transmission into these environments.  We happened to have a lot of empty hotels at the time too.  Yes, we would have had to pay significant bonuses to entice employees to go nowhere other than that hotel room and to work but we could have, and if we did it would have saved nearly 50% of those who died in the first four months.  Not one so-called "expert" demanded or even suggested doing so but I was calling for exactly this in March of 2020.  This, of course leaves aside the various Executive Orders that intentionally seeded the virus into nursing homes in multiple states by multiple Governors.  Indeed even this winter in still-locked-down New York there was still no segregation of employees and residents were killed in size by infection brought into the care home by employees.  Recent small case number spikes have been associated with vaccine distribution.  How's that possible?  There's only one rational explanation: The health care workers are giving the virus to the patients getting the shot!  And yet we are still told that all these people are "heroes" and don't you dare forget it.
  
  
• We didn't -- and don't -- have early treatment options that work.  FALSE; Japan spent their effort on early treatment and keeping people out of hospitals.  They have roughly a third of our population and only 8,000 dead people.  Japan is far more-dense population-wise than us yet did a hell of a lot better despite having a materially older population.  What Japan didn't do, in short, is spread the disease via their health care workers.  In short if you went to the hospital you were likely to die; this has proved out in my own county in Tennessee with a >60% death rate.  Up until we started with the panic porn -- the entire first three months of this outbreak in the US until March of 2020 -- we did fine too despite the virus being literally everywhere for months.   We in fact knew of several early treatment candidate drugs, all cheap and available, in March of 2000 and exactly zero of them were investigated by the NIH, CDC or any of the so-called "public health" institutions such as Vanderbilt, IHME, Johns Hopkins and others.  Those physicians and even hospital systems who did investigate them on their own were derogated, attacked and in some cases even threatened with license suspensions and other sanctions which continue to this day.
  
  
• Age is the primary determinant of risk.  FALSE; obesity and the panoply of health conditions caused and exacerbated by being a fat-ass is the primary determinant of risk.  Nations with lower obesity prevalence have a ten times lower or better risk of death from Covid-19 on a per-100,000 population basis.  Obesity is in each and every instance a lifestyle choice.  This was known very early on in the NY Coroner data which is updated frequently; only six persons 75 and older have died of Covid without one of a relatively short list of underlying conditions -- and over 10,500 died with one or more.  Simply put most of those who died deliberately put themselves in a medically compromised condition through their own lifestyle choices just a person who drinks too much and ruins their liver decided to drink.  Absent those personal lifestyle decisions the death rate from this disease, while certainly not zero, is approximately half as likely as death due to an automobile accident over a year's time.  Read here -- this is exactly what I pointed out one year ago.  Who's been right on this -- and who's been wrong?
  
  
• Existing drugs will not work and we have no existing treatments until you're hospitalized; we must develop new treatments and vaccines.  FALSE.  The data is that ivermectin works, among others.  A trial out of Australia conducted in Britain (they locked everything in and did not have enough people in Australia who were sick) showed Budesonide (a cheap inhaled steroid used for asthma) works if given immediately when someone becomes symptomatic.  The latter trial was stopped because it was ruled unethical to not give the controls the medicine since it prevented ninety percent of hospitalizations.  Ivermectin has worked in every trial run thus far except one recently reported study the authors themselves state cannot prove effectiveness as the necessary deterioration in cases to do so was violated to the downside immediately, possibly due to widespread community use of the drug.  The data on HCQ says it works if used early but appears to be worthless if not used until you're in the hospital.  Remdesivir, which has an EUA, was disproved -- that is, shown worthless in a very large trial called "Solidarity" (along with several other drugs) and yet is still being used as it is on-patent and expensive.  No drug works 100% of the time nor should it be expected to, but we should damn well not continue to use drugs that are proved worthless just because they cost $3,000 and the FDA issued an EUA for them.  Deliberately not treating people until they're choking to death is monstrous and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, many if not most of them avoidable at a cost of a few dollars.
  
  
• Masks are the best tool we have to stop the spread and, if you just wear them for a few -- 4, 6, 8 weeks -- we will have Covid under control.   Stated under oath before Congress by the CDC's director in September following multiple previous statements over a two month period in the summer by the CDC and NIH which urged (and got) the issuance of mandates.  FALSE and known false as Hawaii took a ten times case rate spike a month after their mandate.  This was known before Redfield perjured himself before Congress.  There are ZERO states which did not take a monstrous spike in the winter despite mandates including California with the most-strict lockdowns and mask mandates in the nation.  Compliance via multiple surveys has been around 90% with no evidence of effectiveness anywhere against non-mandate states and counties next door.  Those states including South Dakota and Florida who repudiated the mandates or refused to issue them in the first place had identical or better outcomes than the states and locales that imposed them.  The CDC has now itself published a MMWR (weekly report) in which they "claim" masks work -- their definition of "work" is a shockingly tiny decrease in death and case rates and this assumes you ignore the confounding elements in their study that could invalidate even that tiny impact.  Their "study" also deliberately did not include the control counties (where there were no mandates); if you did, for example, Blount .v. Sevier, it would be obvious that the curve in fact was worse in the mandate county in many cases.  In other words despite the nearly year-long and continual screaming about masks even the CDC itself now states that out of the 500,000 dead statistically no lives were saved at best, they deliberately ignored the control counties and further, statistically-speaking it is entirely possible zero lives were saved.  REMEMBER, WE WERE TOLD IN THE SUMMER AND EARLY FALL THAT MASKS WOULD ABSOLUTELY CONTROL THE VIRUS -- NOT JUST SLIGHTLY REDUCE CASES -- AND IN FACT THE CDC STATED UNDER OATH THAT MASKS WERE BETTER PROTECTION THAN A VACCINE.  THIS LIE WAS REPEATED FOR MONTHS AND IS STILL BEING REPEATED TODAY.  This wasn't a random statement made "off the cuff" it was made under oath to Congress five months ago and has, over time and by the data, been conclusively proved to be a lie.
  
  
• The new strains will cause another spike even worse than the last one.  FALSE; this was stated originally in the fall and repeated in December through February and yet since then cases have dropped like a stone despite these "new strains" becoming more and more prevalent.  Florida in particular has documented widespread prevalence of one of the "demon strains" that were trumpeted in Fauci's fear porn.  There has been no spike.  Incidentally viruses mutate all the time; within the first few months there were hundreds of distinct viral RNA strains of Covid-19 known and that was only of the infections sequenced -- a tiny minority.  If our actions do lead to new strains (specifically our ridiculously-unsound mass-vaccination campaign) and viral evasion occurs you may well be more screwed if you took the vaccine due to ADE than if you did not!
  
  
• The Super Bowl will cause a huge case, hospitalization and death spike in Florida due to the ridiculously crowded parties and no masks in bars and similar all over the Tampa area.  In fact the mayor threatened to arrest people for exactly this reason (an empty threat as the Governor had banned enforceability of said mandates.)  FALSE; there has been no spike.  Look for yourself; it's been over a month and cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all falling.  Where's the spike?
  
  
• Texas dropping its mask order will lead to mass-disease and death.  FALSE; there has been no spike at all.  Biden called the move "Neanderthal thinking" and predicted disaster, as did California's Newsom among myriad others, both among political leaders and so-called "medical experts" such as Fauci.  Multiple lefties claimed that "there is no limit to how far Republicans will go to kill people."  The truth is that Covid-19 cases fell by 28% in the next two weeks.  The histrionics were, once again, wrong.
  
  
• If we social distance and wear masks we will buy enough time for the vaccines to be developed and approved.  FALSE.  The case and hospitalization rate on a national basis peaked and was falling before the first jab went in the first arm.  That which you do after something happens cannot be the cause.  Simply put the vaccines did not stop any of the death; despite the lack of testing and rushed approvals they came too late.
  
  
• The only people who count for "herd immunity" are those vaccinated.  FALSE; never in history has such a lie been propagated for any disease, ever, anywhere.  The CDC by its own estimates puts the lower boundary of persons infected and recovered at over 1/3rd of the nation and that's their lowest estimate.  By more-reasonable belief the number is over half.  Those people have immunity and absolutely count.  Further, we knew in the first months that a material percentage of the population has pre-existing resistance to some degree, likely due to previous infection with other coronaviruses.  This is why the case rate peaked before fully-vaccinated persons existed in the US; there is no other possible explanation.
  
  
• Even if you've had the disease and recovered you should get vaccinated.  There is zero science behind this claim.  If you've had the measles or Chicken Pox would you take a vaccine against either?  I certainly would not and have not; that would be pointless and stupid.  The claim that there is no durable protection once infected is nothing more than conjecture; note that coronaviruses circulate among us all the time and while immunity may not be perfect (e.g. eventually you may well get it again) the odds are extremely high that if you do it will be a mild case and of no clinical or personal significance.  Suggesting that you take the risk of an experimental vaccine if you were previously infected is wildly inappropriate; there is no such thing as a drug without risk and there is zero scientific evidence that your acquired immunity will not protect you against serious disease.
  
  
• Even if you've been vaccinated or had the disease and recovered you should wear a mask and distance from others.  FALSE, unless you believe the vaccines are worthless.  If you believe the vaccine protects the person who takes it then you no longer need a mask or to distance and since others can choose to take a vaccine or not you have no reason to wear a mask or distance for allegedly protecting others either.  If you do not believe the vaccines are effective protection then why did you take it?  In short you either believe that you gain immunity by vaccination or infection or you do not; if you do then there's no reason for you to take any measures beyond either recovery or completion of the vaccination.  Further, if you don't believe infection and recovery provides meaningful and durable protection then neither will the vaccine so the same scenario applies to both cases and if you do not then believe the shots are protective then you are stupid for accepting them.

These are the very same people folks -- the NIH, the CDC, State Departments of Health, Fauci, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, IHME, Vanderbilt and many more who now tell you after a solid year of unbroken lies and falsehoods that the vaccines are both safe and effective while at the same time our government has provided a 100% waiver of all liability to the pharmaceutical companies that developed and manufactured them.

I note that unlike the other common vaccines that are safe and effective, and which took 10+ years to so-prove, the mechanism of action of these shots are wildly different; they use only part of the virus and rather than introduce it into your body they hijack your cellular metabolism to produce the spike protein exactly as would a replicating infection with the virus, but since only the "spike" is there rather than the entire virus the hypothesis is that hijacking your cellular metabolism in this fashion will not hurt you.  While for other vaccines the immunity produced is metabolically identical to infection because a killed whole virus that cannot replicate is used in this case the shots deliberately cause replication in your body of only one part of the virus, the spike protein.  This is not identical to the broad immunity provided by natural infection because it can't be with this approach; if the entire virus was used you'd get the disease and it would be systemic in every case instead of localized to your upper respiratory tract.  Further, unlike a killed virus vaccine that cannot replicate in your body at all these shots all cause production of the spike protein by your cells exactly as would an infection and that production is systemic since it is given by injection and thus circulates through the body.

The safety of this approach is unproved and in fact the rate of deaths closely associated with these vaccines is wildly higher than that associated with any of the other routinely given vaccinations including flu and chicken pox.  The intermediate and longer-term effects of this approach including the possibility of long-term or even permanent damage as a result of systemically hijacking your cellular metabolism to produce that foreign protein are unknown.

Unlike a mask you can remove you cannot un-take a shot and the litany of those previous lies killed over 400,000 Americans who otherwise would not have died.

What if their statements are false this time, specifically on safety?  What if viral evasion shows up as did during early trials for a SARS vaccine in animals, trials that were abandoned and not performed for these preparations?  It typically takes ten years to know if a candidate vaccine produces unacceptable side effects including lifetime disability due to immune dysfunction, never mind exactly how effective it is and for how long.  Further, the media and these people continually claim that nobody has been killed by these vaccines yet VAERS, the CDC's own reporting data which is public, shows roughly two thousand associated deaths.  The number of associated deaths with the annual flu shot from last year's flu vaccination which shipped roughly 170 million doses, was twenty-six.

That means the Covid-19 shots are associated thus far with roughly seventy five times (7,500%) as many deaths as last year's entire set of flu vaccines!  Remember that we give flu vaccines to old and morbid people just like the first priority for Covid-19 vaccines, so these should produce similar "associated" rates of bad events if they are similarly safe.

VAERS reporting is voluntary and thus always under-reports vaccine-associated events.  Association does not establish causation but a pattern of 75 times as many deaths as are associated with another commonly-given vaccine in the same population group damn well ought to raise anyone's eyebrows; to claim that such does not represent a "safety signal" is a flat-out lie.

I remind you that the false statements of alleged facts outnumber, by a wild margin, the true ones particularly when it comes to things you were told to do that "would work" to stem the spread of this virus.  Every single one of those claims has been proved false over time.

In short you're now being exhorted to believe a cadre of people and government agencies who are proved repeated liars and to trust them with your life after their previous lies killed your mother.

The facts are that Covid-19 basically burned itself out before the first shot went in the first arm and that none of the mitigating factors prevented net deaths from occurring; in fact all these mitigations, from mask orders to lockdowns to closing businesses and others caused more deaths due to ODs, suicides, avoidable heart attacks and strokes not screened for and other maladies by a wide factor than the mitigations, even using fatally flawed claims taken on faith by these very same agencies, could have possibly saved.  The actions we could have taken to actually reduce death, specifically as regards care home and other medical facilities we deliberately refused to do and we knew those actions would save lives.  Instead of protecting the most-vulnerable while those least-likely to be seriously harmed were naturally infected and built a wall of population immunity we deliberately refused to protect those older and sicker people from infection via the health care system and they died.

Given this record of falsehoods, actions and intentional refusals to act you're willing to bet your life they're telling the truth this time?

Even without full testing there may be reason for certain people to accept the vaccine, particularly those at specifically-high risk who have not had the virus.  However, on the data if you are not specifically morbid in known ways the risk of death from Covid-19, by the CDC's own data along with that of the NY coroner, is approximately 3/100,000.  From the associated deaths in the CDC's own VAERS system it appears the vaccines are approximately as dangerous to materially more dangerous than the disease in non-morbid individuals and that is without having any data on intermediate and longer-term effects which can only add to those risks.  Further, if you've already been infected with Covid-19 you already have broad immunity and there is zero scientific evidence that vaccination can be of any value to you whatsoever.

When do we stop allowing people like Fauci, the CDC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Governors along with various health departments to lie through their teeth about virtually everything related to this virus?

One Year To Flatten Life As We Knew It

 Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

It is a year since we embarked on an untried, untested, unscientific, draconian and frankly mad medical, social, economic and psychological experiment on millions of people. On the day we were thrust into this folly I wrote, “So that seems to be that. The end of Britain as we knew it.” All that has taken place since has, I believe, confirmed that, and my only surprise is that millions of people still cling to the bizarre idea that Lockdowns were based on science, that they were necessary, that they have been effective, and that we have a benevolent Government whose aim has been to keep us all safe. None of these things are true.

You will search in vain for pre-2020 medical and scientific literature advocating the mass quarantining of healthy people as an appropriate response to a pandemic. In fact, after a panicked Mexican Government flirted with the idea for five whole days during the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak (ending it once it was realised how devastating it would be), the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the time, Dr Margaret Chan, explicitly warned against such destructive measures being used:

“In this regard, let me make a strong plea to countries to refrain from introducing measures that are economically and socially disruptive, yet have no scientific justification and bring no clear public health benefit.”

So this disruptive, unscientific measure, with no clear public health benefit was quietly buried and forgotten about. Until, that it is, it was implemented in January 2020, in the Chinese province of Hubei, on the orders of Xi Jinping, leader of one of the most totalitarian regimes on the planet, as the lawyer Michael Sanger details in great depth here.

One might have expected the WHO to take the same line as Dr. Chan in 2009, yet by February it had inexplicably changed its pandemic response guidance, on the flimsiest and most unreliable evidence, bringing it into line with the Wuhan decree.

One might then have expected Western countries to reject this tyrannical approach, but shockingly they did not. In Britain, the perfectly sensible Pandemic Preparedness Strategy the Government had had in place since 2011, which stressed the absolute importance of ensuring minimal disruption to society, even during a virus outbreak that might take 315,000 lives in a 15 week period, was binned. Why? That is the single most important question to which we need answers, but I think that Professor Neil Ferguson gave us a big clue in his interview with The Times in December:

“They [the Chinese] claimed to have flattened the curve. I was skeptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy. But it’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

His claim of flattening the curve is a red-herring. His comment that they realised they could get away with implementing the tactics of a despotic regime is not.

Having been failed by the WHO and the Government, surely the British people would not fall for something so self-evidently absurd as prohibiting millions of perfectly healthy people from coming into contact with other healthy people? Surely the spirit that had made this country one of the freest nations on earth would kick in?

Sadly, and bafflingly, no. The British people, through a combination of being bombarded with fear, hysteria and outright lies on an unprecedented scale, meekly submitted to these despotic decrees, believing them to be something to do with being kept safe.

The Lie of Asymptomatic Transmission and the Myth of Half a Million Deaths

The biggest lie by far is that of asymptomatic transmission. Indeed, it may one day become known as the biggest lie, told to the largest number of people, in the shortest space of time. The claim was based chiefly on an incident in Germany, where a Chinese lady, who was thought to have been asymptomatic, was said to have spread the illness. However, it subsequently turned out that she did in fact have symptoms, but had suppressed them with medication. Yet that was scarcely reported on, and by that time the myth that this was some kind of new, mystical disease that could be spread by people with no symptoms had been born, and with it the basis for the Lockdowns, masks, and the myriad of other bizarre, dystopian restrictions placed upon us. Later in the year, a huge study of 10 million people in Wuhan showed zero cases of asymptomatic spread, but as you can probably guess this was entirely ignored by Governments and media around the world.

What of Professor Ferguson’s claim of 510,000 deaths? This remains the basis for the claim of Lockdown supporters that there would have been hundreds of thousands more deaths had we not locked down. Apart from the fact that the UK is currently fifth on the worldwide deaths per million table having had the third most stringent Lockdown on planet earth, according to the University of Oxford, and that countries who did not lock down have fared no worse, is there anything else that we can point to, to show the fallacy of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday prophecy?

Why yes there is, and it is in fact contained within Professor Ferguson’s report itself. He arrived at his figure of 510,000 dead for a “no-restrictions” scenario by estimating that 81% of the population would become infected, and by assuming an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid-19 at 0.9%. However, in October, arguably the world’s foremost epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, California, published a definitive study into the IFR of Covid-19. He calculated that the median rate was 0.23%, not 0.9%, as Ferguson had assumed, and his work was accepted and approved by the WHO.

This is very important: If Ferguson had used the IFR number of 0.23%, rather than 0.9%, guess what number of deaths he would have arrived at? The answer is around 127,000. Which is mighty interesting, since the total number of “official” deaths from Covid-19, at the time of writing, is 126,172. In other words, if Ferguson had used the correct IFR, the number of deaths he would have predicted in a scenario with no Lockdown would have been the same number of official deaths that we’ve actually had with the 3rd most stringent Lockdown on earth. Of course, I’m well aware that those 126,000 or so deaths were not all from Covid-19, but Lockdown supporters claim they were and so it’s for them to explain how this number is currently the same as Ferguson’s study would have predicted for a non-Lockdown situation, had he used the correct IFR.

That Lockdowns have not saved lives ought to be obvious. The virus was known since early March 2020 to overwhelmingly kill the elderly with comorbidities, and so resources could and should have been targeted to protect such people. Yet the scattergun approach that was taken of quarantining everyone is not — by definition — a targeted approach. And so the irony is that with all the absurd calls for healthy people to change their whole way of life to protect the vulnerable, what actually happened is the healthy had their lives utterly overturned, and the vulnerable were left to die.

The Destructive Power of Lockdowns

So much for the futility of Lockdowns to do good, what about their destructive power? This cannot be overstated. They are destroying lives. They are destroying livelihoods. They are destroying jobs. They are destroying businesses. They are destroying education. They are destroying churches. They are destroying trust. They are destroying mental health. They are destroying marriages. They are destroying relationships. They are destroying communities. They are destroying the idea that the police serve the people. They are destroying the rule of law. They are destroying free Britain

Time and space will not suffice to tell of the destruction to the delicate balances of life in the medical sphere (especially weakened immune systems), the social sphere, the psychological sphere and the economic sphere, or the slide to a Transhumanist future brought about by the incessant calls for humans to stay away from other humans, and the bizarre ritual of covering the human face — the most immediate and important physical manifestation of the Imago Dei — with useless bits of cloth.

To those who have acquiesced in this, I would just ask this: Do you still not see what you have done? Do you still not see what it is you have supported?

The Britain that existed prior to March 2020, or which many of us thought existed, is gone. The Britain, in which we took freedom for granted, is gone. We have entered a very different future, and what is more, the vast majority of people seem to have welcomed it. Worse than this, we are being ushered into a Transhumanist Technocracy, where we are not seen as human, made in the image of God, but merely as potential virus carriers, digital ID numbers, drones fit to be tracked and traced, fit to be watched and ordered about by the dystopian technocrats who are building their Medical Despotism around us, but not considered worthy to live quiet and peaceful lives, going about our lawful business, living life without interfering overlords meddling in every aspect of it.

Why has this happened?

For the first few months I hedged my bets between the idea that the continuance of these measures was down to politicians trying to cover up for a monumental blunder, or that it was part of something far more nefarious. And whilst I am still unclear on the origins, for me the “covering up for a big mistake” possibility became untenable in October, with the release of The Great Barrington Declaration. This was a scientifically sound, medically robust, intellectually credible way out of the crisis that had been created. It was an open door for the British Government, along with others around the world, to walk through and save face. But what actually happened is they either ignored it or, in the case of Comrade Hancock, actively ridiculed it.

I think it obvious by now that there is something far more nefarious going on. But how to explain it? Some imagine that this must require some Dr Evil character, pulling the strings and making his puppets all dance to the same tune. I don’t believe this to be so. Anyone who has even the most cursory knowledge of politics over the past two decades must have noticed that almost all the people who rise to the top have broadly the same ideology. They think the same things. They mouth the same platitudes. They walk the same walk. And if you don’t think, speak or walk like them, why you’ll never be invited to the party. It is fairly obvious that many of these people have seen Covid-19 as an opportunity to increase their power, to control people, and to remake society in their own hideous image.

But that’s not all. I have seen endless disquieting comments – echoing my own thoughts – from both Christians and non-Christians, that the inexplicably bizarre reaction to what happened was as if millions of people have been put under some kind of spell. On this, it would be well to remember that there are things that go on which are well beyond our ability to explain by purely human reason and human actions:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:1).

Looking to the Future

Having been lulled and propagandised into the acceptance of measures that are not only futile in and of themselves, but which have destroyed the idea of what we might call normal life, millions have now been lulled into the idea that rushed, untried, untested “vaccines”, which are not due to finish their clinical trials until 2023 (see links to Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna trials), are some sort of salvation and way back to normal. But as the news in recent days has shown, they are in for a big disappointment. Your overlords do not want to let you return to normal. They have the bit between their teeth, and I don’t think they are about to let this opportunity go.

What we are seeing is far bigger, far more comprehensive, far more awful than most of us can comprehend. As Naomi Wolf summed up in a fantastic commentary on the situation recently:

“But this time we do not just face a war on freedom. This time we face a war on human beings, and on all that makes us human.”

Indeed. From Lockdowns to social distancing to masks, humanity and what it means to be human is under attack. There is but one peaceful way out of this Transhumanist Technocratic future: individuals, churches and nations need to repent before God, and having repented they need to plead with Him for deliverance from this judgement, and that he will re-establish truth, reality, and what it actually means to be human, in a world that has forgotten these things. The hour is late. The need really is urgent.

 

Covid Cases Spike in a Dozen States With High Vaccination Rates Which May Signal a Feared Health Catastrophe

 

 

 

 Some of the worst predictions of 2020 seems to be playing out: The mRNA vaccines may be making things worse, not better... as famous virologists predicted...

 Guest Post by Bill Sardi

Virologists and public health authorities aren’t publicly saying what this means, at least not yet… but they know there may be something very ominous unfolding.  Something virologists all feared.  Something that must be kept hush-hush until vaccine makers inoculate the world and make their billions of dollars and national leaders reach their political goals.  But politicians just may end up taking blame, not credit, for a health catastrophe of unprecedented proportion.

The fact COVID cases are spiking in a dozen States with high vaccination rates may indicate vaccination is spawning viral mutations that turn vaccinated individuals into superspreaders.  The vaccine suppresses symptoms but fails to halt transmission.

A vaccine-induced health catastrophe may be unfolding.  It is something journalist Mike Whitney recently called “Satan’s Poker.”  It is what mathematicians in France recently feared in their analysis of the future course of the COVID pandemic.

COVID-19 is likely mutating and is turning on younger age groups.  As the mathematicians stated in October of 2020 in the journal of Mathematical Biosciences, health authorities need to monitor, very early on, if a significant number of younger people are affected by a severe form of the disease.  That would be a shift from the frail elderly to middle-age adults, which is what is occurring in Israel where 50% of the population has been inoculated with an RNA vaccine.

Israel becomes the country where its citizens become guinea pigs

Israel is the human laboratory where such a catastrophe may first be noticed.  Reportedly 76 of every 100 Israelis have been vaccinated with the Pfizer RNA COVID-19 vaccine at $28 per dose.

Under a headline article entitled “Israel’s Clever Coronavirus Vaccination Strategy,” DW.com (Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster) quotes the chief of anesthesiology at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv to say:

“We are seeing young people connected to a heart and lung machine – something we have not really seen before.  We are witnessing tragedies here.”

The government there in Israel is blaming the problem on vaccine refusal rather than investigating whether the vaccine itself is changing the direction of the pandemic.

A frightening story comes from Mike Whitney, writing that “Israel’s COVID-19 cases… spike sharply during the first month of the mass vaccination campaign.”  Israel has sold itself to Big Pharma and has agreed to become a giant experimental laboratory for the new RNA vaccines.

As the RNA vaccines have been rolled out and around half of the Israeli population has been immunized there has been a major shift in coronavirus demographics: “70% of new COVID-19 cases are under age 39; only 5.5% are over age 60; 40% of critical patients are under age 60,” according to Whitney’s report.

This begs the question: have the vaccines created a more virulent strain of the virus that targets younger age groups, in particular the unvaccinated.

According to Whitney’s report, Orthodox Jews in Israel now experience a 15-fold rise in morbidity while Israeli Arabs experienced a decline.  The Arabic segment of the population did not comply with the efforts to vaccinate as did the Orthodox.

Not monster virus, but monster vaccine

An alarm has been issued by a leading virologist that vaccination will create “a wild monster” that is going to wipe out large parts of human populations.  The Israeli experience appears to back this claim.

According to Whitney’s report, within a two-month period, inoculations in Israel managed to double the number of accumulated deaths in the prior ten months of the pandemic.  The so-called superspreaders may be the vaccinated.

Antibodies backfire

What the French mathematicians are talking about in medical terms is called Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) where antibodies that normally alleviate the symptoms of viral infection end up doing the opposite, facilitating entry of the virus into cells, and via a resultant “cytokine storm,” damage internal organs.  This is precisely what Canadian virologist Dolores Cahill predicted back in January.

Reinfection among the vaccinated

Also, reinfection is surely occurring.  Vaccine makers are saying maybe a third inoculation may now be needed, a concession the initial round of two inoculations isn’t working, believing this will raise antibody response 10-20-fold.  But that may only worsen the problem.

In their mathematical predictions, the mathematicians in France describe a pandemic that alters course and instead of reinfection causing 4.1% of all COVID deaths it causes 28%.  All reinfected individuals experience severe disease with a death rate of 10% in their mathematical model.

Excess deaths not COVID

The World Health Organization, which is over-committed to the vaccination model of managing infectious disease, isn’t waving a red flag yet and has been keeping another fact hidden, that the excess deaths that have been reported are among non-COVID patients and are middle-aged.  This is the CDC reporting this, not some wanna-be-famous anti-vaxxer.

There is no health crisis, no evidence that demands a lockdown.  Over 95% of infected patients globally get well on their own.

Up to this point in time, excess deaths are occurring from something other than COVID-19, possibly due to the lockdowns and a stealth vitamin B1 deficiency that mimics viral infection symptoms, emanating from increased consumption of alcohol, sugary foods and coffee and tea.

Bottom line, we can’t believe the case numbers nor can we believe the fatality numbers either.

Not 95% effective

Data shows the RNA vaccines are able to cut COVID-19 illness and deaths by a qualified 93% among those who become infected or test positive and have symptoms.

An estimated 4,362,416 Israelis have been vaccinated.  Obviously, not all are infected at the same time.  More than 95% recover on their own without vaccination.  The reported 95% effectiveness rate is among the few who are actively infected at any given time.  For example, there were 25,941 total active cases in play in Israel on March 17, with 1,472 new cases reported on March 16.

At baseline (start of study), only 3.0% (1125) participants in Pfizer’s trials were deemed to be COVID-19 positive.   There is no way to determine if Pfizer’s RNA vaccine saves lives because current trials are not designed to determine that.  But news headlines say otherwise.

The advertised 93% effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine is misleading and frankly represents false advertising.

It is not 93 in 100 Israeli’s benefit from vaccination (spared of infection or avert death) because only 9.1% (823,314) of the population of 9 million Israelis have experienced laboratory confirmed COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.  And out of those 823,314 cases, 6051 have died of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, or 7/10ths of one-percent.  So, the vaccine cannot be more than 1% effective in the population at large in regard to mortality.  Furthermore, more than 95% of cases recover and get well on their own.

In hard numbers the vaccinated probably experience a reduction in death risk from 7/10ths of one-percent to 1/10th of one-percent, which is ~90% relative difference.

In Israel epidemiologists (those who study diseases in populations) give the false impression that to save any the 6051 accumulated lives that have reportedly been lost to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, nearly 9 million people have to be vaccinated.  That those who don’t vaccinate threaten the lives of others.  That is patently false. B

Only 6.7 out of every 10,000 (6051 divided by 9 million) Israelis have died of COVID-19, or far less than 1-percent.   Said another way, 9,993 have to be vaccinated to save ~7 lives.  In other words, Israelis have a remote chance of ever benefiting from vaccination.

Using another data source, out of a population of 8,655,535 in Israel, 826,000 cases and 6,069 deaths have been recorded as of March 19, 2021.  That amounts to 9.5% infection rate and a death rate of 7/10^ths of one percent (6069 deaths divided by 8,665,535).

US COVID case and death rates are unreliable

All of the data cited above must be evaluated in the light of false positive tests and re-classification of deaths as COVID-caused rather than COVID-related.  Many may be dying with COVID-19 or a false-positive test for COVID-19, but not dying from COVID-19.

Using flawed numbers issued by The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, the death rate in the US population as a whole is less than 2/10^ths of one-percent (539 deaths divided by 325 million American).  But as a percentage of those infected it is 1.8%, ~ten-fold higher (539,000 deaths among 29.7 million cases).

Because so few subjects are infected and even fewer succumb to this virus, trials to determine effective of vaccines only requires 150-170 individuals who exhibit symptoms out of hundreds of thousands of vaccinated people.  Much larger numbers of patients must be tested to determine if vaccination prevents death.

The notoriously inaccurate PCR test

In Israel the positive test rate is down from more than 10% in January to just 2.1% by mid-March 2021.  That just may be due to changes in the sensitivity of PCR lab tests rather than any real decline in infection.

The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test used to confirm symptoms are caused by COVID-19 is plagued by a 40% false positive rate, particularly among asymptomatic people who undergo routine tests to see if they are positive.

Furthermore, the threshold to detect COVID-19 via PCR test is too sensitive (35 doublings of the genetic material).   Setting the PCR test so it is more sensitive may just detect dead virus shedding, not active infection.

A lower number of PCR cycles needed to detect COVID-19 may be more indicative of infectiousness and a higher number of PCR cycles (33+) needed to detect COVID-19 may just indicate a person is not contagious.

In the US most States set sensitivity too high (35-40 doublings) to detect viral particles, so all of the early data regarding cases may be flawed.  A lowering of the threshold for COVID-19 to 30 cycles would reduce by 63% the number of positive cases.  So, the justification for the lockdowns and contact tracing is totally contrived.

The bar for FDA approval is set too low

To obtain licensure from the FDA, COVID-19 vaccines only need to demonstrate they suppress symptoms by 50%.  Even with this low-bar to gain approval, one reviewer claims the Pfizer RNA COVID-19 vaccine is no more than 19-29% effective at relieving symptoms.

The horror

Are these RNA vaccines simply injected “disease bombs” to frighten the public into more and more vaccination?  Already vaccine makers are planning on annual booster shots X 7.9 billion people on the planet.  Nothing like creating your own business.  Let the vaccine make things worse and blame it on anti-vaxxers.  Immunization of 7.9 billion people @$12 per dose = $94 billion a year.  Governments and vaccine makers have too much invested to ever allow vaccine trials to fail.

At the current time the sole objective of living on planet earth is to avoid infection from a mutated cold virus that vaccination ironically appears to be hastening.  Why not use the cure to spread the disease?  No one will suspect.

If it is mutated coronaviruses that threaten human life on the planet, the World Health Organization is remiss in not fortifying foods with the trace mineral selenium, or not recommending selenium dietary supplements, which prevent viral mutations.

And aren’t all the health precautions, face mask wearing, social distancing, and handwashing along with vaccines getting the mistaken credit for reducing infection and saving lives when it may be the tilt of the earth towards the sun in northern latitudes during summer months that increases sunshine vitamin D levels which reduces coronavirus risk and mortality?  The problem is, there is no way to make money off of, nor political capital to gain, from mandating a daily sun bath.

Was Covid-19 a bio-weapon?

 From the beginning I have argued that this was the case based on circumstantial evidences. To understand this issue, it is important to know that the genome of a virus is not "observed" but calculated with statistical tools so we can never be absolutely certain unless we have samples that can be compared. But in the case of Covid-19, all the original samples have been destroyed, further muddying the water. So it is likely that we will never know, while the evidences accumulate!  

CHINESE ATTACK: Was Covid a Bioweapon?

Via GenZConservative

The Question the World Must Answer: Was Covid a Bioweapon

Although I believe the general threat of Covid to healthy people has been greatly exaggerated, it is undeniable that it has killed many people and has placed a great strain on western nations. America’s formerly booming economy was decimated by the virus and our reaction to it, commerce around the world has slowed dramatically, and the cost of responding to Covid has been enormous. Because of those immense costs, it’s important to determine culpability. The question of from where it came is obvious: China. How it was released is still undecided, which brings us to the next most important question: was Covid a bioweapon?

That question isn’t as outlandish as you might, at first assume. While we were originally told it came from a wet market in Wuhan, that idea has been largely discredited. It is possible a strain of Covid came from a wet market. That contention is far from ridiculous. However, there is a Chinese bio lab (which Fauci helped fund) that happens to be in Wuhan. That lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, happens to have been doing research on strains of coronavirus around the time Covid became an issue.

That connection has not gone unnoticed, hence this article on the “was Covid a bioweapon?” question. Some American researchers have been digging into the virus’s quiddity and found that it doesn’t look like a typical, natural virus. It looks like it was modified by CCP scientists.

Here’s what one such researcher, David Asher (now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the former lead investigator who oversaw the Task Force into the COVID-19 virus) told Fox News about his findings on Covid:

“[Asher] tells Fox News that he not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military, or People’s Liberation Army, was doing on a bioweapon.

[Asher told Fox that] ‘The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health…It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view…it was a biological weapons program.’

He believes the Chinese Communist Party has been involved in a massive cover-up during the past 14 months.”

Asher also said that all the hallmarks of a crime and cover-up are there: “Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this. And the fact that the initial cluster of victims surrounded the very institute that was doing the highly dangerous, if not dubious research is significant”

There are other indicators that the answer to “was Covid a bioweapon?” is a resounding “yes.”

For one, the Chinese stopped talking about what bioweapons research they were performing in 2016-17, around the same time that the PLA began funding the Wuhan lab Covid likely originated from. Here’s what Fox and Asher said about that:

“The Chinese, according to Asher, stopped talking publicly about the research into coronavirus “disease vectors which could be used for weapons” in 2017, at the same time its military began funding the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Additionally, according to the New York Post, a Chinese scientist who has been forced into hiding for shedding light on the man-made origins of Covid said that the virus has unique “tells” that make its origin obvious:

“’The genome sequence is like a human fingerprint,” she told the talk show. “So based on this, you can identify these things. I use the evidence … to tell people why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the only ones who made it.‘

Not only that, but the same article said that the Chinese tried to hide her research to make Covid’s origins unclear:

“Yan also claimed that before she fled China, her information was wiped from government databases…’They deleted all my information,’ she told “Loose Women,” claiming that people have been recruited ‘to spread rumors about me, that I’m a liar.’”

A final piece of evidence is a sickness in the Wuhan lab itself. According to Fox, a number of scientists in the lab had “flu-like symptoms” in November of 2019, which was shortly before China announced the presence of the disease.

Conclusion

It’s all there. The motive: to sink the West’s booming economy and make Trump politically unpopular. The means: a PLA-funded lab in Wuhan that had been investigating using Covid as a bioweapon in 2016 and 2017. The evidence: Covid-19 has all the hallmarks of a lab-made disease, scientists in the lab were sick, China has stifled any investigation and has hidden evidence about the origins of the disease, and the very research the lab was performing is suspicious.

So, was Covid a bioweapon? I think so. The CCP might have not intended to release it. My guess, based on what I’ve read, is that the release was unintentional. But, it sure looks like the CCP and its agents designed the disease and have done their best to hide their culpability. China lied and people died!

Lockdowns Wrecked Democracy Around The World by James Bovard

Authored by James Bovard via The American Institute for Economic Research,

While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them.

Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils. 

In October, Freedom House issued a report, Democracy under Lockdown – The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Freedom, which warned that since the pandemic started, “the condition of democracy and human rights has worsened in 80 countries.” Sarah Repucci, co-author of the report, warned that “governments’ responses to the pandemic are eroding the pillars of democracy around the world.” Abuses of power have been propelled by a presumption that government officials are entitled to all the power they claim to need to keep people safe. 

When the pandemic arrived in America, governors in many states responded by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb – something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo set the standard when he effectively declared that he was entitled to inflict any burden on his state’s residents to “save just one life.” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer prohibited anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned people from walking or bicycling outside. More than ten million jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States last year had its sharpest plunge since World War Two. 

Australia imposed some of the most heavy-handed restrictions. In August, the state of Victoria dictated an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for the Melbourne area and prohibited people from venturing more than three miles from their residence. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews decreed: “Where you slept last night is where you’ll need to stay for the next six weeks.” Melbourne has been hit by repeated lockdowns since then. 

Britain unleashed some of the most absurd restrictions. In June, it prohibited couples who live in different homes from having sex indoors. The Independent (U.K.) noted, “People who have sex outside can be punished under pre-existing laws on outraging public decency and indecent exposure.” Steve Watson reported in January for Summit News that British cabinet ministers “ have privately debated preventing people from talking to each other in the street and in supermarkets, and even preventing people from leaving home more than once per week, and introducing curfews.” British vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi fretted, “I’m worried about some of the pictures I’ve seen of social interactions in parks, if you have to exercise you can go out for exercise only.” Apparently, a national vow of silence is necessary to fight Covid. Summit News noted, “Police are also demanding new powers to force entry into the homes of suspected lockdown violators.” Former British Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption complained last month, “Foreign travel is being prohibited, turning us into a hermit island on the basis we cannot know what mutations may be lurking out there. The logic of these policies is that we must be locked down for ever simply because the world is a dangerous place.”

New Zealand has imposed four separate lockdowns in its pursuit to banish the virus from the island, repeatedly placing residents in the capital city under house arrest. In October, the government announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

Covid horrors have been more dramatic in some developing nations.

In Uganda, as the Economist reported, Francis Zaake, a member of parliament, delivered food to his neediest constituents during a pandemic lockdown. But “Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has ordered that only the government may hand out food aid. Anyone else who does so can be charged with murder, Mr Museveni has threatened, since they might do it in a disorderly way, attract crowds and thereby spread the coronavirus.” 

Police and soldiers forcibly entered Zaake’s house and “dragged him into a van and threw him in a cell. He says they beat, kicked and cut him, crushed his testicles, sprayed a blinding chemical into his eyes, called him a dog and told him to quit politics. He claims that one sneered: ‘We can do whatever we want to you or even kill you…No one will demonstrate for you because they are under lockdown.’” 

In Kenya, police killed at least 15 people during brutal crackdowns on alleged violators of lockdown decrees. Amnesty International declared that the Covid-19 pandemic provided “the perfect storm for indiscriminate mass violence” by the police, thanks to the “pervasive culture of impunity among [police] service members who rely on systemic corruption.”

Journalists in many nations risked their hides if they violated politicians’ monopoly on fear-mongering. Almost a hundred nations have imposed new restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press since the pandemic began. Freedom House reported: “Governments enacted new legislation against spreading ‘fake news’ about the virus. They also limited independent questioning at press conferences, suspended the printing of newspapers, and blocked websites.” Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit for press freedom, warned, “Most governments yielded to the temptation, using a variety of repressive measures…, of making official channels the only credible and authoritative sources of information.” Many regimes have expanded the definition of “fake news” to justify repression:

• “In Ethiopia, the definition of misinformation is so broad that it gives the authorities the discretionary power to declare any piece of information false.”

• “In India, Egypt, Botswana and Somalia, only government statements on the subject may be published.” 

• “In Cambodia, the government gave itself the legal power to ban the publication of “any information that could cause unrest, fear or disorder.”

• In Rwanda, the journalist who runs the YouTube news channel Ishema TV was imprisoned for violating Covid lockdown regulations. “At the time of his arrest he was reporting on the effects of the lockdown on the population and investigating allegations of rape committed by soldiers enforcing the lockdown,” Reporters without Borders notes.

• In Zimbabwe, anyone “who publishes or disseminates ‘false’ information about an official, or that impedes the response to the pandemic, faces up to 20 years in prison,” the Economist reported. 

• Tanzania suffered a wave of censorship after the nation’s president publicly denounced Covid-19 as a “Western plot.” “Several news outlets, including the country’s leading Swahili-language newspaper Mwananchi, were closed down after publishing stories about Covid-19. Others were forced to broadcast apologies after carrying reports on the subject which angered the authorities,” Reporters without Borders noted. 

• In Thailand, Amnesty International reported, “authorities are prosecuting social media users who criticize the government and monarchy in a systematic campaign to crush dissent which is being exacerbated by new COVID-19 restrictions. Authorities have wasted no time using existing repressive laws in order to censor ‘false’ communications related to COVID-19.” The government decreed five-year prison sentences for any Thai journalists or media outlets that published information officials decree to be “capable of causing fear in the public.”

“Government knows best” is the subtext for arbitrary decrees issued around the world. An Associated Press article in January explained why Californians were denied access to the information that determined the fate of their freedom: “State health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public.” But many data-driven dictatorial policies relied on data that was either fraudulent, politically contrived, or laughably inaccurate. On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the World Health Organization changed the test standard for defining Covid cases, guaranteeing that far fewer “cases” would be reported and thereby making a mockery of the previous 10 months data. 

The pandemic’s precedents pose a long-term peril for liberty around the globe. Freedom House expects that “official responses to COVID-19 have laid the groundwork for government excesses that could affect democracy for years to come.” This was foreseeable from the start of the pandemic but the media in some Western nations were the biggest cheerleaders for obliterating limits on political power. The secrecy that proliferated during the pandemic will make it harder for citizens to recognize how badly they have been misgoverned. 

Going forward, citizens in many nations might appreciate this old adage from American politics: “The Constitution isn’t perfect but it’s better than what we have now.” Federal judge William Stickman IV declared in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But unless there is a similar stark ruling from the Supreme Court, shutdowns could return whenever politicians can panic enough citizens with some new threat. 

Lockdown victims around the globe would be wise to heed Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 warning that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.” The pandemic painfully illustrated how government officials can always concoct the data to justify whatever decree they itch to issue. And regardless of the needless deaths and disruptions caused by government policies, it will be the opponents of lockdowns who will be labeled grandma-killers.

The Biden administration is reviving America’s proselytizing for democracy around the globe. But Covid-19 crackdowns are a warning for people to be wary of oppressive governments regardless of their purported mandate. The world doesn’t need any more Cage Keeper Democracies where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest.