Understanding how Propaganda works

Listen to an interesting interview about propaganda to understand the Covid manipulation.  

PS: If the link below does not work, please copy the address to access directly.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/07/28/2020-a-propaganda-masterpiece/

Record Coral Cover Of Great Barrier Reef Shames Climate Alarmists, Media

Remember Global Warming and the mass dying of corral reefs? It wasn t so long ago.

Then, I started diving all over the world and saw no dying whatsoever! Everywhere healthy reefs, except where polluted or overfished. 

In fact, reefs do bleach and die... then they recover as everything in nature. They have done this through ice ages, extremely warm periods, asteroids...  for ages. In Papua New Guinea, the waters are above 32C, volcanoes are erupting and dreadfully polluting the waters with toxic chemicals... to no avail. The corals are splandid!

Some parts of the world are over-populated, others are polluted. Temperatures are rising slightly but for all we know, it takes one large eruption to see snow in lower lattitudes in the US or Europe in August. The seas have been rising by a millimeter or two for the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age when they were historically low. And in Japan, near where I live, I find shells, not fossils, deposited 50 to 80m above the current sea level.  That s another 40,000 years at the current pace! Even taking into consideration the fact that the coast is been pushed up by earthquakes, that is still 20,000 years. We will have another ice age long before that. 

But i disgress. We are talking about reefs. Here is the data:

Authored by Peter Ridd via ClimateChangeDispatch.com,

The annual data on coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, was released on Monday showing the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels.

Record high, despite all the doom stories by our reef science and management institutions.

Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health.

For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years, and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment.

This data is good news. It could hardly be better

This data series, which started in 1985, is taken from the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s yearly long-term monitoring of the Reef. Source: Peter Ridd

But somehow, our science organizations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. How has this happened?

One reason is that occasionally colossal amounts of coral are killed, mostly by cyclones, but also by the crown of thorns starfish and bleaching.

So the media, with its predilection for bad news, can be fed a regular diet of doom. Our scientists are always happy to oblige.

The quiet recovery is generally downplayed or ignored.

Growing up in Innisfail, adjacent to the reef, in the early 1970s, I recall the initial doom stories about the reef.The scientific study of the reef had only just started, and plagues of starfish that eat the coral had just been discovered and were making headlines worldwide. The reef had, supposedly, only a decade left.It was reasonable in the ’70s to be concerned about these plagues and they ultimately precipitated AIMS’ long-term monitoring of coral and starfish in the ’80s.

I was working at AIMS when this important work started, and it is interesting to look back on what has changed.

The coral cover is no less, the number of starfish is no more, but the number of scientists and managers working on the reef has exploded. Perhaps this is the problem.

In 50 years we have now learned a great deal about the cycles of coral death and regrowth. The data reported every year by AIMS shows all areas go through these cycles every decade or two.

Remarkably, even the excellent news of record coral still has the scientists pessimistic. The reef is, apparently, still doomed from climate change and this is just a temporary reprieve. How well does the data need to be to make them admit the reef is fine?

The science institutions have been claiming that there have been three disastrous bleaching events in the past five years, which does not accord with the latest statistics.

Record coral cover means there was no disaster on the reef. The only disaster is the quality assurance at the science organizations.

An examination of the data shows that, while there have been three events, they occurred in largely different regions in each year. The reef has thus effectively had one major bleaching event in the past five years and the previous major event was in 2002.

So the reef has had roughly one event in 15 years, and most of the coral on the reef did not bleach and most that bleached did not die. Therefore, it is not surprising that the reef is in good shape.The science institutions have been caught out by their own deception. They exaggerated the bleaching events – as usual.

Luckily, we have the AIMS long-term coral monitoring surveys, which are done professionally with good-quality protocols, to demonstrate the state of the reef.

The bad news is that the record high coral cover means it is likely that coral cover will decline in the next few years.

Prepare for the headlines saying the reef has lost much of its coral and is indicative of climate change and farmers polluting the reef. And the reef will be predicted to be gone by 2050 – or whenever.

When will these doom stories about the reef, which have been going for 50 years, cease? Will it be like the Ancient Greek legend of Prometheus, who was chained alive to a rock so that his liver could be eaten by an eagle, only for the liver to grow overnight so that it could be eaten again and again? Will the agony ever end?

According to legend, Heracles saved Prometheus. Who will be our Heracles, and support a better quality assurance of the science?

It should be the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, but so far it has not been interested. The various ministers could also take an interest.

In the meantime, don’t forget we have record-high levels of coral. It is time to stop scaring the children with doom stories about the reef.

Why Is The CDC Quietly Abandoning The PCR Test For COVID?

 Another title could be: How to make a "normal" if accute flu look like a pandemic?

We have detailed (most recently here and here) the controversy surrounding America's COVID "casedemic" and the misleading results of the PCR test and its amplification procedure in great detail over the past few months.

As a reminder, "cycle thresholds" (Ct) are the level at which widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test can detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus. The higher the number of cycles, the lower the amount of viral load in the sample; the lower the cycles, the more prevalent the virus was in the original sample.

Numerous epidemiological experts have argued that cycle thresholds are an important metric by which patients, the public, and policymakers can make more informed decisions about how infectious and/or sick an individual with a positive COVID-19 test might be. However, as JustTheNews reports, health departments across the country are failing to collect that data.

Here are a few headlines from those experts and scientific studies:

1. Experts compiled three datasets with officials from the states of Massachusetts, New York and Nevada that conclude:“Up to 90% of the people who tested positive did not carry a virus."

2. The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40: “With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT. “And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “

3. An appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.

4. A new study from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, found that at 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of PCR test "positives" are not "cases" since the virus cannot be cultured, it's dead. And by 35: 97% of the positives are non-clinical.

5. PCR is not testing for disease, it's testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is the key pivot. When you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really "positives" in any clinical sense, since it cannot make you or anyone else sick

So, in summary, with regard to our current "casedemic", positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports... and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide...

In October we first exposed how PCR Tests have misled officials worldwide into insanely authoritative reactions.

As PJMedia's Stacey Lennox wrote, the “casedemic" is the elevated number of cases we see nationwide because of a flaw in the PCR test. The number of times the sample is amplified, also called the cycle threshold (Ct), is too high.

It identifies people who do not have a viral load capable of making them ill or transmitting the disease to someone else as positive for COVID-19.

The New York Times reported this flaw on August 29 and said that in the samples they reviewed from three states where labs use a Ct of 37-40, up to 90% of tests are essentially false positives. The experts in that article said a Ct of around 30 would be more appropriate for indicating that someone could be contagious - those for whom contact tracing would make sense.

Just a few days earlier, the CDC had updated its guidelines to discourage testing for asymptomatic individuals. It can only be assumed that the rationale for this was that some honest bureaucrat figured out the testing was needlessly sensitive. He or she has probably been demoted.

This change was preceded by a July update that discouraged retesting for recovered patients. The rationale for the update was that viral debris could be detected using the PCR test for 90 days after recovery. The same would be true for some period of time if an individual had an effective immune response and never got sick. Existing immunity from exposure to other coronaviruses has been well documented. These are many of your “asymptomatic” cases.

However, due to political pressure and corporate media tantrums, the new guidance on testing was scrapped, and testing for asymptomatic individuals is now recommended again. Doctors do not receive the Ct information from the labs to make a diagnostic judgment. Neither the CDC nor the FDA has put out guidelines for an accurate Ct to diagnose a contagious illness accurately.

Hence, our current “casedemic.” Positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports.

A month later, Dr. Pascal Sacré, explained in great detail how all current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID.

This assumption is misleading.  Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works.

In mid-November, none other than he who should not be questioned - Dr. Anthony Fauci - admitted that the PCR Test's high Ct is misleading:

“What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard,” Fauci said, is that “if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more … the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule.”

“It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians,” he continued, when “somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it’s like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.”

So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period.”

So, if anyone raises this discussion as a "conspiracy", refer them to Dr.Fauci.

In response to this and the actual "science", Florida's Department of Health (and signed off on by Florida's Republican Governor Ron deSantis), decided that for the first time in the history of the pandemic, a state will require that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform.

Then, in January,  as Biden takes office, The FDA publicly admits it...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting patients and health care providers of the risk of false results... with the Curative SARS-Cov-2 test.

First Fauci, then WHO, and then FDA all admit there is malarkey in the PCR Tests, but have - until now, done nothing about it... allowing the daily fearmongering of soaring "cases" to enable their most twisted 1984-esque controls.

All of which brings us to today's announcement from The FDA, that it will be abandoning the PCR Test for COVID at the end of the year.

Audience: Individuals Performing COVID-19 Testing

Level: Laboratory Alert

After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.

Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page.

In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing.

The question one is forced to ask is simple - as with everything else that happens in the Healthcare-Industrial-Complex - cui bono?

Is another provider of testing about to be enrichened?

Or is it even more sinister than standard crony capitalism? Given the traditional winter spike in 'flu' cases and the PCR-Test-driven "casedemic" we experienced into the election and through the start of the Biden administration, one could be forgiven for suggesting that the last thing an already weakened Democratic Party, desperate to cling to control in DC, would be a dramatic re-emergence of the "deadly" virus (driven by the numerous false positives of the PCR Test as described in detail above) ahead of the Midterms?

Killing off the PCR Test would go a long way to "solving" the "casedemic" and offer Biden and his pals a positive talking point for voters

 The market review this week by Michael Every of Rabo Bank, one of the best market  commentator right now, including all the nonsence we were served about Covid with a special mention to President Biden... 

Sad but amazing times!!

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Our ECBeebies’ analysis of the ECB’s strategic review (“Lost in Translation”) notes there was no new stimulus. However, by shifting the focus on inflation reaching the 2% target to “well ahead” of the end of its projection horizon, the ECB emphasized it will be “persistently accommodative”. This may have added some downward bias to the markets’ reaction function to inflation forecasts, with the end-point of the staff projections becoming less indicative for policy. In short, the ECB is a loooong way from raising rates whatever data we see ahead. Which we already knew.

Indeed, as noted yesterday, one could speculate Lagarde may never raise rates, just as Draghi never did. Notably, the last ECB hiking cycle was now a decade ago, with two 25bp moves, rapidly reversed, and more, over 2012-15 following the Eurozone crisis. Moreover, *every* ECB hiking cycle has been followed by reversal: they hiked from late 2005 to July 2008, when the GFC was biting – and had to cut in October; and they hiked from late 1999 to late 2000, as the tech bubble was about to burst – and cut in May 2001. Are key messages being lost in translation somewhere?

On which, at a CNN Town Hall US President Biden was asked: “What is your administration doing to ensure the poor and middle class are not hurt by higher prices?” in light of the inflation risks from two multi-trillion dollar packages the White House is pushing. The reply was:

“No, look, here’s the deal. Moody’s today went out, Wall Street firm, not some liberal think-tank, said if we pass the other two things I am trying to get done, we will in fact reduce inflation. Reduce inflation. Reduce inflation. Because we are going to be providing good opportunities and jobs for people who in fact are going to be reinvesting that money back in all the things we are talking about. Driving down prices, not raising prices. And so it, it is, I, I, I sincerely mean this. Prices are up now. And they are up – for example, we’re in a position where you’re trying to build a house, trying to find two-by-fours and lumber. Well guess what? People stopped working. Cutting lumber. They stopped doing it because they, the unemployment was so…..Now all of a sudden there’s this need, because people are coming back and guess what, instead of paying ten cents, you’re paying twenty. You understand what I am saying?” (“Yes,” adds the CNN host; “No,” says I.) “It relates to what in fact is now needed because we’re growing.”

Trying to translate, high inflation is driven by a loss of labor supply, due to unemployment benefits, and as this reverses --yesterday’s surprise spike in weekly initial claims aside-- so will inflation. Relatedly, a small business owner was told they needed to raise the minimum wage to $15 to get staff. That’s a worthy goal, and one which would help close labor vs. capital gaps; but SMEs are least-well placed to raise wages without passing those costs on; big corporations can – but generally just offshore or automate as an alternative.

Moreover, this view overlooks just how strained US supply chains are: there is almost no spare capacity on rails or road at present. One report just seen is of another US firm placing a two-week delay on all containers moving into Chicago, which will naturally have to sit in West Coast ports. Moreover, there is as large a problem with *international* supply chains as US demand surges. Yet, according to the president, even more demand won’t make things worse because this money will be “reinvested back in all the things”: so trillions in public spending will be saved by households and pumped back into Treasuries again? That’s how tax cuts for big businesses work, rather than driving investment, but Joe Public’s marginal propensity to consume is different, no? Anyway, Presidents Biden and Erdogan can swap their views on inflation as well as NATO next time they speak.

President Biden also had this to say on Covid-19: “And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where are why can’t the experts say we know that this virus is in fact it’s going to be or excuse we know why the all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved and but permanently approved, but that’s underway too.”

Which, to be fair, is in keeping with how little sense almost everything everyone in authority everywhere has been making in the last 18-months. As examples: US Senator Klobuchar has introduced a Section 230 bill specifically to punish social media if they allow public dissemination of virus “disinformation”; Dr Fauci is accusing Senator Paul of slander; Senator Paul wants a “criminal referral” for Dr Fauci’s actions; China refuses to cooperate with a WHO investigation into Covid-19 origins; and US Democrats just blocked a bill to force the Director of National Intelligence to declassify US investigations into it.

Indeed, on inflation and labor shortages and Covid, the UK now faces empty supermarket shelves, with people warned not to panic buy by the government - naturally producing panic buying? A list of key workers is now being made of those who do not need to self-isolate if ‘pinged’, which is so long that one wonders why they are still bothering to ping at all. But with Covid case numbers about to grow exponentially as restrictions are dropped, some experts warn, and pinging still a thing, pingmageddon looks likely to continue. Not coming soon to a supermarket near you.

So are we inflating or deflating? Reopening or locking down? Singing or pinging? Markets have difficulty translating this noise into a signal, but are erring on the side of caution (today) – while central banks are making it abundantly clear they are doing nothing.

Meanwhile:

Bloomberg purrs how China-US trade is booming despite tariffs and the trade/Cold War backdrop. Something appears to have been lost in translation there too. Covid is hardly normal times, and China’s SHARE of exports to the US, even under the current extreme circumstances, has *declined*. Imagine when things get back to normal – if that is still a thing.

Russia seems to be able to translate some things extremely well. The day after the US and Germany agreed a Nord Stream 2 deal to allow Germany and Russia to get everything they wanted, and Ukraine bupkis, Moscow is suing Kyiv for a slew of alleged offenses, including the downing of MH17(!); and there has been another major cyberattack on Western firms’ websites. (And on South Africa’s main port and rail system by the way, making more of a mess there.)

In China, Evergrande continues to wobble - as it waits to find out which particular de facto public bailout will emerge? Beijing has also announced Didi is facing “unprecedented” punishment for its US IPO, which may include a fine, the suspension of some operations, or the introduction of a state investor. In other words, the $4bn Didi just raised from the US may end being at least partly handed over to Beijing; or as a business loss; or nationalized. Wall Street singularly failed to translate those evident political risks “because markets”. 

in Tokyo, the Olympics are about to start with fewer athletes, less sponsorship, no spectators, and no director of the opening ceremony – because of some far-beyond-lost-in-translation Holocaust jokes nobody in Japan was capable of Googling before hiring him for the job.

Happy Friday.

'Zero COVID' Catastrophe: Participating Nations See New Records Across The Board

 If it does not work, it is necessarily because we do not do enough of it! - "More bleeding!" Will require our Middle Age doctors and politicians!

Authored by Jordan Schachtel via 'Dossier' substack,

Zero Covid, the idea that heavy-handed government edicts and population controls can permanently eliminate a coronavirus from a country, is now failing spectacularly everywhere it is being tried.

You might not read about it in western corporate press agencies, but Zero Covid nations are seeing explosions in Covid-19 cases across the board. The widely praised “success story” countries that followed the radical ideology that is Zero Covid have not only failed to contain a virus, but are now witnessing the uncontrolled spread of that virus in their population centers. The governments committed to this pseudoscientific, totalitarian adventure are scrambling for options, and responding by locking down their nations and further violating the rights of their citizens. The lid has flown off the Zero Covid pressure cooker, revealing the shortcomings of such a reckless ideological endeavor.

Let’s take a look at how “Zero Covid” nations are holding up:

Australia

Australia is arguably the most dedicated large nation to a Zero Covid strategy. The country has been closed off from the vast majority of the world since the beginning of COVID Mania. Even many Australian citizens have been unable to enter or leave the country. 

Australia has pursued so many lockdowns that it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of what number we’re currently at. Zero Covid has been an unmitigated disaster, as Canberra’s elimination strategy has unsurprisingly failed to permanently move cases to zero. 

On Thursday, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia’s two largest cities, enacted yet another lockdown. This will be Melbourne’s fifth lockdown in the span of a year and a half.

Australia’s lockdowns have been infamously ruthless.  In some places, lockdowns meant citizens were only allowed to leave their homes for one hour a day, and they were not allowed to travel outside of a certain radius from their homes. In many places, the act of protesting is illegal, and it will be met with by riot police. Australia has also enacted mandatory quarantine camps for citizens who are privileged enough to be allowed to return to the country.

Vietnam

Labeled a Zero Covid “success story” by the corporate press for its ultra stringent policies, cases are now exploding in Vietnam.

The government, in full panic mode, has responded by locking down major cities, only for the case count to continue to move upwards.

South Korea

Seoul set up one of the most intrusive Covid surveillance regimes in the world. Applauded by authoritarians as a country that had its priorities in order, South Korea was supposedly the model “contact tracing” nation. Today, South Korea is seeing record numbers across the board.

This week, the country has seen record case loads. Zero Covid has failed, and the government has responded by restricting rights even further.

Singapore

Once a Zero Covid nation in good standing with the radical ideologue “public health experts,” the government in Singapore wised up and decided last month to drop the idea of forever eliminating a minimally threatening endemic virus.

China

China is lying about its COVID numbers and just about everything else. The Chinese Communist Party claims to be a Zero Covid participant, but in reality, Beijing has been fooling the world about mitigation and suppression “successes” since day one of Covid Mania.

Thailand

Thailand, a widely praised “success story” for its strict lockdowns and other draconian policies in pursuit of Zero Covid, is setting its own Covid case records.

New Zealand

New Zealand, which has been in a self siege since the beginning of 2020, remains completely committed to its Zero Covid elimination strategy. Like Australia, the country has set up quarantine camps for people who have been granted access to the nation. Due to isolation-related Covid “immunity debt,” the country is seeing skyrocketing hospitalizations among children, who are not threatened by Covid-19.

Free from Covid (for now), emergency rooms are said to be at a “breaking point” in the country, with the country dealing with unknown “winter illness.” It seems the Zero Covid fanatics have forgotten that there are still other ways to get sick.

Kiwi officials have not even commenced discussions over how long they will remain committed to their self siege strategy. Their closed borders have resulted in a massive shortage among hospital staff.

Summary

Every country that has embraced the radical notion of Zero Covid has ended up failing to contain a virus and/or failing to accept that the costs of attempting to contain a virus have been exponentially worse than the benefits of containing the virus. The promised “cures” have been infinitely worse than the disease. There are no longer any “success stories” involving nations using tyrannical means in an attempt to stop a virus. Zero Covid, as any rational person could have predicted a long time ago, has failed in spectacular fashion

The Panic Pandemic

After a year and a half of non-stop panic, it should be time to pause and reflect on what really took place over that time. This is what this article does.

The conclusion is ominous, it is not the people who are sick, it is our society and for this, there is no vaccine. 

Authored by John Tierney via City-Journal.com,

Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus...

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.

The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.

Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”

Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.

The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.

In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”

But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.

Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.

But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.

Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.

If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.

A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.

Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”

The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.

Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.

But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.

Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.

Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.

Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.

The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.

And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.

“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.

Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.