“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” is the famous saying from John Maynard Keynes. But, as we’ve seen over the past 18 months, a great many people – especially in government and public health bureaucracy – will never, ever change their minds, facts be damned.
It was some 15 years ago that public health mavens first started beating the pandemic drum. The emergence of SARS and then Bird Flu prompted endless, fear-mongering scare stories, harking back to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and asserting that the next Spanish Flu was going to sweep the world any day.
I bought into it all. I bugged my then boss with the dire necessity of having a pandemic plan in place and setting up remote working contingencies for when we were all house-bound for weeks.
When the first stories of a mysterious new respiratory disease emerged from China, I naturally thought the Big One had come. Financier Bruce Fenton did, too.
I was terrified in February 2020. I saw the viral videos of people dropping dead in the streets, the massive China quarantines, I tracked the cases: Italy, the cruise ship, the plane, the Seattle nursing home. We faced an unknown risk with massive potential downside.
By March 17, 2020 it seemed possible this virus would ravage our world[…]We were always “2 weeks” away from disaster.
I sounded the alarm like a fool.
Fortunately, the experts reassured us, the solution was at hand.
I listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam who said we just needed “two weeks to flatten the curve”.
If we could just shut down for only two weeks, the reasoning went, the virus would die out.
If not, then we faced massive death in the streets & would see morgues in Central Park.
BFD readers will recall New Zealand’s very own labcoated media tarts touting the same warning, complete with dinky little cartoons. Well, they were the “experts”, surely?
I read up on the science, I tuned in to the WHO daily briefings, I followed dozens of epidemiologists, I became a prepper and moved to the country.
When I heard that people would be dying because of a lack of ventilators I made this my mission.
I made calls, wrote articles & recruited people – I joined Yaneer & Taleb’s group the New England Complex Systems Institute & it’s Stop Covid initiative.
I decided I would do everything I could to get ventilators.
Except that, very early on, it was already becoming clear that something was amiss with the official narrative.
But as I was interviewed for the New Yorker in March, I was already becoming concerned with what I saw.
By the time the article was published, I was skeptical of the need for ventilators at all[…]Try as I might with calls & volunteers reaching out to hospitals, we couldn’t actually find any real shortage of these machines.
Yet NY governor Andrew Cuomo was setting up some, ah, “interesting” deals, paying suppliers $20k of taxpayer’s money for machines worth $500. Someone was getting very rich from all this fear-mongering.
Meanwhile authoritarianism increased[…]
“Whoa whoa restrictions on being…outside?! That’s not in any of the recommendations I’ve seen.” That’s not science.” was my reaction.
In fact, the sudden rush to lockdowns contradicted years of carefully compiled pandemic preparation. Instead, governments around the world simply copied what the Chinese Communist Party had done.
Then we saw that all those ‘absolute idiots’ who partied on St Patrick’s Day or who went to church in Florida against the government order did NOT suddenly drop dead[…]
We were told to stay home because of the overload on the hospital system. But that never came.
Hospitals were empty. Surgeries and other important visits were all delayed due to fears of overload which never happened[…]
Meanwhile places without the lockdowns seemed to not have the mass death predicted.
We also saw that people could get this illness and never even know it without a test. With weak evidence we accepted “asymptomatic spread” as a thing.
When politicians daily harangued the public with “case numbers”, they were in fact talking about people who were mostly not sick at all. They had simply tested positive for the presence of a virus that wasn’t giving them so much as a sniffle.
The virus turned out to be far less deadly than feared. As with all flus it is dangerous and deadly to some.
Yet the tyranny increased. Previously unimaginable restrictions on basic human rights became common. Meanwhile places without the restrictions had no worse results.
The bad data around ventilators was just just the beginning. By May we saw Covid become even more political. Death counts were changed to include anyone who ever had a positive test or who had symptoms.
Even shooting victims were counted as Covid deaths.
We all know the rest.
The rest is: lockdowns without end, forced vaccinations, mandatory masking in public, government “health permits” to travel, go to work, or even go to the pub or a shop. Constant shifting of policy and ludicrously contradictory rules: clearance for football matches, but bans on family get-togethers.
And endless, endless, and ever-more intrusive state prying into the most intimate activities.
We’ve been lied to consistently & seen more of our freedoms & human rights destroyed than perhaps any generation in history.
We lost when we got into debates over “science”. The reality is that government should NEVER have such powers, no matter how serious a virus.
The idea that some people in fancy government offices know better than the citizens & this gives them moral authority to use violence on peaceful people is barbaric and evil.
Bruce Fenton Twitter
Even more barbaric and evil is the fact that the very policies of the lockdowners are imposing death and illness on people who are under almost no threat from Covid. Elective surgeries and diagnostics were cancelled, while self-righteous nurses film TikTok videos, dancing in empty hospitals.
So, don’t finger-wag us about “the science” and “save lives”. It’s bullshit and we know it.
Even if it weren’t, science never justifies authoritarians and bullies to strip away our human rights and empower goon squads to kick down doors and arrest pregnant women, just for a Facebook post.
Benjamin Franklin was right: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
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