[The following is Senator Rand Paul’s foreword to Jeffrey Tucker’s book, Life after Lockdown.]
In Life after Lockdown, Jeffrey Tucker paints a picture of the living hell that was the government lockdown and outlines a roadmap for never again allowing such a police state to occur.
During the multiple winters of the Covid lockdown, I discovered Brownstone Institute. On the pages of Brownstone, I found not only the incisive critique of the pseudoscience put forward by Fauci and others, I also routinely came across scientists with the intellectual rigor to disassemble the unsupported scientific platitudes of the state.
From Jay Bhattacharya to Martin Kulldorff to Scott Atlas to Paul Elias Alexander, Brownstone Institute brought clear-headed, data-driven refutations of the lazy, observational studies that the government trotted out in a vain attempt to convince the public that masks worked, that standing six feet apart had any effect, and that naturally acquired immunity to Covid did not exist.
After discovering the opinions of Scott Atlas, MD of Stanford, I began advocating and calling President Trump to try to get Dr Atlas into the White House to counter Fauci. I succeeded but by the time he arrived, Fauci had become addicted to the microphone and the adulation of the left-wing media. Atlas did his best, but the Trump Administration was not forceful enough in banishing Fauci.
Fauci also possessed a great desire to cover up and obscure his responsibility for having funded the gain-of-function research that likely led to Covid’s leak from the lab in Wuhan.
In Life after Lockdown, Jeffrey Tucker gives us a compendium of the best arguments why and how we must resist, how we must never let this happen again. Tucker writes that what will be needed is:
A more ferocious culture that allows no trampling of human rights and is deeply suspicious of power…No longer can we take liberty for granted. It is something for which we must fight for.
Amen to that sentiment and really the fight is not only against Covid tyranny but a battle to restrain the leviathan state that pokes its nose into almost every nook and cranny of our lives.
Tucker reminds us that: “All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from the public space. Dissent was silenced.” Which reminds me of a quip by Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “We knew about natural immunity since the time of the Athenian Plague, then in 2020 we forgot about it, but now we know about it again.”
In my recent book: Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, I tell the story of a woman who as a baby became infected with the Spanish flu in 1918. A hundred years later, she was still alive. They tested her for antibodies to the Spanish flu and lo and behold – she still had antibodies!
Likewise, I recount that multiple studies showed both antibodies and memory B and T cells active against SARS 1 (another coronavirus) seventeen years after the epidemic of 2003. But facts be damned, still each day I was subjected to glares and remonstration from twenty-something-year-old reporters who likely never even took a science class in college. These ridiculous young journalists would scowl at me and lecture me through three masks about how I couldn’t be sure that surviving an infection creates immunity.
Sure enough, though, every study, not some, but every study thus far has shown significant protective immunity is acquired from a Covid infection. Just recently, studies showed that at 40 weeks post-infection robust protection against hospitalization and death persists and study after study shows naturally acquired immunity provides greater protection than the vaccine.
Since I had tested positive for Covid in early March of 2020, I ignored all the diatribes hurled at me by know-nothing young journalists about covering my face with their silly masks. I tried to explain to them about immunity. The crotchety old senators shook their bony fingers at me demanding I cover my face. I calmly tried to discuss immunity with them which only inflamed them more.
Ultimately, many of them would tacitly admit that they had no counterargument but would resort to their final plea: “Can’t you just wear a mask to be polite?” or the less conciliatory command: “Just wear a damn mask!”
To this day, I still continue to fight against their pseudoscience. The Senate doctor, an acolyte and political sympathizer of Fauci, he continues to mandate booster vaccines for the 15-16 year-old Senate pages.
On several occasions, I’ve disabused him and his lead disciple, Chris Murphy of Connecticut with data that clearly shows the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risk of the disease for young people. I’ve presented the country-wide statistics showing virtually no Covid deaths in young healthy people. I’ve reminded these science deniers that there is no evidence that the booster vaccine decreases hospitalization or death in teenagers. Period.
And yet the followers of Fauci are more concerned, and always have been, with submission. Jeffrey Tucker was on to them from the beginning. Tucker has been one voice unwilling to look the other way and ignore that the lockdowns began in the Trump Administration and may well have “caused him to lose his presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization…or because mail-in-ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both.”
Most importantly, in Life after Lockdown, Tucker recognizes that really the whole fiasco of the lockdowns was never about disease but about submission. Tucker writes: “Covid became the template for the biggest expansion of government power over the population in world history.”
I should know. In Kentucky, the Democrat mayor of Louisville (with the tacit blessing of Fauci and his cronies) sent government agents to a church on Easter Sunday to take down the license plates of any churchgoers who dared to defy his order to close the churches. He was ultimately rebuked in one of my favorite court decisions of all time.
Judge Justin Walker wrote: “The Christians of On Fire, however, owe no one an explanation for why they will gather together this Easter Sunday to celebrate what they believe to be a miracle and a mystery.”
In Life after Lockdowns, Jeffrey Tucker recounts the thoughts that led to the Great Barrington Declaration.
“The problem,” according to Martin Kulldorff, “is that the mainline journalists out there who are writing about Covid know absolutely nothing about the topic. They, therefore, defaulted to medieval superstition.”
Exactly, I can’t think of the mask nonsense without picturing the long-nosed masks that doctors wore in medieval times with garlic and other potions in their false “beak” to ward off the plague. One would have thought 800 years later, such hocus-pocus would no longer be countenanced.
Tucker worked with Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University to write the Great Barrington Declaration.
According to Tucker: “The statement was not radical. It said that SARS-CoV-2 was primarily a threat to the elderly and infirm. Therefore, it is they who need protection.” The declaration should not have been controversial in that it simply advocated for targeting prevention and treatment to those at greatest risk – the elderly.
But it is impossible to overestimate the degree of demagoguery that came from the likes of Fauci and Francis Collins. They conspired in private to describe the declaration as a strategy of “let it rip. Let the virus do what it would without any intervention.”
But the good news is that for a change the Establishment, the powers that be, did not squelch the truth. The declaration went viral and was viewed 12 million times and ultimately 850,000 people signed the Great Barrington Declaration, including thousands of physicians and scientists.
So, rather than despair at the freedoms lost during the Covid lockdowns, let us rejoice that the freedom of discourse on the internet allowed so many great voices for liberty to find each other and amplify our resistance.
For the first time in modern history, Congress repealed a vaccine mandate when we voted to end the Covid vaccine mandate for our soldiers! We discovered so many scientists and physicians brave enough to debate the origins and treatment of Covid. While many scars of the lockdown remain and persistent abuses of our liberty continue, our resistance was of consequence. Our resistance did save us perpetual servitude. My hope is that Jeffrey Tucker’s new book Life after Lockdowns will further galvanize and enlarge our army in defense of liberty.
