We’ve completed one year of lockdowns globally for Covid-19, and the effort to curb spread of the virus has created a great deal of unintentional humor and absurd situations. The virus is real, vaccines are good. Silencing people and censoring those with conflicting viewpoints has become more common place. A thoughtful podcast said, “this is the golden age for cults, and now we’ve got Covid.”

The following have been good source of skeptical news;

• Dr. Vinay Prasad does a regular podcast, Plenary Session. Episode 3.58 talked about the ethics of news and censorship.
• The Tom Woods show hosted Ivor Cummins, who I had interacted with previously on diet and health related issues.

Categorizing the Absurd

1. What’s Going on? Media, Censorship and Covid-19
2. There’s a Deadly Disease.
3. There are no treatments – therefore Lockdowns are the Answer
4. There is a Vaccine

1/ What’s Going On?

• The top public health official in the US, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is blaming a rise in recent numbers on ‘spring break’ and ‘loose states’ – however, the states with worsening numbers are not spring break destinations and have the strictest restrictions.
• A new media company announces that people no longer trust traditional media.
• Twitter puts up a warning on one of the US’s leading epidemiologists, who is also a faculty member.
• Wildly inaccurate forecasts – always with more deaths and cases than expected. (NYT curves in the example.)

2/ There’s a Deadly Disease

• If a deadly disease was spreading rapidly and killing millions, it would be important to understand the origin of the disease and make sure such a threat to society does not occur again.
  • The former CDC director suspects that the disease was accidentally released from a research lab, however it is difficult to have that disease in public because it is viewed as embarassing to the host country and potentially racist.
  • Photos (real? fake news? who knows?) circulate of President Obama and Fauci at the lab – because the topic is forbidden, only the most extreme theories are circulated.
• Travel measurements indicate that people are ignoring the restrictions from lockdowns; the public no longer believes that the threat from the deadly disease is in line with what comes from public health officials.

3/ There are no Treatments, therefore Lockdowns are the Answer

• Texas announced it was not doing lockdowns three weeks ago on March 3, 2021. As noted in many tweets, they are not all dead, and cases there have fallen greatly.
• In most countries, schools were kept open. In many parts of the US, schools were closed. This is one of several drivers for elevated suicide risk in children.
• Large unions in New York have chosen to select their own physicians to listen to about how and when a lockdown can end.
• Lockdowns have served to make several companies and their owners immensely wealthy.
• Parents are so fearful of the disease (see 1/ above), that they are not taking children in for regular appointments – this will lead to a worse public health impact in the future than will occur from the current disease.
• Wide variety in response to NPIs – Germany with masks.

4/ There are Vaccines

• Rich people in Atherton, California are cutting in line to get access to the vaccine.
• IBM is involved in promoting a vaccine passport; they were involved in past population measurement and census activities that led to genocide.
• Rutgers University will require the vaccine for all incoming students in the fall; they are not legally able to make such a requirement of faculty or staff.
• South Africa’s results look nearly identical to Israel – where a great deal was spent on vaccination.
• Vaccines reduce severity of infection, do not necessarily stop infection. (Article on Hawaiian re-infections.)

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