SAGE HANA again for the win! Excellent for it shows clearly Weinstein got it wrong, complete! lockdowns "they needed to be more intense than they were." WRONG! China's ZERO-COVID showed it never works
why? because there was 1)animal rervoir, not like smallpox 2)we have open borders & will not shut 3)once crossed borders, no lockdown works 4)will destroy economy, lives 5)denies population immunity
The key is with any tight lockdown, if you could ever do it, you deny the population from moving, inching closer to population HERD immunity which is the game, even for the vaccine they brought, the deadly mRNA vaccine; the aim is via natural exposure infection or vaccine, one, or both, to get to HERD immunity…not so? if you lock down tight, and theoretically you could in a make believe world, you will leave your population defenseless when you do open as you saw in China etc. You underestimate the evolutionary capacity of the pathogen to evole and adapt to the selective pressure you place on it via lockdowns.
Any action you take societally, the pathogen adapts and responds to it, so that it does not arrive at an evolutionary ‘dead end’…it evolves milder yet more infectious in wait for you…it wants to live.
Bret, you can never ever outrun a virus via lockdowns, nor even vaccine, ever!
You can never get ahead of it!
You must strongly protect the vulnerable taking sensible precautions, and given animal reservoir etc. so always will be a source, you allow the low-risk ‘healthy’ in your society, to live lives naturally and harmlessly, to be exposed naturally and harmlessly, to recover, and to help contribute to herd immunity. You use the younger healthy persons to immunologically protect the elderly weaker compromised persons. Epidemiology 101. Increase handwashing, increased ventilation etc. Usual suspects. But no lockdowns. Will never work.
I wonder if Bret will say same today?
Did Bret ever get around to reading my seminal Brownstone treatise here, or the one I did for AIER, with folk like Risch, McCullough, Tenenbaum, Dara etc. with sage input from Hodkinson etc. Note these were written 3 years ago or so:
‘The great body of evidence (comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant to this analysis) shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths. These restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies.
Nearly all governments have attempted compulsory measures to control the virus, but no government can claim success. The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures have had no discernible impact of virus trajectories.
Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.” We’ve known this for a very long time now but governments continue to double down, causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair.
The benefits of the societal lockdowns and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the harms to our societies and children have been severe: the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths resulting from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities.
Now we have whispers again for the new lockdowns in response to the Omicron variant that, by my estimations, will be likely infectious but not more lethal.
How did we get here? We knew that we could never eradicate this mutable virus (that has an animal reservoir) with lockdowns and that it would likely become endemic like other circulating common cold coronaviruses. When we knew an age-risk stratified approach was optimal (focused protection as outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration) and not carte blanche policies when we had evidence of a 1,000-fold differential in risk of death between a child and an elderly person. We knew of the potency and success of early ambulatory outpatient treatment in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death in the vulnerable.
It was clear very early on that Task Forces and medical advisors and decision-makers were not reading the evidence, were not up to speed with the science or data, did not understand the evidence, did not ‘get’ the evidence, and were blinded to the science, often driven by their own prejudices, biases, arrogance, and ego. They remain ensconced in sheer academic sloppiness and laziness. It was clear that the response was not a public health one. It was a political one from day one and continues today.
A recent study (pre-print) captures the essence and catastrophe of a lockdown society and the hollowing out of our children by looking at how children learn (3 months to 3 years old) and finding across all measures that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.” Researchers also reported that “males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”
Perhaps Donald Luskin of the Wall Street Journal best captures what we have stably witnessed since the start of these unscientific lockdowns and school closures: “Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”
The British Columbia Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) issued a full report in September 2020 on the impact of school closures on children and found para “that i) children comprise a small proportion of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, have less severe illness, and mortality is rare ii) children do not appear to be a major source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households or schools, a finding which has been consistent globally iii) there are important differences between how influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted. School closures may be less effective as a prevention measure for COVID-19 iv) school closures can have severe and unintended consequences for children and youth v) school closures contribute to greater family stress, especially for female caregivers, while families balance child care and home learning with employment demands vi) family violence may be on the rise during the COVID pandemic, while the closure of schools and childcare centres may create a gap in the safety net for children who are at risk of abuse and neglect.”
Now places like Austria (November 2021) have re-entered the world of lockdown lunacy only to be outmatched by Australia. Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up!
The pandemic response today remains a purely political one.
What follows is the current totality of the body of evidence (available comparative studies and high-level pieces of evidence, reporting, and discussion) on COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates. There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful.’
or
https://www.aier.org/article/the-catastrophic-impact-of-covid-forced-societal-lockdowns/
‘he present Covid-inspired forced lockdowns on business and school closures are and have been counterproductive, not sustainable and are, quite frankly, meritless and unscientific. They have been disastrous and just plain wrong! There has been no good reason for this. These unparalleled public health actions have been enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). Let me write this again, 0.05%. Can one even imagine the implementation of such draconian regulations for the annual flu? Of course not! Not satisfied with the current and well-documented failures of lockdowns, our leaders are inexplicably doubling and tripling down and introducing or even hardening punitive lockdowns and constraints. They are locking us down ‘harder.’ Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up! No one can point to any instance where lockdowns have worked in this Covid pandemic.
It is also noteworthy that these irrational and unreasonable restrictive actions are not limited to any one jurisdiction such as the US, but shockingly have occurred across the globe. It is stupefying as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, are taking these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies are misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s tantamount to insanity what governments have done to their populations and largely based on no scientific basis. None! In this, we have lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy is being championed by government leaders who are disregarding the Constitutional (USA) and Charter (Canada) limits to their right to make and enact policy. These unconstitutional and unprecedented restrictions have taken a staggering toll on our health and well-being and also target the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic is no different in overall impact on society than any previous pandemics. There is simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently.
There is absolutely no reason to lock down, constrain and harm ordinarily healthy, well, and younger or middle-aged members of the population irreparably; the very people who will be expected to help extricate us from this factitious nightmare and to help us survive the damages caused by possibly the greatest self-inflicted public health fiasco ever promulgated on societies. There is no reason to continue this illogical policy that is doing far greater harm than good. Never in human history have we done this and employed such overtly oppressive restrictions with no basis. A fundamental tenet of public health medicine is that those with actual disease or who are at great risk of contracting disease are quarantined, not people with low disease risk; not the well! This seems to have been ignored by an embarrassingly large number of health experts upon whom our politicians rely for advice. Rather we should be using a more ‘targeted’ (population-specific age and risk) approach in relation to the implementation of public health measures as opposed to the inelegant and shotgun tactics being forced upon us now. Optimally, the key elements for modern public health include refraining from causing societal disruption (or at most, minimally) and to ensure freedom is maintained in the advent of pathogen emergence while concurrently protecting overall health and well-being. We also understand that at the outset of the pandemic there was little to no reliable information regarding SARS CoV-2. Indeed, initial case fatality rate (CFR) reports were staggeringly high and so it made sense, earlier, to impose strict lockdowns and other measures until such a time as the danger passed or we understood more clearly the nature of this virus, the data, and how it might be managed. But why would we continue this way and for so long once the factual characteristics of this virus became evident and as alluded to above, we finally realized that its infection fatality rate (IFR) which is a more accurate and realistic reflection of mortality than CFR, was really no worse than annual influenza? Governments and medical experts continuing to cite CFR are deeply deceitful and erroneous and meant to scare populations with an exaggerated risk of death. The prevailing opinion of our experts and politicians seems to be to “stop Covid at all costs.” If so, this is a highly destructive, illogical, and unsound policy and flies in the face of all accepted concepts related to modern public health medicine. Unfortunately, it seems that our political leadership is still bound to following the now debunked and discredited models of pandemic progression, the most injurious and impactful model having been released upon the world in the form of the Imperial College Ferguson model that was based on untested fictional projections and assumptions that have been flat wrong. These models used inaccurate input and were fatally flawed.
How Did We Get Here?
Let us start with a core position that just because there is an emergency situation, if we cannot stop it, this does not provide a rationale for instituting strategies that have no effect or are even worse. We have to fight the concept that if there’s truly nothing we can do to alter the course of a situation (e.g., disease), we still have to do something even if it’s ineffective! Moreover, we do not implement a public health policy that is catastrophic and not working, and then continue its implementation knowing it is disastrous. Let us also start with the basic fact that the government bureaucrats and their medical experts deceived the public by failing to explain in the beginning that everyone is not at equal risk of severe outcome if infected. This is a key Covid omission and this omission has been used tacitly and wordlessly to drive hysteria and fear. Indeed, the public still does not understand this critically important distinction. The vast majority of people are at little if any risk of severe illness and yet these very people are needlessly cowering in fear because of misinformation and, sadly, disinformation. Yet, lockdowns did nothing to change the trajectory of this pandemic, anywhere! Indeed, it’s highly probable that if lockdowns did anything at all to change the course of the pandemic, they extended our time of suffering.
What are The Effects of Lockdowns on the General Population?
On the basis of actuarial and real-time data we know that there are tremendous harms caused by these unprecedented lockdowns and school closures. These strategies have devastated the most vulnerable among us – the poor – who are now worse off. It has hit the African-American, Latino, and South Asian communities devastatingly. Lockdowns and especially the extended ones have been deeply destructive. There is absolutely no reason to even quarantine those up to 70 years old. Readily accessible data show there is near 100% probability of survival from Covid for those 70 and under. This is why the young and healthiest among us should be ‘allowed’ to become infected naturally, and spread the virus among themselves. This is not heresy. It is classic biology and modern public health medicine! And yes, we are referring to ‘herd immunity,’ the latter condition which for reasons that are beyond logic is being touted as a dangerous policy despite the fact that herd immunity has protected us from millions of viruses for tens of thousands of years. Those in the low to no risk categories must live reasonably normal lives with sensible common-sense precautions (while doubling and tripling down with strong protections of the high-risk persons and vulnerable elderly), and they can become a case ‘naturally’ as they are at almost zero risk of subsequent illness or death. This approach could have helped bring the pandemic to an end much more rapidly as noted above, and we also hold that the immunity developed from a natural infection is likely much more robust and stable than anything that could be developed from a vaccine. In following this optimal approach, we will actually protect the highest at risk amongst us.’
Now to SAGE HANA’s excellent stack:
‘In August, 2022, Bret Weinstein doubled down on "intense lockdowns" and ramped up testing to combat the Dangerous Novel Coronavirus. Straight out of Rockefeller's Operation Lockstep.
“Lockdowns I think I got right. Which was, there was a place for lockdowns, but they needed to be more intense than they were."
Promo Code: Jessica Hockett
Bret Weinstein, August 4, 2022: “Lockdowns I think I got right. Which was, there was a place for lockdowns, but they needed to be more intense than they were. They needed to be short duration and they needed to be paired with excellent-quality testing, which frankly we still don’t have. Which, I don’t know, I can’t imagine why we still don’t have it. I think it’s a problem money would solve, and the fact that we haven’t dedicated enough money to have tests that are worth anything is conspicuous to me.
But I would have had, let’s say – yes, painful–six week, very intense lockdown. And the reason for that is that gives it enough time –most of the transmission was at home. So, six weeks gives it enough time to burn through, you know, places where we were corralled together, such that at the point you lift that six-week mandate, you have a small number of places where active COVID still exists.
And you had good testing, you could figure out where they were and you apply some very local solutions that we – the rest of us could have gone back to life. Given that we never had good tests, I would not favor that plan. But, were I in charge, I would’ve invested very heavily–
Shellenberger: Then the Asian, East Asian approach. Korea, Hong Kong.
Weinstein: Well, yes and no. Good tests would be key, and then an epidemiologically sensible lockdown in which the virus was given a chance to be not contagious in any given group. So that, you know, you would have hotspots but you could find them and the rest of us wouldn’t be infecting each other. So I think I had that right, but we don’t know, because we didn’t do that.”
Just in case you thought Intellectual Dark Web Creation Bret had revised his June, 2020 stance on the DANGEROUS GERMS PANDEMIC which Pierre Kory and your entire Corporate News Propaganda devices were presenting as a war.
And by implication, necessitating, “fuck your freedom, we have to save the world from the novel smart bomb virus!”.
This is the whole Op.
Fake pandemic to garner Biosecurity based control.
And some of y’all are just never gonna get there because they gave you a Hero and your fee-fee space is all hurty.
Operation Lockstep, Rockefeller’s:
Bret Weinstein, June, 2020: "We screwed up the lockdown, badly, because we went halfway. That a very short, very intense lockdown could have ended it and that would have been the smart thing to do."
·
SEPTEMBER 5, 2023
Tulsi Gabbard, 2020: "Immediately activate at least 560 contact tracers, with hundreds more on standby should the infection numbers continue to climb"
·
DECEMBER 9, 2023
JJ Couey runs a clip of Intellectual Dark Web (🙄) Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein discussing the need for forced vaccinations BEFORE the fake pandemic.
Strange that.
Just a discussion in advance. Of what to do when Smart Bomb hebbbens.
And the Smart Bomb of Infectivity is going to keep hebbening, just ask Bob Malone and Steven Hatfill.
So many Heroes.
All protecting us from the Dangerous Germs with Lockdowns and Masks.
Pierre Kory: All my patients are dying of Covid, Covid, Covid. We are at war with this virus.
Unfortunately, in some parts of the United States, the proportion of citizens routinely wearing standard masks in at-risk environments is nowhere near what's required to prevent spread. The fact that the maximal exhaled viral load of infected persons occurs before the development of actual symptoms should concern all who might come into close indoor proximity with maskless presymptomatic “super spreaders.”
July 1, 2020 USA Today Article is reprinted in full here, by Dr. Pierre Kory and Dr. Paul H. Mayo.
The severity, morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 must be re-emphasized to all, both young and old, as it spares neither. To avoid a catastrophic repeat of the initial surge, we recommend a population-wide intervention — a significant increase in the use of N95 masks — that might allow for a safer reopening of the U.S economy.
Upgrade to paid
Doc: I checkmated Bret on X and he stopped responding to me:
https://twitter.com/2ndSmartest/status/1744486654746730885
https://twitter.com/2ndSmartest/status/1744795404703613398
Bret Weinstein was recently interviewed by Tucker. He clearly stated he got it all wrong and his views are not different than yours.