From the Brownstone Institute

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

There is an old expression: “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan.”

It’s a spin on Tacitus: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”

We can judge the results of the pandemic response, then, by the number of people who claim it as their own. So far the answer seems to be: none.

These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had.

Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn’t force anyone to do anything.

Even from 2021, the media routinely referred to the “pandemic” and not the pandemic policies as responsible for learning losses, depression, business failures, and poor economic conditions. This has been deliberate. It’s designed to normalize lockdowns as if they are just something one does to deal with infectious disease, even though lockdowns have no precedent on that scale in the West.

More recently, this denialism has taken a strange turn. Now the people who actually did pull the trigger on the loss of liberty are routinely refusing to admit that they forced anything.

We’ve heard Donald Trump make this claim for a good part of this year. Mr. “I left it to the states” has yet to be publicly confronted with his decisions from March 10, 2020 and throughout the rest of his presidency. Interviewers don’t press him on the subject for fear of having access cut off later. And yet the record is very clear.

Then Anthony Fauci joined in, claiming that he never recommended the lockdowns at all.

But the pandemic of lockdown dentialism has gotten worse, to the point that the head of Health and Human Services plus the head of Occupational Safety and Health Commision are doing the same, even though the Supreme Court actually ruled against their edicts.

Ah, what a difference time and events make.

It gets worse. One of the most imperial and invasive of the governors was Andrew Cuomo of New York. He issued a massive number of edicts that he enforced with police power, including even dictating that bars couldn’t sell drinks alone but also mandating the selling of  food, even to the point of spelling out the quantity of food. This resulted in the infamous Cuomo Fries served around the state.

But to hear him talk now, he didn’t do a thing and no one had to comply with anything.

“Government had no capacity to enforce any of this,” he says now. “You must wear a mask and people wore masks in New York. But if they said I’m not wearing a mask there was nothing I could do about it. You must close your private business. I won’t. Well there was nothing I could really do about it. It was really all voluntary. It was extraordinary when you think about it. Society acted with that uniformity voluntarily because I had no enforcement capacity.”

And that’s why hundreds of thousands of people fled the city and state? It was all voluntary?

As Thomas McArdle explains:

 In fact, the “New York State on PAUSE” executive order Mr. Cuomo signed on Friday, March 20, 2020, included a directive that all businesses in the state deemed non-essential by the government must cease employee activities within their offices before the following Monday. That December, an army of police sheriffs shut down a popular bar and restaurant on Staten Island that responded “I won’t” and arrested its general manager for defying coronavirus restrictions by remaining open for indoor business, in just one example of enforcement of lockdowns in the state.

Cuomo’s dissembling rhetoric is simply incredible. And it speaks to why we’ve seen no justice for what they have done. It’s simply because not one pandemic leader has admitted to having done anything at all. The entire pandemic response was so brutal, so outlandish, and so utterly wrong even according to their own goals, whatever they were, that no one wants to take credit for any of it.

All of which reminds me of Dr. Carter Mecher, who Michael Lewis in The Premonition celebrates as the key architect of lockdowns. In the Red Dawn emails of 2020, he pauses from his frenzied push for lockdowns with a winsome comment. He says that if everything goes well with the lockdowns, they will have saved society from a deadly disease. The irony, he says, is that if their strategy works, everyone will be saying: look it wasn’t bad after all, so why did we lock down?

So either way, he predicted, they are doomed.

This was the real premonition. Today, no one likes these people. The public is furious beyond measure. The leaders of the response all over the world are being toppled and fleeing offices with as much dignity as they can muster, which usually means landing in the Ivy League (Jacinda Ardern, Lori Lightfoot, Yoel Roth. and Cuomo).

The one thing they will not do is admit that they were completely wrong and only caused massive wreckage from which we are still suffering, plus completely discredited public health and government for a generation or two.

Early on, I and many others were accused of Covid denialism for citing the data on the age disparities of risk. The alarmists and lockdowners were said to be the realistic ones. Three years later, this has completely flipped. Reality bit back. Now the denialists are those who actively promoted and enforced lockdowns, and now implausibly deny that anything happened at all.

All of this gives new meaning to the word gaslighting. Indeed, it is enough to drive one crazy. We encounter it everywhere, even in the second Republican debate where not even one question was about the lockdowns, much less the surveillance, censorship, vaccine mandates, or the failures of the shot. Here we have the greatest failure of government in my lifetime or any living lifetime and we don’t have official institutions out there even willing to talk about it.

The major media is tacitly conspiring with the political establishment, the corporate sector, and the administrative state to pretend like that fiasco was completely normal and also entirely forgettable, not even worth naming. We did the best we could with the information we had so just stop complaining about it!

This is not going to work. It is too close to living memory for this level of gaslighting to be effective. The more these official institutions engage in this crazy form of denialism, the more they discredit themselves.

Author

• 
  Jeffrey A. Tucker

  Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

From the Brownstone Institute

BY RUSS GONNERING  

I once was proud of my profession. I spent over 40 years as a clinician, educator, and researcher and for most of that time thought I was engaged in a noble calling. But all that has changed in the last 3 years. Medicine is lost in The Wilderness.

There were warning signals, to be sure. For many years I was heavily involved in medical associations on the local, state, and national levels. Gradually I became disillusioned when I saw that many of my colleagues who gravitated to this activity did not share my views. They enjoyed the politics of medicine. In fact, they enjoyed it too much. I lost interest. Perhaps in retrospect that was part of the problem. The policy of medicine gradually became the politics of medicine. And as is often the case, where there is politics there is also corruption.

Twenty years ago I was appointed as a technical advisor to a panel of the federal government. I was flown to Washington, housed in an upscale hotel and dined on fancy meals. I saw how intoxicating power can be. I began to somehow consider that I was special. The problem was I was expected to use my technical expertise to advise in a certain way. I realized, almost too late, what was going on. But I did realize it and was not reappointed to that position.

Looking back on it, this experience gave me a taste of how the events of the past three years came to be. I saw how money, power and flattery could cause physicians to shade their recommendations. It happened oh so gradually until one day, integrity was completely lost. The tragedy is that many times, those who lost it did not miss it.

I have come to realize that ethics and medicine have parted ways for many physicians, myself included. Things we once took for granted are gone…evaporated. We reached a point where, relating to COVID, attempts to treat disease were not just ignored but penalized. As a surgeon, I had operated under the obligation of giving Informed Consent to all my patients. I was expected to clearly explain the risks, benefits, and alternatives of my proposed course of action and allow the patient to make the decisions regarding their response to those recommendations. I could be sanctioned for failing in this obligation. However, in COVID, Informed Consent was criminalized…but only for that disease. Those who still felt an obligation to their patients were, and continue to be, vilified, slandered, fired from their position, and in some cases, prosecuted.

One would have thought that organized medicine, and academic medicine in particular, would have rallied to their defense, but that was not the case. They were the primary prosecutors. I shake my head when I think back to the days that I taught medical ethics to residents and medical students. One of the case studies involved discussing how accepting a lunch, or even a pen, from a drug company was unethical. Somehow, individuals who made life and death decisions were suspected of being bribed by a pen! And owning stock in a company and prescribing medications manufactured by that company were absolutely forbidden!

Now where are we? A good deal past the use of pens, for sure!

If a physician from even 10 years ago would look at the contents of most of our medical journals today, I am sure he or she would think they were reading fiction. These are the four articles that make up the Viewpoint section of the September 19, 2023 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

• Affirmative Action Ruled Unconstitutional: Options for Building a Diverse Health Care Workforce
  Eli Y. Adashi, MD, MS; Philip A. Gruppuso, MD; I. Glenn Cohen, JD

• The Supreme Court’s Rulings on Race Neutrality Threaten Progress in Medicine and Health
  Harald Schmidt, PhD; Lawrence O. Gostin, JD; Michelle A. Williams, ScD

• The Supreme Court Decision on Affirmative Action—Fewer Black Physicians and More Health Disparities for Minoritized Groups
  Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD; Martha L. Elks, MD, PhD; Mark Howse, PhD

• Holistic Admissions at UC Davis—Journey Toward Equity
  Mark C. Henderson, MD; Tonya L. Fancher, MD; Susan Murin, MD

In order to truly understand the departure from what was the norm a mere 10 years ago, this is a link to the contents of the Viewpoint section in the September 18, 2013 issue:

• The HIPAA Conundrum in the Era of Mobile Health and Communications
  C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD; Delphine J. Huang, MS

• A Trial-Based Approach to Statin Guidelines
  Paul M Ridker, MD, MPH; Peter W. F. Wilson, MD

• Medicare Payment for Chronic Care Delivered in a Patient-Centered Medical Home
  Andrew B. Bindman, MD; Jonathan D. Blum, MPP; Richard Kronick, PhD

• PEPFAR’s Antiprostitution Pledge Spending Power and Free Speech in Tension
  Lawrence O. Gostin, JD

The difference in the tenor of the articles is striking, at least to me. In the current articles, the author’s primary focus seems to be finding ways to circumvent the rule of law. In 2013, the two articles that deal with a legislative focus explore how to comply with the rule of law. While some may claim that is a distinction without a difference, I would disagree. Something has changed! Change is inevitable, but is it always positive? Looking back on history, many nations have changed in response to internal and external pressure. Unfortunately, the majority of those changes have been negative.

Back in 2019, before the Great COVID disaster, Baffy and associates warned us of a change that was occurring in medical and scientific publishing. They observed the concentration of medical and scientific publishing in the hands of a few very large corporations which answered to stakeholders with conflicting interests:

Because the use of complex digital tools and rapidly growing electronic databases require advanced computing skills, Internet-based mega-companies such as Google (Mountainview, Calif), Amazon (Seattle, Wash), Facebook (Menlo Park, Calif), and Apple (Cupertino, Calif) may become interested in spearheading further transformation and outcompete current stakeholders in scholarly communication and develop more user-friendly tools. Such developments could potentially lead to a few large entities controlling the gateways to scientific knowledge, a sobering thought…

Scientific publishing has been a highly profitable industry, and there is little doubt that financial interests will continue to drive its transformation. However, the academic community has a fundamental stake in this process and should understand the trajectories of change to protect enduring values, embrace promising developments, and make scholarly communication increasingly inclusive and efficient.

It would seem the authors were amazingly prescient, as their world has come to pass. Medicine seems, at least to me, to have become the Willing Servant of an Unholy Trinity of Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Politics. Medical publication and medical education have become more interested in ideology and propaganda than healing, more interested in class than the individual. It is the very antithesis of the concepts contained in the Hippocratic Oath. Although the proponents of the transformation may claim it is being done for a “greater good,” that excuse has been used before in medicine of some nations of the last century. When sanity returned, that excuse was repudiated.

Society now finds itself a passenger on a ship which has been taken over by ideologues. The ship is heading for the rocks. Lookouts stationed high above can see the disaster unfolding and urgently inform the captain of the ship. The captain solves the problem by throwing the lookouts overboard.

This is the dystopian world in which we now live.