Brownstone Institute
The Covid Narrative Flunked the Critical Thinking Test
From the Brownstone Institute
At the height of the Covid hysteria, several times I encountered variations of the meme “It’s not a pandemic; it’s an IQ test.” Probably the memesters were poking fun at those duped by the mainstream Covid messaging.
In any case, that meme really misses the point. The essential problem has never been about one’s IQ. Many highly intelligent people (in an academic sense) swallowed a very dubious narrative, while others less academically gifted did not. The real divider was the ability and inclination to think critically about it.
In a previous article I explained the basic concept of critical thinking, which can be defined as rational judgment about appeals to belief. Here I will lay out my own classroom approach to it in relation to the Covid messaging and policies.
The approach was derived from Browne and Keeley’s once popular critical thinking textbook, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking. Simplified for Japanese university students unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking, this approach consists of six questions, all very applicable to the official narrative about Covid. For any Japanese speakers who may be reading this, here is a video link of me explaining my approach.
Number one: What are the issues and the conclusion? The purpose of this question is to spur awareness that very often there is an assertion being made in the context of a debated issue. Many of my students have been completely unaware that a debate exists about many matters they hear about in school or from the media, such as climate change/global warming.
When people insist that no real debate exists in regard to an issue about which reasonable people differ, they have already failed the critical thinking test. That stance certainly has been the substance of much Covid messaging.
Number two: How good are the reasons? Many of my students can brainstorm on their own the characteristics of good reasons: clear, true, logical, objective, and important. In the Covid context, untrue reasons include arguing on the basis that novel, experimental injections are certainly (100 percent or 95 percent) “safe and effective.” Moreover, the demand by pharmaceutical companies to receive complete legal protection from any liability belied this claim of safety.
Along with that, it was not logical to endanger people with potentially serious health harms from experimental injections or to withhold from them medical care in the name of protecting them, as happened during the lockdowns.
Number three: How good is the evidence? For the purpose of learning critical thinking about statistics, a number of books explain common forms of statistical deception and error. The classic book How to Lie With Statistics, along with the more recent book by Joel Best Damned Lies and Statistics, show how such dubious statistical data is often created or else badly interpreted.
In a Japanese book, Shakai Chosa no Uso (The Lies of Social Research), Professor Ichiro Tanioka reveals that government statistics also are often deceptive and simply serve the interests of bureaucrats and politicians, either by magnifying a problem to justify government policies and funding or by making a government program appear to be successful. Since many people are easily impressed by number data, he comments that more than half of all social science research is garbage, a problem compounded when the data is then referenced by the mass media, activists, and others.
Since the earliest days of the Covid panic, statistical chicanery has been conspicuous, including Neil Ferguson’s now-infamous predictions of millions of deaths without lockdowns. Norman Fenton exposed a number of statistical confusions in the UK’s national statistics in regard to Covid. As another example, Pfizer’s claim of 95 percent Covid vaccine efficacy was based on its own shoddy research using the PCR tests. However, few in the Covid-messaging mainstream bothered to look into the statistically shaky basis for this claim. They simply parroted the “95 percent.”
Number four: Are any words unclear or used strangely? A number of words took on unclear, strange, or inconsistent meanings during the Covid panic. One notable example was the word safe. In the case of the experimental Covid injections, the term evidently could accommodate a wide variety of serious side effects and a considerable number of deaths.
However, in other contexts, an extreme, all-or-nothing concept of safety came into play, as in the slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” This slogan makes as much sense as shouting, during the sinking of a passenger ship, “If everyone is not in the lifeboats, then no one is in the lifeboats.” Nevertheless, this nonsensical mantra was on the lips of many in the corporate media, in order to insist on policies like universal Covid vaccination.
Interestingly, this absurd concept of safety is actually one of the items in The Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test, which I made use of in my teaching and research (The test and manual can be downloaded for free). The test focuses on a fictional letter to a newspaper editor arguing for a total ban on overnight street parking in a certain city. The test-taker’s job is to evaluate the various arguments in the letter, one of which asserts that “conditions are not safe if there’s even the slightest possible chance for an accident.”
Of course, such a view of safety could lead to the ban of almost anything with the slightest element of risk. To illustrate this, I pretended to trip on a student desk in class. Then I would insist that the accident showed that “teaching is too dangerous” and leave the classroom briefly. There is very little in life that is really “100 percent safe.”
Another conspicuous misuse of terminology has been referring to the Covid injections as “vaccines,” since the novel mRNA technology does not fit within the traditional definition of a vaccine. A more accurate designation would be “gene therapy,” since the injections influence the expression of the body’s genes, as Sonia Elijah and others have pointed out.
In order to allay public anxieties and avoid the necessity of testing their injections for possible toxic gene-related side effects like cancer, the familiar, user-friendly term vaccine was chosen. Then when the “vaccines” were obviously failing to prevent Covid infection, as vaccines are normally expected to do, the public was suddenly offered a new definition of a vaccine –something that does not prevent infection at all but simply ameliorates the symptoms of disease.
Number 5: Are there any other possible causes? People often arbitrarily attribute phenomena to causes that they wish to implicate. However, multiple causes may be to blame, or the real cause may actually be something entirely different. For example, many have been blaming human-generated CO2 for the high temperatures this summer, but other possible causes have been identified, such as an increase in atmospheric water vapor from underwater volcanic eruptions.
In regard to Covid causation, John Beaudoin discovered evidence of widespread fraud on death certificates in Massachusetts, in response to pressure from public health officials wanting to inflate Covid death figures. Hundreds of accidental deaths and even Covid vaccine deaths were counted as resulting from Covid.
Looking at the UK’s national Covid death statistics, Norman Fenton discovered a similar problem. Only around 6,000 people actually died from Covid alone, a mere four and a half percent of the total number of supposed “Covid deaths.” The rest had other serious medical conditions as possible causes of death. If a person tested positive on a PCR test after hospital admission, even someone fatally injured in a traffic accident could be counted as a Covid death.
In another example of wrong-headed thinking about causation, elements of the mainstream news media and certain “experts” credited the initial relatively low numbers of Covid hospitalizations and deaths in Japan to the practice of universal masking here. Unfortunately for that theory, soon afterwards Covid cases and hospitalizations shot up dramatically in Japan, making the “saved-by-masks” explanation difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, many officials and media outlets had decided early on that they believed in masks, regardless of what the evidence and common sense had to say.
Number six: What are the basic assumptions and are they acceptable? An assumption is an underlying, unstated belief that often goes without challenge and discussion. Recently I encountered a false assumption when I decided to stop wearing a face mask in class at my university. This met with the displeasure of one of the higher-ups, who called me in for a chat. He insisted that my unmasked face was making my students uncomfortable in class. He was assuming that they felt this way about it, so I decided to do an anonymous survey to find out their real feelings. To my surprise, only one student in all of my classes objected to my going maskless. The rest preferred that I teach without a mask or else expressed indifference.
Adherents of the mainstream Covid narrative accepted as axioms dubious ideas such as these:
- Viral epidemics can and should be halted by extreme measures bringing great suffering on large numbers of people.
- The threat of Covid infection supersedes human rights such as the rights to work, to commune with other human beings, to express opinions freely, etc.
- Facial masks prevent Covid transmission.
- Facial masks do no significant harm.
These assumptions have been ably debunked by many articles at Brownstone Institute and elsewhere.
Thus from the beginning the mainstream Covid narrative has failed to give persuasive responses to any of these questions. In light of that, it is remarkable that there are still many people who endorse the original Covid measures and messaging. Especially in times like these, more people need to employ critical thinking to become less gullible and more skeptical of widespread ideas and influential entities, including those usually branded as reliable. They neglect to do so at their own peril.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
On Thursday, Joe Rogan and Marvel megastar Josh Brolin traded stories about the preponderance of Covid vaccine injuries among their friends. Brolin even described contracting “a mild case of Bell’s palsy” earlier this year, which Rogan attributed to the vaccine, noting he knew several people who suffered facial paralysis following Covid vaccination.
There is no perfect medicine. The benefits and harms of any treatment must be carefully considered in order to prescribe the safest, most effective course of action for a patient. While the FDA and CDC continue to extol the benefits of the Covid vaccines, they have ignored a growing body of evidence that these products can also be harmful. The code of medical ethics demands a transparent and balanced accounting of their impact on the American people. Only then can we set the best course for healthcare policy and future pandemics.
An honest accounting begins with clinical trials, supposedly “the most rigorous in history.” Pfizer’s own legal arguments suggest otherwise. Responding to a whistleblower lawsuit alleging major deviations from protocol, Pfizer’s lawyers noted that the company’s “Other Transactions Authority” agreement (OTA) with the Pentagon didn’t require clinical trials to comply with FDA regulations because the vaccine was a military prototype for “medical countermeasures.” This agreement allowed Pfizer to “grade its own homework,” so to speak — a point emphasized by DOJ lawyers in a separate filing in Pfizer’s support.
The FDA intended to keep Pfizer’s data hidden for 75 years, but attorney Aaron Siri’s FOIA lawsuit forced the agency to release them. Naomi Wolf’s DailyClout led 3,250 volunteer experts in analyzing more than 450,000 pages of internal Pfizer documents and uncovered massive harms ignored by the FDA, detailed in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity.
This effort revealed 1,233 deaths in the first three months of the vaccine rollout, and a litany of injuries: “industrial-scale blood diseases: blood clots, lung clots, leg clots; thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a clotting disease of the blood vessels; vasculitis, dementias, tremors, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, epilepsies.”
These harms are echoed by data from V-safe, a smartphone-based tool created by the CDC. Among 10.1 million registered V-safe users, 7.7 percent reported side effects so serious they were compelled to seek medical care, many more than once.
The main culprit is the Covid spike protein encoded in the vaccine’s mRNA technology. This protein is an antigen, or foreign immunogenic substance, located on the outer coat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that triggers an immune response. The mRNA in the shots instructs the body’s cells to produce identical spike proteins, inducing the immune system to create antibodies that bind to them, theoretically protecting vaccinated individuals against the virus. Unfortunately, this plan has a fatal flaw: The spike itself is toxic and potentially deadly.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed articles have demonstrated the spike’s potential for harm independent of the rest of the virus. Potential complications include myocarditis, blood clots, neurological injuries, and immune dysfunction. Pfizer’s own pre-market biodistribution studies show that vaccine components leave the injection site in the arm and penetrate every major organ system within hours, where mRNA can linger for weeks, forcing cells to churn out more and more of the toxic spike protein, which can persist for months. There is no way to predict how much spike protein the mRNA injections will produce in any individual, and there is no “off switch.”
According to CDC figures analyzed in Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of the COVID “Vaccines,” from 2021-2023 the US suffered 600,000 excess deaths not associated with Covid. Furthermore, Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveal that two million Americans became newly disabled, with unusual excesses in historically low-risk groups.
These trends coincided with mass Covid vaccination, including an unaccountable 59 percent surge in deaths among Americans ages 15-44 in the third quarter of 2021 compared to 2019. Crucially Covid contributed only part of this excess mortality: in that quarter the US suffered around 201,000 excess deaths, with Covid officially accounting for 123,000, leaving 78,000 excess deaths — 39 percent of the total — still unexplained.
Similar figures from abroad underscore a tragic loss of life among healthy people at minimal serious risk from the virus.
It could get worse. No carcinogenicity studies were performed on the injections prior to their launch, thus long-term cancer risks are essentially unknown. The spike protein also appears prone to prion-like misfolding, raising the specter of potential neurodegenerative disorders.
Medical ethics demand a balanced approach to every intervention, weighing potential benefits against potential harms. However, in the case of the Covid vaccines, federal agencies have chosen only to proclaim benefits. By surfacing data that bear upon both the positive and negative impacts of the Covid vaccines, and evaluating the pandemic performance of CDC, FDA, and other health agencies, the new administration can restore confidence and integrity in medicine and public health.
Republished from The Federalist
Author
Brownstone Institute
Zuckerberg openly admits the US government’s involvement in aggressive violation of the First Amendment
From the Brownstone Institute
Benjamin Franklin warned that those who would surrender essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.”
Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight years of increasingly aggressive content moderation, including nearly 100 fact-checking organizations operating in over 60 languages, Meta is now pivoting to a community-driven system similar to X’s model.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg first suggests that the censorship was purely a technical mistake, and then changes his tune near the end and admits what has long been litigated: “The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”
In many court cases costing millions, involving vast FOIA requests, depositions, and discoveries, the truth of this has been documented in 100,000 pages of evidence. The Murthy v. Missouri case alone uncovered substantial communications through FOIA and depositions, revealing the depth of government coordination with social media platforms. The Supreme Court considered it all but several justices simply could not comprehend the substance and scale, and thus reversed a lower court injunction to stop it all. Now we have Zuckerberg openly admitting precisely what was in dispute: the US government’s involvement in aggressive violation of the First Amendment.
This should, at least, make it easier to find redress as the cases proceed. Still, it is frustrating. Tens of millions have been spent to prove what he could have admitted years ago. But back then, the censors were still in charge, and Facebook was guarding its relationship with the powers that be.
The timing of the shift is telling: a Trump ally joining the board, Meta’s president of global affairs being replaced by a prominent Republican, and a new administration preparing to take control. But while Zuckerberg frames this as a return to free speech principles, the damage of their experiment in mass censorship can’t be undone with a simple policy change.
The irony runs deep: private companies claiming independence while acting as extensions of state power. Consider our own experience: posting Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power” – only to have Meta remove it as “misinformation.” This wasn’t just censorship; it was meta-censorship – silencing discussion about the very mechanisms of control being deployed.
While tech platforms maintained the facade of private enterprise, their synchronized actions with government agencies revealed a more troubling reality: the emergence of exactly the kind of state-corporate fusion they were trying to prevent us from discussing.
As we’ve covered before, we didn’t just cross lines – we crossed sacred Rubicons created after humanity’s darkest chapters. The First Amendment, born from revolution against tyranny, and the Nuremberg Code, established after World War II’s horrors, were meant to be unbreakable guardians of human rights. Both were systematically dismantled in the name of “safety.” The same tactics of misinformation, fear, and government overreach that our ancestors warned against were deployed with frightening efficiency.
This systematic dismantling left no topic untouched: from discussions of vaccine effects to debates about virus origins to questions about mandate policies. Scientific discourse was replaced with approved narratives. Medical researchers couldn’t share findings that diverged from institutional positions, as seen in the removal of credible discussions of Covid-19 data and policy. Even personal experiences were labeled “misinformation” if they didn’t align with official messaging – a pattern that reached absurd heights when even discussing the nature of censorship itself became grounds for censorship.
The damage rippled through every layer of society. At the individual level, careers were destroyed and professional licenses revoked simply for sharing genuine experiences. Scientists and doctors who questioned prevailing narratives found themselves professionally ostracized. Many were made to feel isolated or irrational for trusting their own eyes and experiences when platforms labeled their firsthand accounts as “misinformation.”
The destruction of family bonds may prove even more lasting. Holiday tables emptied. Grandparents missed irreplaceable moments with grandchildren. Siblings who had been close for decades stopped speaking. Years of family connections shattered not over disagreements about facts, but over the very right to discuss them.
Perhaps most insidious was the community-level damage. Local groups splintered. Neighbors turned against neighbors. Small businesses faced blacklisting. Churches divided. School board meetings devolved into battlegrounds. The social fabric that enables civil society began unraveling – not because people held different views, but because the very possibility of dialogue was deemed dangerous.
The censors won. They showed that with enough institutional power, they could break apart the social fabric that makes free discourse possible. Now that this infrastructure for suppression exists, it stands ready to be deployed again for whatever cause seems urgent enough. The absence of a public reckoning sends a chilling message: there is no line that cannot be crossed, no principle that cannot be ignored.
True reconciliation demands more than Meta’s casual policy reversal. We need a full, transparent investigation documenting every instance of censorship – from suppressed vaccine injury reports to blocked scientific debates about virus origins to silenced voices questioning mandate policies. This isn’t about vindication – it’s about creating an unassailable public record ensuring these tactics can never be deployed again.
Our Constitution’s First Amendment wasn’t a suggestion – it was a sacred covenant written in the blood of those who fought tyranny. Its principles aren’t outdated relics but vital protections against the very overreach we just witnessed. When institutions treat these foundational rights as flexible guidelines rather than inviolable boundaries, the damage ripples far beyond any single platform or policy.
Like many in our circles, we witnessed this firsthand. But personal vindication isn’t the goal. Every voice silenced, every debate suppressed, every relationship fractured in service of “approved narratives” represents a tear in our social fabric that makes us all poorer. Without a full accounting and concrete safeguards against future overreach, we’re leaving future generations vulnerable to the same autocratic impulses wearing different masks.
The question isn’t whether we can restore what was lost – we can’t. The question is whether we’ll finally recognize these rights as truly inviolable, or continue treating them as inconvenient obstacles to be swept aside whenever fear and urgency demand it. Benjamin Franklin warned that those who would surrender essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Our answer to this challenge will determine whether we leave our children a society that defends essential liberties or one that casually discards them in the name of safety.
Here is the full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement, January 7, 2024:
Hey, everyone. I wanna talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown 5 years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years.
There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content, governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I wanna make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re gonna do.
First, we’re gonna get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we’re gonna phase in a more comprehensive community note system. Second, we’re gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I wanna make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms. Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re gonna focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
And for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re gonna dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off.
It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re gonna start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
Fifth, we’re gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we’re gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right. And these are complex systems. They’re never gonna be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there and more to come soon.”
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