COVID-19
COVID Is Over — But Did We Learn Anything From It?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By PETER ROFF
The lockdowns instituted during the COVID pandemic were only supposed to last a few days. Remember “14 days to flatten the curve” was all that was needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by patients infected with the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus.
Two weeks turned into three, then months. Schools were closed. Businesses were shut down. Commercial activity in the world’s most powerful nation ground almost to a halt, but the virus kept killing, mutating and spreading.
States like California and Kentucky enforced the lockdowns with ruthless efficiency. The free exercise of worship and assembly was crushed on the altar of public health and safety.
Was it worth it? The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s report, “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years,” says no. Its authors, who include the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Scott Atlas (who served as an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force), Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke and the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan conclude, by using publicly available data and peer-reviewed studies, that the lockdowns cost more lives than they saved.
Atlas, Hanke, Mulligan and Phil Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) and the fourth and final co-author, conclude: “The ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.”
“We did not focus on theories or models. We looked at cold, hard facts,” Kerpen says. “The evidence is overwhelming. Lockdowns, school closures, and societal panic/disruption resulted in a staggering number of excess non-COVID deaths in the United States versus zero in non-lockdown Sweden.”
Kerpen estimates that the policies implemented during the lockdowns saved approximately 16,000 lives while causing about 400,000 extra deaths and imposing staggering economic costs, including the loss of 49 million jobs.
Other adverse consequences stemming from the lockdowns cited in the report include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.
In the U.S., catastrophes like COVID are usually followed by the appointment of bi-partisan, blue-ribbon commissions to study everything and issue recommendations we’re told will prevent something similar from happening again.
That hasn’t been done this time, which reinforces the suspicion in some minds that COVID-era policymakers who are still in a position to influence the conversation are hiding something. Having made a hash of things, they just as soon allow it all to slide down the memory hole.
Even in China, where popular opinion doesn’t matter, the investigation into the origins of the virus hit a stonewall thanks to what news reports have called “bureaucratic infighting.”
Too many people think the lockdowns worked. They’re ignoring the data. The CTUP report shows them to be wrong. It’s a call for a further probe that searches for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Without it, how can we be sure the public’s health and safety will be protected the next time, not to mention our civil liberties?
The CTUP report offers a few “lessons learned” that should inform policymakers’ decision-making in the next crisis. One is that “Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them.”
“Conventional wisdom pre-COVID was that communities respond best to pandemics when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” the authors conclude. During the pandemic, responsible officials in the public eye “intentionally stoked and amplified fear, which overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health harms on top of the harms of the virus itself.”
As hard as it is to argue against that, it’s easy to suggest the crisis was used as a political club. What of it? Suppose public health officials, the media, and other policymakers deliberately ignored sound science and proven pandemic countermeasures to inflict political damage on a president they wished to see booted from office. Does that matter? The answer is yes, it does.
There’s more to be learned because there’s more to be studied. None of the nations that used lockdowns to prevent COVID from spreading can report that they worked as intended.
“The best-performing major country in the world was Sweden,” Kerpen says, “which did not employ mandatory lockdowns. Yet, to the extent that official and unofficial commissions in many countries have issued reports, they say the principal lesson to be learned from the pandemic is to lockdown harder and faster. The evidence doesn’t support that. It tells us that the lockdown policies must never be imposed again.”
If Kerpen is correct, and the evidence suggests he is, then policymakers are drawing the wrong conclusions. Lockdowns were a failure, not a success.
Other ways must be found to prevent a future outbreak from turning into a pandemic, hopefully, before the next crisis presents itself.
A former U.S. News & World Report columnist and United Press International senior political writer, Peter Roff is an acknowledged expert on U.S. politics and the policy process. His take on politics and policy appears frequently in print and on U.S. and international broadcasting outlets. Email him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on social media AT TheRoffDraft.
From LifeSiteNews
By Stephen Kokx
The star quarterback argued that Dr. Anthony Fauci was financially incentivized to suppress COVID treatments like ivermectin, adding that Americans should have compassion on those who were convinced by the ‘full-court propaganda.’
NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers has not been shy about his opposition to the COVID shot in recent years. During many public appearances on television, he has strongly denounced mandates, lockdowns, and government and media officials who pushed the jab. Now, he’s striking a somewhat different tone.
“How do we call these people forward, in love and acceptance… to step into the truth?” Rodgers asked Tucker Carlson in reference to Americans who bought into the “full-court propaganda” and received the shot.
Aaron Rodgers pic.twitter.com/sYBCtOVNU2
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 14, 2024
“They went through all the mass-formation psychosis that we all did… and are now going, ‘Oh s***. Maybe that wasn’t the best. Maybe they lied to us. Maybe this wasn’t safe.’”
Rodgers spoke with Carlson earlier this month in a timely, two-hour long interview on his The Tucker Carlson Show. As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, they touched on an array of subjects related to how global elites control the world, including blackmail and pedophilia.
There are “a lot of really interesting secret societies, not just the Skull and Bones at Yale, which has produced all those presidents and Freemasonry at its highest level,” Rodgers said. “There is a sexual component, I think, to a lot of that.”
Rodgers won Super Bowl XLV with the Green Bay Packers in 2010. A sure-fire Hall of Famer, he was one of the highest profile professional athletes to push back against the shot at the time. During an appearance on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show in January, he courageously argued that Dr. Anthony Fauci had a financial incentive to vilify alternative treatments like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, zinc, vitamin D, and vitamin C. He made similar points with Carlson.
“If we’d called this ‘gene therapy,’… maybe we thought it was about 5 to 10 percent of people that might take this. We call it a ‘vaccine’ then that brings in all the potential [of] being canceled as an anti-vaxxer, because that’s what they did to me and you as well,” he said.
READ: Bill Gates predicts mRNA ‘vaccine factories’ worldwide and $2 vaccines for every disease
Rodgers, 40, has been a vocal supporter of medical freedom activist turned pro-abortion presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He told Carlson that Kennedy asked him if he would consider being his running mate. He ultimately said no but he hopes that if he was elected “Bobby” would make the hard decisions to take on the Deep State and the “alphabet” agencies like the FBI and CIA.
“There’s a top line in a lot of those organizations that are actually at their core anti-American and are not doing things that [are] in the best interest of our people,” Rodgers said. “[Trump] had four years to do it and didn’t drain the swamp, and whether he just got scared because of what he learned when he was in there, I think it’s very plausible.”
Rodgers and Carlson also discussed COVID propagandist Bill Gates.
“I think there’s some people that want depopulation… Bill Gates… if you look at his track record and what he’s done around the world,” Rodgers said, referring to Gates’ vaccine activism in Africa.
“I think he’s strongly pro-death,” Carlson replied.
“I think he’s not the only one. I think there are a lot of other people. I don’t understand what that motivation is… but I think those are some of the evils that we’re up against,” Rodgers commented.
Rodgers revealed that he has done a seven-day fast to improve his health and encourages others to try it as well. He also explained that he doesn’t eat a lot of sugar because cancer cells thrive off of it. He then pointed out that there has been a proliferation of ailments developed by children in recent decades, seemingly hinting that he believes that is a result of the massive increase in vaccines they receive.
Although raised in a Christian home, Rodgers told Carlson it is possible religion is a tool to “control” people. At the same time, he said there is a “demonic” element to UFOs and that, regarding the COVID shot, he thinks “evil kind of overstepped a little bit too far. And now that the tides are turning.”
“There’s a battle that’s going on between the seen and the unseen world, between good and evil, between the powers that we can see and the powers that we can’t see,” he stated.
At one point in their conversation, Carlson asked Rodgers, “do you know anyone who didn’t get the vax who’s upset he didn’t get the vax? Does anyone regret that decision?”
“No,” Rodgers replied.
“Right. Not one person, ever,” said Carlson.
COVID-19
NIH Quietly Altered Definition For Gain-Of-Function Research On Its Website, Former Fauci Aide Confirms
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JASON COHEN
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak confirmed on Thursday that his agency’s communications department altered NIH’s definition for gain-of-function research, with the change being “vetted” by “experts.”
The NIH until Oct. 20, 2021 defined this research as “modif[ying] a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent,” while “some scientists use the term broadly to refer to any such modification,” according to the House Oversight Committee. Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York questioned Tabak, a former aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, about the agency changing its definition of the research on its website, asking him who authorized the alteration.
WATCH:
The current website does not define gain-of-function research, but asserts this research is usually uninvolved with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.
“The change was made by our communications department because of the confusion that people have about the generic term of gain-of-function and the specific term gain-of-function,” Tabak testified.
Malliotakis responded by suggesting the communications department would not be qualified to make a change like this and must have had other input.
“The content was vetted,” Tabak testified. “By individuals who are subject-matter experts.”
Fauci firmly denied that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) before the COVID-19 pandemic during a Senate hearing in May 2021.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said.
Tabak testified on Thursday that the NIH did fund this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it “depends on [the] definition.”
The NIAID, which Fauci previously led, funded the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance to study bat-based coronaviruses in China that consisted of the transfer of $600,000 to the WIV, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.
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NIH Quietly Altered Definition For Gain-Of-Function Research On Its Website, Former Fauci Aide Confirms
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