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Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

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From the Brownstone Institute

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It’s been more than obvious since April 2020 that lockdowns were far too costly for individuals and society and could never earn a rational public-health defense. And the evidence was rolling in from one year later that the vaccine mandates were similarly indefensible.

Both tactics had in common the enormous use of state coercion that flew in the face of every principle of civilized government.

As we are constantly told, both people and government were panicked, and needlessly so. As it turns out, the infection fatality rate was not 2-3 percent, as the WHO had said early on, or 1 percent as Fauci told the Senate in March 2020, but rather 0.035 percent for anyone under the age of 60 (which is 94 percent of the population).

Covid has been highly transmissible and with it the resulting protection of natural immunity. The correct policy should have been to maintain all social and market functioning while the actual vulnerable population protected itself as it awaited widespread immunity. That’s how every generation for 100 years has handled infectious disease: as a medical and not political matter.

In other words, politicians and officials the world over made enormous and obvious errors, just not later but from the outset. This is not really worth arguing any more. The evidence is now 2.5 years deep. Insisting on 85 percent coverage of an ineffective vaccine was also an egregious error becaus people are not stupid and knew that they did not need this vaccine, especially since it protects not against infection or transmission and its approval bypassed all normal standards of clinical trials.

Where are the apologies? Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Faced with enormous failure, the machinery that did this to us has generally refused to say the simple word. It’s the hardest thing for people with power to admit their fallibility. Even though the whole world knows what they did and vast and increasing numbers are aware of the utter failure, the political class still insists on living in a fantasy land of its own creation.

There are exceptions.

Prime Minister Imran Khan apologized for lockdowns in April 2020.

Ron DeSantis of Florida has repeatedly said that the lockdowns were an enormous mistake and will never happen again so long as he is in charge. That’s very close to being an apology, though many residents are still awaiting the magic word.

Also in 2020, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on Norwegian television to say that she and others panicked and “took many of the decisions out of fear.”

That’s close to being an apology.

So far as I know, that’s about it. Until yesterday. The new Premier of Alberta Canada Danielle Smith has offered an apology to Albertans who were discriminated against because of their COVID-19 vaccination status. “I am deeply sorry for any government employee that lost their job and I welcome them back if they want to come back.”

Glory be! That’s precisely what we are looking for. Not just from a few but from all. The near absence of such apologies is driving the massive political realignment the world over, as furious voters demand admission of wrongdoing and justice for the victims.

They are not forthcoming and therefore the anger is only rising. The storm clouds are gathering around the impossibly arrogant Anthony Fauci, with a new hit movie making the rounds and a judge demanding that he be deposed in a powerful lawsuit filed against his hypercritical collusion with social media companies to censor truth.

Now nearly three years into this disaster, the worry that humanity would just accept the outrage and move on is proving unwarranted. People are discovering that there is plenty of dissent out there, and it stretches across the partisan divide. The resulting cultural and political realignments will echo long into the future, like other major upheavals of the past.

Think of the big historical events that echoed for generations in American politics. The struggle over slavery. World War I. Prohibition. The New Deal. World War II. The Cold War. The last one I know well, having come of age in the latter years. In retrospect, the long episode of the Cold War was packed with mythology. Still, the struggle was expressed in ideological terms of freedom vs. communism. The alliances that lined up remained for decades and impacted cycle after cycle of political controversy at home and abroad.

For strange reasons of timing and loss of principle, the “woke” left found itself mixed up in lockdown politics and then the vaccine mandate. Many of them lined up with policies that violate the very rights they had spent decades defending. So much for the Bill of Rights, the freedom of movement, the appreciation for the classless society, bodily autonomy, and so on. The left lost its soul during these years, and thereby alienated multitudes of sane lefties who watched in horror as their own tribe abandoned them in favor of the authoritarianism they had long decried.

Lockdown/mandate vs not: this has the capacity to be a theme that will resonate far into the future. It also unites people on the political “right” again with small business, genuine civil libertarians, and champions of religious liberty. It permits the “left” to again find its voice for human rights and freedoms. For that matter, they do not have to be activists; they only need to be people who do not want their houses of worship padlocked, their business closed and bankrupted, their speech curtailed, or their bodily autonomy violated.

It also put the emphasis on the correct point: the protection of American liberties not from some shadowy foreign enemy but from our own governments. It also draws in the left that has long been suspicious of the place of big business, and, in this case, rightfully so. The largest corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook), for all the good that they achieve in this world, have leaned decisively in favor of lockdowns.

Same with Big Media. The reason is not just that they are harmed less by lockdowns and, in many cases, actually benefited from them. It’s because the people ruling these companies enjoy ruling-class lives, and they see the world through them. Lockdowns were the favored policy for cultural and political reasons, which is itself a scandal.

There is another group of powerful people in a position to dedicate themselves to the anti-lockdown/anti-mandate cause: parents. In an astonishing act of despotic ignorance, governors closed schools down all over the country, with zero medical benefit and grotesque levels of abuse for children and parents.

These are schools for which people pay heavily in property taxes, while parents using private schools pay twice. Governments shut them down, robbing parents of their money and smashing their settled lives. Many children in this country lost two years of education. Many families with two incomes had to drop one of them in order to babysit their children at home as they pretended to learn on Zoom while being denied access to peers.

Then once schools were operating normally, the CDC approved without evidence the Covid vaccine as an addition to the childhood schedule. Parents are not this dumb. They will never go for it. They will pull the kids out of public school and into private and homeschooling, causing a real crisis for one of the most settled institutions in American life.

Then you have the problem of colleges and universities. Rightly or wrongly, parents and students make extreme financial sacrifices to pay for college in the hopes that the right education and degree sets people up for a lifetime of success. Whether this is true or not, parents are risk-averse with their children’s future so that they do whatever is necessary to make it happen.

Then one day, the kids were locked out of the universities that they pay to attend. No parties. No study sessions. No going to other people’s rooms. No in-person instructions. Many thousands of students in this country have been fined and harassed for noncompliance. They’ve had masks forced on them even though their risk from the virus approaches zero, and the memory of this humiliation will last a full lifetime. Then came the vaccines, forced on college students who did not need them and are most vulnerable to adverse events.

Why have the people put up with this? Under normal conditions, they never would have. None of this would have been possible. The one reason they did this time: fear. Fear of getting sick and dying or, if not dying, experiencing permanent health effects. This emotion can last far longer than one might think. But eventually emotions do catch up with facts, among which is that the danger of severe outcomes was wildly exaggerated and the lockdowns and mandates achieved nothing in terms of disease mitigation.

You mean all this suffering and horror was for naught? Once that realization dawns, fear turns to anger, and anger to action. If you understand that dynamic, you can see why the architects of lockdowns from Dr. Fauci to the CDC are doing their best to delay that dawning, with daily doses of alarmism designed to keep people languishing in fear and ignorance.

The fear however is breaking. We will reflect on all the incredible health theater to which we’ve been subjected for two and a half years, the hopping around people to stay 6 feet away, the silly ban on restaurant menus, the on-again-off-again mandatory masking of the people, the curfews and capacity limits, and we’ll realize that the people who passed on all these emergency measures were just making things up in order to appear decisive and precise.

We will look back and feel mortified at how we treated each other so brutally, how so many turned into rats hungry to get our friends and neighbors in trouble with the compliance police, how we willingly believed so many untrue things and practiced such preposterous rituals out of a belief that we were avoiding and thus controlling the enemy pathogen we couldn’t see.

None of this will soon be forgotten. It’s the trauma of our lives. They stole our freedom, our happiness, our way of life, and attempted to replace them all with a stern regime with puritan sensibilities that rivaled the Taliban, forcing the whole population to hide their faces and live in fear of the American Mandarins who then came after the whole population with needles and woefully vetted shots.

Karma is already turning on the whole gang of coercive totalitarians here and abroad. While the virus is invisible, the people who dreamed up and enforced lockdowns and mandates who wrecked the country are highly visible. They have names and careers, and they are right to be very worried about their futures.

The sociological basis of the Catholic institution of auricular confession is to habituate people into the psychologically most difficult practice of admitting error, asking forgiveness, and pledging not to do it again. Saying it out loud within earshot of others is harder still. Every religion has some version of this because doing so is part of becoming a responsible human being.

The best approach is a simple word: sorry. So rare but so powerful. Why won’t more follow the lead of Danielle Smith and just say it?

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

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

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Brownstone Institute

Kid Lab Rats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas BuckleyTHOMAS BUCKLEY 

” (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.” “

Mommy, can I be a Covid lab rat?”

That is a request most parents will never hear and it is a request that very few parents would ever want to hear.

But, unlike the more typical “Can I have a pony?” request, letting your child be a Covid shot test subject is a request that can actually be granted around the nation.

Right now, for example, Pfizer/BioNTech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids.

Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects; this is how they describe the study on their “Enrolling Children 6 to 23 months old for a COVID-19 Vaccine Study” website:

This study will help us learn how well our updated COVID-19 vaccine works in babies and toddlers who have not been previously vaccinated and see if the number of recommended doses can potentially be reduced for children under the age of 5. The study vaccine has been authorized by the United States Food and Drug Administration for children at least 6 months of age. It is designed to protect against the newer COVID-19 variant called XBB.1.5.

The company is also running similar trials for older kids and, of course, adults.

Clinical trials for drugs and procedures involving children are not inherently wrong and they are conducted safely around the world almost daily.

But this Covid trial stands out for a number of reasons.

First, the trial only involves kids who have never had a Covid shot before. The likelihood that a parent who has declined to get the shot for their kids in the first place will say “We chose not to get the shots for our kids, but feel free to experiment on them with the stuff we previously declined” is minimal.

In other words, if a parent didn’t feed their kid aluminum foil-flavored ice cream before it is highly unlikely they would feed their kid an experimental version of aluminum foil-flavored ice cream, even if you paid them (the trial comes with certain compensation enticements – Pfizer did not respond to a request for exactly what they are in this trial, though industry averages would indicate the pay would be between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).

Second, there is the matter of “informed consent.” A trial subject must give permission freely, be told of any risks, and understand the entire situation. Clearly, nine-month-olds cannot do that.

It is perfectly legal for parents to give their “informed consent,” but here we get into the third problem: the risk/benefit question.

For example, during the pandemic (early 2020 to May 2023) there were 41 Covid deaths in California of kids under five. That number does not differentiate between “died with Covid” or “died from Covid;” that is a debate that continues to rage across the country and shall be put aside for the time being.

Every death of a child is a tragedy and this article is not intended to lessen that fact. However, children in general were not at all likely to get, let alone die from, Covid during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were about (rolling average) 2.4 million (about 6% of the total population) under-fives in California and there were about 385,000 cases of Covid reported in that age group.

Currently, about 3.2% of California’s under-fives have had the latest shot. That’s on par with the national average. What is interesting is that of the 70,817 kids who have received the shot in the state, 41,224 live in the Bay Area. In other words, the Bay Area has 20% of the state’s population, but 57% of the state’s “vaccinated” toddlers and babies. But do not ever think that politics has had nothing to do with Covid protocols.

During the pandemic, the overall likelihood of a child dying from/with Covid was about 1 in 60,000; for those over 75 – about 6.5% of the population or 2.7 million – there were about 51,000 with/from Covid deaths, or about 1 in 50.

The risk, clearly, is extremely different depending upon age and general state of health.

With a relative risk of being harmed by Covid, the risks of the Covid shot itself must be considered carefully – note: no kid in the study will get a placebo for comparison purposes.

The Covid shots, in the general population, did have significant side-effects and did cause a number of deaths. While these numbers are not broken out by age, in the same time period there were 640 deaths and 89,000 “adverse effects” experienced (much much more than just a sore arm) by Californians.

Also during the same time period, all other vaccines combined caused 66 people to die and 14,000 to have a reportable “adverse effect.” (Note – the numbers are taken from the CDC’s “vaccine adverse event reporting system,” a tool it stood by as an early warning device for decades…that is, until the Covid problem numbers got too high.)

That puts the general odds of something bad happening to a person after they get a Covid shot at about 1 in a 1,000 and some studies have shown it to be 1 in 800. In other words, the risk from the shot appears to outweigh the risk of Covid itself by a factor of 60 times.

Citing the uncertainty of benefit, it should also be noted that the European Union has not cleared the shot at all (with minor exceptions) for the under-fives and were hesitant in allowing them for the under 18s.

Clearly, the risk outweighs the reward, as it were, and it is unclear – because Pfizer did not answer any request for information/comment (see questions below) – if parents are given those figures when making the decision to enroll their kid in an experimental drug program.

Adults calculate risk and reward constantly – from “Can I make that light before it turns red?” to “Should I tease that lion?” But a seven-month old is simply not capable of doing so and while certain clinical trials do hold out serious hope and are important for society at large, a trial such as this for such a limited reward – kids very very very rarely get, let alone suffer seriously, from Covid – seems dubious.

In other words, if you wanted to test a new malaria drug you would not do so on Santa’s elves at the North Pole because there are no mosquitoes there to infect anyone.

According to the Belmont Report, which set baseline standards for human-involved clinical trials in the late 1970s (it was a government reaction to the horror of the CDC’s own “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) one of the three core standards for justifying clinical trial testing is “beneficence.”

In other words, there is an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risk and harm.

That risk/benefit calculation obviously changes in regard to other far more common childhood maladies, making participation in those studies potentially far more “beneficent.”

But in the case of Covid, the question is how are maximal, as it were, are the anticipated benefits?

Very very minimal and that is the problem, said Dr. Clayton Baker, former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

“Given the real and well-established risks of harm (including myocarditis and death), and given the functionally zero potential for benefit (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.”

Come to think of it, maybe just get the kid the pony instead.

Here’s a link to an on-going kids Covid study with a handy map so you can find a location near you (mostly Bay Area): A Study to Learn About Variant-Adapted COVID-19 RNA Vaccine Candidate(s) in Healthy Children

For clinical trials in general, you can look here for one that you might be interested in taking part in:

For clinical trials just about Covid, you can look here

As noted above, here are the questions Pfizer did not reply to:

-Exactly how is informed consent handled? I assume a parent/guardian can provide said consent?

-Do (or have) you run trials with previously vaccinated children?

-What child/youth trials have been run in the past and what have been their results?

-What is the compensation amount?

-Have any previous trials shown conclusively that the vaccine ameliorates Covid severity in children?

-When and in what manner did the FDA approve this trial?

-When do you expect to conclude the trial?

-Is this trial aimed at testing a “booster” shot or to cover a new variant?

-Has any child in any trial conducted had a significant and serious reaction requiring hospitalization and/or led to death?

-It appears one of the points of the study is to figure out how to cut the number of doses as well as check effectiveness. Is that correct?

-How many children – nationwide and in California specifically – have signed up for/been through the trial so far?

-What are the differences between trials involving children and those involving adults?

-Will Pfizer conduct trials each time it comes out with new variant vaccine shot?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Thomas Buckley

    Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

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