From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker  

The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report.

Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco, and utter wreckage – all fine words and phrases but nothing quite captures it.

Given that, there is probably no report on the thing that can properly characterize the whole of it. On the other hand, it’s worth trying.

Meanwhile, the results of Covid commissions of governments around the world have become unbearably predictable. So far they have mostly said their government failed because they didn’t act fast enough, did not enforce lockdowns hard enough, did not communicate and coordinate well enough, and so on.

Everyone in the corporate world knows that when a committee reduces all problems to “communication and coordination” you are being fed a load of bull.

So far, it’s been almost entirely bureaucratic blather, and that helps account for the global loss of confidence in political systems. They cannot even be honest about the most catastrophic policies in our lifetimes or several.

The amount of corruption, waste, and destruction from this period of our lives, lasting from 2020 until 2023 but with remnants of bad policies all around us, is so unspeakable that not one report has yet been fully honest about what happened, why it happened, who really won and lost, and what this period implies for how vast swaths of the public see the world.

Among other astonishing revelations to come from this period was a full presentation of just how many institutions have been corrupted. It was not just governments and certainly not just the elected leaders and career bureaucrats. The problems are very deep and reach more deeply to intelligence agencies, military-based bioweapons systems, and preparedness agencies that guard their activities under the cloak of what is called classified.

This is a major reason why so many questions are being left unasked and unanswered. Then we have the ancillary failures in a whole series of additional sectors. The media went along with the nonsense as if they are wholly owned and controlled by government and industry. Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed.

The tech companies cooperated in a massive censorship operation. The retail end of the pharmaceutical companies enforced the government’s edicts, denying people basic medicines, as did the whole of the medical systems, which heavily enforced mandates on an experimental and failed product mistakenly called a vaccine. Academics were largely silent and public intellectuals fell in line. Most mainline religions cooperated in locking worshippers out. Banks were in on it too. And advertisers.

In fact, it’s hard to think of any institution in society that leaves this period untarnished. It’s probably not possible for a government report on the subject to be fully honest. Maybe it is too soon, plus the hooks that created the whole problem are still embedded too deeply.

All that said, we’ve got a solid start with the highest-level government report produced to date: After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward, by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as assembled by the US House of Representatives. The report was written by the majority and it shows.

Coming in at 550 pages with 2,000-plus footnotes (we have made a physical version available here), the preparation involved hearing from hundreds of witnesses, reading thousands of documents, listening to thousands of reports and interviews, and working at a furious pace for two years. Based on the outline and breadcrumbs of the Norfolk Group, while adding in additional material based on critiques of media and economic policy, it is a comprehensive blast against the public-health features of the pandemic response.

The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report. It is an excellent breaking of the ice around the topic. Note that this report has received very little press attention, which only further underscores the problem.

Coming in for heavy criticism: gain-of-function research, the deference to the WHO, the lab-leak coverup, the funding of pharma cutouts, business and school closures, mask mandates, the lack of serious attention to disease monitoring, vaccine mandates, the sloppy approval process, the vaccine injury system, the banning of off-the-shelf therapeutics, social distancing, the rampant fraud in business loans, the effects of monetary policy, and more.

The report contains nuggets that we cannot help but praise:

Ignored in the report: the rental moratorium, the frenzy of Plexiglas and air filtration, the push for sanitizing all things, the reopening racket designed to prolong lockdowns, domestic capacity restrictions, the division of the workforce between essential and nonessential, the role of CISA and the intelligence agencies, the CDC’s push for mail-in ballots that might have been decisive in the national election, and the astonishing gibberish over the infection fatality and case fatality rates.

There is so much more to chronicle and criticize that the report could have been 10 or 100 times as long.

To be sure, the report has plenty of problems aside from these exclusions. Operation Warp Speed comes in for praise for saving “millions” of lives but the citation is to a modeling exercise that assumes what it is trying to prove. Look at the footnote: It’s bad science.

The real trouble with this section is not even its incorrect claim that the vaccine saved lives. The core issue is that the whole point of the lockdowns and all that followed was to create conditions for the release of the countermeasure. The plan from the beginning was: lockdown until vaccination. Praising the goal while criticizing the ineffective means diverts the point.

This is precisely what was explained to me in the early days in a phone call from a member of George W. Bush’s biosecurity team, a man who now runs a vaccine company. He said we would stay locked down until the world’s population got a shot in the arm. This phone call happened in April 2020.

Quite simply, I thought he had lost his mind and hung up. I did not believe that 1) the plan was always to stay in lockdowns until vaccination, and that 2) anyone seriously believed that governments could vaccinate their way out of a wave of respiratory infections insofar as the pathogen had a zoonotic reservoir.

The very idea struck me as so preposterous that I was incredulous that an educated and responsible adult could ever advance it. And yet that was precisely the plan all along. Sometime in the last week of February 2020, a global cabal decided to pull the trigger on a worldwide campaign of shock and awe – tapping every asset in civil society for assistance – to bring about worldwide forced medicalization with a new technology.

This was never really a public health response. That was only the cover story. This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once. I get it: that is an ominous statement and hard to wrap one’s brain around the whole of it. In completely ignoring this point, the Select Subcommittee has missed the forest for the trees.

Let’s attempt a different metaphor. Let’s say your car is hijacked in Manhattan and you are thrown in the backseat. The goal is to drive all the way to Los Angeles for a drug deal. You could object to the means and goal but instead you spend the entire trip complaining about potholes, reckless driving, warning of the need for an oil change, and complaining about the bad music playing on the car radio.

At the end of the trip, you put out a report to this effect. Do you think that would be strange, to wholly ignore the theft of your car and the destination and purpose of the hijacking and instead focus on all the ways in which the grand larceny could have been smoother and happier for everyone involved?

In that spirit, the Subcommittee’s separate recommendations list is weak, leaving governments wholly in charge of anything labeled a pandemic while only suggesting a more cautionary approach that takes into consideration all costs and benefits. For example, it says on travel restrictions: “It is far easier to undo the restrictions that may have been unneeded than it is to take a ‘wait and see’ approach once the unknown virus of concern has entered our borders and thoroughly spread.”

It seems like the core lesson – governments cannot be masters of the microbial kingdom and allowing them to pretend otherwise for purposes of an industrial and political reset cues up a moral hazard that is an ongoing threat to freedom and rights – is not yet learned, or even so much as admitted. We are still being invited to believe that the same people and institutions who created calamity last time should be trusted again next time.

And keep in mind: this is the best report yet issued!

My friends, we have a very long way to go to absorb the fullness of the reality of what was done to individuals, families, communities, societies, and the whole world. Nor is it truly possible to move on without a full accounting of this disaster. Has it begun? Yes, but there is a very long way to go.

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.

Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Elon Musk has said he would help Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill financially in her fight against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who is embroiled in a legal battle with a medical regulator for her anti-COVID jab and mandate views on social media, is looking to take her case to Canada’s Supreme Court with financial help from Elon Musk and a leading freedom-fighting lawyer.

Libertas Law, which is representing Gill, said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews on Monday the canceled doctor “filed an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada” her case against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO).

“The growing overreach of regulators into monitoring the speech of professionals on social media has become a matter of national concern to the public, which loses the benefit of hearing a variety of opinions when professionals’ speech is chilled out of fear of punishment,” Libertas Law attorney Lisa Bildy said. “We hope that the Supreme Court of Canada will use Dr. Gill’s case to restore the historic role of the courts as guardians of the constitution.”

The application follows Gill’s unsuccessful judicial review of the “cautions-in-person ordered against her in 2021” by a CPSO committee concerning her Twitter comments in August 2020 that criticized multiple levels of governments COVID mandates and policies.

The orders against Gill were made despite her “providing the College with ample evidence in 2020 to support her position against catastrophic lockdowns,” Libertas Law noted.

Musk, the billionaire Tesla and X owner, pledged in March to back Gill financially.

The application to Canada’s highest court comes after her application for leave to appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal (ONCA) “was denied” on October 3.

“The infringement of Dr. Gill’s freedom of expression and conscience, guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was barely mentioned by the committee when it issued the orders for cautions in-person (which Dr. Gill has not yet received),” Libertas stated in its press release.

Libertas noted that a brief comment about the committee having “no interest in shutting down free speech” was made “before proceeding to do exactly that.”

According to Libertas, the CPSO had placed on its website in 2020 a warning to doctors to provide “an opinion that does not align with information coming from public health or government.”

“Yet the Divisional Court declined to quash the orders, finding that the committee was sufficiently alert to the Charter infringement of Dr. Gill’s speech, such that its decisions were within the range of reasonable outcomes,” the legal firm said.

Last May, LifeSiteNews reported that Gill had vowed to fight with appeals with the help of her Musk-backed legal team after she lost a court battle.

One of Gill’s “controversial” posts she made in 2020 read, “If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention. #FactsNotFear.”

The Divisional Court decision against Gill dated May 7 concluded, “When the College chose to draw the line at those tweets which it found contained misinformation, it did so in a way which reasonably balanced Dr. Gill’s free speech rights with her professional responsibilities.”

“In other words, its response was proportionate,” the ruling stated.

In Monday’s press release, Libertas Law noted that due to an unrelated recent court ruling relating to Charter Rights, Gill will argue the same reasonings to fight her censorship in her appeal to the Supreme Court.

Canceled doc’s legal battles against medical regulator ongoing for months

Gill’s court challenge against the CPSO began earlier this year, with Bildy writing at the time that the “decisions were neither reasonable nor justified and they failed to engage with the central issues for which Dr. Gill was being cautioned.”

She argued that Gill had a “reasonable scientific basis” for her posts, noting that the previous decision made against Gill targeted her for opposing the mainstream COVID narrative.

Gill is a specialist practicing in the Toronto area and has extensive experience and training in “pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology.”

Last September, disciplinary proceedings against her were withdrawn by the CPSO. However, Gill was ordered last year to pay $1 million in legal costs after her libel suit was struck down.

The CPSO began disciplinary investigations against Gill in August 2020.

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews at its annual general meeting in July 2023 near Toronto, canceled doctors Mary O’Connor, Mark Trozzi, Chris Shoemaker, and Byram Bridle were asked to state their messages to the medical community regarding how they have had to fight censure because they have opinions contrary to the COVID mainstream narrative.