Brownstone Institute
The New York Times: Latest Descent into Madness
From the Brownstone Institute
Sunday morning Belle and her husband drove to the emergency room at the University of North Carolina Hospital; got two rabies shots, one in each arm; and “paid $600 E.R. copays with heftier hospital bills to come.”
The New York Times really outdid itself this past weekend. On Sunday, the it published an Op Ed titled, “A Bat Flew Into My Bedroom and Reminded Me of All We Take for Granted.” I took the bait — I found the strange mix of triviality and hyperbole irresistible.
The article starts out innocently enough. A mom in North Carolina, Belle Boggs, didn’t like the oppressive summer heat and the evening news so she went to bed early. But things quickly went off the rails.
While she slept, her husband (who was working late) left a screen door open and a bat flew into the house. A light sleeper, she noticed the bat, told her husband to capture it (so that they could turn it in to the authorities!) but the bat flew away.
That should be the end of the story, right?
Nope, Belle Boggs was just getting started. She lets us know that this incident was part of a heroic journey. “What happened over the next few days restored my faith in the systems in our country that keep us safe.” What!?
I’ll let her explain:
To decide what to do next, we consulted every resource.
Richard, my husband, read the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.
I called our health care after-hours line and spoke to a nurse who also consulted the C.D.C.
We called our county’s animal control center, and an officer was at our house within 10 minutes. He searched the house and garage for bats, found none and put in a report to our county’s public health department.
Lady, THE BAT DID NOT TOUCH YOU AND FLEW AWAY.
But Belle’s undiagnosed hypochondria was now in full bloom. So on Sunday morning Belle and her husband drove to the emergency room at the University of North Carolina Hospital; got two rabies shots, one in each arm; and “paid $600 E.R. copays with heftier hospital bills to come.”
Wait, she got rabies shots because she saw a bat that flew away!? That makes no sense.
But it gets worse because she uses this harrowing tale — a bat flew into her house and then out again — to launch into a political critique!
She explains that Donald Trump and Project 2025 want to shrink the administrative state. And that is bad because the layers and layers of civil service officers (C.D.C., night nurse, county animal control center, and university hospital) are what kept her safe from this bat that flew into her house and then out again on its own without touching anyone.
She concludes the op-ed by saying that she’s supporting Kamala Harris because “I don’t want to live in a country that doesn’t hold the health and safety of its citizens in high regard, and I don’t want to be left to make important decisions without guidance from qualified professionals. But for now and for at least the next six months, I don’t. I live in the United States of America — land of bats, land of doctors, land of public health — and that’s worth fighting for.”
It apparently never occurred to Belle that these “qualified health professionals” might be part of the problem.
The crack editors at the New York Times thought this was one of the best op-eds they’d read all week so they published it in the Sunday Opinion Section read by millions of people.
II. A Technical Aside
To be clear, I take the threat of rabies seriously. According to StatNews there were 89 rabies deaths in the US from 1960 to 2018 (so, about 1.5 per year). An estimated 96% of bats don’t have rabies but the remaining 4% do, so prudence is in order. One still has to get scratched or bitten though in order to get infected and that’s extremely rare (because bats are scared of humans and try to avoid us).
What Belle Boggs and the New York Times absolutely refuse to do is to look up how many people are injured by rabies vaccines every year — that’s the information one needs in order to do a proper cost-benefit comparison.
So I went over to OpenVAERS to find the results for myself. I discovered that:
- Since 1990 there have been 6,305 VAERS reports of rabies vaccine injuries including 184 deaths.
- If one restricts the search to just the US there are 4,332 VAERS reports of rabies vaccine injuries including 9 deaths.
- Those are really high numbers of injuries given that so few rabies vaccines are administered every year (a CDC Rabies Vaccine information Statement from 2009 claims 16,000 to 39,000 people are vaccinated against rabies in the US every year as compared with over 150 million flu shots annually).
- And remember: the underreporting factor for VAERS is between 10 and 100 so the actual number of rabies vaccine injuries and deaths are likely much higher.
Furthermore, if you’re bitten, what saves your life is human rabies immune globulin (HRIG), not the vaccine (immunity to rabies from the vaccine takes much longer to develop).
So if one has not been exposed and is not in a high-risk group (bat researchers for example) the rabies vaccine is almost all risk and no benefit.
My hunch is that Belle Boggs actually got HRIG in one arm and the rabies vaccine in the other, rather than “two rabies vaccines” as she claimed — please see additional details below.
III. Takeaways
My takeaways from the article are that:
• Vaccines in general and Covid in particular broke the brains of progressives.
• These people are now completely insane.
• I should not have to explain this but you do NOT need a rabies shot if you happen to see a bat!
• Hypochondria is a serious mental illness; Belle Boggs and her husband need psychological counseling not rabies shots.
• Articles like this convince me of the urgent need to abolish the administrative state.
• The grifters in public health need to stop taking advantage of crazy Democrats who are not thinking straight.
Also, what is going on with the New York Times!? Do they really believe that a small flying mammal who made one wrong turn is equivalent to fighting a house fire with a single glass of water (as the graphic accompanying the article suggests)!?
And is this really the sort of cutting-edge journalism that they want in the Sunday Opinion section? Is everyone at the New York Times now just completely nuts?
But then there is a final twist. Longtime uTobian reader April Smith pointed out that there is a new mRNA rabies vaccine. Was this article actually paid product placement to try to get this new shot approved? Given everything we know about the New York Times seems more than likely.
I note also that the CDC recently published Rabies Post-exposure Prophylaxis which includes a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG) and FOUR DOSES of rabies vaccine. Perhaps the CDC just placed the article to try to sell more product on behalf of their Pharma patrons?
Bats feed every evening at dusk where I live. They swoop and swirl eating the bugs — mosquitoes mostly. They are incredibly beautiful and they use echolocation to avoid coming in contact with us. I’ve been inside temples, caves, and archeological sites in Southeast Asia with thousands of bats and never feared for my safety. I don’t want to live in Belle Boggs’ hypochondriacal dystopia where the risks of nature are exaggerated and toxic injections are worshipped.
We are a part of nature, inseparable, and this extreme estrangement from nature is the source of so much misery. Healing from the current crisis does not require more civil servants, it requires a restored relationship with the natural world. I’m grateful for the people who understand this and are troubled by the New York Times’ brazen attempts to manufacture unnecessary anxiety and increased alienation.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
A relatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.
“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”
A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.
“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.
Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute
Today, Wenstrup announced a subpoena to compel Moore (The FOIA lady) to appear for a deposition on October 4, 2024, saying that she’d repeatedly resisted these efforts and delayed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.
“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation,” said Wenstrup.
“Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government,” he added.
Moore, however, has indicated through her lawyers that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she’d cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find “an alternative” to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.
They also explained that Morens’ emails suggesting Moore gave tips “about avoiding FOIA,” were misleading because Morens, under oath said, “That was a joke…She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”
Nonetheless, Moore’s decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation’s top health research institutions.
It’s not over until the FOIA lady sings!
Further reading: The great FOIA dodge
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Mere words cannot restrain our aspiring censors from weaponizing their power to silence dissent. Enemies of the First Amendment vow to “hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry explained this week, and they are prepared to circumvent legal protections to achieve their aims at all costs.
Kerry, speaking on a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum, lamented what he regards as insufficient censorship of “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free be able to implement change” despite the “major block” of the First Amendment.
But a survey of the dismal state of free speech in the United States shows that Kerry and his allies have already developed means to sidestep the “major block” of our founding documents. Hillary Clinton herself has floated the idea of criminal penalties for the spreading of “misinformation.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly called for “reining in the media environment” so that people cannot just “spew information.”
Earlier this year, journalist Mark Steyn was forced to pay $1 million in “punitive damages” for mocking a climate scientist and comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.
The prevailing attorney urged the jury to inflict the punishment to demonstrate the ramifications for engaging in “climate denialism,” which he compared to President Trump’s “election denialism.”
In New York, State Attorney General Letitia James has demonstrated the threat that change poses to our foundational freedoms. During her 2018 campaign for office, James proudly broadcasted her antipathy to the First Amendment, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association.
Her intolerance for dissent led her to target VDare, Peter Brimelow’s immigration-restrictionist website. Unable to find a crime, James used her office to drown the organization in legal costs until it was forced to cease operations. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute
Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, Roger Ver, and Pavel Durov have undergone similarly brazen persecutions that debunk the supposed safety of free speech protections in the West.
Our Constitution cannot survive Soviet-style justice of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Brimelow, Assange, and Durov were targeted for their dissent, and the regime reverse-engineered means to punish them.
A similar process occurs in academia. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would sanction law professor Amy Wax, a critic of affirmative action, by suspending her for a year and docking her pay. Penn insisted that the sanctions did not implicate freedom of speech and instead concerned “professionalism” standards for its faculty.
But Wax’s sanctions are explicitly based on 26 incidents of wrongthink, including criticizing “anti-assimilation ideas,” “rap culture,” and cities being “run like third world countries” as well as commenting on differences between the sexes and racial groups.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains, “Penn’s willingness to sidestep academic freedom protections to punish Wax sets a troubling precedent. If scholars with controversial views can lose their academic freedom merely for unspecified ‘unprofessionalism’ concerns, all faculty who hold minority, dissenting, or simply unpopular views are at risk.”
Americans more broadly face the same risk. Neither the First Amendment nor abstract free speech principles will stop the censors in their crusade. They will sidestep legal protections of our freedoms under the guise of ostensibly innocuous sloganeering.
Germany is already showing the way, with a guilty verdict for CJ Hopkins, an American living there who objected to Covid controls. With the documents already in place for “the future of the Internet,” the existing administration has a stated aim to close the Internet to free speech and install censors at all levels. This will necessarily run headlong into a confrontation with Elon Musk, but it will eventually hit Rumble and every other alternative source of information.
The target is the First Amendment but with a precise purpose: securing regime control over the whole population, with a public culture wholly controlled in the interests of protecting the administrative state against populist resistance. Those are the stakes.
Let there be no mistake about this. Your freedom to know the truth is what is at issue.
Author
Employer Vaccination Mandates Under Scrutiny Post COVID-19
The FOIA Lady Pleads the Fifth
‘Total Failure’: Shocking Data On Criminal Migrants In US Highlight Harris’ Border Hypocrisy, Former ICE Official Says
Federal Greenwash law: guilty until proven innocent
-
National2 days agoRetired judge slams Trudeau gov’t for promoting ‘false’ accusation about residential school deaths
-
Daily Caller2 days agoFEMA Doled Out Millions Pushing ‘Equity,’ Prioritizing ‘Underserved Communities’ Leading Up To Hurricane Season
-
Frontier Centre for Public Policy2 days agoDid the CBC prove in 1962 that no children are buried at Kamloops?
-
Economy1 day agoFederal mismanagement to blame for Canada’s immigration backlash
-
Daily Caller1 day agoMusk Reveals To Tucker Why He Thinks 2024 Will Be Last Election If Dems Win
-
conflict2 days agoMiddle East War Shows No Signs Of Stopping One Year After Oct. 7 — And No Clear Path To Exit
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days agoJulian Assange laments growing censorship, suppression of truth in the West upon release
-
COVID-192 days agoDr. Trozzi appeals revocation of his medical license in ‘existential moment’ for Ontario courts