Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, steer public-health policy for purely political ends — and, in particular, to cover their own asses when things got hot.
The article is long, but every word of it is well worth your time. (My only critique of the piece is that I wish Jim had mentioned that during this period Anthony Fauci was the highest-paid of all the federal government’s four million employees, making well over $400,000 a year.)
COVID itself was bad enough, but pandemics pass. The sickness Jim describes in this essay is far, far worse — and the prognosis is not good.
Read it here. And don’t be surprised if you suddenly remember what “tumbrels” are.
2 Comments
I’m reading this and liking it, but this early sentence bothers me:
“officials both overstated the vaccines’ benefits and understated their small (but not trivial) risks to certain populations.”
In fact they (1) overstated the “small but not trivial” benefits *to certain populations* (2) understated the *known* risks to certain populations, and (3) falsely claimed or implied that the *known* risks were the only risks.
These products were beneficial, on balance, for only some specific groups of people. (Even that is debatable, but let’s just suppose.) For many other groups–pretty much all healthy people under 60–there was never any evidence of *any* significant benefit, even before considering whether the paltry benefit might be outweighed by known and unknown risks. (It was definitely outweighed for many large groups.)
There were some known risks from the beginning; the manufacturers’ own dubious studies (which they wanted to keep secret) clearly indicated some risks. These risks were far greater than policy makers, politicians or journalists admitted. (In some cases they flatly denied known risks before finally conceding but downplaying those risks.) Even now there are already-known risks which are simply denied or minimized.
Just as importantly, there almost certainly were *unknown* risks. Shockingly, we were told by these liars that the injections were simply “safe and effective” even though there couldn’t have been *any* way of testing for safety even in the very near future. Millions of people were being injected with *zero* data on what happens to people mere months after being injected. We won’t really know for years or maybe decades what this bizarre and largely pointless product may be doing to people.
In most countries where the miracle injections were very popular, we now see significant excess deaths, often starting right around the time of the miracle. The “health” officials don’t care.
So when the author says “the rapid development of vaccines was one of the few policy victories of the pandemic”, that seems strange. What kind of “victory” is it to race through testing for a product that benefits only a tiny minority (arguably) and then push this drug on everyone in the world? At best, it was a disgusting trick, taking advantage of the gullible and frightened masses to enrich mega-corporations. At worst it was something close to mass murder. Eventually we might find out which.
Quite so, Jacques; I raised all of these objections myself as I found myself browbeaten into getting the first two rounds of the vaccine (living in New York the pressure was just overwhelming).
I had a brief exchange with the author earlier today (before your comment appeared), and he said that if he’d had the time and print space he could easily gone on for another 4,000 words. Other subjects not focused on in this piece were the arbitrariness of vaccine mandates and the extraordinary arrogation of “state-of-exception” powers by local authorities. I shouldn’t be surprised if he weighs in on all of this in a future piece.