“Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly”, writes Bret Swanson in the Wall Street Journal, but you could leave the first word off the headline and it would still be true. It is not necessary to agree with or even understand every one of Mr Swanson’s specifically Covid-related points to see the inevitable truth of what he says below:
Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.
The worldwide system of individual doctors reporting and pooling their observations of how diseases progress and treatments work out has been a major factor in the spectacular medical progress of the last two centuries. For it to work, obviously, all must be free to say what they have seen and all must be free to see what others have said. I had thought this understanding was an unshakeable pillar of science, one of those innovations, like literacy and the scientific method itself, whose advantages are so clear that once discovered it is never abandoned.
This turned out not to be the case.
A big chunk of humanity – let’s call it the most timid and frightened 65% of humanity – is always going to be accepting and grateful for a government that exerts unconstitutionally coercive powers to herd everyone into acceptance of a draconian health regime when we’re in the face of what even some of them consider to be a worldwide deadly pandemic.
I think we can prove silencing and censorship until the cows come home, and we’ll still never get anywhere politically by doing so. People WANT government to make everyone wear masks and get shots and stay away when the plague is about, even if it turns out to be less serious than feared.
When the next pandemic comes along, I’ll bet that the majority of the people push the governments to be even more draconian than they were during Covid. There are a lot of people who think that we just barely dodged a bullet, what with all of the non-conforming mask-avoiders and the vax-lax, and that we need to do much better because the next disease could be much worse.
tl;dr – Most people are scared sheep.
The international establishment denied that there were any helpful Early Treatments – indeed they actively smeared Early Treatment “Trump wants you to drink bleach – or horse poison”. They censored, and actively smeared, any medical doctor or medical scientist who tried to get the truth to the public. Indeed both medical doctors and medical scientists faced punishment and persecution if they went against the lying “narrative”.
The reason for this international campaign of censorship and smears, was two fold – if there were effective Early Treatments then the justification for “lockdowns” (which were never really about “saving lives” – they were about power-and-control, the destruction of so many small business enterprises, for example in California, is quite deliberate – it is part of the international agenda to have society dominated by government and a handful of “partner” Corporations) would collapse, and the case for the Covid injections (the so called “Covid vaccines”) would also have collapsed.
Very large numbers of people who died could have been saved – the international establishment has blood upon their hands.
Then there is the matter of the Covid injections (the so called “Covid vaccines”) – endlessly the claim was made that these injections were “safe and effective”.
They were not really effective – and they were certainly not “safe”. There has been no apology from the international government and corporate establishment (the international Corporate State of “public-private partnership” or “Stakeholder Capitalism) to the people injured by the Covid injections, or to the families of the people who were killed by the Covid injections.
In private the defence is produced that – you do not understand, this is a matter of Public Health, for example the birth rate had-to-be-reduced to save The Planet, you are stuck in the reactionary paradigm of thinking that health care is just about the individual patient.
I am indeed a reactionary, I do believe that medicine (health care) is “just” about the individual patient – I reject the Collectivist political and cultural agenda of “The Planet”.
I also reject the international agenda for life to be dominated by government and a handful of vast “partner” banks, financial entities, and other vast “partner” Corporations.
In case anyone still does not know – the lockdowns did not “save lives”, and were never about “saving lives”. The economic collapse that the lockdowns will help cause, will cost many lives. Anyone who claims that they “did not know” that this would be the result of the policy – is either an idiot or a liar.
As for the concentration of the economy under governments and vast partner corporations – that is, yes, mostly the Cantillon Effect (Credit Money) – but the lockdowns certainly helped with this long standing international agenda.
Here’s a thought, in tangential reference to this:
Many people espouse the “Great Man” theory of history, that things happening around us all are driven by the bigshot types, like Adolf, Napoleon, and Josef. The idea that you can manipulate the masses through things like censorship and propaganda are outgrowths of this semi-fallacy.
I happen to think that they’re not as critically influential as many would think. The “Great Men”, I fear, are mere expressions of the zeitgeist; had Alexander not been born, then some other figure would have taken up Phillip of Macedon’s finely tuned army and done something with it. The time was right, the military imbalance was too great between Macedonia and the rest of the Greco-Persian world. Sure, the machinations of Olympias played a huge role in how it went down, but the essential fact was, something was going to happen. Alexander was at one and the same time a “Great Man”, and a victim of fate and circumstance.
It’s the same with this crap surrounding COVID. Someone was going to pull the scam, eventually… The corruption of the CDC and the biological industries has been a fact for decades; witness the whole manufactured “Opioid Crisis” as an example. COVID merely arrived at the right time to be opportunistically used as a tool to take down Trump and the American economy. Who slid the shiv in? Ohsoverymany… Something was going to happen. They just took advantage of it all.
With that said, the point is then to be made that the propaganda and disinformation were merely a symptom of the more deeply-rooted causes. The CDC ceased doing “Public Health” a long damn time ago, and got into politics. That’s a long-standing issue; like Phillip’s massively superior military, it’s an enabling condition, one that meant that something was going to happen, one way or another, for some reason or another. Fauci and his ilk likely think they’re “Great Men”, turning the wheel of history, but the reality is that they’re as much creatures of the wheel’s turning as anyone else.
In other words, you can claim the whole thing was caused by one guy and a bunch of PR work, but… Yeah. No. There were underlying causes and contributory factors, well out of that one guy’s control. Napoleon was as much an expression of his age as he was a mover of it; had the enabling factors not been there, he’d have likely remained a relatively low-level bit player in history, one nobody would remember. Imagine our favorite “What-If” character of history, our boy Adolf: Where would he have wound up, absent WWI? What if we’d had WWI, but radio and the mass media didn’t get as big as they did in our actual history? What keystones in the arc of Adolf Hitler’s trajectory could be pulled out, and still have it follow the same path?
I’m highly critical of all this “Great Man” crap, TBH. The censorship and propaganda around COVID didn’t just “happen”; there were a ton of underlying conditions that contributed to it, not the least of which has been our inattention to what was going on with the CDC and NIH, followed closely by the essential death of the physician’s professional credibility and professional associations. Time was, you’d have had a very difficult time silencing these guys, but as the corporate health care ecosystem has taken over, their independence and ability to freely state their opinions has evaporated. Employees are way more easy to shut up than men who own their own practices…
So… Yeah. It ain’t just the one thing, I’m afraid. Yes, they used propaganda and censorship, but neither would have worked very well under other conditions. They won’t work as well in the future, either, because credibility and trust are both easy things to lose. Which they have.
@bobby b
A big chunk of humanity – let’s call it the most timid and frightened 65% of humanity
This used to not be true of Americans. Both the filter of immigration (meaning you had to be an ornery, non conforming pain in the ass to want to move here in the first place) along with the cultural norms that came out of that, along with the origins of these in the English legal system from the Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights, and the general culture of the “rights and privileges of an Englishman” made Americans uniquely self reliant, suspicious of government, dreaming big, eschewing the ideas of “knowing one’s place”.[1]
Unfortunately that has been drained away over the past several decades, and that drain has turned into an open sewer in the past few years.
Which is why, despite your often sunny eyed optimism on the subject, I do not believe that better messaging from the right or the libertarians is going to change election results in favor of liberty. On the contrary, I think they will just drain what little we have. One need only look at recent USSC results. The cases judged at the end of the term would have been “duh, no brainer” thirty years ago. Now they are so shockingly controversial that we are ready to toss the whole idea of separation of powers in the trash.
So as I have said before, Each American need a Plan B.
[1] It is worth pointing out that this did not happen so much in South America for religious reasons. Americans tended to be from small, independent religious sects, where as South America was heavily populated by Catholics and the huge hierarchy that comes with that. And so that Catholic church’s dominance very much depended on ensuring that everyone “knew their place”. The south and slavery are a whole different twist on this. I need to get ChatGPT to write an essay on that for me 😀
It still is. Your mistake is assuming the goal of the censors was the advancement of science. It was not. Their goal was the empowerment of the Left.
And, let us be brutally honest: A lot of that “science”? It was more “sciencism” than real honest scientific inquiry that was repeatable by others and/or falsifiable.
You go digging into all the work that was done around the mRNA “vaccines”, and if your hair doesn’t turn white, then you didn’t understand the implications of what you were reading. None of the issues with myocarditis or fertility problems were new or unknown; they were all reported in the animal studies. What was new was the utterly haphazard and dare I say, unscientific work that was done to get approval. To include undoing the double-blind studies, so as to remove any real evidence for those same issues from the animal studies to exist in the human trials.
Whole thing was shoddy work, just like most of the pointless “gain of function” research done. What, pray tell, was the utility of that research, the thing crying out for it to be done? I’ve yet to see it, other than that they had some nebulous idea that it would speed up the vaccine development process. Actual facts of what happened…? We paid China to develop bioweapons against us. What. The. Actual. F*ck?
The entire NIH and CDC structure that enabled that happening ought to be ripped out at the roots, and all involved parties should be serving long prison terms for treason or execution for actual depraved indifference murder of several million human beings…
I was hunting for a Voltaire quote and found this one by mistake. It seems vaguely on point :
Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.
“Whole thing was shoddy work, just like most of the pointless “gain of function” research done. What, pray tell, was the utility of that research, the thing crying out for it to be done? ”
The point was nice fat salaries for those involved, plus social kudos among their scientific peers. Thats where the benefit lies, for those doing the work. The output is irrelevant really.
bobby b is spot with his comment, the reaction to covid became what it was because a large majority of the public demanded it, out of blind fear. The politicians and Deep State were only too happy to oblige of course, and jumped in with both boots, they couldn’t believe their luck – all the things they’d wanted to do for decades were being demanded by the public, when they thought they’d have to fight tooth and nail to get them through. Without the public’s demands for lockdowns etc those measures would not have been politically viable.