Jts5665

I’m overwhelmed by your response. Yesterday’s post is one of my most-commented of all time, and I have hundreds of emails. I find reading all these reports extremely informative, and have spent most of the day studying them.

The biographical notes some of you provided are a trove of information in themselves, for the light they shed on the kinds of people resistant to media messaging in general. Libertarians, conspiracy theorists, people who don’t watch television, frequent travellers, expatriates, the religious – all are prominently represented in my replies. In general, it seems you were most likely to survive the propaganda onslaught of February/March 2020 with your wits intact, if you paid almost no attention to the news and trusted your instincts, or if you had a lot of subject expertise and obsessively followed all developments. Those of us in the great informational middle fell hard.

Then there are the common points of disillusionment. Many cite the Diamond Princess as instrumental in convincing them that SARS-2 was never a big deal, before lockdowns were even proposed. That natural laboratory is probably one reason why the narrative shifted so quickly from apocalyptic fatality rates to overwhelmed hospitals as March approached. Many realised something was wrong when the Spring 2020 wave failed to bring the promised disaster (or, in many places, even very many infections); or when Summer 2020 was used to consolidate and extend the containment regime, even though almost nobody was sick. The Floyd riots were a huge moment for Americans; the duplicitous public health messaging on behalf of the rioters did untold damage to the credibility of lockdowns in the United States, to an extent even I hadn’t realised. The absurdity and internal contradictions of many containment measures alienated a lot of people. One reader writes that it was Fauci’s double-masking campaign in Fall 2020 that pushed him over the edge. A final decisive moment was of course the vaccines.

I’ll write at least one further post on this topic, where I’ll highlight some further emails and comments, and write more about the trends I’ve seen. I’ve clipped some of your messages, to fit as much as possible into one email, and I’ve erred on the side of keeping email correspondents anonymous.

Nat writes that he was convinced by the bad data from Wuhan, the senseless attacks on hydroxychloroquine, and tightening regulations in summer 2020:

I was a bit sceptical from the very start but happy to be convinced to play along ... until three things happened in spring 2020 that made me realise everything was way off and not to be trusted. The first was seeing the paper on Wuhan handling of the epidemic, which made it clear the lockdowns there played no part in controlling the virus. The curve / wave followed a natural path, and it started to head downwards nicely BEFORE the lockdown started. The paper was completely ignored, which set off my alarm bells. The second ‘moment’ was the hysterical attempts to demonise hydroxychloroquine, especially the fake paper published in Lancet. It was so badly designed there was no way it was by accident or ignorance. The third was our gov here keeping quiet about close to zero hospital admissions in summer 2020 and actually introducing mandatory masks during that time.

My friend Abdullah (check out his Substack) was put off by the self-defeating absurdity of most containment rules:

At the start, I thought lockdowns were a great idea solely based off the idea that they’d be a temporary measure for about 1-2 months. I followed up very closely with the data in addition to the regular sources of MSM, the latter of which I disregarded once I spotted the obvious inconsistencies like Fraudci lying about mask use and sunlight annihilating COVID, when anons were privy to this information at least a month prior. […] I was always distrustful of the Chinese government and US officials in general before [winter 2020], so I credit my jumping ship very early due to that (and the immense hatred that Governor Meatball Cuomo inspired in me by closing down gyms for 8 months).

It was also the behavior of people in general that tipped me off first thing. People taking their masks off to eat once restaurants opened back up, people fiddling with them all the time and those who outright argued with me about the righteousness of lockdowns then the next day would take a trip to a state that was open (Texas, Florida, etc.). It was clear to me then that this was now a religious belief, that if COVID were truly as dangerous as they said it wouldn't require this level of coercion and spiritually demented compliance.

My absolute Damascus Moment though, was during spring of 2020 when a verified CA Department of Health account tweeted that if you’re eating at a restaurant, and I wish I could still find this fucking tweet: to “make sure you put your mask back on as you chew your food in-between bites”.1 That was it for me, I declared a spiritual and intellectual war on these detrimental demons after seeing that. Fuck these people into oblivion. 

Also a bonus, as someone who has contacts in other Arab nations: what was also indicative during the summer of the same year was how many countries in the Middle East, including one where I’ve lived for many years, were just copying western nations with 0 reflection of their own accord, sometimes even making pretentious attempts at seeming original by variating these measures. A funny example: In Jordan, there was once a measure (that didn’t last very long due to lack of compliance) that ordered all places to shut down only on Fridays and Saturdays, as that’s when people gather most. What happened instead was insane traffic jams and long lines at malls, restaurants, entertainment venues, etc. around Thursdays with a probably negative effect on trying to reduce infection. I swear by Allah, stupidity of this kind used to only be found in sitcoms before March 2020.

A lot of parents – particularly mothers – underlined the vaccines as a major issue. One former containment hardliner writes in:

I started out as a ‘zero covid’ strategy supporter. I was for strict lockdowns and everything that came with it because I really did believe it would eradicate the virus. In BC, Canada we initially had lots of half measures to limit the spread, but there was no appetite at the political level for a zero covid strategy. I was mad! I thought they were doing it all wrong and that we were doomed to suffer a slow agonizing burn of low covid for months or years. Which we did, but not for lack of mandates and restrictions! Why did I think a zero covid strategy would work? Because that’s what we were led to believe. Lots of people were dying, or so we were told. We could get out of this mess if we just did more (or rather less) and waited for the vaccine to arrive. 

What led me to see a different truth? Being a mother and an academic researcher pre-children. When the vaccines first became available in our area, I was breastfeeding my youngest and also hoping to get pregnant again. So obviously I wanted to know from the horses mouth, were these vaccines safe for my child, and safe for my future baby? Was there research to say the vaccines were safe for pregnant and breastfeeding women? I searched for available research, joined mommy groups online about this topic, and read the published Pfizer approval documents. No such data existed to support any safety claim for this group of women. Pfizer’s own documents said as much in clear language. This is when the cracks started to appear and I began to question what I was reading. ‘Everyone’ was saying these vaccines were safe for pregnant and breastfeeding women. But how could they?  There were literally zero studies. This is when I realized we were being lied to. 

Mike Hearn, a software developer, knew something was wrong when he realised that key epidemiological models suffered not only from terrible, unfounded assumptions, but also from catastrophic coding errors:

I first realized there was something terribly wrong with the containment narrative in March 2020. Ironically, it was quality journalism that made me understand that all wasn’t quite right. I read an article by Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph (a British national newspaper) which told me about the controversial history of Prof Neil Ferguson. The claims Knapton made were so extraordinary I immediately began to fact check this and ended up writing my first skeptical article, titled “Is epidemiology useful?”, which looked at the role epidemiological modelling played in the British foot-and-mouth disaster that occurred around the turn of the millennium. Shortly after Toby Young launched his Lockdown Sceptics site, which I started reading.

After realizing the experts maybe weren’t quite as expert as they seemed I waited for Ferguson to publish the source code of the model that had driven Britain and America into lockdown. I’m a software developer and was curious how exactly these models worked. Once it became available I took a look and was shocked to discover that the problems went well beyond poor quality assumptions. The code was riven with critical bugs that caused it to generate wildly different predictions every time you ran it, depending on things like what type of computer it was executing on and timing differences in how the operating system scheduled work onto the CPU. I read the bug tracker and found the Imperial College team responding to bug reports with completely nonsensical and intellectually dishonest explanations, which prompted me to write an analysis and send it to Toby, who then published it on his site. The article went viral in the software engineering community and attracted so much attention the Lockdown Sceptics site crashed under the weight of traffic. Things moved quite quickly after that. Disgracefully, various academics leapt to Ferguson’s defense, including one who wrote a paper claiming the model was replicable whilst simultaneously admitting that it wasn’t. More evidence was uncovered showing that ICL had been lying about the changes they’d been making to the model, the Telegraph started reporting on the scandal and I was put in touch with a British Member of Parliament. I eventually did some presentations to UK Government ministers (though with no impact), and a report I wrote on common errors in modelling was sent to the Cabinet.

After that people started sending me more models to review, and I wrote more analyses (like this one and this one). It was rapidly becoming clear that it wasn’t just Ferguson’s team of „best epidemiologists in the world“ that were publishing corrupted / nonsensical work. The problem was everywhere. Almost every paper I read had at least one obvious and serious problem with it, often of a type that you didn’t need any actual expertise to notice. I started to wonder how these papers were getting through peer review and getting published. Exploring that led me to discover the phenomenon of Photoshopped images and auto-generated gibberish being published as „peer reviewed scientific research“.

It’s been nearly two years now and my confidence in publicly funded science is completely destroyed. I don’t believe anyone reasonably intelligent can read the COVID literature and come out the other side without concluding that universities and governments cannot tell the difference between science and scientism. Our society is completely in the grip of people who have effectively evolved under selection pressure to strongly resemble scientists without actually being scientists. Their work looks roughly right from a distance - there are data tables, charts, equations - but when you sit down and read it the scientific method has gone AWOL. I am now explicitly open to counter-narrative claims I’d never have previously considered.

Legal scholars and solicitors have been ringing the alarm about containment from the beginning. One writes:

It was clear to me in March 2020 that containment was a rabbit hole. As a solicitor I have experience drafting contracts and creating draft legislation.  If you are doing this properly, you are thinking extremely carefully about every single word you write, considering all the loopholes the universe of consequences that your language brings into being. Obviously, legislation which institutes lockdowns with no exit strategy - in fact, no consideration even of standards for exit - is not drafted with the view that the emergency will (can) end. The people drafting this legislation are not stupid. If they have not written an exit strategy into the legislation (i.e., from the state of emergency which justifies the regulations), they do not intend to implement one (at least not unless it is politically expedient).  Emergency powers are the One ring that no political party can bring itself to alienate.

It was obvious that the harms would not be readily calculable. Many of those harmed most by containment policies do not have a voice in our society (consider young children with autism who have lost two years of full-time in-person education during a critical developmental period; consider those who are old, alone, and not connected to the world through technology). Every undergrad who took Bioethics 1 learned about the social determinants of health. It was pretty clear immediately that “all this” was an elaborate shifting of risk from certain individuals to others. The young, the poor, and people with disabilities would be among the cohorts who would bear the brunt of the damage.

These were my rationalizations for rejecting containment early on. But first, I guess, it was just this eerie feeling, like observing tectonic plates shifting. My whole career has been bickering endlessly about life on land - I have never seen movement at this level of the philosophical edifice that we live our lives in.  It felt frightening and important. Big, big levers were pulled, and their pulling was not obviously justified.

Academics with subject expertise also had suspicions. Prof. Jeff Morris (check out his blog) is a microbiologist at the University of Alabama / Birmingham, who studies microbial evolution. He writes:

I never believed containment was possible, once it was clear that the virus had escaped from Wuhan.  To my knowledge no respiratory virus has ever been contained after it broke out so unless CDC had a genie in a bottle this one wasn’t going to be any different.  However, like you I was optimistic about vaccination at first.  I encouraged my elderly parents to get vaccinated, and I would have gotten my family vaccinated as well if we hadn’t all caught COVID right before vaccines became available.  As it was I waited 90 days—as instructed by my doctor—and by the time that wait was over it was an entirely different story.

I wrote about the incident that convinced me the vaccines were on their way to total failure in a blog post back in December.  Here’s the link if you’d like to see the whole thing: https://antisocialdarwinist.com/2021/12/02/grotesque-malpractice/.  But here’s the tl;dr quote most relevant for your purposes:

“I first became concerned about the effectiveness of the SARS-2 vaccines in July, when a gang of Texas Democrat “fleebaggers” fled their state in a stunt to deny a quorum and prevent a vote... Even though 100% of the fleebaggers were “double-vaxxed”, many of them came down with the virus on this trip and ultimately spread it to some of their colleagues in the White House. Now, anyone who knows anything about vaccines knows that no vaccine is 100% effective, but this level of community spread in a situation where everyone was vaccinated was shocking to me, and should have been shocking to anybody. The most parsimonious explanation for what happened is that one of the fleebaggers had the virus and then spread it to all the rest – followed by a tertiary transmission by at least one of them to somebody at the White House later on.

“Why did this worry me so much? Consider this 2017 hypothesis paper by Kennedy and Read that I’ve been teaching in both my microbiology and evolution classes for several years. The authors talk about why antibiotic resistance evolves more readily in most cases than vaccine resistance – namely that antibiotics are applied when you’re already sick and therefore full of bacteria whereas vaccines are applied before virus exposure and therefore are rarely challenged by more than a small number of virus genomes. The rate of evolutionary improvement in these cases is limited by mutational supply – you need a lot of random mutations challenging the antimicrobial to discover the rare one that confers resistance – and mutational supply is a function of population size. Kennedy and Read then bolster their conceptual argument by considering the handful of vaccines that have failed due to pathogen evolution. Every one of these failed vaccines had at least one of two characteristics: either they targeted a single protein, or else they were incapable of fully preventing infection and transmission. In the former case, it is much easier to find a single mutation that can provide complete vaccine evasion, since vaccinated individuals have a very simple response compared to the layered polyvalent response created by natural infection. In the latter case, even though the vaccine is initially capable of suppressing viral symptoms, it allows large viral populations to accumulate, exponentially increasing the number of mutants that can challenge the vaccine-induced immune response. Every vaccine with one of these characteristics failed; every SARS-2 vaccine has both characteristics: the SARS-2 vaccines solely target the SARS-2 spike protein, and the fleebagger incident strongly suggested they were incapable of suppressing viral reproduction and transmission.

“At that moment, I knew that viral evolution would eventually defeat the vaccines, and started looking for evidence of the fact.”

A Canadian surgeon writes about the rapidly shifting attitude in his field, and about the power of groupthink in these circles currently, which would be one reason why more people in these fields aren’t saying anything:

At the beginning, the vast majority of physicians I knew could see that the world was at risk of an enormous over-reaction. They spoke openly of their puzzlement, at least in the lounge. I had planned some time off in March and April, and had to extend it over travel restrictions. When I returned to work in May, most doctors had figured out what they were supposed to be believe, and had forgotten ever having thought otherwise. I’ve had some conversations with bought-in docs, but not one can present any credible reason for the buy-in. Most take it as axiomatic that lockdowns work, and have trouble understanding that I’m not attacking the logic after that, but the base premise itself. One told me that China’s briefer lockdown was still working more than a year after it had ended, because it had been more severe than ours! I pointed out to another that he was not making the correlation/causation distinction on the fall of infections after lockdowns; he admitted that was true, but couldn’t see how it would affect the present argument. I asked another whether he had read the ‘natural immunity’ paper he was mocking, or got his opinion from CNN. Crickets. This kind of experience rather hardens me against making the switch myself, though I do keep re-assessing my own conclusions based on new data. 

Many, many healthcare professionals and first responders knew something was wrong from the start. Masking and distancing guidelines were a red flag for many of them:

I was a Hazmat responder for years, an EMT, a Navy Corpsman and a Fireman.  So I spent years in respiratory science and I knew that underwear on your face (my wife gets mad when I call it that, but there’s little difference) is not stopping a 3 micron aerosolized virus.. and we knew COVID was aerosolized from the cruise ship in Japan.

40 years of NIOSH and OSHA data said their containment strategy was a joke.. and every hazmat expert who spoke up got de-platformed.  That convinced me the government was not serious, and it was all theater.

I was also the “pandemic guy” in my Navy medical unit.  It was my job to stay up on all the candidates for possible pandemics, the plans, etc.  So I knew from history that both cloth masks and 6 feet “social distancing” were both failed strategies from the pandemic of 1917-1919, which Facui et al just recycled.  That’s not serious science. […]

CPK in comments brings a similar perspective:

My Army training for operating under nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) warfare conditions. I’d spent many miserable hours wearing and working in genuine protective gear, and drilling don/doff and decontamination protocols. I knew even those weren’t guaranteed to work. And they certainly couldn’t be maintained for an entire population for a prolonged period.

So it was obvious from the start that cloth masks and the rest were just self-soothing gestures. I never bought the hysteria that Covid was evil magic insta-murder radioactive death cooties. But even if it was, we weren’t going to stop it.

John Bowman realised that the early messaging was out of step with observable rates of illness in the population:

I trained in a profession complimentary to medicine and spent 5 years in hospital service, then 25 years in the pharma/medical device industry, so I have some knowledge and understanding of medical matters as well as how the sector works.

So. What convinced me? Observation. Symptoms for respiratory viruses usually appear 2 to 3 days after infection. They tend to reach their peak effect 3 to 5 days, then subside or the patient deteriorates thereafter usually heading towards pneumonia requiring hospital attention. For a virus that was supposedly so aggressive producing serious disease and fast spreading, I expected to see big numbers of people with severe symptoms even if not requiring hospitalisation, within one to two weeks of the hysteria breaking all over the media.

This would be noticeable by large scale absenteeism from work. Shops and businesses would be short staffed and some maybe closed for lack of staff, factories operating below normal or even shutting down. Public transport would be affected as fewer staff showed up for work, train and air services cancelled, and goods distribution disrupted. Classrooms would be half-filled and lessons disrupted as children and teachers came down with the disease. Also I would expect to hear of relatives and friends, neighbours taken to their beds. And of course the News would be full of crowded hospitals.

But instead… none of this apart from the daily death toll which in fact was a small fraction of the usual all causes daily death toll.

If the virus had been so serious in its effect and so spreadable, there would have been no need for mandated lockdown as most people would be self-locked down at home in bed or in hospital. […]

LH was spooked by the premature eagerness of hospital record keepers to track vaccinations:

In February 2021, I worked as a registered nurse at an ivy league teaching hospital. Our electronic medical record system (Epic) went through an upgrade. One morning I noticed a new item on the medical record home page for each of my patients. Now in the same place as name, date of birth, gender, and allergies, appeared “COVID vaccination status.” All of my patients were defaulted to a status in bright red marked “Overdue.”

I found this very, very odd. How could anyone be over due for a vaccine that was still in clinical trials and was only available under an emergency use authorization. The vaccine was not yet even widely available to at-risk populations.

Derbyshire Delver offers a similar creepy story, this time about apparent NHS anticipation of closures in late February 2020:

My son needed braces on his teeth which you can get for free on the NHS but you have to wait your turn. In early Autumn 2019, he’d had an initial appointment and were waiting for fitting, they said it would be about 6 months, so we were expecting this to happen in Feb/March 2020.

However, I got a letter from his orthodontist on the 19th Feb stating that it would be another 2 YEARS before he could be seen again to have the braces fitted! Something to do with changes to their „NHS contract” and apparently this was a nationwide problem, not just their practice. Clearly, NHS management and the Department of Health were already cancelling anything they determined to be none essential a full month before the first lockdown came into force and they knew damn well it was going to go on for many months/years not the 3 weeks as we were told.

I didn’t put 2 and 2 together for another couple of months but as things started to drag on and, as far as I could see, no-one, who wasn’t already on his/her last legs was dying, I realised that the restrictions were designed to be in place for the long haul regardless of the severity of the „pandemic”. The sudden recommendation to start wearing masks in the middle of the summer of 2020 when there were no cases really caused the „penny to drop” for me.

A few journalists and media people wrote. Amy, in comments, was put off by the disturbing connections between media messaging and the vaccination campaign:

I work in media so at first I was totally on board with trying to keep people safe and distributing that messaging. This probably impacted my ability to catch up and see the way things really were.

Then, in January 2021 I started to notice that media angle was responding to whatever portion of the population was next in line to get the vaccine. If 80 year olds were next up, the MSM messaging immediately pivoted to 80s are most at risk. When it opened up to 70 year old, then 60 year olds, then 50 year olds, this angle kept shifting. Before we would never hear anything about 40 year olds who had covid then all of a sudden when it hit the 40 year old age bracket, the media was flooded with stories of apparently healthy 40 year olds who died from covid. No comorbidities or risk factors, just died. I started to recognize it for fear porn and even suspected some of these ‘stories’ were fabricated.

Guess what’s in the headlines now? Kids are in hospital with covid! Kids are dying! While I recognize that there are children who are dying from covid, possibly healthy children with zero diagnosed comorbidities, I recognize this is very rare. So where did all these kids come from? Why all of a sudden is there a „surge“ in children in hospital with covid? Could it be because they are next up for vaccination?

A reporter for a small newspaper in the western United States writes:

I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the officials, but it quickly became clear that this disease was not killing people like SARS or MERS (and it wouldn’t have spread if it had), and about four to six months in, I tried asking the local health district director whether or not we would all be better off just getting it rather than trying to prevent the spread, and focusing on protecting those most at risk (the elderly and the immune-compromised), and that way encouraging natural immunity. She responded no, that would overwhelm the health care system. Yes it would, since it was never designed for mass disease, and cannot effectively be designed that way. I understood her concern, but she also proceeded to tell me later hat vaccine immunity was better than natural immunity, which never made any sense to me.

Also, I never entirely trusted the decline in influenza cases. How it is the flu virus isn’t getting transmitted when SARS-CoV-2 is? No one could answer that question to my satisfaction, though maybe I wasn’t paying proper attention.

By about month four, I had come to the conclusion that this was just something we were going to have to live with and get through — people would get sick, some would die, doctors and nurses and hospitals would be overwhelmed, businesses would go under, incomes would be lost, there would be no getting around that. I’ve also had this twice now, last April and several weeks ago. It’s not a fun disease, but I had a bout of influenza in 2018 that left me delirious in bed for three days, and that was much worse. (I’m 54 and diabetic, though I have my diabetes well controlled by diet, exercise and metformin; still, I am at risk and I appreciate that too.) There seemed to be something in the health care administrators about ensuring ease of system administration — shutting things down or restricting activity in order to ensure that the health care system is not strained or stressed. I can appreciate that, as doctors and nurses and aides are human beings too, but privileging a single „system” that way struck me as counterproductive and inhuman.

In short, there was an attempt to minimize certain kind of disease suffering and risk when, given the nature of the event, that was simply not possible. It may help I am a theologically conservative Orthodox Christian who doesn’t view suffering as a problem to be solved.

Several people who lost elderly relatives during the pandemic wrote to me. From Matt in upstate New York:

My mom (who had middle-stage dementia) tested positive for Covid, went in the hospital, and never came out. Remdesivir and oxygen only. But she didn’t die from any virus really, she died because the hospital convinced my elderly, distraught dad that she was “hopeless,” and they moved into the no-food, yes-morphine mode. And she lived for twice as long as they expected – if you ask me, because she wasn’t that sick, only weak: My mom deteriorated physically, mentally, and emotionally from being locked in her rooms 23 hours a day; and so did my dad, making him a pliant touch for the “prettied-up euthanasia” they pressured him with. I blame the lockdown more than anything, including more than Cuomo stuffing sick people in the facilities. On the drive home from the last time I saw my mom alive, I had the pleasure of hearing on the radio that Cuomo would get an Emmy for his work.   :-/   The lockdowns are not just stupid, they’re evil.

I find it very interesting to have reports from some Trump administration officials. Paul Elias Alexander (see his pieces on the catastrophic impact of lockdowns and school closures, the failure of compulsory interventions in general, the effectiveness of masking, and vaccine efficacy) writes:

1) I was looking at all of the evidence day one e.g. March 2020 that was emerging that it was a failure and harming people.

2) I was in a position in the HHS of Trump administration where we were getting real state data showing the lockdowns, from April/May 2020 were causing business owners and laid off people to self harm, and children we self harming and by June these groups were committing suicide...many children killed themselves across the US and the media would not cover it and we knew the actual data for it was coming from the States to us.

3) The media I was told were working together to suppress the real outcome of the lockdowns and school closures as Trump would be shown right as he argued to open up society and schools.

4) I was privy to a meeting with the vaccine developers to the media where they told the media that they addressed the short follow-up to examine safety by a larger sample size and from then, this was July 2020, I knew the vaccine was a sham and potentially dangerous...I heard the top vaccine people tell the media this and the govn sat there and accepted that.

5) I knew that the RRR of 95% was a lie for they did not report the ARR of <1% and also, if you go back calculate and put back the 3400 or so that Pfizer omitted, then the RRR drops to 20%, would have never gotten EUA.

6) We know from the Athenian plague 2500 years ago, 430 BC that it is the recovered who are now naturally immune, who cared for the sick...

7) I was told by NIH, CDC, and inside officials in DC that the game plan was to day by day, using the Task Force daily briefings, make Trump look incapable and that all he was doing was a failure...to report infections by the thousands daily, and to make America unmanageable and ungovernable so that by the time the election came, people will be fed up and hurt and crushed by the lockdowns etc. and they actually pulled that off.

If you recently felt a face-searing blast of hot air coming from the east, don't worry, it was just China out-heating the sun for a good long while:

Move over China, North Korea, and Australia!

The post 23 Million Afghans Are on Brink of Starvation appeared first on The Bongino Report.

The tiny Pretrial Services Agency says it will begin documenting "personal religious information" of its vaccine-objecting employees

WHAT DID THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?  Former DARPA Official: COVID-19 Was Designed to Be an Aerosolized Synthetic Spike Protein Vaccine For Bats.

“They” in this case is government agencies, the CDC and definitely Fauci.

#teamheadsonpikes has a pointed rejoinder to this.a

HANS BADER:  Federal agency penalizes states that arrest African American juveniles at higher rates than they arrest whites juveniles.

The post DOJ to Form “Special Domestic Terrorism” Unit appeared first on The Bongino Report.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

UPDATE:

(Updated and bumped.)

FRAUD, BULLYING, INTIMIDATION: Disgraced FBI No. 2 Andrew McCabe Calls For Feds To Treat ‘Mainstream’ Conservatives Like Domestic Terrorists. “I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes… is that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines.”

At the risk of understatement, economists are not good forecasters.

And they are especially incompetent when they make forecasts based on bad policy, such as when the Obama White House projected that his so-called stimulus would quickly lead to falling unemployment.

In reality, the jobless rate immediately increased and then remained much higher than projected for the remainder of the five-year forecast.

The failure of Obama’s stimulus should have been a learning moment for Washington politicians.

But Joe Biden must have slept through that lesson because his first big move after taking office was to saddle the nation with a $1.9 trillion “stimulus” package.

The White House claimed this orgy of new spending would lead to four million additional jobs in 2021, on top of the six million new jobs that already were expected.

So what happened? Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute looked at the final numbers for 2021 and discovered that employment actually fell compared to pre-stimulus baseline projection.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected on February 1, 2021…a gain of 6.252 million jobs over…2021…we now know payroll employment in the fourth quarter of 2021 averaged 148.735 million — an increase of 6.116 million compared with the average of 142.619 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. That means the job growth the President praised this week has fallen 136,000 jobs short of what was expected under the policies he inherited. …President Biden and congressional Democrats promised their $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would create millions of additional new jobs this year — on top of what White House economists called the “dire” baseline of 6.252 million new jobs reflected in CBO’s projection without that enormous legislation. …House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) repeated that claim, stating that “if we do not enact this package, the results could be catastrophic,” including “4 million fewer jobs.” Yet…not one of those four million additional jobs supposedly resulting from that $1.9 trillion spending plan has appeared, as job creation in 2021 did not even match CBO’s projection without that legislation.

Below you’ll see the chart that accompanied the article.

As you can see, the White House projected more than 10 million new jobs (right bar).

Yet we would up with 6.1 million new jobs (left bar), about 140,000 less than we were projected to get (center bar) without wasting $1.9 trillion.

If pressed, I’m sure the Biden Administration would use the same excuse that we got from the Obama White House (and from the Congressional Budget Office), which is that the initial forecast was wrong and that the so-called stimulus did create jobs.

In other words, the Biden economists now would say they should have projected 2 million new jobs, which means that the $1.9 trillion spending spree added 4 million jobs, for a net increase of 6 million.

You may think I’m joking, but that is exactly how the Keynesian economists tried to justify Obama’s stimulus failure.

The moral of the story is that the best way to really create jobs is to get government out of the way rather than adding new burdens.

“will likely give rise to a precarious environment – one where the conversation might very easily devolve”

The post Emory Law Student Govt. Denies Recognition to Free Speech Group Claiming Open Discussion Could Cause ‘Harm’ first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

In defense of regulatory mandates during oral arguments, the following words were spoken by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “Why is a human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus?” For her, it is a simple matter: regulatory impositions rule the machine world so why not the human one too? 

The question came across to listeners (millions heard these arguments for the first time) as shocking. How can anyone think this way? Human beings carry pathogens, tens of trillions of them. Yes, we infect each other, and our immune systems adapt as they have evolved to do. Still, we have rights. We have freedom. These have granted us longer and better lives. 

The Bill of Rights doesn’t pertain to machines. Machines don’t comply with Constitutions. Machines have no volition. Machines are things that must be powered by external sources, programmed by humans, and behave exactly as they are managed to behave. If a machine doesn’t do what is expected, it is broken and therefore repaired or replaced. 

All this seems incredibly obvious and undeniable, so much so that one can only stand back in awe that anyone would doubt it, particularly a judge who holds the fate of human liberty in her hands. It seems utterly astonishing that such a person would not quite grasp the difference between the human experience and a mechanized widget. 

And yet, what she said is actually not out of left field. It wasn’t a point she made up on the spot. The presumption that people should be managed like machines has been a baseline assumption pervasive in pandemic planning for the better part of 15 years. The delusion was born in the heads of a handful of people who happened to be close to power, and it has grown ever since. 

Many great thinkers have tried to blow the whistle on these intellectual trends for a very long time. Twenty years ago, Sunetra Gupta warned us. Nonetheless, the modelers and planners carried on, building more models, fantasizing of central plans, cobbling together mitigation strategies, and otherwise plotting to remove human volition from the list of unknowns during a pandemic. 

In other words, treating people like machines is not a radical idea and it is not purely the cranky invention of an ideologically motivated court judge. What Sotomayor said isn’t unusual at all, at least not in the confines of her intellectual bubble. She offered up a summary statement concerning many of the presumptions behind lockdowns and now mandates. It has been part of the agenda for a very long time, a view held by some of the world’s leading intellectuals that gradually gained influence within the epidemiological profession over the last decade and a half. 

All of this is well documented. We just hadn’t fully experienced it until 2020. That was the year in which they found the opportunity to test the theory that humans can be managed as machines and thereby generate better results. 

Have a look at Michael Lewis’s mostly awful book on the topic. For all its failings, it does a deep dive into the history of pandemic planning. It was born in October 2005 at the urging of president George W. Bush. The innovator was a man named Rajeev Venkayya, who today runs a vaccine company. Back then, he was head of a bioterrorism study group within the White House. Bush wanted a big plan, something similar to the big vision that led to the Iraq War. He wanted some means to crush a virus. More shock and awe. 

“We were going to invent pandemic planning,” Venkayya announced to the staff. He recruited a group of computer programmers who had zero knowledge of viruses, pandemics, immunity, and no experience at all in the management and mitigation of diseases. They were computer programmers and their programs all presumed exactly what Sotomayor said: we are all machines to be managed. 

Among them was Robert Glass from the Sandia National Laboratory, who cobbled together the idea of social distancing with the help of his middle-school-aged daughter. The idea was that if we all just stayed away from each other, the virus would not transmit. What happens to the virus? It was never clear but they believed that somehow a virus that could not find a host would then somehow disappear into the firmament, never to return. 

None of it ever made sense, except in the models. In the world of computer modeling, everything makes sense according to the rules as set up by programmers. 

You can read the original Glass paper on the CDC website, where it still lives today. It is called Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza. It’s a central plan that removes all human volition. Everyone is mapped according to their likelihood of spreading disease. Their choices are replaced by the plans of scientists. The model is based on a small community but it applies equally to an entire society. 

Targeted social distancing to mitigate pandemic influenza can be designed through simulation of influenza's spread within local community social contact networks. We demonstrate this design for a stylized community representative of a small town in the United States. The critical importance of children and teenagers in transmission of influenza is first identified and targeted. For influenza as infectious as 1957–58 Asian flu (≈50% infected), closing schools and keeping children and teenagers at home reduced the attack rate by >90%. For more infectious strains, or transmission that is less focused on the young, adults and the work environment must also be targeted. Tailored to specific communities across the world, such design would yield local defenses against a highly virulent strain in the absence of vaccine and antiviral drugs.

Here is a small map of infection transmissions as presented in this seminal paper. 

Wait, this is my community? This is society? 

You see here how this works. They have mapped what they imagine to be the infection path. They replace this path with closures, separations, capacity limits, travel restrictions, forcing everyone to stay home and stay safe. You wonder why they targeted schools? The models told them to. 

Thus pandemic planning was invented, contradicting a century of public health experience and a millennia of knowledge concerning how pandemics really end: through herd immunity. None of this mattered. It was all about the models and what seemed to work on their computer programs. 

As for human beings, yes, in these models, they are machines. Nothing more. When you hear the claims reduced to preposterous quips by a judge, they are laughable on their face. Or scary. Regardless, they are plain wrong. Surely every intelligent person knows the difference between a person and a machine. How can a person believe this?

But in a different context, you can take that same worldview, throw up some colorful charts, back it by a Powerpoint presentation, add variables that can change the model’s workings based on certain presumptions, and you can generate what appears to be a highly intelligent computerization that reveals things we otherwise would not see. 

Blinded by science, we might say. Many people in the White House were indeed blinded. And the CDC too. They had hoped to deploy the newly codified system of virus control in 2006, with the Avian bird flu, which, experts warned, could kill half of the people who got the bug. Anthony Fauci said the same thing: a 50% case fatality rate, he predicted. 

And yet many people were disappointed: the bug never jumped from birds to humans. They could not try out their great new scheme. Still, the modeling movement grew steadily over a decade and a half, gaining recruits from many sectors, and then enjoying enormous funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Obviously Gates himself was and remains convinced that the best way to deal with pathogens is through antivirus programs we call vaccines, while otherwise mitigating spread through human separation. 

In 2006, I had speculated that disease planning was a new frontier for state control of the social order. “Even if the flu does come,” I wrote, “the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings. It’s a bureaucrat’s dream! Whether it will make us well again is another matter.”

“It is a serious matter,” I continued, “when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention.”

At the time, most people just ignored all this as so much noise. It was just another White House press conference, just another wacky bureaucratic dream from which our laws and traditions would protect us. I wrote about it not because I believed they would attempt it. My alarm was that anyone could dream up such a crazy plot to begin with.

Fifteen years later, that noise became the calamity that has fundamentally destabilized American liberty and law, wrecked trade and health, shattered countless lives, and thrown our future as a civilized people into grave doubt. 

Let us not turn away from the reality: all of this was a product of intellectuals who did and do think exactly as Sotomayor. We are not humans with rights. We are machines to be managed. In fact, if you look back at the March 16, 2020, news conference at which these lockdowns were all announced, Dr. Birx said just in passing the following sentence: 

“We really want people to be separated at this time, to be able to address this virus as comprehensively that we cannot see, for we don’t have a vaccine or a therapeutic.”

Here we have a leading advisor to the president essentially advocating for completely new and radical social transformation, as managed by public health professionals. A comprehensive plan for everyone to be separated, exactly as the disease planners 15 years earlier had advocated in their hare-brained computer models. 

Why did reporters not ask more questions? Why did people not scream that this whole cockamamie scheme is inhumane and deeply dangerous? How could people have sat calmly listening to this gibberish and pretend it was normal? 

It’s sheer madness. But madness can transverse the decades so long as its creators live within intellectual bubbles, enjoy generous funding, and never have to confront the results of their schemes. 

This is the story of what happened to liberty in the US and all over the world. It was shattered by fanaticism, all rooted in a core presumption that we’d be far better off as human beings if our ruling class regarded us as no different from machines spewing sparks. They were permitted to reorganize the whole of our lives based on that principle. 

What the Justice Sotomayer said strikes us now as both dangerous and delusional. It is. And yet her conviction is widely shared, and has been for at least 15 years, among the class of intellectuals who gave us lockdowns and pandemic controls. It’s their template. At their parties and conferences for all these years, such thoughts were considered normal, responsible, intelligent, and wise. 

Now that they have had a go at it, where are they to defend the results? Instead, they have mostly left the scene, leaving the bag of intellectual rubbish in the hands of a Supreme Court justice who is both their accidental mouthpiece and their sacrificial victim. It was the statement that will define her career, forever cited as proof that she should never have been approved for that position. 

In fact, what Sotomayer said about machines and humans was not rooted in ignorance as such; it was the fulfillment of the delusions of countless intellectuals the world over for most of this century. She was summarizing countless papers and presentations in the form of a casual quip, thus revealing it for the fundamental insanity that it truly is. 

“Madmen in authority,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Sometimes that very distillation is what reveals precisely what we’ve tried so hard for so long to ignore. Sotomayer revealed the existential threat, in a way that was mortifyingly ridiculous, but also encapsulated everything that has gone wrong in our times. 

CHINESE ORGANLEGGERS HARDEST HIT: In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig: The breakthrough may lead one day to new supplies of animal organs for transplant into human patients.

Legal experts had predicted conviction of renowned chemist Charles Lieber for concealing ties to China would build support for initiative to prosecute those engaged in economic, technological espionage for the PRC on U.S. soil.

MORE PROBLEMS WITH EMORY LAW SCHOOL:  “Citing the ‘harm’ of open discussion, Emory Law’s student government denies recognition to student free speech group.”  (Here’s last week’s Emory problem.)

INNOVATION: Farmer Makes His Cows Wear VR Goggles to Increase Milk Production.

75 percent of Covid deaths have 4 co-morbidities     CDC Director Rochelle Walensky — “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”         Separate Clip — CDC has a credibility problem NBC’s […]

The post Connecticut Sending COVID-Positive Patients Into Nursing Homes appeared first on The Bongino Report.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS, POLITICO EDITION: “SPOTTED: Speaker NANCY PELOSI, Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER and wife, IRIS WEINSHALL, Sens. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-Minn.) and DICK DURBIN (D-Ill.) dining together at Le Diplomate on Friday night. Pic. CORRECTION: The original version of this item misidentified Iris Weinshall, the wife of Chuck Schumer, as Sonia Sotomayor. Our tipster got it wrong, but we should have double checked.”

UPDATE: But not before Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post rushed to defend Sotomayor:

(Updated and bumped.)

LAWFARE DONE RIGHT: THIS COULD BE A MAJOR CRACK IN THE DAM. As the Good Professor noted earlier today,  shareholders in Google and YouTube are pressing the tech giants to disclose any requests they have received from the Biden administration to scrub politically “problematic” information from the platforms, according to a copy of a shareholder proposal obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The article mentions in passing that Supreme Court rulings have held that private entities may not engage in suppression of speech at the behest of government, as it has the same effect as direct government censorship. Although I don’t think the shareholders have standing to sue on anything but the thinnest of corporate governance rules, let me explain how this may open the floodgates and create accountability for BigTech’s censorship.

We know that as “private actors” (a debatable proposition, but let’s accept it for the moment) BigTech cannot be held liable for violating First Amendment rights. But there have been notable cases where the media worked so hand-in-hand with government in violating constitutional rights, they were considered “government agents” for the purposes of 42 U.S. Code § 1983, which allows a private right of action for the violation of established constitutional rights when the “private” entity is “acting under color of law.”

The case that came most quickly to my mind was called Hanlon v. Berger, where CNN did a ride-along in coordination with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and an assistant United States attorney who raided a Montana ranch. The rancher had allegedly violated Federal wildlife protection laws by poisoning endangered wildlife, including eagles, in an effort to protect their livestock. Citing earlier case law, Justice Stevens noted that:

“There we [held] that police violate the Fourth Amendment rights of homeowners when they allow members of the media to accompany them during the execution of a warrant in their home.” (Emphasis added).

While the feds were excused in Hanlon on qualified immunity grounds based on unrelated facts, CNN was not dismissed from the case, because the rancher had stated enough factual basis to assert that CNN was acting “under color of law.” But private actors cannot assert qualified immunity like law enforcement can.

As is usually the case when corporate media are caught out and face likely loss in court, CNN settled out. (As a result, news organizations have since then severely restricted what we used to call “ride-alongs” with law enforcement).

The rancher suffered a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, which implicate privacy rights by way of unreasonable search and seizure. This is where it gets interesting: 42 U.S. Code § 1983 allows citizens to sue for the violation of any enumerated constitutional right, and it’s unquestionable that the First Amendment is such an enumerated right.

If, in the matter Glenn referred to, The National Legal and Policy Center can produce evidence showing that the content by specific speakers was scrubbed by BigTech at the behest of the Biden Administration, then it’s “game over” because those censored speakers have the same argument against Google and FB as did the Montana rancher and can use Section 1983 to file suit.

Moreover, even if The National Legal and Policy Center does not produce such evidence of media-government collaboration, conservative and civil libertarian groups can on their own, file FOIA cases to seek that evidence, and the censored groups (*Paging Mr. Prager*) have a legitimate way around the “we’re private entities, so go f*ck yourself” defense.

All they need is the means and the will.

IT IS NOT, HOWEVER, PARTICULARLY REWARDED: Why Discovering ‘Nothing’ in Science Can Be So Incredibly Important.

What we don’t usually hear about is the years of back-breaking, painstaking hard work that delivers inconclusive results, appearing to provide no evidence for the questions scientists ask – the incremental application of constraints that bring us ever closer to finding answers and making discoveries.

Yet without non-detections – what we call the null result – the progress of science would often be slowed and stymied. Null results drive us forward. They keep us from repeating the same errors, and shape the direction of future studies.

There is, in fact, much that we can learn from nothing.

Often, however, null results don’t make it to scientific publications. This not only can generate significant inefficiencies in the way science is done, it’s an indicator of potentially bigger problems in the current scientific publication processes.

Related:

DON’T WEEP FOR THE POLAR BEARS: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid kept seeing a World Wildlife Foundation saying the big white beasts of the North face a grim future because the Artic Iceshelf is melting. But that’s not what Jeff found when he investigated the claim.

The law was included in the Democrats' $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes through budget reconciliation to avoid the Senate filibuster

The post DOJ Refuses to Say If Fed Informants Involved in Jan 6 appeared first on The Bongino Report.

WHEW: NASA successfully deploys complex sunshield on James Webb Space Telescope. “The telescope was far too large to launch to space in its final configuration, so mission designers crafted the telescope to unfold after launch. The deployment relies on hundreds of mechanisms and moving parts, and everything has to go right in order for JWST to function. Along the way, there are up to 344 single-point failures, deployments without any backups that must execute as designed or else they could jeopardize the entire mission.”

I.

Here’s my pitch for fluvoxamine (Luvox) for COVID.

In the midst of all the hype about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, scientists put together the giant 4,000-person TOGETHER trial, intended to test all these exciting COVID early treatments. You know what happened next: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine crashed and burned.

But a different drug, the SSRI antidepressant fluvoxamine, actually did really well! It decreased COVID hospitalizations by about 30% - not the perfect cure rate the rumors attributed to ivermectin, but a substantial decrease. Given the size and professionalism of this study, and another smaller one that also got positive results, I and many others take Luvox pretty seriously. At this point I’d give it 60-40 it works.

Can you prescribe a medication when you’re only 60% confident in it? There’s some thorny philosophical issues around this, but I think in the end you have to compare risks and benefits.

What are the risks? Like every medication, including Tylenol, aspirin, etc, Luvox has some common minor side effects and some rare major ones. But let’s step back a second. Fluvoxamine is a bog-standard SSRI. Its side effects are generic SSRI side effects. We give SSRIs to 30 million people a year, or about 10% of all Americans. As a psychiatrist, I’m not supposed to say flippant things like “we give SSRIs out like candy”. We do careful risk-benefit analysis and when appropriate we screen patients for various risk factors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Americans, compared to 12% of Americans who got candy last Halloween. So you can draw your own conclusion about how severe we think the risks are.

For some reason the same experts who don’t mind prescribing SSRIs when people have mild depression freak out about prescribing them when they’re the only evidence-based oral medication for a deadly global pandemic. “What about SSRI withdrawal?”, they ask. After a ten day course? On 100 mg imipramine-equivalent dose? Minimal. “What about long QT syndrome?” The VA system took 35,000 high-risk older patients off of an unusually-likely-to-cause-QT-syndrome SSRI in 2011, and were unable to find any evidence that this prevented even a single case of the syndrome, let alone any negative outcome!

The objection I take most seriously is actually the worry about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, a very rare condition where people on an SSRI can have sexual problems for months or years after they come off. I would be shocked if you could get that from a ten-day course. But technically nobody has ever tested this - there’s never been a good reason to put someone on an SSRI for only ten days before - so I can’t rule it out. Still, the risk from adding a few extra Luvox prescriptions for COVID is still much less than the risk we incur all the time from having 10% of Americans on SSRIs for years at a stretch, so this seems like a weird time to get cold feet.

I conclude that the risk-benefit calculation probably favors using Luvox. And I’m not alone here. Johns Hopkins University’s COVID treatment guidelines recommend fluvoxamine for appropriate COVID patients. Some leading psychiatrists, especially the Washington University psychiatrists who helped discover the new indication, support fluvoxamine for appropriate COVID patients. Many of the epidemiologists and statisticians most instrumental in debunking the hype around ivermectin have spoken out in favor of fluvoxamine, saying this one is the real deal (1, 2). The National Institute of Health hasn’t quite come out in support, but they have taken the unusual step of not disrecommending fluvoxamine the same as they disrecommend every other oral early COVID treatment, saying that the evidence "provides the sort of flexibility for the treating clinician to go either way".

Unfortunately, none of these bodies alone or combined are powerful enough to make the average doctor prescribe differently. That’s why all eyes are on the FDA.

II.

The FDA has a weird role here.

They already approved fluvoxamine as an antidepressant. That means it’s legal, pharma companies can make it, pharmacies can stock it, and individual doctors can prescribe it whenever they want, including for COVID.

But they approved it with a label saying “For Depression”. Doctors are kind of . . . well, “hidebound” is a harsh word, but they really hate doing weird new things that no one has explicitly given them permission for. It’s not illegal to prescribe fluvoxamine for COVID. It’s not even going to get you in any trouble. It might not get covered by insurance, but it only costs about $10 anyway. The problem is just that it’s weird.

So in order to make doctors feel completely comfortable prescribing it, the FDA would have to add “…And For COVID” to the label. The scientists involved in the big study have asked them to do this.

I hoped that the FDA would say “Since the COVID pandemic is an emergency, we’ll do this right away”.

I predicted they would say “Please give us a year to figure out our opinion on this.”

I feared they would say “There’s just not enough evidence”.

What I never imagined at all was their actual response, which was “Sorry, we don’t understand our own bureaucracy well enough to figure out how to do this.”

But according to Kelsey Piper at Vox, that’s where they are right now:

[Professor Ed] Mills, who thinks that fluvoxamine and budesonide are both appropriate to prescribe to patients sick with Covid-19, compares public messaging on fluvoxamine to communications about Merck’s drug molnupiravir. The evidence for molnupiravir is in many ways weaker than the evidence for fluvoxamine, but molnupiravir was produced by a major pharmaceutical company that can shepherd it through the process of becoming a recommended drug. On a call last week, Mills said, the FDA told him “they don’t know how to deal with submissions where there isn’t someone to be responsible for it.”

That is, FDA procedures usually assume there is a pharma company sponsoring a drug. But fluvoxamine is cheap and off-patent and no pharma company is involved in repurposing it for COVID. Nobody has a procedure for a drug without a sponsor, so they won’t do anything.

Kelsey’s article focuses on the systemic failure: the FDA, guideline-making agencies, and public health communicators have dropped the ball on this. I think that’s a perfectly fine thing to focus on. I’m not usually one to defend the FDA, and their actions here hardly seem defensible. I’m with Kelsey in hoping they find a way to solve their institutional dysfunction.

But I can’t help wondering if this is entirely on the FDA. Fluvoxamine is legal. The only reason we need the FDA to get involved here at all is because if it’s not on the label, doctors will feel uncomfortable prescribing it.

What if, in order to save thousands of lives and help beat back a global pandemic, doctors just did the uncomfortable thing?

III.

Am I being harsh in saying that the problem is doctors who don’t want to do something uncomfortable?

There are many reasons not to prescribe a medication for a new indication. Maybe you genuinely think the risks outweigh the benefits. If it were me, I would trust the Johns Hopkins guidelines team on this, but honest opinions can differ. I have no problem with doctors who are holding off for this reason, and look forward to arguing with them in the appropriate venues.

Or maybe you’re afraid of lawsuits. If you get sued for malpractice, it’s nice to be able to tell the jury “it says this drug is okay for this condition right on the label”. But this doesn’t usually stop doctors from doing off-label prescriptions. Gabapentin is the 18th most-prescribed drug in the US, almost always for nerve pain or anxiety, but its label only officially endorses use for seizures or shingles. Beta-blockers for social anxiety? Off-label and dirt common. Prazosin for PTSD nightmares? Off-label and dirt-common. How do doctors sleep at night, knowing they’re constantly at risk of getting sued for off-label prescriptions? Probably using trazodone, the #2 most popular sleeping pill in the US, whose label says it should only be used for depression. No, seriously, it’s because most doctors don’t even know these indications are off-label, plus their medical school professors all did it too so it doesn’t feel transgressive.

Or maybe you suspect the benefits outweigh the risks, but you have a principled heuristic of not trusting your own suspicions. Doctors are constantly meddling with systems we don’t fully understand, people die when we make mistakes, and hordes of scammers and profiteers are trying to exploit us at any given moment. “Never do anything that five government bodies haven’t enthusiastically recommended” is a great meta-level heuristic for staying sane in that environment, and one which I follow 95% of the time. If someone else follows it 99.9% or 100% of the time, and even a Johns Hopkins endorsement isn’t enough of a recommendation for them, I can understand that.

Or maybe you’re a coward.

I’m not saying doctors are generically cowards. My father is a doctor and he’s one of the bravest people I know. Every time there’s a typhoon or an earthquake in some terrorist-infested country on the other side of the world, he hops on a plane to go there and treat victims, sometimes before the rubble is even cold. If this was something simple, like treating river-blindness in war-torn parts of the Congo or containing an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria, I’m sure doctors would be all over it.

But the Devil knows the weaknesses that lurk in the hearts of men. When he wants to scare off doctors, he doesn’t threaten us with insanely hard acts of self-sacrifice. He knows we love that stuff! He threatens us with the prospect of looking slightly weird in front of our colleagues.

Here is a doctor who, if nominative determinism is any guide, knows a thing or two about diabolic temptation. Yet he talks about how he “almost felt dirty” prescribing fluvoxamine, even though he knew there was strong evidence supporting it. He worried the nurses were making fun of him (protip: if you are a doctor, the nurses are always making fun of you). He made the right decision in the end, but I wonder how many doctors in similar situations don’t.

There are lots of reasons to feel nervous and awkward when you prescribe a medication your colleagues won’t. Maybe they think you’re a loose cannon who doesn’t care about evidence. Maybe they they think you’re defecting against the team and going to get everyone in trouble. Maybe they’re remembering the ivermectin debacle and wondering if you secretly prescribe horse dewormer and vote Trump. Maybe they think you hold them in contempt for not being as up on the literature as you are, and only prescribing normal stuff.

You should always consider your colleagues’ opinions insofar as they are good smart people and you want to use their expertise as a check on your own fallible mind. But it’s hard to keep that separate from considering your colleagues’ opinions in the sense where it would be socially awkward to disagree. And that’s how the Devil gets us.

I faced the Devil last year and lost. In March 2020, when everyone was freaking out about ventilator supply, a team of very smart engineers asked me to prescribe them a medical-grade oxygen concentrator. I can’t remember the details, but something about trying to tinker around with a bunch of cheaper machines and jury-rig a budget ventilator, which they could pitch to people as a solution to the ventilator shortage. I punted. I said that this wasn’t really what the prescription system was for, you can’t prescribe things to healthy people just so they can tinker with them, and I might get in trouble with my clinic or the government or somebody. I told them to try to go through the proper channels for obtaining medical equipment, even though I was unsure whether those channels existed, and doubtful they would move with appropriate urgency.

Later I thought about this, and realized the choice before me was “You can contribute to a desperately important project that might save thousands of lives, but only if you do something kind of weird that might get you in a tiny amount of trouble”, and I had said no. Devil 1, Scott 0.

I faced the Devil the year before that, and I . . . well, let’s say it was a tie. I had a bunch of patients with treatment-resistant depression. Everyone knew ketamine was great for treatment resistant depression. But the only people using it were anaesthesiologists giving it IV, which was inconvenient and unaffordable for most patients. The FDA was trialing a new version of ketamine that could be given by psychiatrists via inhaler, and there was no reason whatsoever to think this wouldn’t work with normal ketamine, but nobody I knew was doing it and they all thought it seemed kind of weird. My severely depressed patients kept asking me for ketamine, and I kept saying “Sorry, I can’t prescribe that to you”, secretly ending the sentence with “…unless I use this one weird loophole I’ve never heard of anyone else using”. Finally I called up a compounding pharmacy near me and asked if anybody knew about this, and they said they knew a doctor who did, and did I want his phone number? I talked to him, and he said he’d been doing this for years and it had always gone well. For some reason, knowing that someone else was doing it was the permission I needed, I prescribed it to my patients, and it went well (I’ve since written up a guide for others). But I still didn’t have the courage to do the weird thing without knowing other people were doing it first.

(When I finally got around to prescribing ketamine, one of my patients told me I’d given her her life back. Usually I love hearing that kind of thing. This time it was bittersweet, because I knew I could have given more patients their lives back if I’d done it earlier. There are a couple of people who had six months of terrible depression that I maybe could have prevented if I had more courage. That’s partly on the FDA for making poor decisions such that optimal treatment required virtue on the part of individual doctors. But mostly it’s on me, for not having it.)

I will face the Devil in the future and I’ll fail again. Medicine is too big and complicated and scary to stray from the herd most of the time, and the sort of person who never fails at this problem is probably crazy, and constantly gives his patients snake oil or ivermectin or whatever. Doctors should generally stay within their area of expertise and doubt any argument leading them away from consensus. Certainly if you’re my patient and you somehow find this essay and read it back to me and tell me I need to prescribe you the latest whatever, I’m going to nope out of whatever you’re offering (especially if opioids are involved).

Still, I do want to stress the “facing the Devil” aspect, where this is a difficult moral battle. I know that’s a weird way to frame a prescription decision. But CS Lewis is a leading expert on devils and he was very clear that moral battles generally don’t happen in war-torn parts of the Congo. They happen in ordinary decisions about whether to do slightly unusual things that we worry might affect our social status among people we respect.

(by the way, when the other psychiatrists in my clinic learned I was prescribing intranasal racemic ketamine, they all said that was cool, and a few asked me to walk them through the process).

So if you haven’t been giving fluvoxamine to patients, please take a second, sit down, and decide whether it’s because:

1. You honestly think the risks outweigh the benefits.

2. You’re trying to follow some complicated meta-level heuristic that you need in order to practice good medicine or at least stay sane.

3. You’re scared.

If it’s 1 or 2, you’re valid and I support you. If it’s 3, man up and write the prescription.

If you’d feel happier doing this after you talked to a psychiatrist who has experience with this medication, feel free to email me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I have no personal experience using it against COVID, but I can direct you to the studies and protocols that explain how.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: High-Profile L.A. Crimes Spark Rush for Bullet-Proof Cars, Rolex Replicas and Safe Rooms.

Earlier: Tom Cotton: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

The post John Durham Officially Investigating the Clinton Campaign appeared first on The Bongino Report.

THIS IS A PRETTY GOOD DESCRIPTION: