Monday, December 5, 2022

Our Pandemic Response Model

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” ― G.K. Chesterton

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The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) recently voted to remove Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the nation’s leading cardiologists, from his certifications in cardiovascular disease. Mr. McCullough’s sin had nothing to do with his performance in caring for patients, but rather with questioning the necessity of the COVID-19 vaccine for younger populations.

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By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10 to the 24th bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars.

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Caplan on Magness’s and Michael Makovi’s thesis that Karl Marx’s prominence is due chiefly to the fact that his name was used in a successful coup by totalitarians in 1917:
To speak plainly, academics after 1917 tacitly applied a “might makes right” or at least a “might makes credible” heuristic. When Marx’s followers were an inbred cult, academics treated them like an inbred cult. Once they took over a major country, however, academia “reassessed.” Predictably, they found that the only philosopher whose adherents ruled a country was actually worth reading on his merits.

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There are more than 3,000 federal crimes and an estimated 300,000-plus federal regulations that can be enforced by agencies empowered to seek criminal punishments.

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Our Pandemic Response Model

Nothing is easy. And everything is interconnected. Even failure has a legacy.

Here is Jay Bhattacharya on Biden’s pandemic 'plan:’

'The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population “safe.”

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This policy effectively guarantees that lockdowns will return to the U.S. in the event of a new pandemic. Though the lockdowns did not work to protect populations from getting or spreading COVID—after 2.5 years, nearly everyone in the U.S. has had COVID—public health bureaucracies like the CDC have not repudiated the strategy. Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.”'

It should be remembered that these programs so decried by the Right were initiated by Trump.

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