When You Lose Friends for Saying Out Loud the Things You Observe

Lost any friends for saying what you actually think? None of them have return even after the legacy news finally catches up with the truth.

Things like these:

Many more COVID lies here.

People addicted to legacy news insist that the above untruths were only mistakes, not lies.  My response: if a expert in the field claims that they know something that they don't know, and that they know they don't know it, it is a lie.

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

And in the meantime, I have met and befriended numerous courageous thinkers, those who say what they think regardless of the fact that we are surrounded by fact-police, opinion-police and language police.

It's sometimes disorienting, disappointing and hurtful, but eventually you will be part of a much improved social network: people who think for themselves rather than huddling with sheep, people run in tribes. Steve Kirsch and Brett Weinstein independently described this turnover of friends here.

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Jay Bhattacharya Distinguishes Two Types of Gain of Function Research

I did not appreciate this distinction. Until I saw Bari Weiss' interview of Jay Bhattacharya, I assumed that all gain of function research was dangerous.

I created this transcript of the above interview:

Bari Weiss: Should gain a function research be banned, okay?

Jay Bhattacharya: So you have to be careful here. There's some gain of function research which is entirely benign, has no chance of causing a pandemic and would advance a use that is vital tool for advancing human health, right? So, for instance you have some protein you want expressed so that you can use it as a treatment, like insulin, is a good example of this. You change the DNA of a of an E coli, use the E coli bacteria to produce the insulin cheaply. That's gain of function work. There's nothing wrong with that.

But there is gain of function work that has the potential to cause a pandemic. You take a virus you find in a bat cave in China, Coronavirus, you add a biochemical element. This Is not theoretical. You add an element to it that makes it more transmissible among human cells and then you do that in a setting where it might infect the lab technician who takes it home without knowing it infects their family and causes a pandemic that causes so much damage.

That kind of research, or any research that has any capacity of causing a pandemic through gain of function, work should be banned. I think it has no place among the toolkit of scientists. You have a few scientists taking risks on behalf of the entire human population, and they do it in an unregulated way that makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if you don't agree that that is what led to this past pandemic--I happen to think it does--But even if you don't agree going forward, why would you say yes, you should take that risk? There aren't enough benefits to that kind of research to warrant causing a pandemic that can kill 10 million, 20 million people, if you include the lockdown harms and caused trillions of dollars of damage and set society back for so long. What knowledge gain would be worth that?

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About Cleaning House at the FDA

From "A Midwestern Doctor," who I follow. The article is mostly a sharp edged exposé of the gross incompetence and corruption of FDA Director Peter Marks, who was reportedly ejected from the FDA last week. But there is also this:

[C]onsider this quote from Peter Rost, a former executive at Pfizer and one of the few pharmaceutical leaders to speak out against the industry:

It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry … The difference is, all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves – well, I’d say 99 percent, anyway – look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank … However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen … to otherwise good citizens when they are part of a corporation. It’s almost like when you have war atrocities; people do things they don’t think they’re capable of. When you’re in a group, people can do things they otherwise wouldn’t, because the group can validate what you’re doing as okay
.

One couldn't conjure up a better real life example of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil. Oh, and as independent researchers (and all the rest of us) are denied access to comprehensive vaccine injury data, consider this quote by Arendt:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism…

Here are a few excerpts about the "work" of Marks:

•He asserted VAERS overreports vaccine injuries when in reality less than 1% of injuries make it into VAERS (as the government never wanted a publicly available injury database and once a law forced its creation, the government has worked for decades to undermine VAERS).

•He “compassionately” claimed the Federal vaccine injury compensation program existed to help individuals injured by vaccines and that they could sue a vaccine manufacturer if they were unsatisfied with the verdict—when in reality it is nearly impossible to have most injuries be acknowledged by that program and even harder to be able to sue a manufacturer outside of it).

•He argued that “vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity” (which is false as vaccine immunity often creates a very narrow immunity pathogens rapidly evolve a resistance to). Then as people started to point that out, he pivoted to stating “vaccines do not put you at risk of infection like an actual infection so they are superior due to the lower risk entailed in become immune” and was not called out for moving the goalpost from efficacy to safety.

Note: there is also strong evidence vaccine side effects are often much greater than those from a natural infection (best demonstrated by how many more people have permanent complications from the vaccines than a COVID infection.

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