“No One is Safe”: The Many Stages of the COVID Messaging Campaign.

Matt Orfalea offers a new collection of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.”

Matt Taibbi follows up with this article: "Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign: As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, Apologies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy." An excerpt:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

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Marty Makary Counts the Many Ways the Federal Government Failed Us During COVID

Marty Makary, MD, testifying before Congress:

More tragically, the NIH has $42 billion. BARDA, which is part of the PAHPA Act, has another billion dollars and they couldn't do the most basic clinical research we needed done quickly to answer the basic questions to end the controversies and the conspiracy theories to finally get up the questions Americans were asking us: How does it spread? Is it from touching surfaces? Do I need to pour 20 gallons of alcohol on my groceries? Fauci was telling teachers in July to wear gloves and goggles. Or was it spread airborne? That could have been answered in 24 hours in one of our BSL4 labs? Or in one week of clinical research to answer the question: When are you most contagious? What's the peak day of viral shedding? How long do you have you have to quarantine for? Do masks work? We could have answered these with definitive basic clinical research early. They didn't.

And so I think it's fair to ask how did they do in preparing us? For the pandemic? We've spent over $20 billion on PAHPA over the last 20 years. What has that done for us? How many lives were saved during the COVID pandemic because of investments by PAHPA or BARDA? Now, they've done some good work. I've seen it. But regardless of one's political affiliation, they've got to acknowledge that we doctors in the public were flying blind. We had opinion ruling the day on what we should do or not do when we could have been governed by evidence. Policy driven by good basic clinical research. We didn't have that. And so we had a void of clinical research. And guess what filled that void over half a year? A year? Two years? What filled that void were political opinions. Those controversies could have been ended early. We had the money.

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Marty Makary Exposes Ten Myths Promulgated by the CDC During COVID

Dr. Marty Makary is a highly accomplished surgeon at John Hopkins. I posted some video of his presentation to Congress here. He has now written "10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked" at the New York Post." He writes that throughout COVID the CDC:

weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR. In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.

He then lists 10 ways that the CDC misled Americans. These are the headlines only--visit the NYP for the entire article:

  • Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity.
  • Masks prevent COVID transmission
  • School closures reduce COVID transmission
  • Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
  • Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
  • Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
  • COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
  • It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose
  • Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
  • One in five people get long COVID.

The main sin of the public health officials, according to Makary:"Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer should have been “we’re not sure.” [More . . . ]

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Hollowed-Out

I propose this as a metaphor for a large country whose institutions are being hollowed out.

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Fauci Dissected

Robert Malone is a highly credentialed doctor and researcher, co-inventor of the technology behind mRNA, decided to analyze the inaccuracies, lies and deceptions in a recent presentation by Anthony Fauci on MSNBC. Reading Malone's many comments, cautions and accusations gives one a much different view of Fauci's motivations and credibility. Here's an excerpt:

Dr. Fauci: We've really got to do better than that. I mean, if you look at the relative percentage of people who are updated on their boosters, we have less than 20% of the eligible people have received that updated BA-45 boost. So we've got to do better than that, even though we're doing much better than we were.

Malone - The “boosters” clearly cause more harm than good. Many European nations as well as the UK have discontinued them.>

Joe: It seems to me that the steady stream of disinformation keeps moving out there. A lot of people picked up on a Cochrane summary of mask studies and ran with that a couple of weeks ago and said, see, this proves masks don't work. The Cochrane editor in chief had to come out and say, no, no, no. You're misreading our data.

Malone = The Editor was pressured. The lead author has gone on video interviews objecting to this mischaracterization. This is disinformation. There are three main routes of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Mouth, nose, eyes. Masks do not cover eyes.

That's not what we're saying at all. And yet that disinformation gets out of the door and people just run with it. Looking back, we've learned a lot of things over the past three years. Tell me, what are some of the major takeaways that you've learned over the last three years, perhaps in some things that before we knew exactly how COVID was going to develop, what have you learned three years in about COVID?

Malone - Corporate media, particularly including MSNBC and CNN, have been among the most prominent spreaders of disinformation and government propaganda throughout the COVIDcrisis. This is easily demonstrated.

Dr. Fauci: Well, there's a long, long list, Joe, of what we've learned, and particularly if you look at the evolution of information from the very first weeks when it was felt that this was not a particularly easy virus to transmit from person to person, feeling that it was maybe jumped from an animal to a human and one human would infect another, but very inefficiently. Then we soon found out that it is extremely efficient in its transmissibility.

Malone - Because it was engineered to be highly infectious in humans by incorporating the furin cleavage site. This is well documented, with a paper trail implicating the NIAID and USG in the funding. Fauci knew this from the beginning.

Then we found out that unlike influenza, which is mostly droplet transmission, this is aerosol transmission, which really changed how we looked upon the need to wear a mask when you have aerosol transmission.

Malone - The opposite is actually true. Masks can work for droplets, but not for fine aerosols. This is yet another clear example of Fauci lying.

And then the other thing that we learned as the weeks went by is that this virus is transmitted predominantly, 50 to 60% of the transmissions are from someone who has no symptoms at all, which completely smashes the paradigm of respiratory transmissibility that we're used to with other respiratory borne diseases.

Malone - Many scientists dispute this conclusion. But if true, it would clearly indicate that for the majority of patients this is an asymptomatic infection.>

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