What Public Health “Experts” Got Wrong about Covid

Justin Hart has offered an excellent annotated list. Visit his post for more detailed descriptions of what our public health experts got wrong during COVID, along with ample links. Hint: They got everything wrong. 

I’m Justin Hart — father of nine, data analyst, author of Gone Viral. I spent six years tracking COVID data professionally and ran one of the most-cited COVID data platforms during the pandemic. I’m not a crank, and this isn’t a rant. It’s an itemized bill.

The List

I’ve maintained this list for years. Every point represents something our institutions told us confidently, enforced aggressively, and got demonstrably wrong. Not “debatable.” Wrong.

Here’s the short list of everything these institutions got wrong during Covid:

    • Origin of the disease — wrong

    • Transmission — wrong

    • Asymptomatic spread — wrong

    • PCR testing — wrong

    • Fatality rate — wrong

    • Lockdowns — wrong

    • Community triggers — wrong

    • Business closures — wrong

    • School closures — wrong

    • Quarantining the healthy — wrong

    • Impact on youth — wrong

    • Hospital overload — wrong

    • Plexiglass barriers — wrong

    • Social distancing — wrong

    • Outdoor spread — wrong

    • Masks — wrong

    • Variant impact — wrong

    • Natural immunity — wrong

    • Vaccine efficacy — wrong

    • Vaccine injury — wrong

Twenty items. Every one sourced. Every one with real consequences for real people.

That’s not a crisis of public trust. That’s a record of institutional failure.

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20 Human Cognitive Biases Explained by Steve Stewart Williams

Excellent summary of 20 cognitive biases by psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams.  His Intro:

The human mind is a remarkable piece of biological engineering. It’s capable of an astonishing range of feats like inventing calculus, composing rock operas, and putting spacecraft on other planets. But it’s also capable of an equally astonishing range of predictable reasoning errors. Psychologists call these cognitive biases, and they’re as common as the common cold.

In this post, I’ll outline 20 major biases that distort our judgments about evidence, ourselves, and the world. Once you learn about them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere: in politics, in the news, on social media - and occasionally even in your own thinking. (Mostly, though, in other people’s.)

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US Public Health COVID Policies Exploited Three Classic Human Frailties

Kenny Carmody:

Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.
Carmody's analysis on X is spot on:

Most people know the Milgram experiment. Ordinary people administering what they believed were lethal electric shocks to strangers because an authority figure in a white coat told them to continue. We wrote about this. COVID replicated it at planetary scale, the doctors, the neighbours, the employers, the family members who enforced mandates with a zeal that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with institutional obedience.

But the other two are equally important and far less discussed.

The Asch Conformity Experiment demonstrated something even more fundamental. Solomon Asch showed in the 1950s that a significant majority of people will deny the evidence of their own eyes will give an answer they know to be factually wrong, simply because everyone else in the room is giving that answer. Not because they were threatened. Not because they were paid. Because the social pressure of the group was sufficient to override direct sensory experience.

This is what masking a healthy population, cancelling Christmas, and demanding that people treat their neighbours as biological threats actually accomplished. It was not about any of those things specifically. It was about training an entire population to override their own perception and defer to the group consensus, however absurd that consensus became.

And then the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study abandoned early because it spiralled so rapidly out of control, showed that ordinary people assigned roles of authority over other ordinary people will, within days, begin to abuse that authority in ways they would have found unthinkable before the role was assigned. The guards became cruel not because they were cruel people but because the structure gave them permission and the institution backed them up.

We watched this happen in real time.

The COVID marshals. The border agents turning families away. The hospital administrators barring visitors from dying patients. The teachers reporting parents. The neighbours calling police on children playing in parks. The HR departments gleefully processing terminations for the unvaccinated. Ordinary people, handed a role and a uniform of institutional approval, discovering capacities for cruelty that their pre-2020 selves would not have recognised.

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Sons’ DNA Found in Mothers’ Brains

Amazing!

Anish Moonka:

You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers. Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells. The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.

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No Anti-War Option on the Last Presidential Ballot. No Option for Restraining Israel

I wonder why?

And remember that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris eagerly participated in regarding Gaza.

Transcription of Kamala Harris's statement in the video (from her July 25, 2024 remarks after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu):

From when I was a young girl, collecting funds to plant trees for Israel, to my time in the United States Senate and now at the White House, I’ve had an unwavering commitment to the existence of the state of Israel, to its security and to the people of Israel.

And why do so few of our politicians speak out against the US-Israel war against Iran? For that matter, why aren't we hearing the US corporate media excoriating the bi-partisan effort to blow through tax dollars we don't have to engage in war? What is the top priority of most of our politicians? They will tell you in their own words:

AIPAC (= Israeli) control over our politicians (federal and state) is strong

 

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