Here is my Op-Ed on the collapse of the Covid narrative. The wheels are finally coming off the bus.
This ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
As long-time readers know, I have been highly critical of the government’s handling of the Covid outbreak since the beginning. In April 2020, I argued for a targeted approach to lockdowns, that only the elderly and the vulnerable should be shielded quarantined. We knew from the very beginning that children and teens were not at risk. I argued for keeping the schools open and businesses open since children, minorities, and blue-collar workers would take the brunt of the shutdown effects.
The idea that a cloth mask could protect someone from an aerosol virus is ludicrous. Anyone with military training in biological warfare knows just how ridiculous that is.
In 2017, masking studies were performed with the SARS-Covid-1 virus. Oxford Academic’s Clinical Infectious Diseases reported the effectiveness of various masks against SARS-CoV-1. Their conclusion: “no protective effect against SARS was reported for disposable, cotton, or paper masks.” Only properly fitted N-95 respirators stopped the spread of the disease. Read it for yourselves: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/65/11/1934/4068747
In my November 2020 Op-Ed, I discussed a research study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine confirming those 2017 findings that surgical masks are incapable of preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and cloth masks even more so. Local progressives lost their minds and called on the editors of the Daily News to fire me, electing silence over science.
Last week, CNN’s liberal medical analyst Leana Wen said on that network that cloth face masks are ineffective. “Don’t wear a cloth mask. Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations.” She took flack for those comments, so in the next CNN interview she doubled down:
“Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for Omicron, it was not appropriate for Delta, Alpha, or any of the previous variants either because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne. We’re dealing with a virus that’s extremely contagious.”
“Public health experts have been saying for many months that mask quality really matters. A simple cloth mask won’t do when we are dealing with a highly contagious, airborne virus.”
Something has changed nationally when CNN’s medical analyst is allowed to state the scientific facts twice in one week and not be fired. What will be the progressives’ reaction when they realize they have been lied to for the last 22 months?
We’re watching the narrative of the Covid regime collapse in real time.
President Biden ran for office with the preposterous promise of ending Covid. Fast forward to last week when, at a meeting with the nation’s governors, Biden said, “There is no federal solution [to the pandemic]. This gets solved at a state level.”
He just spent 2021 yelling at Gov’s Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot for saying that very same thing. Either the president is senile and doesn’t know what he’s saying (my personal view), or he’s trying to avoid blame for his incompetence (there are more Covid deaths post-vaccination under Biden than pre-vaccination under Trump) Regardless, since by his own admission there is no federal solution, the federal vaccine mandates should be stopped immediately.
In August 2020, I argued that closing schools would cause irreparable damage to children: not only to their education but also to their mental health and development. How could it not? The only ones who benefit from closing schools are the teachers’ unions.
Professor Carl Heneghan, clinical epidemiologist and director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, released a study “The Impact of Pandemic Restrictions on Childhood Mental Health.” In light of the fact that about half of all mental disorders start by age 14, the study determined that since school closures contributed to increased anxiety, loneliness, and stress; negative feelings due to Covid-19 increased with the duration of school closures; and deteriorating mental health is found to be worse in females and older adolescents, “the overall impact of Covid-19 restrictions on the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents is likely to be severe.”
Heneghan also estimates that anywhere from two to four times as many excess deaths in 2020/2021 were due to government lockdowns than to Covid. How can this be? Because the government’s fearmongering led people to avoid routine medical care, and by the time an issue became a crisis, it was too late. The large rise in at-home deaths during Covid point to this.
Instead of taking a historical, common-sense approach to public health, governments took a novel approach. But reality eventually catches up with fantasy. And that’s where we find ourselves today. People on both sides of the aisle are finally piecing together the truth about our Covid response, and even the president is having to walk back his Covid lies. The house of cards on which media have built their Covid policy couldn’t strand forever, and the time of reckoning is here.