Stick A Fork In It: Lockdowns & Censorship
TL;DR - Scientific "consensus" is a false pretence when all who disagree are silenced
In April 2021, Dr. Douglas Allen, professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, was called upon as an expert witness to to provide an economic analysis of lockdowns for the Barbecue Rebellion constitutional challenge. In his affidavit submitted to the Ontario Superior Court, he noted that the “early cases made for lockdown rested on several unrealistic assumptions,” with the majority of research focused on benefits and scant attention paid to costs. This might explain public health’s initial assumption that lockdowns were worthwhile, but according to Dr. Allen, “by August [2020] there was enough information available to show that any reasonable cost/benefit analysis would show that lockdown was creating more harm than good. It is unreasonable to suggest that a proper decision could not have been made in the fall when the second wave of infections hit.” He also famously wrote, “it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,” because, as he foresaw, the collateral damage from lockdowns was substantial. In hindsight, most would agree.
In the moment, however, only a few dared to advocate for a lighter touch. Among them were several renowned epidemiologists, including Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. On October 4, 2020, they published the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – a formal proposal outlining an approach to covid that they called “Focused Protection.” Co-signed by over 63,000 medical practitioners and health scientists, it cautioned policymakers about the devastating short- and long-term physical and mental effects of oppressive covid restrictions. Furthermore, it emphasized key facts that had since come to light, which should have been cause for course correction, such as:
Covid is mostly a threat to the elderly and infirm, not the young and healthy.
Measures can be adopted to protect the vulnerable without damaging or disrupting the lives of everyone else.
Natural immunity is robust and enduring, and when acquired in community settings, it expedites herd immunity and reduces the risks to the vulnerable.
Herd immunity is not dependent on vaccination, even if vaccination proves helpful.
The GBD marked a proverbial fork in the road for policymakers because it offered a high-profile off-ramp to extricate themselves from their injurious lockdown strategy. They could have used it as a platform to return to sound public health principles and messaging; tempering the excessive fears they had fostered by striking a more reassuring tone, while limiting further economic and social damage. From a political and public relations perspective, it provided cover to save face, and more importantly, to save lives.
“Canadians have developed a fear of COVID-19. Going forward, they have to be supported in understanding their true level of risk, and learning how to deal with this disease, while getting on with their lives – back to work, back to school, and back to healthy lives and vibrant, active communities across this country.”
Alas, as lawfully obtained emails revealed in December 2021, when the GBD was presented to covid’s most influential policymaker, Dr. Anthony Fauci, he balked at it. Rather than openly consider this sensible approach or engage in dialogue with its advocates, he doubled down on unproven restrictions. Worse yet, the emails revealed how Fauci and colleague Dr. Francis Collins colluded with media to discredit the GBD, intentionally stifling public debate about its merits. The fawning media’s adulation for Fauci has deterred most from critically examining his actions, but is it so inconceivable that a man with the audacity to proclaim “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” might be lacking for humility? Is it not disingenuous for him to declare “I represent science,” and then fail to recall any scientific justification for his covid directives when questioned about them under oath? If pressure reveals character, then what do these statements say about Fauci’s self-interest, diplomacy, and judgment?
It's hard to imagine a valid reason for social media – our digital public squares – to have prevented scientific discourse and discredited differing points of view during a period of uncertainty unless they felt pressured to do so. Why else would Google and Facebook censor the GBD and other exploratory covid content? Why else would Twitter blacklist credentialed and experienced professionals like the GBD authors? The answer arrived in January 2023, and it confirmed the worst fears of critics. The Wall Street Journal revealed that the White House’s director of digital media, Rob Flaherty, coerced social media giants into censoring posts that opposed the party line in an overt attempt to create the false impression of scientific consensus. In other words, science was poisoned by politics, which prioritized herd mentality over herd immunity. And this is the heart of the issue with censorship. It is incompatible with democratic values because it prevents conscientious dissent and the intellectual exercise of questioning beliefs, while presuming that authorities are unimpeachable arbiters of truth.
Censorship protects nobody while obstructing the only honest corrective mechanism in the marketplace of ideas – free speech. Free speech is the pathway to truth because it has an unlimited capacity for criticism and deliberation, which is the optimal filter for exposing the faults of bad ideas and illuminating the utility of good ones. Conversely, censorship selects arbitrary outcomes based on the pretense of knowledge, which are enforced by limiting the depth of information discovery and the breadth of debate. Although some naively argue that free speech is dangerous because it permits exposure to objectionable ideas, the alternative may authorize their unchecked proliferation, and that is a far greater evil. As it relates to covid, the damage from suppressing dissenting viewpoints continues becoming more apparent the more time passes.
In another testimony submitted on behalf of the Barbecue Rebellion by Dr. Gilbert Berdine, a Harvard and MIT educated pulmonologist and Texas Tech professor, he argued that “Canadian lockdowns resulted in more deaths from COVID-19 than would have occurred by doing nothing.” His claim is supported by a rigorous data analysis of mortality rates stratified by age for different jurisdictions with different restrictions. It is further substantiated by the real-world outcome of countries like Sweden, which refrained from lockdowns, yet managed to maintain one of the lowest death rates among all Western countries according to both the WHO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development throughout the covid era. According to lockdown proponents, roughly 3% of Swedes should have died – but they didn’t. Why not? As Warren Buffet famously said, “it's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.” In the context of covid, the pierced veil of censorship has exposed that the emperors of lockdown have no clothes.
“We, or the Swedish government, decided early, in January, that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. And when you start looking around at the measures being taken now by different countries, you'll find that very few of them have a shred of evidence.”
– Johan Giesecke, Former Head Epidemiologist of Sweden. April 17, 2020.
This post is part of an article called Stick A Fork In It: The Barbecue Rebellion & The Rude Awakening, which is available in its entirety on my Substack:
