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COVID Origins: Our Gatekeepers Remain but the Gates Are Down

So the Ruling Class Was WRONG WRONG WRONG About Covid-19. What Else Are They Wrong About?

• MAY 27, 2021

Earlier by Ann Coulter: “I Will Not Be Scienced”—Experts Wrong, Covid Could Have Come From Wuhan Lab After All

The sudden dramatic collapse of the elite-enforced Narrative that Covid-19 could not possibly have originated in a Chinese laboratory is one of the most extraordinary developments in modern political history [That Didn’t Age Well: Wuhan Propaganda From MSM Laid Bare, by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, May 27, 2021]. Equally dramatic but much less well-known: the earlier collapse of the elite Narrative that, in the words of CNN Medical Talking Head Dr. Sanjay Gupta [Tweet him] Covid-19 “doesn’t discriminate based on race. We must learn three chilling lessons from this scandal: (1) The authorities cannot trusted; (2) The “Main Stream” media is only “mainstream” because of the extent to which it will limit its questioning of these authorities; (3) Only trusted members of the Ruling Class may question the authorities.

I have a personal stake in this. In February 2020, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow killed a column I wrote about the evidence that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory and speculating that it might have been a bioweapon. Brimelow’s motive was frankly fear: Silicon Valley’s Tech Totalitarians were on the rampage against any deviationism, especially from the elite-enforced line that Covid-19 originated naturally. Twitter had just banned the huge ZeroHedge account for running a story about Covid’s possible lab origin [Twitter bans Zero Hedge after it posts coronavirus conspiracy theory, by Kate Gibson, CBS News, February 3, 2020].. (ZeroHedge was subsequently mysteriously restored). Facebook had just banned VDARE.com for obviously fallacious reasons, part of its campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Brimelow just didn’t want to take the risk, especially since the origins of the disease was not central to VDARE.com Immigration Disaster/ National Question focus.

But I was denied a scoop.

When Covid-19 began to become a major news issue in early 2020, nobody really knew what was going on. All that we could do was speculate intelligently, based on the available evidence (which of course did not include data about racial incidence, suppressed by our race-denying Ruling Class).

I must confess that I made the mistake at first of thinking that, as with previous outbreaks of similar diseases like SARS and MERS, Covid-19 would be unlikely to have much an impact outside East Asia. That was a reasonable hypothesis. But it was not correct.

And I, like everybody else who wrote about Covid, was under the impression that it was a “fact” that Covid had started in a Chinese market. It definitely hadn’t leaked from a Chinese lab that experiments with creating dangerous diseases. There was no way that could so, because the authorities told us that it was wild, absurd conspiracy theory.

Of course, that was apparently not correct either. It now seems that “authorities”—such as Dr Anthony Fauci and the entire Ruling Class—were wrong in asserting as indisputable fact that the virus came from a Chinese “wet market” and definitely did not leak from a Wuhan laboratory. And wrong again in the way they acted upon their certainty,

Remember, when the lab theory came to light, it had to be condemned by all right-thinking people. As Stephen L. Miller has written in The Spectator, it was a denounced as a “nut-job idea…first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media” [Don’t let the media get away with U-turning on the lab leak theory, May 24, 2021]. It was utterly condemned in the pages of the leading medical journal The Lancet, where a group of senior scientists proclaimed that they , “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife” [Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19, by Charles Calisher et al., February 19, 2020]. The following month, in the journal Nature Medicine, another group of scientists claimed: “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 [the latest name for Covid-19) emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus” [The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, by Kristian Anderson et al., March 17, 2020].

In the panic of the time, with people confronted with the possibility of a serious plague, they craved certainty. And here they were being offered it by pillars of the Medical Establishment. Only “nut jobs” and “Far Right” types, were going to question this, obviously.

This is because, as is surely clear now that we are cancelling mathematics as “racist” [Reality check: mathematics is not racist, by Mark Ronan, The Critic, March 21, 2021], “Far Right” increasingly means anybody of genuinely questioning disposition…anybody who is prepared to put facts and logic over emotion.

“Fact Checks” by Leftist news organs were unambiguous that the “lab theory” was complete nonsense; dangerous nonsense at that. Now, they’ve had a conversion to the new Party line, such that it is “suddenly credible” [Ted Cruz mocks Washington Post as ‘clowns’ after fact-check declares Wuhan lab leak theory ‘suddenly’ credible, by David Rutz, Fox News, May 25, 2021].

And of course Facebook and YouTube banned users from mentioning the theory—and, incredibly, were still doing so three days ago[Why does Facebook still ban users from saying Covid was man-made even as Dr Fauci casts doubt on virus origins? And Italian journalist is censored by YouTube for claiming it was created in Wuhan lab, by Chris Pleasance, Mail Online, May 24, 2021]. They reversed course as of May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:, but you can still see their earlier ban on about.fb.com:

In many ways, how this change of mind took place is even more frightening.

It appears to me that there were two factors involved. Firstly, it gradually became clearer to people, especially scientists, that there was too much about the Narrative that didn’t make sense. And secondly, the science journalist Nicholas Wade went public, at the beginning of May, with a very detailed article in which he persuasively argued that a lab leak was the best theory and in which he highlighted the gaping holes in the earlier “fact checked facts” [The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 5, 2021].

Wade’s essay was so cogent, that it was very difficult for people to argue with it. However, the Regime Media is now asserting the “sudden” new facts based on the same kind of appeal to authority as they had previously.

Nicholas Wade has an important niche for himself as being just about part of the “Ruling Class,” having spent 30 years on the staff of the New York Times. His 2014 book on the ever-“controversial” issue of race, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, managed to tread that all-important fine line between the science and accepting Multiculturalist dogmas. Thus, the book was, on the one hand, denounced by many ideologue scientists as “racist” but, on the other, positively reviewed in The Wall Street Journal [by Charles Murray, May 2, 2014 ] and other respectable journals.

And it appears that due to Wade being just about part of the Ruling Class, he has been able to get away with his “medical misinformation” because, as the Regime Media reason and even Left-wing scientists reason, he’s just about “on our side” so we are prepared to listen to him, in a way that we would not to a scientist who was more of an outsider.

Thus, the Overton Window has shifted and Main Stream Media as well as the mainstream scientific authorities are shown up as what they are: people who are obsessed with power, control and the spreading of Leftist ideology; because, after all, the lab theory was “racist.”

Now, what about the idea, still unacceptable, that Covid-19 was deliberately leaked, a kind of biological warfare? Or that, even if it leaked accidently, it was originally developed as part of a biological warfare program?

The Regime Media will still condemn this as absolutely wrong and unsayable.

They must not be allowed to get away with it again.

From UNZ Review, here.

Who Will Punish the Lockdown-Pushing Scientists?!

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us.

The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.

Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.

The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.

Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe.

The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true.

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes.

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America.

It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse.

The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way.

In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies.

The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again.

As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology.

When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once.

Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.

That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.

It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming.

Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government.

From AIER, here.

‘Trust the Doctors!’ (Unless They Disagree with You, Of Course…)

Nearly 100 Israeli Doctors Issue Letter Demanding That State Not Vaccinate Children Against COVID-19

Nearly 100 Doctors and medical professors signed their names to a letter requesting that the Israeli health system refrains from vaccinating children under any scenario unless the disease were to become dangerous to them.

According to a report by Channel 12 News, the doctors explained that “there is no room to vaccinate children at this time.” The doctors added that based on agreed-upon medical values, including “caution, humility, and do no harm” that there is not enough evidence or threat to vaccinate children against the disease. The doctors explained further that not enough is known about the disease and the various vaccines that have been produced to combat it.

Among the signatories of the letter are such well-renown Doctors as Dr. Amir Shachar, director of the emergency room at Laniado Hospital, Dr. Yoav Yehezkeli, an expert in internal medicine and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Avi Mizrahi, director of the intensive care unit at Kaplan Hospital.

In the letter that was addressed to “the chiefs of the Israeli Ministry of Health, to our fellow doctors around the country, and to the entire public.”

They noted that “the increasingly prevalent opinion within the scientific community is that the vaccine cannot lead to herd immunity, therefore there is currently no ‘altruistic’ justification for vaccinating children to protect at-risk populations.”

They added that even today it is unclear whether the vaccine prevents the spread of the virus and for how long it confers protection and noted that new variants “that may be more resistant to vaccination are popping up all the time.”

The letter continues, “We believe that not even a handful of children should be endangered through mass vaccination against a disease that is not dangerous to them. Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the vaccine will have long-term adverse effects that have not yet been discovered at this time, including on growth, reproductive system, or fertility. Children should be allowed a quick return to routine; the many tests and broad isolation cycles should be stopped, and no separation between the vaccinated and unvaccinated should be created in the public sphere. Vaccination of at-risk populations should be allowed, and under the almost complete vaccination of this population – it is possible to return to full routine (with periodic adjustments) even in the presence of COVID-19 virus.”

“Therefore, we fear that at this point in time, there is under-reporting of side effects. Moreover, a causal link between events – if any – will only emerge in due course, as more and more events of a certain type accumulate. For example, if there is a serious health event that happens to 12 young people a year in Israel (ie – an average of 1 per month), while the vaccine also causes this serious event infrequently, it will take many months until it is clear that there is an increase in the incidence of the event, and that there is a connection between the vaccine and its appearance.”

“Do not rush to vaccinate children as long as the full picture is not clear. Coronavirus disease does not endanger children, and the first rule in medicine is, do no harm. The full picture is expected in many months, and possibly years. Moreover, one must wait for such documentation not only from Israeli data but from global data. In this context, it is worthy to add that black box warnings – about severe or life-threatening side effects – accumulate months and years after drug approval, due to the fact that severe but rare toxins appear, naturally, only over time.”

“We believe it is not appropriate to impose the inconvenience of vaccination on the pediatric population, where coronavirus is not dangerous, especially at this stage when the efficiency, in the long run, is not at all clear. Pediatrics in Israel is one of the best in the world, and pediatric intensive care – above all. It is extremely rare for a child to die of a viral disease, and this can happen, unfortunately, as a result of various types of viruses. We do not think it is right to manage private life and public health policy as a result of an ongoing fear of a viral illness that is very rarely liable to harm our children’s lives. ”

“In view of the fact that the vaccination of the vulnerable population reduces hospitalizations and mortality from Covid – we believe that the negative effects of the virus will be much smaller when the majority of the at-risk population is vaccinated, as begins to appear to be the case in the country, and this without the need to vaccinate children,” they explained.

“We believe that our children should be allowed to return to the routine of their blessed lives immediately, and should not be vaccinated against Covid-19. Asymptomatic children’s tests, which have no clinical significance but cause widespread indirect damage, and the mass isolation cycles in education frameworks, should be stopped immediately. It should be emphasized to the public that even vaccinated people can be infected and infect others, and that the same rules of conduct apply to everyone without connection to vaccination status. We must stop pointing the finger of blame at the unvaccinated, and we must stop violating the rights of the individual. We must immediately stop all forms of exclusion and separation between people in the public sphere.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

From Yeshiva World, here.

Chovot Halevavot: Be an Informed Patient!

Chovot Halevavot Sha’ar Hayichud chap. 3:

אך לדעת, אם אנו חייבין לחקור על הייחוד בדרך העיון אם לא, אומר, כי כל מי שיוכל לחקור על הענין הזה והדומה לו מן הענינים המושכלים בדרך הסברה השכלית, חייב לחקור עליו כפי השגתו וכח הכרתו. וכבר הקדמתי בתחילת הספר הזה מן הדברים המראים חיוב הענין מה שיש בו די. והמתעלם מחקור [באמיתתו ובברורו] הרי זה מגונה, ונחשב מן המקצרים בחכמה ובמעשה, והוא דומה לחולה, שהוא בקי בחליו ובדרך רפואתו, סמך על רופא שמרפא אותו בכמה מיני רפואות, והוא מתעצל לעיין בחכמתו וסברתו ברפואות הרופא, לדעת אם הוא מתעסק בעניניו על דרך נכונה אם לא, והיה יכול לעמוד על זה מבלי דבר שימנעהו. וכבר חייבתנו התורה בזה, כמו שכתוב וידעת היום והשבות אל לבבך כי ה’ הוא האלהים…

Without going into the book itself, or the matter at hand (Chakirah), this is a powerful parable. True, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client“, etc., but one knows his own body best (לב יודע מרת נפשו), and the wisdom of medicine is vast enough for the best of doctors to overlook or misunderstand things, not to mention simple error.

(And all this applies even without considering today’s scientistic doctors, with their institutional incentives (Big Pharma) and built-in blindspots (“Alternative Medicine“, nutrition), esp. now (Corona Bologna).

‘The Place Moshe and Aaron Didn’t Merit, Who Says I Will?’

Stranded in Frankfurt

Living in today’s surreal times when Jews are physically unable to come to Israel, provides us all with opportunity to reflect.Op-ed.

Avraham Shusteris , Mar 03 , 2021 9:32 PM

Ben Gurion Airport

Ben Gurion Airport

Flash 90

Getting into Israel today is no simple matter. With a quota of citizens allowed entry each day into Ben Gurion airport, combined with the multiple bureaucratic loops of fire one needs to jump through to get a boarding pass, one has to be both incredibly determined and lucky to get back home to Israel today.

For Jews that are not Israeli citizens, it isn’t even possible. And while we all look forward to coming back to visit Israel in the near future, just as soon as Corona quiets down, it’s sobering to think that already a year has gone by since the gates of Israel have been effectively closed for world Jewry. A year of missed weddings and brisses, a year of grandchildren growing older that grandparents have lost the chance to experience forever.

Living in today’s surreal times when Jews, despite their best intentions and efforts, are physically unable to come back home to Israel, provides us all with opportunity to reflect. I recall when I was still living in New York, I must have heard more or less the same monologue from different people at least a few dozen times. This monologue went more or less as follows: “Eretz Yisrael- of course, we all want to be there. What’s more special than davening at the Kotel. When Moshiach comes, we’ll be the first one’s on the Elal Plane. Im Yirtze Hashem- one day soon. Ok, see you later, got to get back to work/carpool/yeshiva/real-life.”

Even before immigrating to Israel myself, I was always taken aback by “the monologue”. As Jews, the people whose guiding principle is faith, how could it be that when it comes to Aliyah, even the most “religious” amongst us are so pragmatic and lacking in faith? When it comes to the far off, theoretical concept of “when Moshiach comes” we are all fervently religious in our convictions that the time will come when we will all pick up our belongings and go. When it comes to practical, direct, and immediate concept of moving to Israel in the near term, we are big pragmatists and look for any excuse to exempt us from the Mitzvah.

Could it be possible that we are only fervent in our beliefs as long as it does not require any difficulty or practical commitment? It is easy to be religious as long as it requires no difficulty, sacrifice or risk. There are many wonderful religions out there that don’t require any of these things. Judaism is not one of them. A Jew does not shy away from challenges because they are difficult or even seemingly impossible.

Furthermore, I never understood why the “When Moshiach comes” Jew believes that he will be one of the lucky ones that actually merit to return to Israel when Mashiach actually comes. Just a while ago, 80 hareidi Jews, Israeli citizens for that matter, were blocked from boarding a rescue flight to Israel from Frankfurt Germany, which many of them had planned and waited for weeks to arrange. Forced to sleep on the airport floor with no guarantee of when the next rescue flight will become available, these desperate Jews are learning the hard way, that when it comes to returning home to Israel- there are no guarantees.

Even the best of Jews with the best of intentions do not always have the merit to return home. How many great Torah scholars over the many centuries dreamed to return to Israel, but were held back by one difficulty or another, and in the end never made it. Moses and Aaron, the greatest of our people, did not merit to enter this land. What brazenness must we have to assume that we will be the ones to merit to return “when Moshiach comes,” while at the same time refusing to take the opportunity to come when it is granted to us on a silver platter.

The truth is, “when Moshiach comes” is nothing more than an excuse clothed in piety. If a Jew has a goal, he naturally works and prays for that goal. Whether the goal is getting married, finding a job, improving one’s health, improving one’s marriage or battling an addiction. A person who truly wants something, takes action to make it happen. If you want to return to Israel, make it happen. If you don’t really care, there’s no reason to assume that Moshiach will make it happen for you.

Avraham Shusteris is an accountant in Ramat Beit Shemesh. He made aliyah from Monsey with his family in 2018.

From Arutz Sheva, here.