…or the politicians and untrustworthy elected officials who use both for unethical ends.
Further reinforcing his Ethics Alarms status as an Ethics Villain, the now retired Dr. Anthony Fauci blithely told lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week that “social distancing guidelines”—warning the public to keep six feet apart from anyone else supposedly to limit the spread of the Wuhan virus — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input, and was “likely not based on scientific data.”
Oh! That’s nice! Schools remained closed well into 2021 substantially as a result of the social distancing guidelines that he stood by and allowed to be issued without scientific data. I was screamed at in several public places because I knew the social distancing edicts were garbage from the beginning, just like the “don’t touch your face!” nonsense and 95% of all masks. My sister has been a phobic about physical contact ever since March of 2020: she has yet to allow me into her house, and will only speak to me at my home ten feet away on the front yard. Research studies and other health officials pooh-poohed the social distancing mandates early on while media scaremongers—-after all, it was vital to wreck the Trump economy if he was going to be brought down—were quoting some “experts” saying that we should all wear masks and socially distance forever. Fortunately my pop culture addiction served me well: I recognized all of the CDC recommendations from the 2011 pandemic movie “Contagion.” They were exactly the same, proving to me that “social distancing” and the rest were just boiler plate “Do something!” measures off the CDC shelf. (They didn’t work in the film, either.)
Ethics Alarms tried to be an island of sanity in all this, but as you know, there aren’t many on this island. I wrote in November of 2020 that Canada’s Community and Public Services Committee, pathologist Roger Hodkinson had told government officials that the pandemic crisis is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” Hodkinson said that “there is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians.” Nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus besides protecting older more vulnerable individuals, and that what we have been experiencing is “politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.”
Anthony Fauci was the main facilitator and referee of that “game” in the U.S. Yet today he refuses to accept any responsibility for the harm his abuse of science and his own perceived expertise inflicted on the nation.
Hodkinson stated that “social distancing is useless because COVID is spread by aerosols which travel 30 meters or so before landing…Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever. Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling. They’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous. Seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people – I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.”
When I designated Fauci an Ethics Villain in April of last year, it was after he lamented the American streak of independence that caused many to doubt the safety and necessity of the Wuhan vaccines. During the pandemic there wasn’t enough rebellion and independence, clearly: most of the nation was duped and given a dose of the kind of totalitarian measures Democrats would like to use to fight climate change, another area where the science is over-hyped and the scientists can’t be trusted.
By early December in 2020, I was writing, “I’m not going to wear a mask inside my home, nor in my car, nor outside while playing with my dog, and I’m going to regard anyone who follows this edict with a ‘please’ attached as an enemy of my future liberty as an American.” Yet some places, like California, are trying to inflict masking mandates again. “Wired” laments that another outbreak of the virus is ongoing, and that it is dangerous that these ignorant, independent Americans aren’t acting appropriately terrified. “Over 80 percent of people in the US have not yet received the updated 2023–2024 booster shot, the CDC reported last week,” it reports, despite Fauci’s successors sagely telling them to. That is because of Fauci and his cronies lied to us, deliberately tried to frighten us, and generally forfeited any public trust they had accumulated.
Not being able to trust authorities and experts is frightening; it’s reassuring to think someone with superior knowledge and our best interests at heart is there to tell us what to do. This is not a comfortable or a desirable place now in the U.S.: an unprecedented percentage of the country realizes that it cannot trust elected officials, politicians, journalists, educators (Hi there, Claudine!) or scientists. We are really and truly in the dark.
But it’s better to be in the dark and know it than to think you have illumination when what you are experiencing is radiating deception and manipulation.
***
Added: “The US may be heading to a “dangerous vaccination tipping point,” with immunization rates falling so low that population-level immunity is now at risk, and we will likely see thousands of needless deaths this respiratory virus season, two top officials for the Food and Drug Administration warned in a recent JAMA commentary.”
And whose fault is that?
Ethics Alarms 
Johns Hopkins just mandated universal masking in all of its facilities. I cancelled my appointment scheduled for next Wednesday and I explained that I do not believe in the efficacy of masks or any of the other Covid protocols that were pushed on the populace. Their reasoning is that they are following Maryland Department of Health guidelines. Does this make sense? One of the leading medical communities on the planet is deferring to political organizations on health matters.
In other matters, today I found out that Dr. Sherita H Golden, Hopkins’ Chief Diversity Officer issued an internal memo which provided a definition of privilege as well as a list of those who enjoy such unearned privileges at the expense of others. The list is proxy for oppressor and the oppressed. I basically identified white, heterosexual, cis-gendered Christian males as those with privilege. While the pushback was immediate and she retracted the statements, I am hesitant to reschedule any future appointments with Johns Hopkins. She can retract all the memos she wants but she cannot un-ring the bell by saying she disavows what she wrote.
I am not sure what my best course of action is when your health care provider believes you are an oppressor of others. I am tempted to just tell them to give all my appointments to someone destitute on a pro-bono basis so they can assuage their privilege.
I don’t believe much of anything coming from institutions anymore.
(They didn’t work in the film, either.)
The vaccine underwent even less testing in the movie, too.
As for the updated shots, I keep meaning to get it, but only want to do it on a week that I can afford to be tired/achy/dizzy/other assorted side effects. The COVID vaccine is the only vaccine I’ve ever had an adverse effects from, and I wasn’t going to let it potentially effect my Christmas or Birthday.
I shared your article across several Usenet newsgroups and got a reply from Dr. Chung.
https://groups.google.com/g/Sci.Med.Cardiology/c/3ycR1ONf6sg/m/YCsMWE9RBgAJ
First name “Wang”?
His first name is Andrew.
I was listening to the Victor Davis Hanson show a few weeks back. VDH and Dr. Steven Quay were discussing the impact of the COVID vaccine on the body. (The podcast aired on December 15th, so count that as work cited.) Dr. Quay was explaining that the primary mechanism of the mRNA vaccine, what is is supposed to make it work so well, is to convince your body to create a bunch of the spike protein, which your body should then recognize and create a host of antibodies against. Specifically, the mRNA acts a messenger to the body’s cells and “programs” the cells to produce the spike protein. These should be identified as foreign bodies and trigger the normal immune response. However, the actual impact of the vaccine in the long run has been to train the body to see the spike protein as “normal” and ignore it. This is in part because of the high volume of the spike protein produced by this method, and in part because the effect is cumulative. This then leaves the body vulnerable to the actual Wuhan virus, and since the virus can act with impunity for a longer time before the immune response triggers, it has the ability to mutate more readily.
I have not dug deeply into the research behind Dr. Quay’s claims, but it both sounds quite plausible, and it explains why the boosters don’t seem to actually help much (which, admittedly, is an anecdotal observation, not a rigorous study on my part).
If 80% of the American population is eschewing the latest booster, I think the writing is on the wall that people have completely lost faith in it. Effective or not, it is just a short period of time before it is defunct. And it isn’t because there has been so much mis/dis/mal-information, but because those who have demanded compliance have acted arrogantly, secretively, and dishonestly themselves. Each new revelation is another bullet wound in the credibility of these experts. Why should we trust them when they say the vaccine works when they have lied to us in the past?
If this pandemic has a film counterpart, i nominate the horrible and forgettable Steven Steagall film “The Patriot”
“Over 80 percent of people in the US have not yet received the updated 2023–2024 booster shot, the CDC reported last week,”
One has to wonder at the ‘over 80 percent’ — is that 80.1% or is it closer to 89.5%? My sisters are two of those 20 per centers, although to be fair we are all in fairly high risk groups. But I got my booster in 2021 and not since, in part because my body was showing increasingly more pronounced reactions to the shots.
It doesn’t act like a normal vaccine and we are increasingly treating it as not a real vaccine. And when people liken it to the flu shot, that really doesn’t help — we’ll start thinking “Well, are the flu shots really any good either?”
I think a big part of the problem is that the so-called ‘experts’ on these matters are so self-righteous and so dead certain that they have the only true answer. Then when they turn out to be wrong, they’ll just deny what they used to tell us was ‘The Science! ™”.
Many people don’t like being treated as children. And guess what? Children themselves aren’t stupid — insist to them that something is so when they can see for themselves it isn’t? Lying to people is really not an optimal strategy.
“Further, the social distancing recommendations forced on Americans ‘sort of just appeared’ and were likely not based on scientific data.”
That’s the actual quote and it was from Chairman Brad Wenstrup, not Fauci.
I’d like to read the actual transcript because that’s not a direct quote from Fauci.
He could have meant that the social distancing recommendation wasn’t based on any data since there wasn’t any yet regarding Covid.
Which is expected and the 6 feet recommendation could have been a best guess. Which is totally fine during a global pandemic dealing with an unknown.
It was a member reporting what Fauci said. That’s probably as close as we’re likely to get, since it was a closed hearing, but Fauci has said similar things before, on the record, in his weaselly way. It’s hearsay, but would be accepted in court as evidence because its a statement against interest: it reveals Fauci to be the lying, irresponsible fraud that he is. No, a “best guess” is not “fine” if it is not represented as a “best guess,” but as a “fact” that had to be enforced, as it was in grocery stores and other places, even out doors in some insane locales.
You don’t mandate that the public fall into lockstep with guesses. We were not told that they were guesses, but health expert advice based on data and fact. But they weren’t based on facts, were they?
Why you, or anyone, would defend Fauci and his cronies is beyond me. The carnage from their deliberately mischaracterized “guesses” is massive, in human, financial, societal and cultural terms.
it reveals Fauci to be the lying, irresponsible fraud that he is.
How could he be telling the truth and be lying at the same time?
We have no idea what the actual quote was, it could be totally made up, and there’s zero context.
I also have no idea why you’re randomly bringing up a hearsay exemption.
We’re talking about a press release and this isn’t a court room where a witness isn’t available. Also, a heresy statement allowed in court doesn’t make it true.
Kinda odd you would even bring this up.
Bob, I can appreciate a certain amount of skepticism around any politically charged statement. We’ve all seen both parties engaged in spin, and direct evidence is always better than secondhand or third hand reporting.
However, Jack has been consistent with handling hearsay, with a standard of whether it would be inadmissible in court. Thus this is not a random exemption of hearsay. I do agree that just because a hearsay statement is admissible in court doesn’t make it true, but by what standard do you reject this statement? This isn’t a case in which there can be no other proof, and isn’t a case of “he said/she said” because the hearings would have been recorded, and there would have been other people in the room that could quickly intervene and say “that statement is flat out false” or “what was reported is a mischaracterization of what Fauci said” or the like.
When evaluating statements like this, one should examine the probability of truth, not merely the possibility. Jack gave reasons to believe the probability of truth is reasonably high. The statement is in accord with many other details we have learned about Fauci, and the statement is backed by record.
The problem is not that the 6-foot distancing was a guess. The problem is the command that we follow the science, from the people who would not back down from a stance when the science showed the guess, to put it mildly, needed to be updated. The problem is when we’re told to follow the science, but anyone who is engaged in the “wrong” science is silenced, ridiculed, and shunned, only for us to find out later it was the experts who were wrong and the dissenting voices who were at least closer to the truth. The problem is the demand we follow the science when science is always open to being updated when more data becomes available, is always open to new theories that fit the data better (though those new theories have pass scrutiny themselves), and is never settled. If we are in a situation where data is lacking and all that we can do is make guesses, we better make damned sure we explain that we’re ignorant and that we’ll update directions as we learn more, and essentially act with humility. That is the exact opposite of what we received, as has been shown by previous statements from Fauci. The Chairman’s report, given what we know about Fauci’s hubris, stands in a likely true category. That is why Jack brings it up.
The issue in hearsay is how reliable the reported statement is. We have prior evidence of Fauci’s dishonesty. A s far as we know, the members of the committee reporting what he said do not have a similar record.
This—“How could he be telling the truth and be lying at the same time?” is evidence of bad faith argument on your part. It’s obvious how: when an individual makes diametrically opposed statements, both as truth, he is lying and telling the truth: the question is when and which statement. Thus the frequent question in cross-examination: “Were you lying then or are you lying now?” Again: I don’t see the justification for spinning for Fauci.
There’s nothing wrong with making guesses, providing you admit they are guesses, not [I]The Science[/I] received from on high. It also wouldn’t hurt to be understanding of those who guess differently, or who refuse to upend their whole society on the basis of your guess.
Exactly. This sort of thing was not represented as a ‘guess’ or even as a ‘best judgment based on what we currently know.” It was presented as Revealed Truth and anyone who questioned it was presented as a heretic.
PWS