Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck

These Are Poisonous Fruit Of Squandered Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many  in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.

You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading →

Climate Change Media Hype, 2022

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The more I think about it, the more the Wuhan virus fiasco strikes me as a microcosm (not too micro, unfortunately) of the climate change hysteria. Both are “Do Something!” debacles; both have demonstrated that those who argue for lock-step compliance with ideologically driven “science” don’t understand the science they demand we bow to. And, as we have seen, the policies applied to both problems have proved to be irresponsible, reckless, expensive, and destructive. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the population remains brainwashed by climate change hysteria, even those individuals with brains one would think are too substantial to wash, much like the once sane and competent Americans who wear masks alone in their automobiles and while walking their dogs. I am seeing this in my college reunion report, as I slog through hundreds of life stories. A majority of them express terror at the looming climate apocalypse. Their solution is massive “structural change”…you know, “one world” government, though few are bold or honest enough to say so clearly.

Aiding and abetting the hysteria that is so useful to those who find democracy an inconvenience is the mainstream media. Just as it hyped the risks of the pandemic, never clearly explaining that the virus was overwhelmingly a mortal threat only to the already sick, elderly or obese—all the better to justify shutting down schools, businesses, social interaction and the economy, the news media continued to exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of climate change in 2022. Continue reading →

Amnesty For the Unethical Pandemic Policymakers, Fearmongers And Health Experts?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was thinking about making the latest Atlantic essay “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” an Ethics Quiz. Wouldn’t that be the civilized, forgiving, soothing, fair thing to do? After all, as author, a Brown professor named Emily Oster, argues, weren’t “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”? They meant well! (Rationalization #3A  The Road To Hell) Anyone can make a mistake! (#19. The Perfection Diversion) OK, we could have done better! (#19B The Insidious Confession) That’s in the past! (#52. The Underwood Maneuver). There are so, so many more rationalizations, all employed here to avoid accountability by those who richly deserve it. And I realized that this was coming from The Atlantic, one of the leaders of the Trump-hating media, and a herald of the Progressive New Order. Of course they want an amnesty.

Continue reading →

Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 2: Hospital Masking

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I actually witnessed this exchange three days ago, as part of my four-day Alexandria, VA hospital adventure:

Woman: Put on a mask! This is a hospital!

Man: Why should I? You’re not wearing one!

Woman: I am!

Man: You’re wearing it under your nose!

Woman: I’m still wearing it! Put one on, or I’m reporting you!

Man. Go ahead!

Whereupon the woman turned to the elderly volunteer manning the desk at the entrance. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Are the idiotic pandemic masks the official symbol and attire of The Great Stupid? I think so. My experience at the INOVA hospital convinced me. At the Emergency Room entrance. a large sign mandated masks. A security guard ordered me to put one on (but not my wife, who was being checked in). The masks being handed out were those cheap paper things that are either completely useless or mostly useless, depending on who you talk to. During the four days of hospital visits, I didn’t see a single N95 mask on the faces of staff, patients or visitors.

Around the busy ER waiting area, there were unmasked people, masked people, and people wearing masks under their noses or chins. When my wife was being checked in, nobody appeared to care about the masks at all. The nurse processing us wore no mask. I didn’t; my wife didn’t. The attendants who took her to the temporary room did. Later on, all of the nurses and techs were masked, but some doctors were not. Nobody ever asked me or my wife to put one on. In the nearby rooms, the typical scene was an unmasked patient and a mixed crowd of masked and unmasked family members, shoulder to shoulder.

Later, when my wife was moved to a regular hospital room, the signs even disappeared. The Patients Entrance and Visitors entrance had cheap masks available, but there were no apparent requirements. Sometimes the receptionists were masked, sometimes not. Sometimes one was and the other wasn’t. I walked in maskless (let’s see…) eight times, and nobody said a word.

What’s going on here?

Madness, as Major Clipton said. Virtue signaling. Confusion. Mixed messages. Chaos. Fear. Stupidity.

Science!

Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[There’s almost no traffic here on Saturday if I don’t get a post up before 10:30am; I guess I’m going to find out what kind of traffic there is if nothing gets posted before 4 pm. Ugh. I’m sorry. Sitting down at my desk is still very painful, more so, in fact, today than yesterday. I also don’t understand why an 18 inch bruise on one leg makes the rest of me feel so terrible. I feel like a weenie, and I’m sorry.]

1. Biden again extended the Wuhan pandemic public health emergency, which was set to expire last week. Now it will remain in place past the midterm elections. This keeps millions of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program beneficiaries who might lose their coverage enrolled for several more months, and allows allowed vaccines, testing, and treatments to be offered for free. It also requires states to offer continuous enrollment for Medicaid and CHIP, public health insurance programs for low-income individuals, in order to receive additional federal funding.

That’s nice, except that there is no emergency, and Biden’s previous public statements admitted as much. This is an abuse of Presidential power, no more ethical nor legal than a leader’s extending a curfew or martial law to seize dictatorial powers—it’s the same principle, and the same tactic. Congress should throw a fit, but it won’t, because Congress has no principles or guts: the measures benefit voting blocs, and though the President is abusing his emergency powers to bypass the requirements of legislation and rule-making, the public can’t comprehend such details like due process and the separation of powers, nor, apparently, basic honesty. If the President can declare an emergency (extending an emergency is not different from declaring one) when there is none and get away with it, why not martial law?

The Wuhan gravy train has benefited so many (while wrecking the economy, whole sectors of the economy and the education and social progress of our children, just to mention a few of the self-inflicted wounds) that ending it will undoubtedly cause many considerable pain. HHS estimates that as many as 15 million people will lose their Medicaid coverage—but then, they aren’t supposed to have medicaid coverage. 

Many families will also lose supplemental money they received through the federal government’s nutrition program. But the only reason they were getting such funds was because of an emergency that no longer exists. Biden has already used the non-emergency to justify student loan forgiveness (we’ll see if he gets away with that) and make landlords continue to do without rent. HHS overrode state laws regarding which vaccines pharmacists could administer to certain age groups.  Whether the nationalization of pharmacy vaccine rules will expire when the “emergency” is lifted is still open to question. Essentially, this is a scheme to spend more taxpayer money and extend nanny state benefits and ratchet up big government control, using the pandemic as the tool. It is both an abuse of power and a cynical exercise in bypassing democracy. Continue reading →

ER Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m running back and forth to the Alexandria hospital’s Emergency Room today (don’t ask why). It’s been at least 6 months since the last unpleasant visit, and something new has been added in the check-in area. It is a large sign warning that “aggressive, threatening or inappropriate conduct or language” will not be tolerated, and may result in refusals to offer treatment.

It was immediately evident why the hospital felt such a threat was necessary. The place was a disaster. It was obviously understaffed, and the staff members that were there were rude, distracted, slow and harried. I watched a 90-year old woman stand at the check-in window as the woman behind it left without explanation abandoning the potential patient who was literally whimpering as the minutes ticked by. “At least there’s no emergency,” I said to the angry lady. She was not amused.

As with so many other places in which professional, timely service is expected and once, before the pandemic gave them an excuse to go with skeleton staffing, was delivered, the ER was lowering its standards and telling people that they could like it or lump it, but they had better not complain or express frustration.

And life in the USA gets just a little bit shittier.

For Amherst College Students, A Values And Self-Respect Test…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…and for Amherst itself, a test of how well its totalitarian indoctrination program is working. Just look at this head-exploding thing:

Well.

The new policy at Amherst College has each student and teacher fill out an anonymous survey to state whether they want a mask mandate in their classroom. If a single student, or the instructor, so desires, everyone will be required to wear a mask, despite the fact that masking as the paranoid and largely useless security-blanket response to the lurking Wuhan virus and its relatives is no longer required by CDC guidelines (Science!) and that masks are now almost exclusively worn by phobics, lock-step progressives seeking to show their fealty using the equivalent of a Nazi armband, and people so immuno-compromised that they probably shouldn’t be out in public at all. Continue reading →

“The Pandemic Is Over”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Of all the fumbling, dishonest, weird things President Biden said in his “60 Minutes” interview last night, that statement: “The pandemic is over” was easily the most significant. Because…

  • As if there wasn’t enough proof already, this was smoking gun evidence that poor Joe doesn’t know what’s going on in his own administration, or, in the alternative, that what his own administration is doing is only marginally within his power.
  • Programs and policies completely dependent on the existence of the pandemic are not only ongoing, they are being challenged in court.
  • Biden’s insane college loan forgiveness scheme relies (dubiously) on the existence of the pandemic to avoid being illegal.
  • States are still firing employees who refuse to get vaccines. New York is attempting to fire hundreds of teachers and school administrators. Private companies are also  firing unvaccinated employees. Military personnel are being disciplined for not getting vaccinated.
  • Many school systems are still inflicting mask mandates on children.
  • Professor Turley points out that Biden’s public statement is certain to be used in briefs relating to the many cases challenging emergency powers and policies used by the Administration, like the appeal being considered en banc by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenging the moves taken under the Administration’s claimed pandemic authority.
  • While conservative critics are concentrating on the inconsistency and self-contradiction represented by Biden’s announcement, the Mask Loving Left is furious, because they want the pandemic, along with the fear and submissiveness it engenders, to continue forever. If the pandemic is gone, how will Democratic states justify installing new voting systems where voters just yell out their choices from the windows of their homes and cars, to be recorded by government vote-takers, written down, and deposited in convenient drop-boxes?

Be Proud, Mainstream Media And Health “Experts”! This Is Your Doing…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

That is poor Vanessa Sun above, an obviously intelligent young woman (even though she does include her pronouns in her social media profiles) who has been turned into a mad phobic by years of pandemic hysteria, political manipulation and fearmongering. She writes on Twitter, “The universities said we are doing the personal responsibility approach so now I will be lugging this large air purifier to my classes 2x a week.”

Vanessa is an MIT geochemistry PhD student, and has been reduced to this.

Where is the accountability for turning millions of U.S. citizens into whatever this is?

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ethics Villain Dr. Anthony Fauci

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Well, I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”

—Dr. Anthony Fauci, architect of the disastrous Wuhan virus response, to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto’s question, “In retrospect doctor, do you regret that it went too far? … Particularly for kids who couldn’t go to school except remotely, that it’s forever damaged them.”

How Clintonian of the good doctor, picking up on Cavuto’s awkward “forever” and adding “irreparably” to make it seem especially extreme. Maybe the lockdown forever damaged people, but it didn’t forever irreparably damage people. The lockdown caused more than 200,000 small busineses to shut down during 2020 alone. Gee, is that “forever enough”? It murdered the economy, the arts, and sports; it was significantly responsible for the George Floyd riots. The education and social development of young children were indeed retarded permanently by the isolating experience of remote schooling, as increasing numbers of assessments indicate. The corruption of US elections in 2020 arising out of the lockdown did long-term damage to the public trust in elections; whether it is “forever permanent” is yet to be seen.

It wrecked our small business, our savings, and our development permanently.

What an asshole.