Today In Covid Response Fiasco

Has there ever been a time when the world’s “elites” have been either so incompetent, or so corrupt, as at present? One silver lining of the covid epidemic is the light it has shed on the quality of leadership in government, public health and media. The fiasco of leadership on covid is a daily phenomenon; here are a few current instances.

Over the last year, the World Health Organization has been exposed as a politicized, corrupt and inept organization. At the American Institute for Economic Research, Jeffry Tucker points out how the WHO has fudged some of the most basic concepts in public health to advance its political agenda:

The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity.
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Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.

That is the correct definition. But then it changed:

However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.

That definition was simply wrong.

In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.

There must have been quite a bit of push-back, because in January the WHO backed off and corrected its definition, while still focusing on vaccination:

Via InstaPundit.

Tech titans like YouTube have suppressed discussion of covid and its treatments by banning any opinions (or any facts) that don’t toe the line of the WHO or the CDC, whatever that ever-changing line may be at the moment. Lives undoubtedly have been lost as a result of the lack of a vigorous debate over the best approaches to covid.

In a particularly egregious instance, YouTube has banned a high-level medical discussion of the appropriateness of forcing school children to wear masks:

This week, YouTube deleted footage of a COVID-19 roundtable discussion between Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and medical experts from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard. The doctors and medical experts reportedly disputed Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance that children wear masks in school to stop the spread of COVID-19.
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[T]he panel included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University; Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford University; and former Trump White House COVID-19 advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.

I suppose the key fact here was that Ron DeSantis participated. YouTube and the other tech oligopolies are desperately trying to prevent him from being elected president in 2024.

Finally, in the interest of free and open debate, this video features Dr. Ryan Cole. Dr. Cole, like many other practicing physicians, believes that the policies that have been followed by the public health establishment have been misguided at best. He emphasizes the importance of Vitamin D, and argues among other things that we already have a cheap and effective treatment for covid in Ivermectin. He doesn’t think much of the current vaccines, either. Here it is for your consideration:

I don’t know whether everything Dr. Cole says is correct or not, but I do know that vigorous debate on an important topic like covid is vitally important, and that debate has been suppressed.

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