Coronavirus
October 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Kevin Roche is the former general counsel of UnitedHealth, former chief executive officer of United Health’s Ingenix (now Optum Insight) data analysis division, and the proprietor of Healthy Skeptic. When authorities announced that Minnesota would be using a $17 million federal grant to learn from its mistakes in Covid-19 forecasting and improve its forecasts the next time around, we thought that Kevin had an important contribution to make.
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September 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Liberals love to talk about misinformation. They also love to disseminate it. A case in point is New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. She grotesquely exaggerated the impact of covid on children, apparently for the purpose of supporting school shutdowns, one of the worst policy fiascos of modern times. And her claims were not, remotely, in the ballpark: Reporter who wrote in NYT that 900,000 children had
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September 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging
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September 17, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this month President Biden held a White House ceremony to present the Medal of Honor to former Army Captain Larry Taylor. The award recognized Taylor’s unbelievable heroics in Vietnam some 55 years ago. James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column compiled accounts of the underlying story in “‘A 25-Minute Flight on 20 Minutes of Fuel.’” ABC News has more on the White House ceremony here. Biden
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September 15, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Marty Makary and Tracy Beth Høeg share the byline on the New York Post column “The real data behind the new COVID vaccines the White House is pushing.” Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Høeg is an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Both are physicians. Their column takes on the new Covid vaccine that the Biden administration is peddling like Steppenwolf’s “Pusher.”
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September 15, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week House Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (Select Subcommittee on the Permanent Select Committee on Coronavirus Pandemic) and Mike Turner (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) released issued a press release that reads as follows: Staff on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offered six analysts significant monetary incentives to
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September 14, 2023 — John Hinderaker
One or more new varieties of covid are being reported, and cases are rising. This news is welcomed by the fascists among us, who already are calling for shutdowns and masks. Others–the majority, one hopes–vow not to comply with another round of repression. So what do most Americans think? This CBS News poll offers some answers at a very high level: Despite a recent rise in COVID cases and new
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September 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
While we’ve had our guard up against the return of the Branch Covidians, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has shown us a new frontier in the malign uses of public health “emergencies.” Grisham has suspended laws that allow open and concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days after declaring a public health emergency (I’m borrowing the formulation of Jonathan Turley, who explains what it’s all about in
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September 4, 2023 — Scott Johnson
We’ve had Anthony Fauci’s number for a long time. I took to calling him the fallacious Anthony Fauci during the epidemic, mostly for the alliteration. However, his fallacies served his lying and his will to power, which seem to be his leading characteristics. Asked over the weekend about the January 2023 study by Tom Jefferson et al. published by Cochrane pooh-poohing the efficacy of the mask regime, Fauci served up
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August 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Pretty much everyone now agrees that shutting down our schools during the covid epidemic, at the demand of teachers’ unions, was one of the most catastrophic policy decisions of modern times. As I have said before, it is unfortunate that some old and very sick people had their demises hastened by covid, but what government did to our children, for no good reason, was a crime. Having skipped school for
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August 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
So Trump is out yesterday with an attack on the Branch COVIDians, as I call them. COVID Tyrants want to take away our Freedom. Hear my words— WE WILL NOT COMPLY. pic.twitter.com/Kql1YaxuO0 — Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 30, 2023 Good for him, but let’s not airbrush out Trump’s bad judgment over COVID, unquestionably his single largest failure in office: Shut it all down. Lockdown Don bragged
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August 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has posted “The COVID lie that started it all” for subscribers to his Racket News site. It is accompanied by a Matt Orfalea video documenting “the COVID lie.” Here is a passage from Taibbi’s post that struck a chord with me personally: As Orf shows above via his inimitable Newspeak-smashing style, the early apocalyptic predictions that so freaked out the population were eventually walked back by the same
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August 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
News reports indicate that a new variant of covid–now, basically the common cold–is in the air. Some people are alarmed. Driving to work this morning, I passed a young woman walking by herself, outdoors, no one within a block of her. She was wearing a mask. Are we about to enter a new era of shutdowns, masks and general hysteria? If governments try to impose such neo-fascist measures, will citizens
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August 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Zach Weissmueller takes a deep dive into Missouri v. Biden with (plaintiff) the great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and attorney John Vecchione in the Reason podcast (video below). Reason provides background for the podcast here. We have covered the lawsuit and the underlying issues of the epidemic and social media censorship repeatedly on this site. The historical review captured in the video is enraging and the related clips included light it
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August 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
David Zweig draws on the emails released last month by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to write a lucid narrative account setting forth their content and significance. His Free Press story is aptly titled “Anthony Fauci’s deceptions.” This is one incriminating paragraph: Evidence of Fauci’s purposeful evasiveness can also be seen through the actions of a direct subordinate. Two months after Collins denied funding gain-of-function research, David
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August 7, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Via Healthy Skeptic, this Report for the Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry, providing a retrospective on covid in Scotland, is one of the most useful documents on the disease that I have read. Among other things, it provides a description of viruses, coronaviruses, covid-19, and how vaccines work that is the clearest I have seen. The whole report is eminently worth reading. For now, I want to highlight the report’s laconic conclusions
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August 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi published his powerful July 28 Racket News column “The New ‘Facebook Files’ Show Everything the First Amendment Was Designed to Prevent” for subscribers only. Racket New has now posted the column as narrated by Jared Moore on YouTube and on podcast platforms. I have embedded the video below. Toward the end of his column Taibbi warns: “In hindsight it could equally be argued Biden was killing people [as
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