Coronavirus
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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July 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Local authorities in Reedley, California uncovered a warehouse lab that “they suspect was home to an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, medical waste and hazardous materials.” NBC News covers the story here. The CDC tested substances on hand and detected at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis and herpes. The NBC News story buries this nugget and leaves it hanging: Officials were unable to get
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July 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
“The Covid Cover-Up Explained” is the title of Matt Orfalea’s video companion to Matt Taibbi’s subscribers-only Racket News posts “‘Covid Origins,’ an Animated Adventure” and “‘So Friggin’ Likely’: New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception” (see my post “Queen Covid proximally.”) Roger Pielke, Jr., provides an understated version of the story in “Why Proximal Origins must be retracted.” The video tells the story in 01:25. Will there ever be a
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July 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has posted his column “Covid’s Origins and the Death of Trust” in accessible form. It includes a link to the full cache of Slack messages and emails by the scientists who wrote the “The Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2.” As Taibbi notes, this was the key article used to dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 was caused by a lab accident. The full cache of Slack messages and emails
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July 11, 2023 — John Hinderaker
That is the conclusion of the House’s Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a report issued today on early efforts to squelch speculation that the coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan lab. The report focuses on the famous conference call of February 1, 2020, among an international group of virus experts, and the production, rapidly thereafter, of a report titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” which became one
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June 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Defenestration of Prague (1618) is not to be confused with the defenestration of Jan Masaryk in Prague (1948). It means throwing someone out a window. In Communist China, they do these things differently. They throw someone off a roof. If we had a word for it akin to defenestration, it might be detectation. I prefer to think of it as defenestration, Chinese style. Consider the case of the Wuhan
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June 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Running searches on “Ben Hu” at the New York Times and the Washington Post, I can’t find news of the identification of Covid’s patient zero (or patients zero) by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag last week. They reported in this Public post on Substack: According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus,
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June 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
At his Racket News site, Matt Taibbi has a new subscribers-only post on Dr. Peter Hotez, star of stage and screen during the Covid epidemic. Taibbi calls his post “Notes from the Memory Hole: The Great Double-Talking Vaccine Scientist.” The long post by Taibbi comments on a video mashup by Matt Orfalea of Hotez’s greatest hits. Taibbi introduces the video in his post: Few health figures have been more visible
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June 12, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John wrote yesterday about how the case for the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID is now more firmly locked down than a university president’s brain. Now we come to add a brand new paper, circulating in pre-print form on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) that is devastating about the collateral costs of our COVID policy madness, especially the lockdowns. The paper is titled “How Did the COVID
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June 11, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Sunday London Times, out today, has a long, long article about the origins of the covid-19 virus in the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Until the far-off day when Chinese sources open up honestly, it will stand as definitive proof of not just the lab leak hypothesis, but the conclusion that covid-19 was a human creation. Its conclusions are unqualified: Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese
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June 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The data are in and the conclusion is inescapable: the covid shutdowns imposed by governments around the world were the worst public health disaster of modern times. This story is in the Telegraph, but the study it refers to is global: “Lockdown benefits ‘a drop in the bucket compared to the costs’, landmark study finds.” Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University examined almost 20,000 studies on measures taken
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June 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Biden Administration clearly has learned nothing from the multiple debacles of COVID policy, or they have complete contempt for the American people, or they are just complete idiots. (Actually these possibilities are not mutually exclusive.) Here’s the Biden Administration’s choice for the new director of the Centers for Disease Control: New CDC Director Mandy Cohen recalls how she and her colleagues came up with COVID mandates during her time
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June 1, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John notes immediately below Trump’s bizarre attack on DeSantis over COVID, which makes one wonder if Trump actually has learned anything from listening to the terrible policy advice of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. This may prove Trump’s Achilles’ Heel in the Republican debates—if he shows up for them. Here’s what the chart for COVID death rates for New York and Florida looks like: The Committee to Unleash Prosperity comments:
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June 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
While Ron DeSantis has many achievements to his credit, it was establishing the Free State of Florida during the covid shutdown era that really put him on the map with conservatives nationwide. It was both his signature accomplishment and emblematic of many more pro-freedom moves that have made him a successful and popular governor. But Donald Trump is now criticizing DeSantis for not going along with covid shutdown propaganda from
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May 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Remember when government officials told us that we needed just a brief shutdown of economic and social activity to “flatten the curve” of covid transmission? The theory, although few seem to remember it, was that the same number of people would eventually catch covid, we just wouldn’t catch it all at once and thus we wouldn’t overload the hospital system. In fact, two weeks of curve-flattening turned into a year
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May 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
A global consensus has emerged that governmental responses to covid-19, which mainly involved shutdowns, limitations on mobility and other aspects of freedom, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, did an enormous amount of harm. The issue is sometimes posed in terms of whether governments’ responses did more damage than the epidemic did. But that isn’t actually the right question. The epidemic happened. The question is whether the epidemic + government restrictions
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May 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has just published the subscribers-only post “Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign” at his Racket News site. He draws on Matt Orfalea’s new video (at the bottom) to argue that “apologies are due for the media campaign against ‘the unvaccinated,’ which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy.” Taibbi defends the right and the wisdom of thinking for yourself: In this case one didn’t
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