Governments, social media platforms, and journalists are quick to point a finger at the “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” for allegedly undoing the hard work of public health officials by spreading misinformation, distrust and confusion among their fellow citizens. But pointing the finger at troublesome citizens only distracts from the elephant in the room: it is not the “conspiracy theorists,” or the critics of vaccination campaigns, that are driving the groundswell of public distrust, but the lamentable behaviour of public authorities themselves.
While governments and public health authorities have been put in a tough spot by the explosion of infections and disease caused by a relatively novel virus, their decisions throughout the pandemic reached levels of incompetence, recklessness, cowardice, and moral blindness that were shocking, even to those of us who were already skeptical about the competence and integrity of our political leaders.
A Stunning Betrayal of Trust
The decisions that have been taken in many countries across the world in response to this pandemic represent a stunning betrayal of the duties of state of both elected representatives and public officials. Elected leaders and high-level civil servants, instead of prudently steering the ship of State, have fanned the flames of public neorosis, confusion, and misinformation by feeding citizens with advice and opinions that are neither ethically responsible, honest, nor scientifically plausible.
Essentially, we have witnessed what has been described by one public health expert (Prof. Jay Bhattacharya) as “the single worst public health mistake in history.” The litany of reckless interventions, arbitrary attacks on civil rights, misleading statements, and scientifically one-sided and self-serving opinions coming out of Western governments since the SARS-2 outbreak in Wuhan is far too long to catalogue here.
All of this gives citizens ample justification for distrusing the people moving in government circles who claim to look out for their interests. In this article, I just want to highlight a selection of the most egregious scientific blunders and ethical travesties committed by public officials acting in our name:
(1) No Impact Assessment
First, there is the simple fact that a large number of Western governments repeatedly gave a lifeline to one of the most dangerous public policy experiments in modern history - large-scale societal lockdowns - without either sifting the empirical evidence for their efficacy, or conducting any public cost-benefit impact assessment. Given the massive collateral harms of lockdowns, the failure to conduct any impact assessment over 18 months after the oubreak of the pandemic is nothing short of criminal.
(2) Pretending Natural Immunity Isn’t “A Thing”
Second, there is the fact that a whole class of political and public health leaders wilfully chose to ignore the rudimentary facts of natural immunity, corroborated by data showing that unvaccinated individuals who had contracted Covid were many, many times less likely to be reinfected than vaccinated individuals who had not naturally contracted the disease (see this August 21st preprint, for example; and this study as reported in The Times of Israel). Public health authorities and politicians literally decided to fire citizens from their jobs rather than recognise that they enjoyed superior immunity to that of the vaccinated.
(3) Playing Fast and Loose With Covid “Cases”
Third, there is the fact that public health officials and political leaders constantly played fast and loose with the definition of a Covid “case,” creating a fog of confusion and misdirection that left citizens dazed. They repeatedly treated and reported Covid “cases” derived from PCR tests as though they were cases of actual disease, even though high-level PCR scientists warned early on that PCR tests were so sensitive that they would pick out many “false positives” - people who were in perfectly good health, even if they had passed the virus in the previous weeks or months. Similarly, official statisticians, State-employed scientists, and political representatives constantly cited “Covid deaths,” using inaccurate data that conflated death with a positive PCR test and death caused by the disease, Covid-19. This inevitably resulted in significantly inflated reports of Covid-related deaths in many jurisdictions.
(4) Reliance on Scientifically Unsupported and Ethically Abhorrent Forms of Mass Coercion
Public authorities chose to tackle the problem of infectious disease with what should have been either completely off the table, or a weapon of last resort: mass coercion. They flailed around in the dark, ordering citizens to do things that they claimed would mitigate the pandemic, but generally either made no difference or made things much worse than before. The sorts of measure they imposed upon citizens had - and still have - very weak, at best inconclusive, scientific support, and no basis in any sound conception of a free society.
Among the measures zealously imposed by politicians, frequently with the use of emergency powers, we find:
(i) Mandatory community masking: for the first time in recent history, citizens were required to don a face mask in a series of community settings such as shops, schools, workplaces, restaurants, and universities, on pain of being fined or being refused access to public venues. This measure was imposed in spite of the paltry, or at best inconclusive scientific evidence, for its efficacy. Evidence for the efficacy of community masking at reducing the incidence of respiratory disease is “weak to moderate” and ultimately inconclusive, as confirmed by metastudies conducted by the World Health Organisation, the European Centre for Disease Control, Cochrane, and the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
(ii) Mandatory stay-at-home orders: for the first time in history, governments ordered the whole population (with some opt-out clauses) to stay in their homes, not as a recommendation, but as an order, to reduce disease transmission. This drastic measure was not contemplated in the WHO’s pandemic guidelines, and was not generally considered by public health scientists as an eligible strategy for responding to a pandemic. Predictably, its collateral harms (erosion of civil rights, isolation and depression, untreated illnesses, heart-attacks at home, collapsed businesses, lost jobs, spikes in child abuse, etc.) were enormous, while the evidence for its efficacy, beyond highly speculative mathematical models, was quite simple non-existent. In short, it was a massive gamble on a dangerous, un-tested, population-wide intervention.
(iii) Mandatory or quasi-mandatory vaccination. Governments have effectively rendered Covid vaccines either mandatory (say, for government employees, health workers, or other classes of citizens), or coercive, to the extent that the life of many of the unvaccinated has been made very difficult through incredibly draconian vaccine pass schemes. These schemes have wafer-thin basis in scientific evidence, since Covid-19 is already in wide circulation in the community, and the vaccines do not even consistently block transmission. But more importantly, they violate the Nuremberg code against forcing people to submit involuntarily to medical experiments (since the vaccines were still under trial when the vaccine pass schemes were imposed), and effectively turn the clock back generations as far as the right to informed consent is concerned.
(5) Inexplicable blackballing of emerging treatments for Covid-19
Public health authorities such as the US’s Food and Drug Administration have positioned themselves quite aggressively against perfectly safe drugs like Ivermectin that have been on the market for decades, even in the face of substantial clinical testimony and empirical evidence for their efficacy in the treatment of Covid-19 (the FDA went so far as to insinuate, from their Twitter account, that Ivermectin was a medication only suitable for horses!).
Even acknowledging that scientific opinion is divided on the efficacy of Ivermectin and other emerging treatments for Covid-19, one would expect that in the face of a public health emergency, public authorities would permit the use of emerging treatments that have an excellent safety profile, even if there was a 50% chance that they were effective. The governmental resistance to emerging Covid treatments is even more surprising, given how enthusiastically many Western governments have promoted Covid vaccines with a much worse safety record than drugs like Ivermectin.
(6) Taking unnecessary risks with vaccine safety
Numerous Western governments have promoted the use of vaccines for children, who are at such low risk from Covid-19 that it is very unclear what net benefit they could possibly derive from a novel and incompletely tested vaccine. The UK government, for example, bulldozed ahead with its child vaccination plans, against the recommendation of its own official vaccine advisory body, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. It is very difficult to see how it could be ethically responsible to gamble with our children’s lives to combat a disease from which there have been a tiny number of child hospitalisations and deaths.
I could go on, but hopefully by now the point is clear enough: public authorities and their advisors have manifestly betrayed the trust of the public by ramming through draconian measures that are constitutionally dubious and ethically abhorrent, and have no demonstrated efficacy as tools of disease control. They have also fueled public distrust by bombarding the public with false or highly misleading information, on issues such as the accuracy of PCR testing, the real risks associated with Covid-19, the net risk-benefit ratio associated with child vaccination, and the efficacy of lockdowns, just at a time when the public needed and deserved to know the truth.
Those who try to pin the crisis of public authority on citizens who share conspiracy theories on Whatsapp or Telegram are sorely mistaken: the root of the crisis of public authority is not ordinary citizens, but government officials themselves, who have fed citizens with a string of lies and half-truths, and failed abysmally to discharge their duties as stewards of the public weal. Western governments and their scientific advisors have nobody but themselves to blame for their fall from grace.
Thanks for reading! Check out my other writings and videos at davidthunder.com. You can also subscribe to my Telegram, Youtube, and Rumble channels.
spot on Thunder, thank you
David, muchas gracias por tus articulos, son certeros en la apreciacion de todo lo que ha ocurrido y muy necesarios, es incomprensible la censura en twitter, vergonzoso como tantas otras cosas que estan pasando. Animo, un abrazo.