One of the remarkable features of these Covid years is the amount of misleading and downright false information flowing out of “official” sources, most notably public health authorities, government-appointed regulators, and mainstream media. As somone who turned on a daily basis to the website of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention for updates on the Covid outbreak in February and March 2020, I was especially shocked and disappointed by the abysmal failure of authoritative bodies to impartially report the evidence bearing on masking, vaccinations, lockdowns, PCR testing, and other aspects of pandemic policy. My whole faith in the political, media, and scientific establishment, limited as it was, was shaken to the core.
We have been betrayed by the people charged with sharing the best available data and information with us in a time of crisis. We have been lied to and deceived about matters of life and death, such as the risk-benefit tradeoffs of the Covid “vaccines,” by the very people who occupy positions of public authority in our society. Our politicians have sold us “solutions” to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction.
Among the more egregious falsehoods that were either stated or implied by official authorities, and uncritically echoed by mainstream media, were the following:
the notion that community masking was supported by strong scientific evidence. It never was (here is the latest Coughran review of evidence for mask efficacy).
the idea that it was critical that young and health people get vaccinated, if not for themselves, then for the sake of “granny and granddad.” This idea was just incoherent, since an effective vaccine prevents disease in the people who are vaccinated: it does not require low risk individuals to be vaccinated.
the idea that toddlers and young children and teenagers with no serious health issues could benefit from receiving a Covid vaccine. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that children’s risk from Covid is significant enough to warrant their exposure to a vaccine that has sparked a significant number of adverse events and whose long-term risks remain uncertain.
the idea that sheltering in place for months on end would effectively stop a respiratory virus from spreading through the community, rather than just deferring the inevitable and inflicting enormous social and human costs in the meantime. This was a dangerous and revolutionary proposition that had no strong empirical evidence to support it.
I could go on, and talk about the exaggerated risks of “long Covid,” the use of a handful of cases of infant hospitalisation to push vaccines on children, the US government’s active role in encouraging private social media companies, behind the scenes, to censor their critics, or the infamous Hancock files, which uncover the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s plan to “scare the pants off everyone” with his announcement of the next “variant” of Covid-19.
Thoughtful citizens who notice these betrayals have strong grounds for distrusting “official” sources to tell them the truth, or present the facts in a non-manipulative, impartial manner. For me, and many other thoughtful citizens, the old idea that you could depend on your government to inform you of the latest science or tell you the threat level of a disease is now dead in the water.
Put simply, we now live in an informational No Man’s Land, in which every man must fend for himself, to the best of his ability, without the backing of an impressive Official Source to do his thinking for him.
We each have to scrape together whatever information we can from unofficial sources that have gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc. It puts many of us in the peculiar position of placing more weight on the words and recommendations of individual journalists and scientists whose character and intellect we trust, than the pronouncements of national governments, official regulators, or international bodies like the World Health Organisation.
Living in an informational No Man’s Land is demanding because you can’t just skip over to the CDC website to resolve your doubts. And it is uncomfortable because you do not enjoy anything like the level of faith the average citizen has in “Science” and “Officialdom.” You are sort of at sea, and you cling to whatever bits of information and insight you can scavenge from sources that are not living off the proceeds of vaccine sales or paid by government’s to manipulate citizens into compliance.
A part of me hankers after the times when I could just trust my government in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget that you can also find me on Youtube, Twitter, and Telegram. My professional website is davidthunder.com.
What It’s Like to Live in an Informational No Man's Land
Well said David, thanks for articulating, I will keep this in my pocket for when a conversation turns to politics / government / covid farce. Will save me getting angry and incoherent!
> gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc.
Please all of us must stop using the word vaccine or vaccination for the mRNA gene therapy TRANSFECTIONS. Please look the word transfection up. Jay Couey as been using transfection for all the time I have watched him. I looked it up. It is the correct word for gene therapy injections.