Lockdown sceptics are akin to mass-murdering Russian dictator Joseph Stalin in promoting “antiscience” and causing “mass death”, an article in Scientific American has claimed. The inflammatory piece by Peter J. Hotez, a Professor of Paediatrics and Molecular Virology at Baylor College of Medicine (he’s on Twitter if you want to contact him), lights into sceptics for dismissing the severity of the epidemic, attributing Covid deaths to other causes, claiming the epidemic would eventually end by itself, and downplaying the importance of masks.
“Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation,” he writes. The world must therefore “mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognised and established threats”.
His thinly-veiled summons to a new global regime of anti-lockdown censorship continues:
Containing antiscience will require work and an interdisciplinary approach. For innovative and comprehensive solutions, we might look at interagency task forces in the U.S. Government or among the agencies of the United Nations… We must be prepared to implement a sophisticated infrastructure to counteract this, similar to what we have already done for more established global threats. Antiscience is now a large and formidable security issue.
Hotez defines antiscience as “the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains”. He singles out the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as purveyors of antiscience, accusing this movement (without evidence) of targeting prominent scientists and attempting to discredit them. Without pausing for a moment of self-reflection, he then launches into a gratuitous smear-by-association of his own, likening his targets to Stalin and his eccentric guru Trofin Lysenko:
The destructive potential of antiscience was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures. Soviet scientists who did not share Lysenko’s “vernalisation” theories lost their positions or, like the plant geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, starved to death in a gulag.
Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s right. Anyone who disagrees with “mainstream scientific views” on lockdowns (the ones that appeared just over a year ago and which flew in the face of the WHO’s advice about how to manage pandemics) is basically Stalin and responsible for mass deaths. This, apparently, is what passes for respectful and reasoned discourse in the pages of Scientific American.
Bizarrely, and with a strong political slant, he then claims that scepticism about lockdowns and the official narrative on Covid stem from a movement “that began modestly under a health freedom banner adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas” in 2015.
So it’s not because the radical new authoritarian approach to pandemic management contradicted all the science and official advice from before 2020. It’s not because people are free thinkers who can see for themselves that there was no great disaster in Sweden, South Dakota, Florida or Tanzania. It’s because of the insidious influence of a grassroots conservative movement begun in Texas five years earlier. That’s very flattering to the health freedom movement and the Tea Party, I’m sure, but also completely inadequate as an explanation as to why so many eminent scientists and others are not convinced by the new lockdown orthodoxy. Seems the lockdowners are partial to a few conspiracy theories of their own.
As for the claims Hotez identifies as “antiscience”, let’s take a closer look at them.
Antiscience downplays the importance of masks, according to Hotez. It’s easy to forget now that it was mainstream to downplay the importance of masks in spring 2020. England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries said on March 12th: “For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea” to wear a face mask in the hope of preventing infection, adding it is also a potential infection risk due to possible contamination.
Though many now claim this opposition to masks was just an interim position to conserve supplies for health care workers, in fact scientific studies were also generally negative about them. As late as May 2020, the U.S. CDC (a Government agency) published a review of evidence on the use of masks to protect from influenza (a similar virus). It looked at 10 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and found “no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks”. On medical masks in particular it said:
Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids. There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
The only RCT to date looking at whether masks protect from COVID-19 specifically found no statistically significant effect of medical masks protecting the wearer against infection in a community setting.
A number of the other “antiscience” claims are similar or related. Dismissing the severity of the epidemic, attributing Covid deaths to other causes, and claiming the epidemic would eventually end by itself are all a way of saying SARS-CoV-2 is overhyped in terms of how many people are dying or will eventually die.
The problems with attributing deaths to COVID-19 are well-known and there is nothing anti-scientific about pointing this out.
The fact that the Covid mortality rate was initially stated by the WHO as 3.4%, which is high even compared to the 0.9% assumed in the modelling from Imperial College London, and 23 times higher than the current estimate of 0.15% from Professor John Ioannidis in his review of the global data, shows that there’s nothing anti-scientific about questioning the figures coming out from official channels on how serious the virus is.
Hotez’s claim that it is “antiscience” to say the epidemic will come to a natural end without intervention dovetails with his claim that “antiscience disinformation” created “mass havoc in the red [Republican-led] states”. Allegedly, the premature lifting of restrictions in the Southern states in summer 2020 created an “unnecessary wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths”, while a large motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, ignited a surge in the autumn in the Upper Midwest.
The claims about the Sturgis motorcycle rally have been thoroughly debunked, including by Jennifer Dowd, Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, who wrote:
The Sturgis study essentially tries to re-create a randomised experiment by comparing the COVID-19 trends in counties that rallygoers travelled from with counties that apparently don’t have as many motorcycle enthusiasts. …
While this approach may sound sensible, it relies on strong assumptions that rarely hold in the real world. …
Since attendees hardly had time to attend the rally, get infected, and then bike home and infect others, the fact that rates in large sending counties are higher than those for non-sending counties strongly suggests that these differences in trends were in the works anyway due to local transmission dynamics, and not a direct result of the rally. …
Given the huge inflow to this specific location along with increased testing for the event, a bump was not surprising. Contact tracing reports have identified cases and deaths linked to the event, but in the range of hundreds.
The claim that Covid outbreaks will naturally burn out in the absence of interventions without causing greatly elevated deaths has been borne out by the experience of American states which did not lock down in the spring or winter or which have lifted restrictions in the last few weeks. As Lockdown Sceptics has pointed out several times, the Covid mortality rate in states which did not issue stay-at-home lockdowns this winter is currently lower on average than in states which did. No “mass havoc” here.
The irony is that the true antiscience lies not in questioning the dogmas of the political consensus and current orthodoxy, but in seeking to marshal the coercive forces of Government and private sector patronage to close down scientific debate. That’s the real threat to science and human understanding. Unfortunately, on that score Professor Hotez appears closer to Stalin than the lockdown sceptics.
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A good start, and essentially correct. As you say, one could fill pages with a list of negative effects, but high on the list would be the loss of reputation of some organisations. E.g. some police forces, politicians in general, journalists, bureaucrats that are supposed to provide real value to the public, and certain companies that took an opportunistic view of it all.
The loss of trust in science is especially important. People were always vaguely aware that police, politicians, journalists and bureaucrats might lie, but the realisation that science has been captured essentially demystifies it as the unstated religion of modernity.
In some ways that’s a good thing, as science is a good methodology but an inadequate religion. To have to critique scientific pronouncements the way we have always critiqued every other human activity is, in the end, beneficial for truth.
And the Church, indeed, must step into the breech – it has been aggressively critiqued for 200 years and yet still meets human needs as ideologies rise and fall.
Jon Garvey, when you say “the Church”, which Church are you referring to?
Do you mean the Anglican Church whose head, Archbishop Justin Welby, said that Jesus would get the Covid vaccine and that those who chose not to get vaccinated were breaking his commandment to love one another:
‘“Go and get boosted,” said Archbishop Welby to ITV News. “Get vaccinated. It’s how we love our neighbour. Loving our neighbour is what Jesus told us to do. It’s Christmas: do what he said.”’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/22/dont-play-god-card-anti-vaxxers-justin-welby/
Or do you mean the Roman Catholic Church whose head, Pope Francis, said:
“Getting vaccinated is a simple yet profound way to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable”.
And endorsed by the Catholic Church’s many Cardinals, one of whom, Honduran Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga, said:
“But one thing is certain: the authorized vaccines are effective, and are here to save lives. They are the key to a path of personal and universal healing.”
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-08/pope-francis-appeal-covid-19-vaccines-act-of-love.html
Thankfully, countless churches – notably in Canada and the USA – stood up against these edicts and people donated money to pay off the massive fines. The senior Catholic Church are bought globalist stooges (even a lot of the high up Church hate Bergoglio!) and the C of E has long been run by woke imbeciles.
That’s good to hear. Can you name any of the churches in Canada?
“The Church” generally refers to the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church.
Off the top of my head, no. There were loads of stories carried on the likes of Breitbart, The Daily Wire and – I’m pretty sure – here in the Sceptic at the time. There were some pretty bold priests and pastors who stood up to the law even when police walked into their churches and arrested them mid-service. It sickens me to think such behaviour ever came to our countries.
Yes, I know you’re thinking of the capital ‘C’ church. I was just saying that there were plenty of local churches that didn’t obey. As with so many things ‘establishment’, post-lockdown, I think people are turning their backs on them and making their own way.
I’d go to this Canadian bloke’s church, though I am not religious
(4) CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Pastor kicks out police without warrant from Passover service – YouTube
The Church of England completely failed to speak out against the abuse of humanity by the government: the CofE effectively IS an arm of the government and the state. It silently and obediently locked its doors during the madness, and spoke only to parrot the narrative: wear your mask, do not sing, get your vaccine, vicars may not even enter their own church. (Do not sing. Anyone remember that pearl of wisdom?)
Funny also the mention of pet worship, as I have not forgotten the government was contemplating forced pet euthanasia, because pets “might” spread it. (I didn’t even need Isabel to remind me of that.) I genuinely feared for the safety of my cats three weeks in, when there were rumblings of this: had Saint Boris made the commandment that all pets shall be killed, I expect many people would have done it, seeing how readily they surrendered everything else, and would have happily have killed any they saw. Would Saint Boris have removed the last crumb of company of somebody forcibly alone? Would he have got enough vets on board to do the job? Would they have succumbed to the insanity? Would one of them have euthanised him instead? Would he and his merry men have sacrificed their own pets on the altar of covid? (Of course not, as they broke all their own roolz in many ways. When does the privileges committee report, by the way? Either he’ll get off scot free as always, and the public will just shrug, or he’ll be done to try to “steady the ship” to persuade people to vote tory. “I believe it is essential for me to thank people leaving with a toast; but you’re not alllowed to be with your dying relatives.”
In 1665 cats and dogs were slaughtered to help prevent the London Plague. Plus ca change…
It was de Toqueville almost 200 years ago who warned of ‘the tyranny of the majority’ in a democracy and advocated the rights of minorities. He warned that the Courts needed to protect those rights by reversing efforts by voters to terminate the rights of an unpopular minority.
Sounds familiar in light of the last three years shenanigans.
The Church must step into the breach. It’s why we’re here.
You’re being ironic, right?
See my reply to Jon Garvey, above.
“The demise of millions of friendships”. Indeed, I meet up with some friends recently who I hadn’t spent any time with for a couple of years. They are vaccinated, mask wearing, public sector employed fully paid up members of the metropolitan elite, and sadly as time went on and after several quite heated discussions about the covid hysteria, net zero and leaving the EU, I realised that despite having known them for over 30 years, I now have more in common with their beautiful dogs that I do with them. And I imagine they feel the same way about me and my unapologetic political scepticism.
I’d only moved out of London nine months earlier when lockdowns struck. I’d moved back to my home town after 12 years and was planning on staying with my folks for a while. I’ve been living with them for four years now. My Mum got breast cancer, then the third Pfizer jab seriously damaged her heart, meaning she’s now on steroids and might have to have a defibrillator fitted (I’m unjabbed!) My Dad, who is in his mid-80s, has been destroyed by the lockdowns. His body was in a bad state anyway and, because he was told not to go out, he seemed to age a decade in just one year. His eyesight is shot, he can barely walk and his hearing is ruined. My folks can’t manage without me now, so I’ve accepted how things have turned out. I have to sort out the substantial garden (I was two and a half when my folks bought the house), I cook and clean and have to select jobs I can fit around all that. I’m not working at the moment, because the business is quiet and the only offer I had was from a client who is far too demanding of my time.
My job has become 100 per cent work for London companies from home. That first year back, I’d begun to make friends at a company I was working for locally, but those early stages fizzle if you don’t see people regularly and the company itself shut down for good when lockdowns began.
I have no friends down here. I worked from home almost non-stop from September 2020 – after six months without work and no state compensation – and simply stopped going out. I’m making myself go out for a 30-minute walk each day. But it’s difficult. I now distrust everyone. I pretty much loathe the police and anyone working for local or national government on sight. I can’t be arsed to get into debates with maskbreathers about COVID-19 (it always comes up in conversations.) There are old friends living away that I could reach out to, but I’d rather know they are out there and not see them than end up despising them. One lovely friend ended up working for GAVI and believes everything she’s told. I can’t bring myself to talk to her, much as I’d like to. Last time, she went on about how everyone should have been wearing masks from the start of March 2020.
I know I’ll have to snap out of this at some stage, because my entire life is now about looking after elderly parents and the house, but I’ve gone from being a London-based freelance rushing around from company to company, with a busy social life, to a provincial recluse for whom ever having lived in London seems a distant dream. I admit I’m lonely, but I’m not into internet dating and I don’t drink (until I reached a certain age in London I drank a lot!) so I’m living through books and old (pre-1990) movies.
I blame UK terrorists such as Johnson, Hancock, Vallance, Whitty, Van Tam, Harries and Michie for all this. And they are terrorists: they terrorised our population and driven us into what will ultimately be a suicidal spiral on a societal level. Going out and about, everything now feels tentative, because we know with the likes of the Pandemic Treaty that all this can happen again at any time.
And I’m tired, more than anything else. In past centuries, if governments became repressive, people would climb on a ship and travel to a new land and found a new community. We’re prisoners of passports and smartphone tracking now and none of us is really better off for it.
(PS. Don’t take this as a self-pitying whinge. I’m perfectly happy in myself – I like looking after the house, I take great pride in all the work I’ve done in the garden. I’m just aware that I’ve shrunk my ‘world’ to one house and that it isn’t healthy in the long term.)
I thought this was a good read. And thank you for separating it into paragraphs as this enhances readabilty a lot.
I’ve just (pretty much) recovered enough of my ability to be among other people to (again) regard (some of) them as something other than ugly, smelly things whose movements don’t seem to be directed by any kind of intelligence beyond a desire to make a nuisance of themselves, who just keep getting uselessly in the way because of this. I’m glad that this took only about 1 1/2 years. I expected at least ten.
NB: I’m entirely aware that this is a social deficiency of mine but that’s how it is.
“ I’m entirely aware that this is a social deficiency of mine but that’s how it is.”
Not sure about that – your description fits a lot of people rather accurately.
Your parents are blessed.
This free online course run by a Christian college in the US (they didn’t impose any of the political covid diktats on staff or students) may help you to further help yourself & heal from the abuse & torture that we’ve all been subjected to, & continue to be subjected to.
https://online.hillsdale.edu/landing/dantes-divine-comedy
“Dante’s Divine Comedy” provides an education for those who are facing great trials and adversity. The poem teaches you how to confront life’s challenges, order your soul, and pursue an excellent and free life. These timeless lessons are especially urgent for Americans to study today.
Well you have kindred spirits here, and hopefully some in real life.
And you are awake in the truth and have faced the awful truth head on and found the strength to continue. That’s worth a lot.
Are you able to change your diet to a paleo/keto one? It makes a huge difference to the tiredness one experiences. Also it would be beneficial for your parents. Dairy and wheat are not the same products as they were 60 years ago. If you aim for 2 good meals a day you will have more time and energy for other things.
Hiya! Actually one of my biggest issues, I discovered, was gluten intolerance. 40 plus years of extreme stomach problems ended almost overnight! I’ve been gluten free for about five years now. I have milk in tea and coffee and otherwise use alternatives such as almond milk on cereal.
That is so interesting. You must be pleased that the stomach problems have ended. Books and pre-1990s movies are also healthier than more recent ones. Have you looked at Eckert Tolle?
The human body has a frequency which aligns with the frequency of the earth & which is felt by another being within 6′ of that human. Experiencing another being’s frequency field is essential for our good health. The seemingly arbitrary social distance was purposely chosen to prevent our frequencies from being shared with others.
The attention to detail to harm is impressive & adds further evidence that this ongoing crime has been many years in the planning.
I will second that BB.
“Bad habits of misanthropy took hold when we were all forcibly separated, under the false illusion that such brutal measures would ‘stop the spread’.”
There was no “false illusion” in what has been done to millions of people across the world these last three years. The actions of national governments were carefully co-ordinated such that they all worked in Lockstep in order to subdue and demoralise their populations. Evil on a Third Reich scale has been perpetrated and in many ways it continues.
Vengeance is overdue and the Nuremberg solution is the only one that will suffice. The numbers involved will be enormous but will go some small way to achieving the depopulation envisaged by the Davos Deviants.
Loneliness isn’t just the abscence of contact it is the understanding that your fellow human beings have passed into a world of fear and self-containment to such an extent that you can never reach them again. It was there in the culture beforehand but this has really fractured things all over the world. The understanding of the remedy is the point of this. There will be some even if you feel unable to contribute.
You can’t necessarily cheer someone up or make their day but just by wishing the best for them but you can make them smile and feel like staying alive another day. Every small thing matters.
Thanks to the author for this article and for his contribution to DS.
His twitter feed is worth checking out.
I think that loneliness has definitely increased because society is now divided into those who are awake and those who still refuse to belthieve that they were lied to.
Before lockdowns I had been happily dating a guy with whom I seemed to share the same values. But it became clear that we could no longer be together when he was disgusted that I would not wear a mask and was urging me to get the vaccine. So I ended it.
Since then dating has been difficult. One guy dumped me when I mentioned my reluctance to get the jab, I used to tentatively ask new dates about how they faired during lockdowns, to see if they were awake. But its clear now that dating is a minefield and I fear that I will end up with a mask-wearing boosted woke zealot, ready to rush into the next hysteria that is the Net-Zero climate change ‘crisis’.
I no longer bother dating. Personally, I am not lonely but I feel that many people must feel like this and this adds to the loneliness in the world. Dating has a bigger set of mines to avoid as we seek those who are awake and know the truth of the the past 3 years and the many lies that were told.
‘Only by constantly highlighting the stupidity and destructiveness of lockdowns will we stop such wrecking measures even being contemplated again. They were a disaster on an unforgivable scale…’
What would Luke Johnson have done? In Autumn 2019 a new banking crisis – a re-run, terminal this time, of 2008 – was happening. We solved the debt crisis then with more debt. A pretext had to be created, or seized from existing events, to do it again.
The real damage of the last few years has been to the concepts of honesty and integrity. Everyone knows we were duped and ripped off over Nightingales, PPI, vaccines. No one cares.
Loneliness has been around a very long time. Over 70+ years as people move away from family, or people have no family. I would imagine you will see less loneliness in countries with intact families and kindness. I would not call the USA, the EU, or the UK kind countries.