Great Barrington Declaration legends Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya have written an op-ed in the New York Post calling for a U.S. ‘Covid commission’ to help the country come to terms with the debacle of the last three years and learn from it. Here’s an excerpt.
When America faced the national tragedy of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding in 1986, Congress created a commission with independent outside experts, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. His iconic demonstration of a faulty O-ring made brittle in the cold as the cause of the Challenger disaster led to fundamental reforms at NASA.
The American people deserve a similar bipartisan, scientifically minded COVID-19 commission so the public-health disaster of the past three years is not repeated.
Due to insufficient protection of older people — whose Covid-mortality risk is more than 1,000-fold higher than that of the young — official counts attribute more than one million deaths to Covid in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. Though people vehemently disagreed about the wisdom of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates and discrimination, masks and so much else, there is near-universal agreement that what we did failed.
By early 2022, about 95% of Americans had contracted Covid despite the harsh countermeasures. A John Hopkins University meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns failed to contain the spread of Covid. At best, they temporarily protected the laptop class, who could work from home while being served by the working class.
The pandemic response itself has wrought tremendous collateral harm. There is now broad agreement that the school closures — in some states running a year or more — have set kids behind in ways that will lead them to worse outcomes as adults, including shorter, poorer lives.
One peer-reviewed paper estimated the spring 2020 closures alone may have cost American children millions of years in life expectancy. The damages are unequally distributed, with poor and minority children suffering the worst learning losses. Hundreds of thousands of kids never returned when schools finally opened.
So the American people deserve answers to fundamental questions about the pandemic. On what empirical basis were schools closed? Did public-health decision-makers consider the harms of their policies? Why do American public-health authorities insist on masking children as young as two years old when mask wearing “makes little or no difference” for Covid’s spread?
Perhaps the most perplexing sin of the public-health establishment is that it abandoned an essential commitment to science. For instance, why did public-health authorities ignore clear scientific data that Covid infection-acquired immunity is stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity? Vaccine mandates forced many frontline workers — heroes who contracted Covid early in the pandemic while doing essential work — to choose between their careers and a vaccine that provides less protection than the natural immunity they already had. University presidents forced young male students, including those with excellent immunity from a prior Covid infection, to accept an elevated risk of myocarditis as the price of a college education.
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya draw attention to the Norfolk Group document they have produced with six colleagues, which they describe as a “blueprint with 80 pages of questions that such a commission should ask”.
Worth reading in full.
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Universities are offensive to me – what can I do about it?
Until now I’ve always been a royalist, even if only because, like democracy, it’s perhaps the least worst option. But frankly, with the wretched new incumbent and the obnoxious behaviour of one of his offspring and associated wife, I’m having to rethink.
Agreed, but it’s the National Anthem, a song which symbolises our Nation as well as a plea for the King to be saved. Personally I’d far sooner have Land of Hope and Glory, but the Woke rabble would hate that even more.
I think of it as a plea for the King to be saved from his moronic Net Zero opinions.
Another example of the abandonment of national pride! I’m no lover of saving the king either but, national pride is an important concept or, what are we?
Land of hope and glory would be a far better anthem, I’m sure we could all get behind that one? F Chortles!
Judge what we are by the number of rainbow, Ukrainian and Palestinian flags flying from homes and public buildings over the last few years instead of the Union Jack.
I know what you mean
it leads you to despair sometimes doesn’t it?
Considering what a great nation Britain once was!
Isn’t flying the Union Jack or, heaven forbid, the George Cross now considered incitement to ‘terror’, whatever TF that means? Are we the only country doing this, or are other Western countries doing the same?
The thing is, I would’ve been happy to sing along to ‘God Save The Queen’ but I wouldn’t be singing the updated ‘King’ version now out of principle, because basically Charles is a globalist, WEF sock-puppet nob who I have nothing but contempt for. So I wouldn’t partake, just for different reasons to that of the students mentioned above. I’d be there getting scolded for wearing my ”Not My King” T-shirt instead.
”Not My King” T-shirt
Can I get one?
Get a “No Smoking” t-shirt and modify to suit.
I’d be there getting scolded for wearing my ”Not My King” T-shirt instead.
If you’re a citizen of some Commonwealth monarchy, he is your king. Nobody gets to choose that. He may be (and probably is) a bad king. OTOH, what kind of wonders are to be expected from a guy who’d have become an OAP long before he had become anything other than an eternal pretender-in-waiting and national laughing stock if he ever had had something resembling a normal life? Nobody can be nothing but The Crown Prince® from age 4 to age 74 and remain mentally sane.
But if he kept his mouth shut he might just get away with it but like Mark Twain pointed out. “It is better to stay quiet and let people think your stupid rather than open it to confirm you are”.
The state should stop underwriting universities.
Here’s a answer to all our immigration and integration problems!
Mandatory national service!
Oh watch the buggers bail out of Britain by the cruise ship full! There would not be enough small boats to meet the market requirements of getting out quickly enough! and the “students” wouldn’t be far behind!
A real world way of sorting the wheat from the chaff!
https://off-guardian.org/2023/12/07/imf-head-wants-world-wide-carbon-taxes/
The only details we don’t have are how these additional taxes will be hidden.
There will come a point at which taxation will bottom out simply because there is no more squeezing to be done. How desperately poor we will be at that point is anybody’s guess.
Celebrating personal achievement should not require the singing of any anthem. No contempt is implied by not singing the national anthem.
Celebrating a university achievement or anniversary – as part of history and heritage – one might argue differently.
Shall we just rip up the flag as well? Maybe we should just call ourselves a “region” rather than a “nation” because that is what we are turning into.
I contribute money to the Republic campaign and any time I’m at an event which plays the dirge which is our national anthem with it’s ridiculous words I just turn my back or remain seated.
Vigilante Bomber:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQww-UvxvqA
https://www.globalresearch.ca/police-state-wants-us-nation-snowflakes/5842324
Another excellent essay from John and Nisha Whitehead detailing the wanton destruction of our history and traditions. There is rightly an emphasis on this Christmas time.
The ‘National Anthem’ is a dirge. It’s dull and uninspiring and more funeral music than a ‘national anthem’. It panders to being sung out of tune. I can’t stand the bloody thing!
Especially NOW!
Not to worry . ——In 50 years we will have a bit of rap as the anthem ——Mutha Fucka Yo
God save us from the King
Keith Emerson’s arrangement of Jerusalem should be the national; anthem.
As long as they don’t replace it with “The Call To Prayer” I couldn’t careless says me , a lifelong defender of the Monarchy but not anymore ! Charlie & William have shown their hand – WEF to the core ! Can’t call them traitors because they don’t work on our behalf & probably never have !!!…
Maybe we need a Globalist Anthem ———“God save our gracious UN, long live our noble UN, God save the planet, da da da da, Happy but having nought, cold but houses stuffed with foam, happy to reign like Club of Rome, God save UN”.
Personally I don’t see the point in the national anthem but it is tradition. How about those who are “offended” (god, I hate that word) that the anthem is not to be used?
Why not axe the mortar boards and gowns? They are surely old fashioned. While you’re about it ditch the sitting around waiting to be given a slip of paper and just email them.