Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator Eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.
And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the U.S. and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies.
All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
It seems like an open-and-shut case: dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies.
This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.
Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyse simple scientific documents and understand basic data.
Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific and Government ladders to the highest levels.
They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgement that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behaviour.
Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most-cited researchers in medicine, cannot read research papers “at a high level”. And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal Government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants, was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.
There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.
Public health experts were messengers for the biodefence response
The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this: The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefence leadership was in charge.
In previous articles, I examined in great detail the Government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.
As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!
As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:
From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared”. HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals”, its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while”. (p. 8)
When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and internet with ‘recommendations’ urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefence agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent or misguided.
They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security and biodefence response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response.
Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefence agenda?
We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top Government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefence network took over the pandemic response.
What would you do if you were a Government employee, or a scientist dependent on Government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?
How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?
More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?
And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccine countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?
We know how the most prominent Covid ‘experts’ answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and a lot to gain by going along with the biodefence narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.
Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important
Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.
Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.
The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognise the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.
We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel.
This ‘public-private partnership’ of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.
Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted ‘experts’ to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behaviour was meant to hide.
Debbie Lerman is a Brownstone Fellow who has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practising artist in Philadelphia, PA. This article first appeared at the Brownstone Institute.
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“Elon Musk’s visionary work with Tesla…”
Oh, puh-lease..
Elon Reeve Musk is nothing but a crook. He noticed the huge amounts of OPM piling up on offer from idiotic politicians to “save the planet” and thought,
“I’ll have some of that!”
He didn’t even found the company. Instead, he destroyed the founder.
If that is “visionary”, then STOP THE BUS – I WANT TO GET OFF.
Aside from this, there is absolutely nothing visionary about electric cars. That happened over 130 years ago. And it was destroyed the moment Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz entered the scene.
Everything Mr Musk touches turns to sh*t sooner or later. Yet there he stands. I can’t help but admire him for using the system. Which is so screwed up.
All he has done is played to the rules available to him to maximise his companies revenue streams and his own net worth (the vast majority of which is tied up in stock in those same companies). That doesn’t make him a crook in the same way that choosing your company car to take advantage of subsidies and BiK rules makes any of us crooks.
You do make good points.
But he participates in and enables the whole fraud, very actively. And he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. Quite the contrary. Check his stock sale history.
All while pushing the man made climate change scam. He is, in the book according to Marcus Aurelius knew, most definitely a crook.
And he sells cars while knowing they’re dangerous, and terrorises/bribes anyone and everyone (including employees and legislators) who tries to blow the whistle.
He’s a huge part of the problems we have today.
But there are worse offenders, obviously. And he got my respect for (initially) declaring that COVID-19 was just the flu. And then he gets in bed with ModeRNA. That should tell you all you need to know.
The guy is a NASTY CROOK.
But don’t believe me. I am gonna leave Time to tell.
And if you’re wrong?
About… what, exactly?
But in the meantime, if I am wrong, I’ll be… wrong.
It’s not as if I’ll be dead or something.
Right, need to go, got work to do!
I was very much a doubter on Musk and could not see how Tesla would ramp up their manufacturing enough to be profitable. I was wrong and I have to respect EM for driving the company to profitability. I do think there are extremely rocky days ahead for all EV manufacturers ahead, the price wars going on in China are brutal and many start-ups won’t survive. I think Tesla will probably be one of the lucky ones though, but it looks grim for most European brands.
Profits paid for by taxpayer subsidy.
Indeed. On both sides. Direct subsidies to the mftrs and direct subsidies to the loons that go and buy one of these non-green, Gaia unfriendly technologies.
Tesla is not profitable in the normal sense of the word, TheGreenAcres. It loses money on every car it sells.
No, he is a crook. What short memories we have. To stop the early collapse of TSLA back when we were smart and knew it should die (without brainwashing by American Legacy Media) he falsified the possible sale of his company, a violation of SEC rules. He settled by paying the largest fine on record for illegal price manipulation/fixing. That’s spells crook in my book, esp. since I had put options on the stock at the time. Alas, we have short memories in a world of information that is near;y impossible to keep track.
If you chuck chips out on the promenade the gulls will wolf it down. Just like the Subsidy farmers wolf all the subsidies down their neck. I know global warming is a crock of manufactured junk science but if government want to pay me big sums of money I will take it and can pretend to save the planet as much as the next guy.
I actually have the same view. That’s why I invest in the whole shitshow. By buying as much of the UK equivalent of VTSAX as I can afford, every month.
The world is not black and white.
Doesn’t mean I have to think Musk is a “visionary”, and I can’t promise not to vomit whenever people faun over him.
Faun, or fawn? I forget.
Fawn is good…………
Billions in US Gov subsidies.
How many ‘entrepreneurs’ get lavish and unlimited state support?
Tesla is a joke and the entire EV market a fraud.
I’m on the fence with a lot of the rantings of the electric Jesus, but, I use his starlink internet connection out here in the middle of nowhere and its darn good, 300mbs for €50 a month and hardly ever drops out!
Wont be getting on the hyperloop, going to Mars, fitting a neuralink brain implant or buying a tesla anytime soon though!
Hmmm. This yank never knew the UK had a “middle of nowhere”. Try southern Idaho. Proof that all things, esp poverty, is relative. Thanks for that Albert.
Things will only get worse for EV owners as the subsidies are withdrawn and replaced with additional revenue streams – that £25bn the Government steals from us in from fuel duty has to be replaced, they sure as hell won’t forgo that cash!
Road pricing – via spy-in-the-car technology.
This is astonishing news— how quickly and unexpectedly that particular arm of the Globalist Octopus has withered.
Looks like the bold Finns were far ahead of everyone else when they did this to a Tesla, starting at 4:55 to 6:56 minutes. You can even see the slow-motion percussion wave distorting the quarry background:
Insane Tesla Model S EXPLOSION!! 30kg of dynamite! (youtube.com)
Excellent watch. Thank you.
I’m glad you watched it— even the music was perfect!
BEV = UXB.
Ha-ha! Wonderful! I didn’t understand your meaning at first, then I looked it up.
Save the planet governments just don’t get the Free Market. People know best how to spend their own money. If they want a Mars Bar instead of lettuce then they will buy the chocolate. You cannot stuff lettuce down their throat no matter how much you bribe them or tell them there is a climate cataclysm coming in a months’ time and we will all be dead from global scorching by September. When there is no evidence then we are going to keep enjoying the chocolate, and it is the same with the green scam. No matter how often they tell us we need EV’s and heat pumps we are going to keep buying the petrol car and the gas boiler instead, because we like them. The petrol car is cheaper and gets us to where we are going and the gas boiler keeps us warm. So flooding the market with lettuce is going to be a bad idea because we just don’t want the bloody stuff. Take your Ev’s and stuff them where the sun don’t shine.
As Milton Friedman said, Socialists don’t understand economics, if they did they wouldn’t be Socialists.
The whole climate change/net zero scam is Socialism with new branding and livery. New bucket same old merde.
Worse still their cocamamy schemes aren’t just unpopular, they actually make things worse.
The revolution is going strong I’m afraid.
They have laws in place that make any change of course extremely difficult if not virtually impossible.
All we are seeing now is the gnashing of teeth, the economic pain, the dislocation of industry, the anxiety and cost of having to change how we live our lives.
They don’t give a shit. They’re not stepping back. We can kock and scream all we like.
I’m afraid that’s how it is.
True… but that course leads onto the rocks.
It does, but our ruling class is in self destructive mode.
The whole covid saga was an exercise in self harm on so many different levels.
The dismantling of our history, our values in favour of bizarre new norms is an act of self mutilation.
The wild over spending and racking up of debt is reckless.
It’s as if they exercise power for it’s own sake, just because they can, with no real regard or understanding of where value resides or comes from.
This is where we are, in a spiral of self destruction.
Exactly, to alter the zero emissions mandate or the ban on the sale of ICE cars would require a significant changer to the climate change act. The new post July 4th UK Government is most unlikely to consider doing this and so we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, if EVs fail to sell and ICE cars are phased out by the climate change act then basically we will all be grounded.
As a sop we may see a large influx of cheap low range Chinese EVs that will be OK for some local utility travel otherwise it will be the end of leisure car travel, the end of motoring as we have known it for the last 50 years.
And if we think we will just hang on to our ageing ICE cars, I think we are kidding ourselves. The UK Gov and local councils will increasingly force ICE cars off the road.
That is exactly what is coming.
It’s not that they just don’t care if you don’t get a car. They actually prefer it. It’s a big part of their vision.
Yup. They will just stop importing petrol/diesel. No fuel …. no point having the vehicle.
And there is no wiggle room because the insane political class have forced us in law to do Net Zero. ——-Total traitors using the junk science climate excuse to impose their eco socialism on us, and the trouble is most people still believe there is a climate emergency, no matter how much evidence you provide them that there is NONE. Such is the power of propaganda.
If you look at the energy density data its obvious that battery powered cars are an absolute waste of time. Mr Toyota us correct. If you want ICE free motoring then you need easily fuel able hydrogen system with a cheap efficient hydrogen fuel cell (sadly this does not exist yet and isn’t looking imminent)
Hydrogen isn’t even a fuel. It has to be manufacture and that is very expensive.
Like everything else that is Green. The days of cheap abundant energy are over. Not because we don’t have cheap abundant energy but because the Politicians have decided we cannot have it anymore. To understand the real reason you need to understand what Sustainable Development really is and who is imposing it on us. Our spineless politicians are fully onboard with all of this eco socialism and they are a total disgrace.
Thanks to a commenter on TCW…..advises that basically a new EV on your driveway arrives with a 70% higher upfront ‘carbon footprint’ which will take 50,000 – 80,000 miles to eliminate.
And battery powered by slave labour.
Indeed!
About half the distance required to break even on the cost of the vehicle plus battery charging vs petrol if you can do cheapest home charging. That’s assuming electricity and fossil fuel prices remain in step over however long it takes you to do 100,000 miles.
As Blessed Margaret Hilda was fond of saying, ‘You can’t buck the market.’
Government intervention can distort the market, but like a spring it will bounce back and correct – often brutally. That’s why we have financial crises and recessions every so often, the inevitable result of political interference in the market process.
Another little snag with the EV revolution; it appears that increasingly unattended EV charging stations are being targeted by thieves who are stealing the copper and leaving the charging point unusable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B_WUPQwzEQ
If I was forced to have an EV I suspect I would only feel confident to use if for local utility travel and charge it on a home charger. I suspect that many would feel like me, not so much an EV revolution as travel immiseration.
Tesla has a fleet of support vehicles, they run on diesel. Nuff said