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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These nonladies and ungentleman have learnt the lessons of the pandemic well: Someone who’s in control of the megaphones can tell an unlimited amount of plain lies unchallenged. There was no summer in 2021, it just kept raining until autumn. Then, preciously few warm and somewhat dry weeks followed before it started getting cold again. With the exception of April, winter 2021/ 2022 basically lasted until the first week of July. There was plenty of rain and more often than not, it was so uncomfortably cold that I had to turn the heating on. I’ve never done that in June before. Come July, sort-of sommer came. Often overcast and rather cool but with longer pauses between the downpours. In the middle of this exactly three warm (not hot) days occurred. This doesn’t make an extreme heatwave and BBC employees who keep claiming the contrary and who know very well that they’re lying shouldn’t wonder why annoyed people keep calling them out on that.
Was it at least a safe and effective heatwave?
We’ve had some average July days this year, two really hot days thanks to a particular weather system, that was followed by a week of below average temperature and above average rainfall. Now it’s back to July norms. Overall I’d guess this July’s average temperature was middle to slightly low compared to the multi-year average.
There’s a technically interesting article in the Udraigna on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/uk-farmers-count-cost-as-heatwave-kills-fruit-and-vegetable-crops
The first interesting thing to note here is that the top heading and the sub heading already differ in meaning, the top heading claiming a catastrophe (of sorts) occurred while the sub heading states that a catastrophe might occur if more extreme heat caused by clima crisis materializes. Chances are that the point of the sub headline is mostly to put extreme heat and clima crisis in one sentence, thereby implying a factually wrong cause-and-effect relation.
Half of the article is composed of quotes from a guy running a green wholesale business for fruit and vegetables in London. This is basically just a lot of handwaiving as no London business man has any first-hand experience of growing stuff in the fields somewhere out of London. The most amusing one is his assertion that he had faced a day long shortage of berries because they had all been cooked out in the open. As the cooking temperature of water is 100C and not 40C (at Heathrow), this certainly didn’t happen. As the next sentence reveals, this was really because fewer berries were picked for a couple of days, followed by the assertion that there could be real trouble of more hot spells occurred.
It then switches to farmers being concerned about the possible effects of the recent dry spell, implying that a few weeks without rain (we haven’t seen yet) would be somehow uncommon and dangerous during the summer months. Farmers – obviously – doesn’t refer to farmers but to another pencil pusher, namely, the deputy secretary of the union of farmers. Again, nothing has happened so far, but if different stuff would happen in future, there could well be difficulties in future.
— I really wish I was better at describing this, IMHO, the article is a textbook example of lying by implication while accurately reporting that nothing happened —
I was reading today that British winegrowers don’t want any rain because they are going to have the best wine year ever if the dry weather continues. My own observations show bumper crops of fruit coming on the trees and the wheat still standing, waiting to be harvested, has ripened perfectly (as opposed to some recent years where it has gone black on the stalk due to the wet). Even some blackberries are ready to pick.
According to the Met office, the definition of a heatwave is FIVE consecutive days of very high temperatures…not the one and a half we had the other week – Monday was Costa del Sol hot, Tuesday started that way, but by the afternoon it was raining. Call that a heatwave? No, Met office, you can’t because it b****y wasn’t you dorks.
The climate changer dream summer was 2018 which it was really unpleasantly hot and dry for an unusually long time. Since then, they’ve been trying to rerun this based on media fantasies every summer (with the exception of 2020 and 2021, when these clowns of doom were too occupied with COVID to care for the weather). 2018 was also the last year when we had normal weather forecasts in summer instead of climate catastrophe nudging by swapping the informational map showing a green outline of the country with cloud, sun and rain symbols to indicate local weather conditions to one using a gradient of light red to dark red calibrated such that the highest temperatures expected on a certain day get the darkest red, regardless of what these temperatures actually are. Any other information which used to be on this map has been silently dropped.
I’d really like to ask this BBC meteorlogist of 25 years why the BBC has chosen to remove the cloudy/ rainy/ sunny/ windy symbols from the overview map in favour of focussing exclusively on temperatures indicated in colours commonly associated with mortal danger from fire. There’s certainly no science which has determined that clouds, rain and wind don’t occur over England anymore. Hence, the BBC is selectively withholding important meteorological information about the actual weather in England in its visualizations of the weather forecast. What’s the rationale behind this?
Great points but this stopped being about observable reality, demonstrable fact and science long ago.
Crybullies, as they are known, have been a long established tactic of the left. It’s pretty easy to do:
Step 1, stoke up anger with a series of unprovoked inflammatory and/or abusive social media posts.
Step 2, cry victim when you get the inevitable backlash. If you are an A-lister this involves a sympathetic appearance on the BBC or in The Guardian.
The best way to deal with a crybully is to give them something to cry about, lol.
For most climate alarmists it’s a fashionable bourgeoise religion and one that ties in nicely with their pathological snobbery and their desire to tell the ghastly stinky little people how to live their lives. But for the BBC – the Grand Muftis of the sect – it’s more serious. They have most of their pensions invested in carbon trading and so-called renewables. The pyramid is collapsing and the only way they think they can shore up its foundations is by calling in ever more frequent truck loads of tax payer funded junk science bullshit, otherwise it’s goodbye gold plated pensions.
Driest July since 1935 according to met office as reported by the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62382703
Not sure how wet July 1976 was or July 2003.
This is the same bullshit as with the global temperatures: They’re averaging different rainfall measurements to arrive at a fictional England-wide level of rain. Mathematically, averages are subject to distortions by outliers and regardless of that, averaging measurements of different quantities still makes no sense.
A sensible way to present this information would be something like the “We’re on fire!” temperature map, just using a neutral colour (eg, light grey to dark gray) which would show how much rain was measured where. One could also create a so-called histogram by adding measurements rounded to mm of the same value together and present the outcome as 2D-plot. One could get then an idea of weather trends by calculating the average number of entries in each category for a number of years.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, more basic working with numerical data. When the Met Office doesn’t do this, either the people working there are very unqualified or a serious presentation of rainfall data would not suit itself to the intended kind of headlines.
I came across a speech made by Hitler in Munich in 1937. He emphasises community, much like Twitter, Facebook and the New World Order gangs.
“…And that brings us to the problem of freedom! Freedom, yes! Insofar as the interest of the national community gives the individual freedom, it is given! Where the freedom affects or even impairs the interest of the national community, the freedom of the individual ceases! Then the freedom of the national community takes the place of the freedom of the individual.”
If you’re stupid enough to watch the BBC you get what you deserve. They’re a propagandist organisation; they pump out propaganda.
Turn it off.
On a positive note. Greta Thumberg has just won (for the 3rd consecutive year) the award for “International Truant of the Year”
The 4-year contract for broadband services costing £70 billion sounds like a modest Government programme to manipulate our lifestyles.
The £70bn contract went to a small company called Place Group Ltd, which in its last published accounts had 2 employees.
Correct. More about this surprising contract award here:
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/small-company-cornwall-awarded-giant-7407664
Most people promoting net zero and a climate change “emergency” are not scientistists and Marr is a typical example. I listem to the view of those scientists who have studied climate and what has efffected it over billions of years rather than people whose opinion is based on what happened in the last few weeks. Most real climate scientists tell us that CO2 generated by humankind has a very minor impact on climate compared to a whole list of other factors that mankind can neither impact or control. There is no current climate emergency apart from that generated by politicians and companies that benefit from the idea of it.
The climate crisis scam that is reaching a scope of almost 1 trillion per year worldwide. This is all funded by tax money from rich Western Countries treasuries using Non Profits NGOs, fake charities, billionaire class trust funds & charities, University grants & government funded agencies. Tens of thousands are making a living & rely on peddling this religion for their livelihood. Climate change only occurs in rich western countries for a reason. This climate crisis will not end until rich Western Countries stop allowing abuse of their tax systems.