My wife is a wonderful woman, but she has horrible taste in television. She, at times, will acknowledge this shortcoming as “guilty pleasures.”
One of her favorite streaming “programs” is the hospital drama “New Amsterdam.” It’s god-awful. More unreal than reality TV. This woke piece of soap opera pabulum is utterly unwatchable. Every once in a while, perhaps to punish me for crimes I am not aware I have committed, she will turn “New Amsterdam” on the bedroom TV before we go to sleep. When the latest overwrought episode mercifully comes to an end, I ask the love of my life the same two questions: Why do you hate me, and where do I go to get the last hour of my life back?
At least it’s just an hour.
In the Covid soap opera, the lockdowners, the “follow the science” preachers, took years from our lives on a foundation of bad science. Some of us knew that while we were in the throes of the endless Covid Red Alert; the rest are learning it these days from the same charlatans who ran the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Testifying earlier this year in a closed-door interview before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a transcript of which was released this week, former NIH Director Francis Collins confessed that the government’s sweeping social-distancing guidance wasn’t backed by the science we were all supposed to be following.
‘I Did Not See Evidence’
On March 22, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued what amounted to placebo guidance advising Americans to avoid mass gatherings and remain at least six feet apart from each other. The warnings were stark. One research paper published in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine was titled, “Six feet apart or six feet under: The impact of COVID-19 on the Black Community.” Just beneath the report is another on “LGBTQ+ Loss and Grief in a Cis-Heteronormative Pandemic: A Qualitative Evidence Synthesis of the COVID-19 Literature.” Your tax dollars at work.
The businesses the government deemed essential — the supermarkets, the pharmacies, the big-box retailers — marked the dividing lines, two yards between life and death, on the floors and in checkout lines.
But Collins and crew, including the smug and self-righteous Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for a dangerously long time, made a very good living segregating a society at an unprecedented level. The damage done from the scientists’ sign-off on a long and cruel isolation experiment will take a long time to fully measure.
“The six feet of separation recommendation had real life consequences. This guideline made it nearly impossible for schools nationwide to re-open due to the pressure from teachers unions to follow this guideline. In addition, businesses had to adapt at great cost or risk complete closure,” states a Thursday subcommittee staff memo on the Collins interview.
But the government-imposed individual internment camps were all worth it, right? Social distancing, plus deeply flawed vaccines, prevented 800,000 deaths, headlines last week proclaimed. But when asked whether he believed any science or evidence supported the six-feet rule, Collins said he did not.
“Is that I do not recall or I do not see any evidence supporting six feet?” a Covid subcommittee staff member asked the good doctor.
“I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point,” Collins replied.
But what about four years later?
“Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” the staffer asked.
“No,” the former NIH director conceded.
Science Silencing Dissent
No evidence. “Follow the science.” The cognitive dissonance is mind-blowing.
Youth suicide rates exploded in the wake of lockdown isolation. Schoolchildren everywhere were left behind in an arbitrary and unnecessary lost year-plus of education. Small businesses in droves shut down. Government bureaucrats stepped all over basic rights, abridging travel, livelihoods, and even worship.
And they did it all with no evidence.
More than that, when people — including some concerned scientists — began standing up and speaking out about these insane guidelines that fueled draconian restrictions on liberty, they were silenced. Or worse.
During the subcommittee interview, Collins also came clean on what the “scientists” relegated to the ramblings of the tinfoil-hat crowd, that the origins of the virus that is suspected to have played a part in more than 1.12 million deaths in the United States remains up for debate. In other words, the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in China is no conspiracy theory. The former top government health official had vehemently disagreed with the lab-leak theory, a theory that government agencies believe is not only plausible but “likely.”
Collins changed his tune in the January interview.
“All it’s calling for is a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Is the possibility of a lab leak a conspiracy theory?” a subcommittee staffer asked Collins, who briefly demurred, according to the memo.
“You have to define what you mean by a lab leak,” he said.
“Putting aside de novo, the possibility of a laboratory or research-related accident, a researcher doing something in a lab, getting infected with a virus, and then sparking the pandemic. Is that scenario a conspiracy theory?” the staffer pressed.
“Not at this point,” Collins said.
As the subcommittee memo notes, “The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is ongoing and there is no incontrovertible proof of either a zoonotic or a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. Yet, this debate is so charged that Americans were censored on social media, and it led to a change in the way scientific debate was conducted.”
Collins is now acknowledging that the origin of the virus is still unsettled science.
I remember late March 2020, when the lockdowns were first starting to hit. My aunt, who is also my godmother, was diagnosed with an aggressive, fatal cancer. For two weeks, the medical facility locked her away from her husband and family in the Covid-quarantined hospital, as they did with the other patients. Finally, hospital officials relented and sent my aunt home to die. She passed away a couple of weeks later. The social-distancing mandate had robbed my grieving uncle and cousins of precious time to say goodbye. Unconscionable forced separation happened to thousands upon thousands of dying Americans and their families — based on bad science.
Who will hold these willfully errant scientists accountable? And where do we go to get those stolen years of our lives back?
