The Burden of Evidence
The Burden of Evidence
Moving Beyond Pandemic Fantasy Thinking
It's often said that a wise scholar listens far more than he dares to speak. Sadly, pandemic policy has been written those who prioritize the latter over the former.
On August 7th, we released the fifth edition of "WHAT COVID-19 DOES TO THE BODY," a curated collection of 100+ scientific articles and medical research about the many harms the SARS-CoV-2 virus poses to the human body, sorted by organ and topic, as well as a section at the end focused on COVID-19 prevention. Started in the fall of 2022, we've done our best to keep doctors, medical professionals, policymakers, and the general public informed on our growing body of knowledge around this new virus & the threat it poses.
"The average person knows about as much about Covid as the average smoker knew about smoking in 1950." -Nina Wildflower, science teacher. (Via Twitter @Ninawildflower)
After pouring over more than five hundred studies from credible researchers and institutions around the world, you will have read more COVID-19's harms than the overwhelming majority of Americans regarding the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and certainly much more than many of the loudest “public health” influencers doing their best to sabotage America’s health.
“Well, you know, some people believe they're Napoleon. That's fine. Beliefs are neat. Cherish them, but don't share them like they're the truth.” -Bill Hicks, Filling Up the Hump (1993)
Some opinions are simply worth more than others - those supported by evidence and scientific fact should be prioritized against unscientific fantasy, with the latter being instantly discarded. Your opinions about the ongoing pandemic and what to do about it should be informed by the growing mountain of medical research that links repeated COVID-19 infections to brain, heart, and other organ damage - including even the genitals. This is undeniable fact at this point, and pretending otherwise invites a rather absurd conspiracy theory, one that certain laptop class academics like Brown economist Emily Oster and UCSF anti-vaxxer Vinay Prasad have both personally profited from endorsing:
That the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 researchers, including hundreds (if not thousands) of scientists and doctors around the world, are dangerously incompetent, or worse, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to mislead the public about a "mild" cold virus that only kills "the vulnerable."
This is an absurd fantasy that policymakers, including those within the Biden-Harris Administration (PAI), have chosen to indulge in, to the detriment of the public's health. Parents complain that their children are sick all the time, workers complain of fatigue and cognitive issues after "mild" COVID-19 reinfections, and millions of Americans are now disabled, many after "mild" bouts with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. After being granted their wish, only to be humiliated by reality, laptop class academics are left ranting on social media about the benefits of repeated COVID-19 infections, sounding like an old Limmy’s Show skit:
Anti-vax and pro-infection pundits, such as University of California San Francisco's Vinay Prasad, or Former COVID Czar Ashish Jha, have never presented credible evidence that COVID-19 is merely a common cold that should not be tested, prevented, or treated in any way. On the other hand, if you've followed the Pandemic Accountability Index for the past year or so, you would be made aware of hundreds of quality studies from credible researchers around the world that detail the many capabilities of COVID-19 to cause lasting harm, even with "mild" infections. That COVID-19 is not merely "respiratory" in nature, but instead a vascular, multi-system disease that can cross the blood-brain barrier and leave lasting damage, amongst many other potential harms.
A Short History of Fantasy as Public Health Policy
The media has frequently enabled these sorts of laptop class, uninformed "do-nothing" academics, such as Stanford Medicine's Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the "Great Barrington Declaration," which argued for the mass infection of unvaccinated children with a brand new pathogen this "health economist" clearly knew nothing about - whilst suggesting it was invented in a lab - with endless airtime and a lack of critical pushback upon their bold, unscientific claims. Since early 2020, the American public has become the target of a relentless advertising campaign for a deadly & disabling virus - with devastating consequences for millions. These "experts," knowing nothing about COVID-19's potential, refused to even consult the literature on the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, which was identified as airborne in 2004, and in 2010 was found to leave the infected with serious lifelong health complications.
Instead, policymakers such as the Trump Administration, Florida's Ron DeSantis, and the Biden Administration have relied upon the "expertise" of said wealthy and comfortable laptop class academics - who were not treating COVID-19 patients and were willfully ignorant about the virus and its potential for harm - even when it was filling mass graves. Stanford’s Scott Atlas, for example, who advised Trump, argued that the mass infection of unvaccinated children would induce herd immunity. He got his wish under Biden, and what followed was four-fold: thousands of dead kids, countless more disabled, and hundreds of thousands of children forced to play a primary more in the death of a parent. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, on the other hand, fed upon these immune naive hosts to rapidly evolve into a volcanic explosion of exponential variant growth:
Public health officials such as Paul Offit, and his fellow subscribers to the school of Vibes-Based Epidemiology, want you to believe that an infection with the original strain of COVID-19 in 2021 provides you meaningful protection against the thousands of ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants that have emerged from years of mass-infection policy. This is quite simply not the case, as millions of Americans have already found out - losing their health, and often their careers. Offit and his colleagues have not offered a penny in aid.
PREVIEW: Stanford's "Pandemic Policy" Conference
Atlas insists to this day that he has always been right, in complete narcissistic denial of reality. Sadly, he is not alone, nor has he faced any meaningful consequences for his unprofessional arrogance and outright incompetence - tragically, reputable institutions such as Stanford University continue to feature him as some sort of "expert," as a grave injustice to their many students. America is supposed to be host to the brightest minds in medical science, and yet our leading institutions are completely failing at upholding any sort of meaningful professional standard.
A Bold New Era of Pestilence
We're facing an entirely new precedent in public health, one with has dire consequences - the current policy is to reinfect American children multiple times a year with the same deadly & disabling virus, potentially one to two dozen times over the course of their education before reaching adulthood. A policy completely ignorant of a mountain of medical research showing the many potential harms of even "mild" infections, including a growing mass of evidence linking COVID-19 to cognitive and neurological impairment. We're also looking at a dedicated campaign to rewrite the history of the past four years by some of the worst grifters who have profited from peddling outright lies about a virus they know absolutely nothing about, enabled by once-prestigious institutions who see fit to enable anti-vax quacks and grifters.
Public health policy debates cannot be dominated by elaborate fictions and creative writing workshops. If you believe in the necessity of preventing COVID-19 infections, you have hundreds upon hundreds of medical research papers on your side. If your priority is "normalcy," you're coming from a place of unscientific emotion, a selfish reckless and willingness to play games with the health of not only yourself, but your loved ones, and others - including children - all in service of an elaborate fantasy of willful ignorance. One perspective undeniably holds more worth than the other. The latter of the two opens the door to all sorts of elaborate conspiracy theories, rooted in long exhausted anti-vaccine tropes. We're repeating the worst mistakes of the past and letting modern day snake oil salesmen profit from an epidemic of outright criminal fraud.
This is a dark road America is yet again going down, and it's left to the general public to start agitating for an “off-ramp” from speeding civil society off the edge of a cliff. News media needs to strike off "experts" that have built a years-long record of being chronically incorrect. Politicians need to be hounded for their abandonment of public health until they yield to the demands of working people. Laptop class academics grifting off of social media with anti-vax profiteering need to be dismissed and condemned. Hospitals need to implement respirator mandates. Schools need to be doing everything in their power to prevent airborne transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses to keep kids healthy and learning in school. Barriers to COVID-19 vaccine boosters need to be eliminated. That's just a start, but there's much more work to be done.
You’re not required to entertain the obscene fantasies of the willfully ignorant in “debate” over public health. If you’ve read the climbed the growing mountain of credible scientific literature around COVID-19, and they refuse to, then your views are automatically right, and it should be made clear for everyone else to see, that before them is one person actually knows what they’re talking about, and the other is rambling incoherently to uphold their own uninformed delusions. You have a right to stand up for yourself and refuse to tolerate such garbage - and for those on the fence, providing critical resources such as What COVID-19 Does To The Body is essential.
Across the country, the public's health is in decline, and not just from COVID-19 - pediatric vaccination rates for other diseases are falling as well. With climate collapse and the demolishing of public health combined, we are rolling the dice on a rather dire future marred by future pandemics - and our institutions have failed to meet the challenge of our current one. As it stands, our status quo is unsustainable, and we cannot wait for things to spiral out of control yet again. A purely reactionary approach in which we wait for viruses like COVID-19 to kill and disable millions, and then kick all responsibility off the edge of a cliff before going back to endless Bloody Marys over brunch, is not a meaningful approach to public health. At its core, this approach is about American capital dictating to you and your family that you're simply not entitled to protect your own health, and your children's health.
As the mountain of evidence showing the harms of repeated COVID-19 infections continues to grow, especially in children's developing bodies, the expectation that has been set by the institutions in our society is to turn a blind eye and throw away our health to uphold a fantasy of "normalcy," as millions of our fellow countrymen are falling disabled - including a growing number of children. Human sacrifice for a "post-pandemic" fantasy. You should be absolutely furious about being subjected to this garbage for the rest of your life - and you have the facts to back you up. What you choose to do with that anger is up to you.
