Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Monday announcement invoking the Emergencies Act to break a weeks-long protest in Ottawa has only served to inspire more resistance, one protest organizer told The Daily Wire.
The Freedom Convoy, a loose coalition of truckers protesting vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions, rolled into Ottawa in late January and has camped downtown since. The protesters have congested parts of the city around Canada’s seat of government on Parliament Hill while demanding a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.
So far, Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers, instead employing increasingly hard-nosed political and legal tactics to try and break the protest.
David Paisley says he has been protesting for weeks now and, as a street captain, helps organize protesters and direct those who wish to support the cause with funds, goods, or services. Paisley told The Daily Wire that Trudeau’s announcement, which made headlines across major news organizations in the U.S. and Canada, went off barely noticed by the protesters on the ground.
“No one really cares about any new announcement. I mean the police have been breaking the law long before any emergency power. They were taking our fuel away. They were arresting people for purely having jerry cans or having empty tanks of fuel,” he said. “They’ve already been doing these ‘emergency powers’ and all it does is make people dig their heels in more,” Paisley added.
“The irony … is that these very powers and threats are why we are here.”
Trudeau announced in a press conference Monday afternoon that he was authorizing the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act, a law passed in the late 1980s to take the place of the War Measures Act. The act strengthens Canadian law enforcements’ ability to fine and imprison violators and ensures the operation of “essential services” such as towing rigs, Trudeau said during his press conference. It also empowers banks and financial institutions to freeze the accounts of any person or business suspected of being involved with an “illegal blockade.”
Paisley said that the protest would continue despite frozen bank accounts or impounded trucks until every protester is cuffed and thrown in prison.
“[The Trudeau government] underestimated the determination and the intelligence of those here, and so everyone still here on the ground, they’re basically willing to give their lives for this – peacefully of course,” Paisley said.
“They’re prepared to drain every last dollar, even from frozen bank accounts,” he added later.
The truckers in Ottawa have received wave after wave of support in the form of cash funds, food, fuel, letters, and even a free laundry service by two ladies who walk Paisley’s street every day collecting clothes. The trucker said he received word on Monday from two men who wanted to deliver hundreds of liters of extra diesel fuel for the convoy.
“You come and sit in the driver’s seat for a few hours and you’ll be able to fill up your wallet again. It’s incredible. People are just handing you fifties, hundreds, packs of hundreds. A friend of mine received a Bible and when he opened it up it had 500 cash inside the bible,” Paisley said.
“The more the government tries to stomp this out, the more and more it causes people to rise up and say ‘this is wrong, and I side with these truckers,’” he said. “These steps from the government have simply hardened the determination of the great men and women down here, so I’m not really concerned at all.
We’ll have lots of new friends when we all get tossed in prison together.”
Footnote
BREAKING: Trudeau regime now using terrorism laws to go after crypto and crowdfunding pic.twitter.com/Fj8ge0Pyzy
The Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has been hacked and temporarily disabled after it facilitated the raising of nearly $9 million for the convoy of Canadian truckers who have been protesting vaccine mandates.
The Delaware-based organization, which hosted a crowdfunding effort for the Canadian truckers after crowdfunding site GoFundMe took down their initial fundraiser at the urging of the Canadian government, was disabled Sunday night. Visitors were redirected to the domain GiveSendGone[.]wtf.
The site had raised over $8.7 million in one week after the GoFundMe effort was taken down.
The [hacker’s] statement alleged that those who had contributed to the fundraiser were the same ones who had “helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the U.S.” and had “helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa.”
GiveSendGo’s list of donors, approximately 92,000 of them, was also leaked and shared online.
The site stated on Feb. 10 in response to previous Canadian court efforts to halt the funds that the Canadian government “has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here” and that all the donations “flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”
Time to End the COVID Emergencywas written by Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. This op/ed was originally published by the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The time has come for states and the federal government to end their COVID declarations of emergency and the accompanying closures, restrictions, propaganda, distancing requirements, forced masking and vaccine mandates. COVID may circulate at some level forever, but Americans can now protect those vulnerable to it with standard medical procedures. They can treat it as they would the flu.
Emergency measures need continuous justification and there isn’t one anymore.
Omicron has become the dominant variant. Over the past two months, the Delta variant strain—Omicron’s main competitor and the most recent aggressive version of COVID—has been declining in the U.S. That is true both in proportion of infections (62 percent on Dec. 18 fell to 2 percent on Jan. 15, then to 0.1 percent on Jan. 29) and the number of daily infected people (97,000 to 14,000 to 400), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the next two weeks, Delta cases will almost certainly decline to the point that the variant essentially disappears, as did the strains that came before it.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many in high-risk categories, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. In America, many of those vulnerable to COVID are already vaccinated and protected against severe disease.
Treatments have also vastly improved since the early days of the pandemic. The medical community has learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like vitamin D to reduce severe disease risk, and there are a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. For young people, the risk of severe disease—already low before Omicron—is minuscule.
There’s evidence that Americans have built up additional immunity through the recent Omicron wave. Daily Omicron infections peaked around Jan. 11 and have been declining. Mortality from COVID, including some from remaining Delta cases, is now declining as well. Influenza in typical seasons peaks in mid-February. That Omicron has been decreasing since early January suggests that the decline may have less to do with seasonal factors than built-up population immunity. If substantial new variants arise, this suggests case and death counts could still remain relatively low.
There is no longer any justification for the federal government and states to maintain their declarations of emergency. The lockdowns, personnel firings, shortages and school disruptions are doing at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus. The state of emergency is unjustified now,and it can’t be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of a more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If the government can grant itself such power, then the limits imposed by the federal and state Constitutions are effectively meaningless.
Americans have sacrificed their rights and livelihoods for two years to protect the general public health. Government officials must now do their part and give Americans their lives back.
John Tierney writes at City Journal Understanding the Covid Odds. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
If you’ve been vaccinated and still feel mortally threatened by the virus, please read this.
It’s obviously not easy to give up fear of Covid-19, to judge from a recent survey showing that the vaccinated are actually more frightened than the unvaccinated. Another survey found that most Democratic voters are so worried that they want to make it illegal for the unvaccinated to leave home. But before you don another mask or disinfect another surface, before you cheer on politicians and school officials enforcing mandates, consider your odds of a fatal Covid case once you’ve been vaccinated.
Those odds can be gauged from a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, published by the Centers for Disease Control. They tracked more than 1 million vaccinated adults in America over most of last year, including the period when the Delta variant was surging, and classified victims of Covid according to risk factors such as being over 65, being immunosuppressed, or suffering from diabetes or chronic diseases of the heart, kidney, lungs, liver or brain.
The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of Covid that required treatment in an intensive-care unit. Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was minuscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died. In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3 percent of the sample that had at least four risk factors.
Among everyone else, a group that included elderly people with one or two chronic conditions, there were just eight deaths among more than 1.2 million people, so their risk of dying was about 1 in 150,000.
Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.
The CDC study didn’t extend through the surge of the Omicron variant, but there’s no reason to think that the odds going forward are worse. While Omicron was much more infectious than previous variants, spreading widely among the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated, it typically caused milder symptoms. Now that the Omicron surge seems to have peaked, it has left huge numbers of people with what researchers call “super immunity” from both the vaccine and an infection. Studies have shown that natural immunity is much stronger and longer-lasting than vaccine immunity. So whatever new variant emerges, much of the population will confront it this year with stronger immunity than last year. And the odds of survival will improve further thanks to new antiviral drugs reported to reduce Covid mortality by some 90 percent.
Of course, the threat of Covid is greater for unvaccinated adults, but why should their personal decision to take that risk arouse so much angst among those who are safely vaccinated? The original argument for vaccine mandates—that they were necessary to stop the spread—is obsolete, now that it’s clear that vaccination doesn’t prevent reinfection and transmission. Even if vaccines might slow the spread, they won’t prevent the virus from eventually reaching everyone. In any case, the risk to the vaccinated is so low that there’s no justification for forcing everyone else to be jabbed.
Nor is there any justification for mandating masks or vaccines for schoolchildren. Even if masks were effective—and the weight of evidence shows that they do little or no good—it would make no sense to require them in classrooms where the risk is so low to everyone (including the vaccinated teachers). Some children with serious health problems could benefit from being vaccinated, but for others the vaccine offers virtually no benefit while risking rare and unforeseen side effects. By analyzing the rates of death and infection in 2020, before the arrival of vaccines, Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis of Stanford calculate that the risk of death for children and adolescents who were infected with the virus was 0.001 percent—one in 100,000. The risk today is lower still thanks to better treatments.
The recent scare stories about children hospitalized for Covid are based on inflated statistics.
Studies have found that nearly half of the children whom the CDC classified as hospitalized Covid cases are actually being treated for other conditions and just happened to test positive. But even if we use the CDC’s inflated numbers—about 300 Covid deaths annually among the nearly 60 million American children aged 5 to 18—the risk of a schoolchild dying from Covid works out to just one in 200,000.
A child is more likely to be killed in a car accident, commit suicide, be murdered, drown, be accidentally poisoned, or die of cancer or heart disease.
If those odds still aren’t enough to assuage your dread of Covid, consider one more statistic, based on Ioannidis’s analysis of data from Covid tests and seroprevalence surveys. He estimates that in the United States, a nation of 331 million people, there have been a total of 250 million to 350 million Covid infections since the pandemic began. While that estimate includes some people who were infected more than once, it seems clear that the vast majority of Americans have already survived an infection and acquired natural immunity, many without being aware of it.
Many don’t realize—and a horde of journalists and public officials are working hard to keep them ignorant—that their enemy today is not a virus in the air but the fear in their minds.
Our covid ‘dashboard’ had reported more cases than any other university in the country.
But the data was increasingly unreliable.
For nearly two years, I oversaw the coronavirus “dashboard” at the University of Florida. On that site, we posted the number of tests performed at the university each day, the percentage that were positive and the total number of cases. We also relayed how many students and faculty members were in isolation or quarantine. The dashboard was a tool that people on our campus referred to, and that the national media monitored (along with similar dashboards at hundreds of other schools) as they tracked the coronavirus situation at colleges and universities. In a typical week, some 3,500 people consulted the site, and there were more than 240,000 page views over the course of the pandemic.
Our dashboard attracted an unusual amount of attention because we identified more coronavirus cases than any other higher-education institution in the country — some 14,500 from May 2020, when the university began steps to return to in-person instruction, through 2021.
On Dec. 31, we stopped updating the dashboard because I concluded that the numbers we were posting were no longer useful.
This generated complaints, including accusations that we were covering up cases at a time when the situation was worsening by some measures. But so many students and staff were forgoing the school’s official testing site, and other sites that reported to us, in favor of at-home tests — and not reporting the results to us — that we lost confidence that our totals bore any relation to reality. We also knew that many students were experiencing mild covid-19 symptoms but attributing them to allergies or a cold, and so not reporting them.
Still others didn’t test because they didn’t want to be barred from dining rooms and classrooms — a trend that increased over the course of the pandemic.
Higher-education reporters took note of our move — as did our community, sometimes vociferously. Among those who complained to me, some argued that transparency is an intrinsically important goal; some also said the dashboard helped them to make decisions about their own behavior (signaling when it was safe to go maskless in public indoor spaces, for example). But transparency is an illusion when the data is bad; likewise, you can’t make good decisions by looking at incomplete or misleading numbers. We at the University of Florida concluded that the pandemic had entered a new chapter, and testing and reporting strategies had to change, too.
Coronavirus family with Omicron as newest member.
Nationally, we are moving from the epidemic phase to the endemic phase, in which vaccinated people are less likely to get infected and far less likely to become seriously ill. Case numbers, even if they could be accurately measured, are far less important than such things as hospitalization numbers paired with vaccination status. As of Jan. 1, we ceded all authority to the Alachua County Department of Health to collect and report coronavirus-related information, ending the categorization of data at the university level.
From the beginning, the dashboard was integrally connected to the campus’s virus-fighting strategy — known as UF Health Screen, Test & Protect, or STP. (I directed that program from its start in May 2020 through the end of 2021.) We created it to support the return-to-campus effort, and we were affiliated with the county health department. All test results for students, faculty and staff were reported to STP, regardless of where the tests were done or which laboratory did them. We conducted more than 500,000 tests on campus, and private labs also reported to us the test results of university community members.
The data collected for the dashboard also let us see the effect of things beyond our control. There was another spike on campus in October 2020 that coincided with the opening of the bars frequented by students. More recently, the large (but still smaller overall) rise in cases during the delta variant wave was mitigated by the aggressive vaccine campaign that preceded it.
Among universities, as I mentioned, we led the country in the total number of coronavirus cases — an unenviable category in which to be No. 1. Many commentators inferred that this must have reflected what they saw as a generally disastrous approach to the pandemic in Florida in general. In reality, I would argue, the high numbers stemmed from our aggressive testing program (as many as 3,000 tests a day), which gave us better information than some of our peer institutions had.
As of this writing, we are unaware of any deaths that occurred among our employees and students from a work or classroom exposure. (Overall student enrollment at the university is about 53,000.) To my knowledge there were two deaths of staff members that were due to exposures off campus.
We’d already begun to transition the services my office provided — testing, vaccination and so on — back to the county and student services in November because of decreasing cases and increasing endemicity. But we retained the ability to rapidly scale testing back up. And when the omicron variant hit, we scaled up big time: We went from about 1,000 tests per week in early December to 1,500 daily now. Of those, roughly 20 to 25 percent are positive. Life on campus, however, is surprisingly normal. Students who test positive are isolated or leave campus, but they can continue their coursework online. A few public events have been canceled or delayed, but many continue.
We absolutely need more data in the fight against the coronavirus. We need to know who is being hospitalized for covid as opposed to with it. We will need to know how future variants differ in their ability to cause severe disease. What we don’t need is a catchall of whatever information happens to be available — including wildly imprecise case counts that include people with symptoms resembling a cold. That’s why we decided to stop updating the dashboard at the University of Florida.
Michael Lauzardo is an associate professor in the division of infectious diseases and global medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and deputy director of the university’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.
Stop showing cumulative statistics all the way to beginning of 2020. These are not informative, only serve to drive fear of numbers that can only rise. The public needs to see what is the situation now.
Cease use of the categories “cases” and “hospitalizations”. Both have been corrupted from original definitions and can no longer serve. Instead report “inpatients” and “outpatients”. These are people who are in a physician’s care for sickness following infection with SARS-CV2.
Inpatients are those admitted into hospital with a prior covid diagnosis, not anyone testing positive after entering hospital for some other reason. Outpatients are those undergoing a treatment protocol at home under the supervision of a doctor who determined an illness deriving from SARS-CV2 infection.
The only other statistics are “covid deaths” which must be defined as dying from Covid19 not dying with Covid19. This outcome is only valid for inpatients and outpatients (no others) within 28 days of first diagnosed with Covid19. “Recoveries” should be reported daily, meaning patients who survive after 28 days.
Empower Primary Care for the General Population
Over-the-counter medical products should be provided comparable to those to treat cold and flu infections. People with mild symptoms should have access to home tests as well as anti-viral medicines and nutritional supplements shown to be effective against SARS-CV2.
Stop Discrimination Against Persons Based on Vaccination Status or Mask Wearing
Those who are vaccinated are protected and do not threaten others. Unvaccinated people are trusting their own immune systems. Likewise, wearing masks is an individual protection choice based upon circumstances.
Outpatients need to self-isolate during treatment, and when symptoms are over, new testing is not required. People who have contact with others who tested positive do not need to test or to self-isolate if they are without symptoms.
Basically, it is a return to common sense citizen responsibility for public health. When you are sick, you seek care and medical advice and treatment and isolate until you are well.
Thomas Harrington advises not to be misled by officials apparently lifting some covid restrictions. The behavior is insincere posturing, offering a temporary reprieve in order to retain emergency powers against citizens’ freedoms. His article at The Brownstone is The Limited Hangout of the Mandaters. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Yesterday, a number of important Democratic governors lifted mask mandates in their states. Almost to a one, they cited the changes wrought by the fast moving and relatively mild omicron variant of the SARS-CV2 virus as the prime reason for the change.
What none of them did was admit what “the Science” has shown for at least two decades, and has been clear through the last two years to anyone doing a modicum of independent research on the subject: masks have never been shown to fundamentally alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population.
What they did say almost to a one, like their counterparts in Great Britain, Denmark and other countries now dismantling previous Covid restrictions, was that the return to normality was greatly facilitated by the uptake of vaccines in the populations they currently govern.
Nearly a half century ago, a man named Ron Ziegler held the position now occupied by Jen Psaki. Like all presidential spokespeople before and since he was a serial dissembler.
But back then there were still a few journalists at the presidential court and beyond willing to do their jobs. And when one day in the midst of the Watergate scandal he used the passive voice construction “mistakes were made” in an attempt to explain away obvious breaches of honesty and ethics committed quite actively by the Nixon Administration, he was roundly mocked by the press corps.
Sadly, however, as I have argued elsewhere, this type of non-apology apology, which caused a scandal then, has become ubiquitous across our social landscape. And that’s a shame.
Why?
Because real apologies and expressions of accountability are important. Without them, neither the apologizer nor the aggrieved party ever experiences what the ancient Greeks considered a cardinal element in human development and human relations: catharsis.
This is especially so in the case of government entities. Without admissions of guilt, the assumptions and premises undergirding failed policies remain intact, lying fallow until such time as the government entity in question feels it opportune to deploy them again in the service of another misguided crusade.
This is what is currently occurring with the Covid hawks who have violated our fundamental rights time and again over the last two years.
These enemies of human dignity and freedom now realize that many of their former supporters among the citizenry feel exhausted, and in many cases, flat out deceived.
At the same time, however, they do not want to permanently relinquish the powerful repressive tools they have acquired during the two-year state of exception.
The answer?
One part of it, already mentioned, is the moderated limited hangout operation now being conducted regarding the use of masks in public. By relaxing these strictureswhile in no way addressing the fundamental fallacies upon which the masking policies were based, they ensure that mask mandates can be brought back when and if they deem it necessary to do so.
The second part, which is far more pernicious and consequential, is the effort to push a proposition that is at best quite tenuous in light of what actual scientific studies are currently revealing about vaccine efficacy: that without widespread injection uptake the virus would have never receded, and we would have thus never have gotten into a position to recover our freedoms.
Note the underlying logic here. We are not getting our freedoms back because they intrinsically belong to us and were unjustly stolen. We are getting them back because an important plurality of us have done what the “experts” and the “authorities” coerced us into doing.
With this approach there is no catharsis or healing, and certainly no acquisition of new wisdom and knowledge. What there is, is a sly reification of the infantilizing and anti-democratic ways of thinking that have predominated in our policy-making class throughout the pandemic.
Though many people, laboring under the mortal fear of being branded with the weaponized term of “conspiracy theorist,” are reluctant to admit it, the central concern of policy-makers throughout the pandemic has not been the health of our communities, but rather gaining enhanced control over where we go and what we put into our bodies.
There is nothing more central to the idea and practice of freedom than bodily autonomy. It is the basal freedom from which all others are derived. Without it—as the history of slavery starkly reminds us—all other liberties are comparatively ornamental.
For this reason, we must vigorously oppose this organized attempt to present the vaccines, which have been delivered to millions under rather severe coercion, as a great, if not the greatest, hero of the pandemic film.
My Comments
Stark examples are playing in Canada’s federal and provincial capitals. The Mayor of Ottawa falsely declares an emergency, and swiftly it becomes illegal to provide food or fuel to mandate protesters and people are arrested and/or fined. The Premier of Quebec announces he will loosen restrictions in coming days, while also tabling legislation to make vaccine passports permanent. The truckers are not fooled, as witnessed by their clarifying demands that these mandates must go away now and forever.
There is a Supreme Court case which must be decided in citizens’ favor: Can a public official, local, provincial or federal rule out constitutional individual opinions, rights and freedoms by simply declaring an emergency?
This is a conditional apology. It falls short of a full apology by suggesting only that something might have happened.
I am sorry that you . . .
This is a blame-shifting apology. It is no apology at all. Rather, it puts the onus on you as the problem.
I am sorry but . . .
This excuse-making apology does nothing to heal the wounds caused.
I was just . . .
This is a justifying apology. It seeks to argue that hurtful behavior was okay because it was harmless or for a good cause.
I have already . . .
This deja-vu apology cheapens whatever is said by implying that there is nothing left to apologize for.
I regret . . .
This sidestepping apology equates regret with apologizing. There is no ownership.
I know I . . .
This whitewashing apology is an effort to minimize what happened without owning any hurtful effects on you or others. The whitewash may seem self-effacing but on its own it contains no apology.
You know I . . .
This nothing-to-apologize-for apology tries to talk you out of your feelings or imply that you shouldnt be upset.
I will apologize if . . .
This pay-to-play apology is not a clean, freely offered apology. Rather, you have to pay to get it.
I guess I . . .
This is a phantom apology. It hints at the need for an apology, but never gives one.
X told me to apologize . . .
This is a not-my-apology apology. The person is saying he or she is apologizing only because someone else suggested it. The implication is that it would have never happened otherwise.
Fine! I’m sorry, okay!
This is a bullying apology. Either in words or tone you are given a grudging I’m sorry but it doesn’t feel like an apology. It may even feel like a threat.
Faux apologies such as these 12 seek to avoid responsibility, make excuses, shift blame, downplay what was done, invalidate or confuse the hurt or offended person, or move on prematurely.
A true apology, by contrast, has most or all of the following characteristics:
♦ Is freely offered without conditions or minimizing what was done
♦ Conveys that the person apologizing understands and cares about the hurt persons experience and feelings
♦ Conveys remorse
♦ Offers a commitment to avoid repeating the hurtful behavior
♦ Offers to make amends or provide restitution if appropriate
An authentic apology starts with listening. If you seek to apologize, you first need to hear what happened from the other person’s point of view and how it affected them.
It’s a common occurrence in winter. A patient calls a primary physician to report a nonproductive cough, slight hoarseness, muscle aches, and a low-grade fever. The physician, and likely the patient, realize that this is almost certainly a viral upper respiratory infection. If the patient were in the office, the physician may test for a streptococcal bacterial infection, but it will likely be negative.
This is probably an infection with a rhinovirus, adenovirus, or endemic coronavirus. Despite this, the afflicted patient will happily proceed to the pharmacy to pick up their prescription for an antibiotic. The patient will feel as though the physician was proactive, something the doctor certainly understands.
This prescription, however, will be of no value to the patient and may actually cause issues. Yet pharmacies in the U.S. see this type of prescription thousands of times a day.
It occurs despite the fact that physicians are constantly reminded that gratuitous antibiotic prescriptions come with side effects and can lead to antibiotic resistance. Beyond that, there is no tangible resistance to this practice from the medical establishment or healthcare authorities.
Case #2
Now let’s imagine another patient calls in. This patient also has a dry cough scratchy throat, muscle aches, and a low-grade fever. Only this patient had a COVID test kit at home and tested positive. The physician wants to prescribe a medication with no risk of bacterial resistance and a very benign side-effect profile. He’s read lots of literature to suggest it will be helpful. There are a significant number of double-blind studies showing it to be effective in the treatment of SARS Co-V2. It has been used in multiple countries with excellent results. Except, in this case, the physician will find it impossible to prescribe that medication. It will be impossible because that medication is Ivermectin. And somehow it has been removed from the market.
Not only has this FDA-approved, Nobel prize-winning drug been made unavailable, if a physician were to prescribe it, or advocate it as therapy, they are threatened with the potential loss of their medical license, their hospital affiliations, and their board certification.
Case #3
It gets even more ironic. I’ve noticed that some physicians are prescribing a very common antibiotic called azithromycin for their COVID patients. It is well understood that for COVID-19 when taken alone, it is of no value. There is absolutely no data to show efficacy in COVID-19. It has the same potential problems, as when it is prescribed for other viral infections. Yet the practice goes on, again unimpeded.
Let’s go one step further. Levofloxacin is another antibiotic, introduced in 1996. It was unusual in that it can treat a broad variety of infections, even those that are severe but can be given orally. Because of this, it was overutilized, threatening to create drug resistance.
In 2016, the FDA issued a black box warning because of several severe side effects including tendon rupture, peripheral nerve damage, for them and psychosis. Since then its usage has waned.
The drug was proposed as a treatment for COVID early in the pandemic but proved to have limited antiviral activity.
Case #4
So I posed this hypothetical to several pharmacist friends: If a physician called in a prescription for azithromycin, or even levofloxacin, and gave the diagnosis of COVID-19, would they fill the prescription? The answer was yes, as there would be nothing to prevent it. So, in other words, a physician is permitted to prescribe useless antibiotics, even those with serious adverse reactions according to the FDA for COVID-19 infection.
If, as apparently the FDA believes, ivermectin is similarly useless but benign, why is it alone being blocked?
Doing the Math
Let’s do some mathematics. As of this writing, there are roughly 890,000 deaths recorded in the United States related to COVID-19. I think most people understand that a lot of these deaths are not due to the virus but from other comorbid conditions. The CDC has long stated that the number of deaths from COVID where there was no comorbid condition (In other words, healthy people who died from COVID) is roughly 7% of the total (65,000). In several meta-analyses, Ivermectin was shown to be roughly 65% effective at preventing serious disease and/or death. So, in the best-case scenario for them, our public health organizations, by suppressing Ivermectin, may be responsible for roughly 40,000 deaths.
In fact, the vast majority of people who actually died from COVID had multiple comorbid conditions, so that number could be much higher.
I need to acknowledge that prescribing antibiotics for viral infections is something that the primary caregivers struggle with. Patients expect them to do something when they’re sick. They don’t appreciate being told to go home and take acetaminophen. Some may never come back and seek care elsewhere.
Yet patients have accepted that exact recipe for dealing with COVID-19, a disease they perceive may actually kill them.
So what’s the difference between prescriptions written for an anti-bacterial, versus Ivermectin, which is an anti-parasitic agent, for a viral infection? Both primarily target infectious agents other than viruses. If anything, even it was futile therapy, Ivermectin is safer than the antibiotics discussed. Yet it is the only medication that has been effectively banned
Given all this, I think it’s easy to suspect that the FDA, the NIH, and the CDC actually understand the potential benefits of Ivermectin and other repurposed drugs. But they also realize that these medications threaten the profits of the pharmaceutical industry with which they are financially entwined.
Case #5
What makes this even more infuriating is the government’s warm embrace of two new antiviral medications, Pfizer’s Paxlovid, and Merck’s Molnupivinir. These drugs have exactly one company-sponsored study each to vouch for their efficacy. Merck’s drug, by its own testing, is only 39% effective in reducing severe disease and/or death. There are no long-term safety data for either medication.
Yet both have received emergency use authorization, and have suddenly popped up on government-approved treatment protocols.
As I look towards the end of my career, I’ve seen a lot of profit-oriented behavior by pharmaceutical companies. I think of the me-too drugs, molecules that are only slightly different than their now off-patent predecessors aggressively marketed to physicians. I’ve seen pharmaceutical reps actually reimburse physicians for a certain number of prescriptions written for their medications. I’ve seen manipulation of the rules regarding inhaled medications to maintain their patents long after they would have expired.
But if they actively suppressed the adoption of useful medications during a pandemic, then this is beyond the pale. It would suggest a total collapse of any morality or sense of responsibility within the pharmaceutical industry and their partners in the regulatory agencies.
I hope that someday, our investigatory agencies can push past the vast political power these companies have acquired through their burgeoning profits, and find out the truth.
I’m not optimistic.
Henry F Smith Jr. MD FCCP practices Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
OTTAWA: The Justice Centre today challenged Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson over his accusation that peacefully protesting truckers are “a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property.”
Mayor Watson has not divulged publicly what facts he might rely on to justify his assessment of truckers as posing “a danger of major proportions,” in light of their law-abiding behaviour since arriving in Ottawa more than one week ago.
The definition of “emergency” under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act is “a situation or an impending situation that constitutes a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property and that is caused by the forces of nature, a disease or other health risk, an accident or an act whether intentional or otherwise;”
“This is a truly disturbing overreach and misuse of emergency powers,” stated lawyer Nicholas Wansbutter.
According to affidavit evidence filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Freedom Convoy has been working closely with the Ottawa Police Service, the RCMP, and the Parliamentary Protective Service. It was one of the Freedom Convoy truckers who reported to police a property damage offence and an assault, committed by individuals not affiliated with the truckers. Convoy leaders have asked all truckers to refrain from honking their horns between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.
One of the witnesses in the court action has stated under oath that truckers and their supporters “are feeding the homeless on Wellington Street and filling their backpacks with food. Truckers have taken a whole trailer full of food to the homeless shelter. Truckers are maintaining the cleanliness of city streets, including picking up discarded masks on the ground, centralized garbage collection, shoveling snow at the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue, and decorating and providing security for the War Memorial and Terry Fox statue.”
Another witness, an Ottawa resident, swears that “the truckers I have interacted with have, at all times, been friendly, courteous, humble, considerate and peaceful. I have not observed any aggressive or inappropriate behaviours.” He says the truckers are diverse, including Sikhs, Blacks, Aboriginals and others. He has “observed truckers decorating the tomb of the unknown soldier with flowers and guarding it” and has “not seen any violent or threatening behaviour.” He notes that “the truckers do not honk their horns at night. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the Freedom Convoy during the day.” He asserts: “My ability to park and to travel in downtown Ottawa, or to and from Parliament Hill has not been impeded by the presence of the truckers.”
Another Ottawa resident, who works for Statistics Canada, describes reality on the ground as follows: “The protesters were peaceful and respectful, I saw no violence or harassment. I was not impeded in any way, and could walk about freely and safely. I did not see any hateful symbols, in fact, I saw an abundance of Canada flags and Quebec flags as well as countless signs calling for freedom and the end of Covid related mandates. I did see some anti-Trudeau flags using harsh language. However, I would describe the scene as a peaceful, pro-freedom demonstration. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the downtown demonstrations.”
“There is no factual basis to support the Mayor’s declaration of an emergency,” concludes Mr. Wansbutter.
Ben Bartee writes at Daily Bell COVID Propaganda Roundup. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
How the Biomedical State Maintains the ‘All the Experts Agree’ False Consensus
The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.
We’ve previously explored the mind-numbing “experts say” mantra that the corporate media parrots non-stop. Talking heads incessantly implore the peasant class to “respect the science.”
The purpose is to create a mirage of consensus in order to discourage real journalists or normal people from looking into matters themselves. This tactic is pervasive, but nowhere has it been more widely employed than in the COVID era.
Because, if three key facts were permitted to infect the public consciousness, they would inevitably result in mass upheaval of the ruling class that perches on top of society, feeding on it like vultures:
A.) the original virus almost certainly escaped from a Wuhan lab (if it wasn’t purposely released; let’s not underestimate the hubris of the biomedical state). Worse, that leaky Chinese lab relied on funding from the United States National Institutes of Health (funneled through a “non-profit” called EcoHealth Alliance) to perform dangerous the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
B.) The vaccines (which are actually mRNA gene therapies) do not work to prevent infection as promisedand cause extensive side effects that were covered up in the original trials.
C.) The “social distancing” lockdown measures – which plunged untold billions worldwide into poverty, death, and despair – were totally ineffective at preventing the spread of the virus: “Shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits.” Imagine the criminality of all the suffering for no good reason.
At every turn, the “experts” got it wrong.
The biomedical state uses multiple mechanisms to discourage scientists from dissenting from the approved narrative
You’ve heard the talking point ad nauseam: “99% of scientists agree the vaccines are safe and effective.”
First of all, that figure is not vindicated by any actual polling; it’s just an offhand catchphrase.
Second, what happens to scientists who deviate from the “safe and effective” slogan?
♦ Their message will get censored or distorted (or both) ♦ Might lose their professional license ♦ Ostracized by their peers ♦ If they’re a researcher, they’ll risk wrecking their career and losing critical funding from NIH and pharma corps.
JFK Jr. explains:
“As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward.”
And, You’ll get smeared in the corporate media
Exhibit A: Epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford – three of the most highly-regarded mainstream institutes of higher learning in the world – authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.
The gist of the document (which you can read here) is that a COVID Zero policy (the elimination of the SARS-CoV-2) virus in the population is a pipe dream. The social distancing and lockdown orders had devastating effects on public physical and mental health. Those at risk of severe illness or death from infectious disease should be protected while the non-vulnerable (the vast majority of the population) should resume normal life.
Those rational, science-based propositions should have been aired publicly in a healthy national debate.
But, predictably, open debate is not how Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, NIH Director, do things. Instead of debating the merits of the Barrington Declaration, Collins sent an email to Fauci on Oct 8 (later leaked) that read:
“This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists… seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt and Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t think like that on line yet – is it underway?”
Does that sound like the language of a public health servant doing God’s work to protect the people from a deadly virus – or that of a cynical political operative?
Is coordinating a media hitjob on ideological opponents part of the NIH Director’s job description?
More importantly, though, if they can orchestrate a smear campaign against three “fringe” epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, what signal does that send to a run-of-the-mill MD in Wisconsin who might be inclined to ask critical questions?
The message is obvious: “shut your mouth or we’ll come for you.”
It doesn’t matter how good the analyst is if the data is fake…
The conclusion will likely be faulty – even if the scientist is immune to the social pressures to conform to the narrative.
We reported previously on Pfizer’s vaxx trial fraud in which the company’s contractor intentionally hid side effects of the drug.
The reported COVID fatality rate was dramatically over-counted by the governing authorities.
Hospitals counted fatal motorcycle accidents as COVID deaths merely because the victim tested positive for the virus before succumbing to his injuries.
CDC Director Refuses to Answer: Dying ‘With COVID’ vs Dying ‘From COVID
Even the corporate media has been forced to confront the obvious rouse.
Via Newsweek:
“‘When asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier if there was a breakdown of how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. were ‘from COVID’ or ‘with COVID,’ Walensky gave a non-committal answer.”
Notice that Baier asked about the alleged 836,000 deaths over the course of the two-year pandemic.Walensky, in a bid to avoid answering, finds a lame excusing by pivoting to the Omicron death count, which is barely weeks old.
Do you think that the average “expert” — a college professor teaching public health at a mid-size state school, or an epidemiologist researching Ebola or some other totally unrelated pathogen – has the time, resources, or personal dedication to parse the CDC’s COVID bullshit from the veritas?
Or are they just going to follow the lead of the “expert” higher up on the food chain?
Is the average scientist human or superhuman?
The above is how the “consensus”-rigging game is played, and why you should never again place a modicum of trust in the rotten biomedical establishment, nor the scientists who vocally support it.
Supporters arrive at Parliament Hill for the Freedom Truck Convoy to protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions in Ottawa, Canada, on January 29, 2022. – Hundreds of truckers drove their giant rigs into the Canadian capital Ottawa on Saturday as part of a self-titled “Freedom Convoy” to protest vaccine mandates required to cross the US border. LARS HAGBERG / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
If the prime minister of a North African or Middle Eastern nation was forced into hiding by a protest occupying his capital city, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton would materialize from thin air to call for U.S.-backed regime change.
“Government Loses Popular Support,” newspaper headlines would blare, amid calls for sanctions, State Department-NGO initiatives and the inevitable “nation-building” exercises.
Justin Trudeau can rest easy, however.
No such song and dance routine is in store for America’s northerly neighbor despite thousands of protesting truckers in Ottawa sending the prime minister underground. While imagining intervention in America’s northerly neighbor rightly seems risible, it does bring President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” to mind. We expect Canadians can handle their own affairs. Those Arab Spring nations of yesteryear obviously needed the Western man’s help, though.
But increasingly, it appears Canadian politicians are not actually demonstrating an ability to manage their own affairs, nor to bring logic or rationality to this scenario, brought about by some of the most restrictive COVID-19 policies in the world.
Nor, until now, has it appeared they cared when anyone raised objections to those policies.
Only when thousands of truckers replete with their 18-wheel freedom-fighting machines descended on Ottawa did the Canadian government begin to acknowledge the existence of dissenters in their midst. This very fact is the political casus belli for the protesters on Parliament Hill. It is also why they shouldn’t leave until some very concrete demands are both met and kept. There should be a prolonged presence of truckers in Canada’s capital.
It appears to be the only language Trudeau’s government understands.
Were it not for a compliant national media willing to almost exclusively echo the claims of the government, the situation could have already resolved itself with a hasty Trudeau exit from office.
Canada’s broadcasters have focused their attention on the appearance of two flags—one Nazi, one Confederate—at protests over the past week. The culprits remain as elusive as the January 6th pipe bomber, though their presence has allowed the government to paint tens of thousands as extremists, racists or worse.
According to the CBC, “there’s concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as the protest grows, and perhaps even instigating it from the outset.”
[Note: Journalists showed great imagination in making the leap linking the convoy to Putin. No such creativity was applied to finding the identity of a person, the only one in the crowd wearing a mask, only one who waved a swastika. I’ll do the media lackeys’ work for them: It was someone who knew the act served the interests of the leftist media and government, so most likely Antifa or a wannabe.]
Even when acting Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen (no, not that one) tasked the government with offering an olive branch and reaching a resolution to the impasse on Parliament Hill, Trudeau’s stand-in, Chrystia Freeland, pivoted to blanket statements condemning the swastika, as if such condemnation were even necessary in the Canadian parliamentary chamber circa 2022.
Bergen rightly riposted, “That, I’m afraid, is classic gaslighting.”
It’s an appropriate characterization of the Canadian government’s approach thus far. A prime minister in hiding, a national capital in counter-lockdown, and the government’s most critical concern is the freshly unfolded flag of a defunct foreign navy that existed almost 200 years ago and 1600 miles away.
Meanwhile, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta are bucking the national trend, announcing an end to COVID-related restrictions. It’s quick progress for an actual peaceful protest that has yet to cause billions of dollars in damages, injure or kill any cops or seek anything but constitutionally guaranteed liberties.
It is of course a back-handed compliment to right-populism that the antagonistic shrieks are less, “Oh my God, what are they doing?” and more, “Oh my God what might they secretly believe in?” It’s also a sign that there is a long road ahead, as politicians and the media attempt to ascribe ulterior motives to the protesters’ actions.
Like France’s gilets jaunes, Canada’s “freedom convoy” may find itself entrenched against its own establishment for some time, and they might just inspire American counterparts.
Yes, the old communist call of “workers of the world, unite!” may have been successfully appropriated by the political Right. The next line isn’t, “No, not like that!” but, truer to what Marx originally expressed, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The denigration of the Canadian trucker protest convoy exemplifies how freedom is now the biggest villain of the Covid-19 pandemic. A Washington Post cartoonist portrayed the trucker convoy as “fascism” incarnate while another Post column derided the “toxic ‘Freedom Convoy.’” Anyone who resists any government command is apparently now a public enemy.
The trucker protest was spurred by the Canadian government’s sweeping Covid vaccine mandate. Many truckers believe the risks of the vaccine outweighs the benefit and, more importantly, that they have the right to control their own bodies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared on Monday, “There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred.” Except for the hatred Trudeau whips up by denouncing vaccine mandate opponents as “racist” and “misogynistic.” And except for the “threats” and “violence” used by government enforcement agents to compel submission to any pandemic decree issued by Trudeau or other politicians.
Since the start of this pandemic, many people who boasted of their trust in “science and data” also believed that absolute power would keep them safe. According to their scorecard, anyone who objected to government commands was the equivalent of a heretic who must be condemned if not banished from everyplace except the cemetery. North of the border, Quebec epitomizes this intolerance with its new edict prohibiting unvaccinated individuals from shopping at Costco or Walmart.
The same critics who latch onto any obnoxious behavior by a few wayward Canadian truckers (MSNBC denounced them as a “cult”)’ to condemn freedom are also happy to exonerate any American politician who pointlessly destroyed freedom during the pandemic with bizarre edicts. In December 2020, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” The mayor (who was caught violating California mask mandates at the NFC championship game) offered no evidence to justify placing four million residents under house arrest. Governor Ralph Northam dictated that all Virginians must stay indoors from midnight until 5 a.m, with a few narrow exceptions. Federal judge William Stickman IV condemned Pennsylvania’s restrictions:
“Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.”
Preventing politicians from obliterating freedom is now the worst form of tyranny. On Thanksgiving Eve 2020, the Supreme Court struck down Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s edict that limited religious gatherings in New York to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate. The Court declared that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf warned that the Supreme Court was becoming “a place like Gilead — the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Many progressives talk as if America faces a choice between reckless freedom and paternalism – i.e., submission to a benevolent elite. But regardless of Fauci’s boundless conceit, omniscient officials have yet to come to the rescue. Government agencies have blundered catastrophically since the start of the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control bollixed America’s initial response by sending out faulty, contaminated test kits to health agencies that failed to detect the rapidly spreading virus. Governors panicked and shut down schools, resulting in vast losses in learning and widening the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. The vast majority of small businesses were locked down and thousands were bankrupted in a futile effort to prevent an airborne virus from continuing to spread. Placing scores of millions of people under house arrest led to record-breaking fatalities for drug overdoses and a tidal wave of depression and anxiety. New York City’s covid vaccine passport regime failed to prevent the Big Apple from becoming the hottest spot in the nation for the omicron variant.
President Biden portrayed the vaccines as a magic bullet and falsely promised that people who got injected would not get Covid. The C.D.C. stopped counting “breakthrough” cases of Covid among the fully vaccinated, paving the way for a resurgence of the virus that has now infected more than 70 million Americans. Or maybe 200+ million Americans since C.D.C. previously stated that only one in four cases are diagnosed and reported. Whatever. The Food and Drug Administration is seeking to delay fully disclosing Pfizer’s application for its Covid vaccine approval for 75 years. After Biden issued a mandate that forced hospitals to fire healthy unvaccinated nurses, the CDC said it was OK for hospitals to rely on Covid positive nurses to treat patients – one of the biggest absurdities of the pandemic.
Freedom is not a panacea for every challenge in life. But it is far superior to boundless submission to tinhorn dictators who know far less than they claim. Politicians like Trudeau and Biden who fuel mass rage against any group that does not kowtow to officialdom are sowing seeds of hatred that will proliferate long after the pandemic ends.
In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.
Which poll do you think better reflects the mood of Canada? The professional one with a select panel of participants or the reaction of tens of thousands on social media?
As the Freedom Convoy 2022 rolls toward Ottawa, a national poll reveals “only one-in-three Canadian’s fully support allowing unvaccinated truckers to cross the US/Canada border.”
A “national survey,” posted Thursday by Maru Public Opinion, indicates just “28%” are for truckers crossing border “without any difficulty in order to deliver food, goods, and other materials to a variety of Canadian destinations.”
Says Maru: “On the other hand, a full majority (72%) of Canadians believe that the borders should be flat out closed to truckers unless they are either fully vaccinated (36%) or, as an alternative middle-ground between the two extremes of being barred or having unfettered access, they show proof of the results of a negative COVID test taken within the previous 72-hours (36%).”
But unlike with most polls, this time there is something to compare it to. For example, while highly-respected Maru’s survey, put out by the company and not paid for by a sponsor, said it polled 1,500 people across the country, a GoFundMe page posted this month has raised more than $6.2 million from more than 80,000 donors.
And a Freedom Convoy 2022 Facebook page — Convoy to Ottawa 2022 — has more than 700,000 followers. Not exactly a “small fringe” group of people, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed Wednesday.
Trudeau’s harsh words toward this group, and the scrutiny the media has put it under, outweighs vetting other polls typically get.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre dealt with that double standard Thursday as he asked reporters “when was the last time the press gallery went through the social media posts of every single person attending a left-wing protest to find and report every crazy comment made” while saying it’s wrong to “disparage the thousands of hard-working, law-abiding and peaceful truckers, who quite frankly have kept all of you alive.”
Some professional polls may show low support for the convoy, but tens of thousands of Canadians, who put their money where their mouths are, may disagree.
Update Feb. 4:
Canadian truckers protesting COVID-19 rules said they are lawyering up after GoFundMe suspended their fundraising page. The page surpassed its $10 million goal, but GoFundMe pulled the plug as it investigates the effort for potential violations.
“This fundraiser is currently paused and under review to ensure it complies with our terms of service and applicable laws and regulations,” read a notice at the top of the convoy’s GoFundMe page. “Our team is working 24/7 and doing all we can to protect both organizers and donors. Thank you for your patience.”
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a Calgary-based firm, confirmed it is representing the Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa and “has a team of lawyers on the ground providing legal assistance and advice.”
The U.S. press, like the U.S. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.
The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works.
The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity.
What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. “The culture of lying,” he writes, “is the discourse and behavior of officials seeking to enlist the powers of journalism in support of their goals, and of journalists seeking to co-opt public and private officials into their efforts to find and cover stories of crisis and emergency response. It is the medium through which we Americans conduct most of our public business (and a lot of our private business) these days.” The result, he says, is a distortion of the constitutional role of government into an institution that must continually resolve or appear to resolve crises; it functions in “a new and powerful permanent emergency mode of operation.”
Wary of making decisions based on opinion or belief, the U.S. public has come to rely on facts, data, surveys, and presumably scientific studies. People are increasingly reluctant to believe any assertion that is not supported by statistical research. Yet, Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.”
A growing industry has thus developed to create the research to legitimize policy positions or marketing objectives. Public policy debates now commonly revolve around competing estimates of cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of a proposal. Much of the health care debate raged around differing estimates of the numbers of citizens without health coverage and the costs of the various proposals to cover them. When President Bill Clinton promised Congress that he would rely on the forecasts of federal spending and deficits of the Congressional Budget Office rather than on those of the executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget, the representatives and senators cheered; they consider the CBO’s forecasts to be more favorable to Congress’s spending proclivities than those of the more cautious OMB.
Concocted or inaccurate surveys and studies taint our perceptions of what is true, and they distort public policy debates. Crossen concurs with Weaver that the media’s desire for drama encourages the distortion and corruption of public decision making. “The media are willing victims of bad information, and increasingly they are producers of it. They take information from self-interested parties and add to it another layer of self-interest—the desire to sell information.”
A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.”
Footnote:
If you read the excerpts or followed the link, you will have realized this knowledge was published in the Harvard Business Review May-June 1995.
Ben Bartee writes at Daily Bell 
Science Matters 