OPINION:
One by one, the myths and lies propagated by the ruling elites about COVID-19 are falling like dominoes.
What was supposed to have been “misinformation” is the real deal.
The “wet market” theory, which never made sense, is turning out to be all wet. Major government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — now say that the virus probably leaked from China’s Wuhan virology lab. It didn’t come from a bat sandwich after all.
Likewise, the lockdowns imposed all over the country did not slow the pandemic but did enormous damage. A year ago, Johns Hopkins issued a meta-analysis stating that while “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”
We now know that natural immunity derived from infection is far superior to that of the so-called vaccines, which prevent neither infection nor transmission. The February edition of the liberal Lancet medical journal reviewed 68 studies, concluding that the vaccines lose effectiveness sooner than natural immunity.
Keep in mind that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities dismissed natural immunity in favor of the vaccines for nearly two years.
“The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern,” Allysia Finley wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.”
The CDC owes an apology to the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, not to mention the public. Released in October 2020 and now signed by nearly a million “infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists,” the declaration recommends targeting shots to vulnerable people (older adults and those with other health conditions) and achieving herd immunity by allowing the healthy and young to get COVID-19 as they would any other virus.
For this medically sound advice, the Barrington signers were slandered and canceled. On Oct. 8, 2020, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins sent an email to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?” A week later, Dr. Collins told The Washington Post: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”
Had the Barrington declaration been heeded, the pandemic may have ended far sooner, with many deaths avoided, including those from adverse reactions to the shots.
We’ve also learned that researchers never believed the vaccines would stop the COVID-19 outbreak, just provide “early partial epidemic control.”
We know this because Dr. Fauci signed on to a paper a few weeks ago for the journal Cell Host & Microbe, “Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenza viruses, and other respiratory viruses.” The authors of the Jan. 11 paper acknowledge that “Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.”
Remember, the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson shots are experimental. They all got emergency authorization without long-term impact studies.
Yet Dr. Fauci aggressively pushed the zero-COVID narrative that natural immunity was a myth and that millions would die if we did not all get the shots. This led to school closings and unconstitutional and destructive mandates, including the expulsion of 8,000 people serving in the armed forces who refused the shots.
In November 2021, Dr. Fauci told CBS that Republicans who disagreed with him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” So is lockstep obedience to ruling elites.
The vaccines have been a huge success for some. Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson have racked up tens of billions of dollars and are now pushing the shots for infants.
Another big winner is the Democrats, who leveraged fear of COVID-19 into loosening election laws, mailing out millions of ballots and engaging in ballot harvesting, the easiest path to vote fraud. The other big winner is China, which lied about the virus and let it travel all over the world via flights out of Wuhan in 2019 and 2020. Meanwhile, China monopolized access to pandemic equipment and sold literally trillions of masks while dealing a crippling blow to America’s economy.
Speaking of masks, a meta-analysis published in the Cochrane Review on Jan. 30 concluded that masks make little to no difference in preventing the transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses.
On Feb. 22, The New York Times ran Bret Stephens’ column on the Cochrane findings, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Earlier, they would have accused him of being a “science denier.”
The ruling elites and their media misled us about everything from the virus’s origin to the efficacy of masks, vaccines, lockdowns, school closings and alternative treatments. The government pressured Twitter, Facebook and other social media to throttle dissent, labeling it “misinformation.” Facebook is still doing it.
Still, when even the far-left New York Times feels the need to let some light shine through the woke darkness, a new day may be dawning.
Perhaps next, they’ll permit a closer look at climate “science.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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