Or, COVID Restrictions, Masks, and Face Shields as Modern Superstition
From Tom Woods, Warning: good COVID news
This is a bit of a potpourri issue. Item #1 is crazy California, but by the end you’ll see how the rest are all good.
(1) If you want to make sense of the various COVID restrictions, especially the insane ones that make no sense and will clearly do nothing to keep anyone “safe,” this general principle seems to work every time:
Forget trying to find “science” in these restrictions. Imagine instead that the principle is “curtail or eliminate things that bring people joy, and demand things that cause them pain or grave inconvenience.” That principle, rather than “science,” appears to explain every restriction I’ve seen.
I just encountered another example of this.
I’m taking a quick trip to southern California with my 11-year-old daughter next week so I’ve been trying to figure out, in light of the ongoing reopening, what is available for us to do while there.
She’s never been to a drive-in movie, so I was considering that.
When I got to the website of one such theatre, I was met with this: “In accordance with L.A. County guidelines, double features are not permitted.”
Evidently double features — performed while you’re completely isolated in the car — are a driver of infection!
I give up trying to figure out how even the most superstitious person can believe this stuff.
(2) Speaking of superstitious, here’s New York’s lieutenant governor two days ago visiting a restored 1924 carousel on the Buffalo waterfront:
Think of the lives she saved by wearing a mask on an empty carousel! Inanimate horses must be especially vulnerable to the variants.
(3) On the last day of May let’s look back to the CDC’s warning of a COVID surge because of the “variant” bogeyman. Since that prediction, cases are down by just about 50%:
From Tom Woods, WaPo stealthily edits headline 15 months later
Joe Biden might wish he’d never said that thing about the repeal of mask mandates being “neanderthal thinking,” given that those states have done no worse than any others, but since no reporter has challenged him on it, he’s gotten a pass.
In case you’re curious, here’s what the graph looks like:
And one last thing: one of my friends just reminded us, given the recent panic over the “Indian variant,” about what happened after the allegedly devastating UK variant became dominant here in the United States:
Although normality is being restored here and there, we all know people who are clinging to doomsday living for dear life. So the craziness has its own set of variants.
From Tom Woods, The Fauci Emails
Well, everyone is talking about the emails.
You know the ones I mean: the Dr. Fauci emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
I’m going through them to see what exactly they tell us that we didn’t know already, and I’ll be doing tomorrow’s episode of the Tom Woods Show on the subject.
(The show, remember, is the key thing I do; this newsletter is but a pale approximation of the episodes I release every weekday.)
Now when I say everyone is talking about them, I’m exaggerating a bit.
According to Tom Elliott of the Grabien media service, as of ten hours ago, when Tom posted this, here are the statistics regarding the time devoted to the Fauci emails:
FOX News Channel: 116 mentions; 3 hours and 48 minutes of coverage
CNN: 1 mention; 28 seconds of coverage
MSNBC: 1 mention; 5 seconds of coverage
The Biden White House came to the defense of Fauci without addressing any of the particulars in the emails. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said today, “The president and the administration feel that Dr. Fauci has played an incredible role in getting the pandemic under control, being a voice to the public throughout the course of the pandemic.”
Yahoo News added this, “Fauci has long been a lightning rod for criticism in the culture war around COVID because of his advocacy for mask wearing, among other measures to combat the virus.”
Notice that Yahoo simply assumes that mask wearing combats the virus, thereby making it appear that critics of Fauci must perversely favor the spread of the virus.
I especially like how the devastation of millions of people’s livelihoods, savings, and physical and mental health is subsumed under the anodyne phrase “other measures to combat the virus.”
For this topic, stay tuned for episode #1911 of the Tom Woods Show.
Meanwhile, some great news, which as usual nobody is celebrating: the United States just hit the lowest COVID case numbers since late March 2020 — and since we’re testing five times more now than we were then, the news is even better:
As long as we’re on good news, here are two items for you:
(1) By March 2021, Census Bureau data showed that the percentage of K-12 students being homeschooled had risen from 3.3 percent before the COVID fiasco to all the way to 11.1 percent. That’s at least a silver lining to the horrific ordeal of 2020.
As you know, I’m partial to the Ron Paul Curriculum, since I created 400 videos on history and government for it, and because in addition to the standard subjects we also teach skills that students need but rarely get in school: how to manage money, how to be an effective public speaker, and how to run a small business, among others.
Join the Ron Paul Curriculum through my link and I’ll throw in some great bonuses, including a signed copy of my New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. My link: RonPaulHomeschool.com.
(2) I’m throwing a huge party for normal people, in the form of the 2000th Tom Woods Show episode live event in Orlando, Florida. It costs nothing to attend. This event is my gift to you.
From Tom Woods, CDC pretends adolescents in danger and need you know what
Perhaps you’ve noticed that in recent days there’s been a hysterical drive to make it appear that hospitalizations among children aged 12 to 17 are on some kind of unique rise (with the not particularly subtle subtext that the vaccination of people in this age group is suddenly very urgent).
I am sure that without even looking into the details, you knew this was nonsense.
We have too much experience with hysterical claims like these not to smell a rat.
And you were right.
One of my friends, who helped design my COVID charts quiz, debunked it. I am sharing the debunking, complete with charts, with you.
Here goes:
“The latest CDC MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) study released today is being used by major media outlets to suggest COVID hospitalizations are rising in 12-17 year old children — except they aren’t. The CDC’s own data contradicts this. The CDC cherry-picked dates in their study to push a narrative.
“First, let’s look at the time they cut off their study: April 24th. Based on the graph below, you do see increased hospitalization rates in 12-17 year olds from March to April 24th:
Coincidentally, April 24th was also when hospitalizations peaked and declined for these age groups. Why did the CDC end their study right at this point, I wonder?
“‘Rising hospitalizations’ also misses very important context – hospitalizations were rising in all age groups around this time frame in the spring — even the most-vaccinated cohort (> 65) — and at faster rates. Yet they use this study to justify why teen vaccinations are needed.”
(TW note: In case you can’t see the key in the graph below, the orange line on the top is 65 and over, the blue line is the overall number, and that dashed line at the bottom that barely registers at all is the terrible apocalypse of hospitalizations among the 12-17 age group that is supposed to make their vaccinations urgent.)
“Something in this MMWR study that is worth mentioning, though: almost HALF (172 out of 376) of ‘COVID’ hospitalizations in this age group were likely there for something other than COVID — further supporting the claim that child COVID hospitalization numbers are inflated.
“Additionally, of the 172 children admitted to the hospital, but not for COVID, over 44% were there for psychiatric care. This seems like a pretty alarming number, but we’d need to see what the baseline is for psychiatric admissions of adolescents.
“It’s becoming increasingly obvious the CDC is not an unbiased, agenda-free scientific organization. Just a month ago it was found they let teachers unions influence school reopening guidance. Their reputation rightfully continues to quickly deteriorate.”
From Tom Woods, Another lying COVID liar caught red handed, deletes Twitter account
First, an additional note from yesterday, when I exploded the nonsense about the adolescents supposedly seeing a spike in hospitalizations. If you missed that one, read it. It’s a reminder of the kind of lies these lying liars tell.
Yesterday a nurse in Augusta, Georgia, who has spread unfounded fear in the past, posted a Tweet saying that a whole bunch of adolescents were in her hospital with COVID and were being treated with ventilators.
My friend Eric then pointed out that there is a grand total of two COVID patients in the entire Augusta hospital system right now, so the story had to be false.
Suddenly, our nurse locked her Tweets so the world couldn’t read them.
Why are people like this?
Early on, back in March 2020, Michigan physician Dr. Patrick Wiater claimed that his “ICU in the hospital is full of young adults on ventilators fighting for their lives.”
The hospital then issued a correction:
From Tom Woods, Another “mitigation measure” they now admit is pointless
Now it’s the plexiglass barriers.
Anyone with half a brain knew these things were stupid.
Joseph Allen of the Harvard School of Public Health had been saying from the beginning that the virus was airborne, and that plexiglass shields weren’t going to stop tiny floating droplets.
Only last month did the CDC fully acknowledge that the virus was airborne.
“We spent a lot of time and money focused on hygiene theater,” Allen said.
Not a single study has found these barriers to do a bit of good; if anything, by interfering with ventilation, too much plexiglass has even been found to be slightly detrimental.
Epidemiologist Shira Doron of Tufts Medical Center, while admitting that “there’s no research” in support of the use of plexiglass barriers, insisted on the principle: “If it might help, and it makes sense, and it doesn’t hurt, then do it.”
It’s been on that basis that all kinds of crazy and stupid measures have been forced on us that practically everyone has to know don’t actually do anything.
It calls to mind the anecdotal evidence we read about regarding people and masks. Even though they’ve been vaccinated and the CDC says they can take the masks off, people seem to keep them on for purely irrational reasons: to signal that they’re not Republican, to “show respect,” because everyone is doing it, and so on.
If there’s any “science” in any of this, it isn’t exactly obvious.
From Tom Woods, Guess which lunatic is releasing a book
Well, one of the worst hysterics is publishing a book.
It’s Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response, by Andy Slavitt, former Biden COVID adviser.
You can tell from the title: it’ll be the usual, predictable nonsense.
If only we hadn’t been “selfish,” and if only our leaders had done X or Y, blah blah blah.
Andy, we did do X and Y. The signs of the wreckage are everywhere.
These people live in a dream world where we implemented the principles of the Great Barrington Declaration. No, Andy, we did what you wanted. The closed businesses, the despair, the ruined lives — the evidence is all around you.
There is zero correlation between lockdown stringency and health outcomes anywhere.
But here’s some correlation for you: not one country with less than 40 percent of its people overweight had a problem with COVID. Not one.
Every single such country had a death rate lower than 10 in 100,000.
There isn’t a lot that the state can do about that, so politicians rarely even bother pointing it out. All the plexiglass barriers in the world, and all the pretending that walking to your table in a restaurant without a mask is going to give someone COVID, can’t overcome that.
And remember, when Andy was asked point-blank on MSNBC about why places that ignored his advice were doing no worse than those who were ruining people’s lives by following it to the letter, he had no answer.
I’m not exaggerating. He could not explain why his advice made no difference at all.
The entirety of his answer was: “Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little bit beyond our explanation.”
And this guy thinks he’s in a position to write a book lecturing all of us about everything we did wrong.
I’m waiting for the Scott Atlas book. That one will tell us what we need to know about what really went on, and the arbitrariness of the “guidance” we were given. (Really, how can any thinking person not snicker at the phrase “CDC guidance” at this point?) And yes, such a book is coming, as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya told me on the Tom Woods Show.
Acrosss the Stars 