Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have assured worried populations that their policies would contain the virus, prevent infections, and save lives. After two weeks of shutting down the country and sealing ourselves off, we would “flatten the curve” and then proceed with our lives as normal.
As we round out the second year of the “two weeks,” I also recall that Biden’s COVID advisor Dr. Anthony Facui assured us that once we hit 70% vaccination rates, we would no longer see surges in coronavirus cases.
NIAID director Anthony Fauci told the Washington Post leadership summit Thursday that if 70% of Americans get at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine by July 4, the U.S. could avoid a case surge later in the year. Fauci called the COVID-19 vaccine a “positive wild card” that wasn’t present in the previous case upticks, but urged the U.S. to continue aggressively vaccinating its population.
Yet here we are with Omicron surges and chatter about amending the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include a booster.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might consider redefining what it means to be “fully vaccinated” against Covid-19 to include a third dose of vaccine — but the question is when the definition could change.Such a change is “on the table and open for discussion,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday.”That’s certainly on the table. Right now, it is a bit of semantics,” Fauci told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box.” Fauci was referring to the definition of “fully vaccinated” for the purpose of regulations or businesses that may require vaccination.”But there’s no doubt that optimum vaccination is with a booster,” he added.
One of the advantages about living through this pandemic is that we have the ability to see scientific “experts” fail in their projections in real time. We have also observed politically connected bureaucrats stifle robust and essential scientific debate, as they colluded with the media to silence well qualified opposition to the latest pet theories and policies.
For example, Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email to Facui concerned about the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement developed by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns.
The two organized a media smear campaign to paint these scientists as “fringe”.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci said Republicans who criticize him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
So if these manipulations are being done to biological science, it would be reasonable to assume they are also occurring with climate science. The challenge is that we can see the infectious disease “experts” fail in the course of a few months, versus the decades it takes for poor climate change predictions to unfold.
We can see media hustlers ginning up climate fear in real time. Instead of allowing the investigation into whether downed power lines combined with poor urban planning resulted in Colorado’s winter wildfires to be completed, many in the press immediately interject “climate crisis” into reports.
Laughing off the delusions of climate activists can no longer be the only course of action. Cambridge University Press has just published a paper that argues “authoritarian environmentalism” in the mode of the pandemic is appropriate to address the alleged climate “emergency”.
Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise.A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.
I would argue the opposite: The lockdowns were never appropriate. The failures of the pandemic response model should make us seriously question all our climate models and the projections being made from them.
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