Since the Government of Quebec under Premier François Legault decided to jump the gun today and announced the coming of “vaccine” certification on September 1st, possibly in response to the opposition’s demand for always harsher measures, I decided to post these extracts from my larger work earlier than planned. As always, the imitation of Americans is instant in Canada—this comes in the same week that New York City imposed its own “vaccine” certification system. In fact the Liberal Party in opposition added a cruel and perverse twist to the naming of the vaccine passport, calling it a “Freedom Passport”. Without the passport, no freedom, hence the indefinite suspension of the constitutional rights of a select group of Canadians, discriminated against on the basis of their health status. This must also mean that workers in “non-essential services” (does that include political parties?) will be mandated to get injected, or else be fired. A “vaccine passport” is thus also mandatory “vaccination” at the same time. Bruised by many months of lockdowns, private businesses are required to not only collaborate with the state, and agree to reduce their revenue by refusing customers, they also agree to be effectively deputized as the state’s auxiliary police service. Where under Canadian law it is stated that citizens are required to involuntarily divulge their private health information to strangers, it is not known, nor did Legault at any point cite any legal support (let alone scientific support) for this measure. We need to further analyze this obvious slide into full-fledged dictatorship, which uses a “pandemic” as a convenient cover and as a gold mine for imposing always more authoritarian measures.
Health Discrimination in Quebec
The Government of Quebec began planning to penalize the “vaccine hesitant,” by removing from them the freedom to access “non-essential services,” as defined by the government (Manitoba is also following). This is clearly a case of shaming and stigmatizing, and the invention of a threat from those who are officially libelled as a dangerous Other. Having invented a vaccine passport (in the works for several months), for which at first the government claimed there was no use, now the government reveals its intended use: to segregate the public and pressure people to allow themselves to be injected, preemptively blaming them for any rise in “cases” given spreading variants (to which the vaccinated are also clearly vulnerable, and which they can spread). The passports, using QR codes, were easily hacked in a trial, thus the system would further breach person’s private data. The federal government of Canada has not gone so far—since vaccine passports are discriminatory, divisive, and force people to reveal their personal health data—but is reportedly considering mandatory vaccination for all federal employees. Quebec Premier Legault, citing the flimsiest of evidence of increased infections (blamed on the unvaccinated, without any evidence) announced on August 5, 2021, that “vaccine passports” would indeed go into effect on September 1st. The “science” behind this, needless to say, is more akin to magic.
There has also been resistance to vaccine passports internationally, not just on the streets of Europe in massive weekly protests that the media refuse to cover, but also from the WHO. In the UK a parliamentary committee concluded that the scientific case for certification has not been made, that passports are discriminatory on prohibited grounds for discrimination, that there are valid concerns for privacy and data protection, and that such passports have “the potential to cause great damage socially and economically”. However, as noted by the Security and Policing Subgroup that advises the UK government, “Once the majority of the population is vaccinated, the exclusion of individuals who refuse vaccination may have public support” (SPI-B, “Lifting Restrictions: Security and Policing Implications,” February 10, 2021, p. 7)—thus one ostensible aim of mass vaccination is precisely to facilitate discrimination against the resistant. One report from France painted a complete picture of devastation wrought by the introduction of this certification regime, where citizens now have to qualify to enjoy inalienable human rights.
Vaccine certification is coercive, placing people under duress and violating free and informed consent; it is also entirely redundant and unnecessary if public health is really the issue. To be clear: vaccine certification is not a health or medical issue, it is political. Anything concerning inclusion/exclusion, controlling population mobility, borders, and passports, is by definition part of the political domain of the state. Highlighting the politics of vaccine passports, even the acute partisanship of the politics involved, witness Democrats in the US who applaud the entry of unvaccinated migrants from Central America, and yet simultaneously call for the exclusion of unvaccinated Americans from universities, schools, workplaces, and entertainment venues.
What is usually overlooked is that such a system of vaccine certification means the removal of basic rights for everyone in Quebec who is required to furnish proof of official approval to enter whichever establishment (a minor change in the app can change the range of access immediately): the right to participate in civic life is thus abrogated, rendering citizenship provisional and tentative. At a very minimum, this expands the already vastly expansive range of regulations that exist at all levels of government in Quebec, a multiplication of powers of oversight and surveillance that render personal autonomy fictitious. When people comply with this, they agree that all aspects of their everyday behaviour are now subject to licensing.
Testing the Logic of the Passport
Examine the logic of the Quebec government’s decision. For this purpose I will use a semi-fictionalized example based on elements of my own routine, and for this purpose the reader will need to assume that the person in question has not been vaccinated. Let’s begin: schools are declared essential services, so there will be no vaccine discrimination when accessing them. Professor X teaches at a university in Montreal, but does not live in the city. To get to that university, Professor X spends 1.5 hours on a heavily packed train. In the train station itself in Montreal, there is a sandwich and coffee bar, in the middle of masses of people swirling around it—there is no feasible way of barring entry, since it has no walls and no door. After the train station, Professor X switches to a crowded Metro system. He arrives at his campus’ Metro stop, and shuffles in a massive throng of people to go up escalators. Then he squeezes into a packed elevator. He arrives at a packed classroom with no windows and poor ventilation. Class lasts three hours. That is just part of the work for that day. After all is done, on his way out of Montreal, he decides to stop at a restaurant near the campus, to have a bite alone—and it is there where he is barred entry.
(Not only that: within the very same building where Professor X teaches and has his office, there are two cafes and a pub—one of the cafes has only two walls—presumably, he will be denied access to services within the same building and among the same people to which he delivers his service.)
Everywhere else, he has been inside of crowds, for many hours, but suddenly when it comes to having a burger off campus, no, that is just too much. Why? Because the “vaccinated,” benefiting from a “vaccine” that keeps them “safe,” still need to be protected from the unvaccinated. Never has such a low bar of immunity been set for a “vaccine”. The vaccinated ought to be wondering exactly what was squirted into their veins that fails to make them immune to the unvaccinated. As for the unvaccinated, they will be protected from dangerous restaurants, but somehow they will also be safe among thousands of people in buildings that are like stacks of cruise ships. The vaccinated will be protected both inside the restaurant, and inside the train station, yet Professor X cannot have a burger in the restaurant, but he can have a sandwich in the train station. The virus understands these nuanced differences and respects the government’s finicky little dividing lines.
What is to be done to people working in “non-essential services,” who are themselves unvaccinated? Are they to be laid off? How is access regulated to establishments that offer a mix of both “essential” and “non-essential”? Will guards with QR code scanners be posted in each aisle? Meanwhile, all “non-essential services” will presumably need to dedicate personnel to stand guard at entrances and scan the QR code of each single person seeking entry to the establishment. There will be lines of people—people lining up like compliant little toddlers, shifting from foot to foot, and repeating this for each store they visit. The security theatre we found in airports all these years, will now be everywhere: every “non-essential” store will have to become a security clearance point, like in an airport.
If the Quebec government’s aim was to increase exasperation, add to confusion, multiply divisions among people, expand bureaucracy, violate the right to privacy, securitize daily life, openly signal politicians’ lust for total power, effectively suspend civil rights and nullify the defining rights of citizenship, and to maximize distrust of the authorities, then this strategy is refined beyond measure. Success is assured, unquestionably.
Medical Apartheid
It’s an “exotic” word, so of course “educated” Canadians working in the media will struggle with it. Some in the Canadian media take umbrage at anyone calling such a pass-based system of discrimination, “apartheid”. They think that “apartheid” is a holy word, that is racially exclusive property belonging to a specific people. To call one act of discrimination by the same word used for another act of discrimination, somehow “cheapens” and “diminishes” that other discrimination. In other words, there is “good discrimination” which is to be applauded (“vaccine passports”) and then “bad discrimination” (which only became bad in Canada when it was politically convenient). Yet, what is the essence of apartheid? Two of the three definitions listed by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language state: “A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups” and “The condition of being separated from others; segregation”. Separation, segregation, discrimination—linking “vaccine passports” with apartheid is all the more warranted when we recognize the fact that targeted Others are forced to contain their movements within what is allowed by a pass. In both cases, the pass is associated with a certain biological property, whether it is skin colour or one’s health status.
Canada, at an official level, likes to celebrate itself as place where diversity and inclusivity reign, and where we face the injustices of the colonial past. This is very convenient, as a distraction. It is a stance that distracts from the new injustices being perpetrated in the immediate present, right under everyone’s nose.
Medical apartheid is precisely the kind of regime we would expect in a Health Security State as discussed extensively by Giorgio Agamben. Writing specifically about “vaccine passports” (or the Green Pass in the case of Italy) in a recent article which, translated from Italian, is titled “Second-Class Citizens,” he explains:
As happens every time a despotic emergency regime is established and constitutional guarantees are suspended, the result is, as happened with the Jews under fascism, the discrimination of a category of humans, who automatically become second-class citizens. This is the aim of the creation of the so-called green pass. That it is a discrimination based on personal beliefs and not an objective scientific certainty is proved by the fact that in the scientific field the debate is still ongoing on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, which, according to the opinion of doctors and scientists who there is no reason to ignore, they were produced quickly and without adequate testing.
Despite this, those who stick to their free and well-founded belief and refuse to be vaccinated will be excluded from social life. That the vaccine is thus transformed into a sort of political-religious symbol aimed at creating discrimination among citizens is evident in the irresponsible declaration of a politician, who, referring to those who do not get vaccinated, he said, without realizing that he was using a fascist jargon: “we will purge them with the green pass”. The “green card” constitutes those who do not have it in bearers of a virtual yellow star.
This is a fact whose political gravity cannot be overstated. What does a country become in which a discriminated class is created? How can one accept living with second-class citizens? The need to discriminate is as old as society and certainly forms of discrimination were also present in our so-called democratic societies; but that these factual discriminations are sanctioned by law is a barbarism that we cannot accept.
Such a certification regime—let us be absolutely clear about this—is authoritarian for everyone. It is not authoritarian just for the “unvaccinated” alone. Everyone who abides by such a system, agrees to furnish documentary proof to gain access to what was previously free and open to them. They thus agree to concede access, on grounds arbitrarily decided by the state. What was previously taken for granted, is now the focus of heightened securitization. This is effectively the abolition of the very concept of everyday life, for everyone.
To end on a personal note, this is an exceptionally depressing time in which I find myself. From the start, I suspected that our summer here of lessened restrictions was just a brief interim period, the carrot dangled in front of the mule before the stick struck our hindquarters again. Never have I personally witnessed such a dark curtain of fascism pulled across a society, and with such insignificant protest, and to the cheers of fake opposition parties and even faker media. Nobody will see this, thanks to ever widening censorship. I knew this was just the beginning of much worse to come, and this newest measure is itself an open door to a permanent “pandemic” of authoritarianism, fear, and the abolition of anything that can meaningfully be called society. It has come to pass, things have finally fallen apart.
For the first time, the US military’s central office for dealing with Hollywood has re-leased internal reports on its operations, revealing how the Department of Defense strong-armed the industry to achieve its propaganda goals.
The reports were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and offer a rare glimpse inside the DOD’s main entertainment liaison offices at the Pentagon, which oversees the individual branch offices in Los Angeles run by the Army, Navy, Air Force and others. The reports cover approximately two years of activities and illustrate just how aggressive the DOD can be when dealing with film and TV producers, as well as their involvement with some of the biggest-name filmmakers in Hollywood.
The sheer range of products mentioned in the documents as having gained assistance from the US military is staggering, from Navy-assisted episodes of Cake Boss and the Great Food Truck Race to the Disney sci-fi fantasy A Wrinkle in Time. Numerous other films are listed, including blockbusters like Captain Marvel, Top Gun: Maverick and Transformers: The Last Knight.
On Captain Marvel the DOD and US Air Force provided research trips to military bases, filming access at several military locations, and extensive promotional help including an Air Force recruitment campaign that tied into the film. The documents also reveal how the two co-directors of the movie, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, paid a visit to the Pentagon just before the film’s release.
One document notes, “During their visit they attended office calls and had lunch with Air Force leaders. They also participated in a professional development session” for Air Force and DOD public affairs officers, showing just how integrated the military-Hollywood relationship has become.
The files also confirm the military’s support on the final season of Homeland, though only after the “major problems noted in scripts” were resolved by the showrunner making “significant edits to the problematic areas.” The result was a show that preempted the false story that the Russian government had been funding Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and played up fears about what will happen when the US finally withdraws from the country.
The Pentagon also worked on smaller films such as The 15:17 to Paris, a Clint Eastwood-directed retelling of how three Americans, including two servicemen, tackled a gunman on a train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015. One entry in the reports records how they received “a long list of things that the film makers hope to obtain from us” but the DOD only approved support after ensuring that they could “create enough military portrayal to justify use of our assets.”
Beefing up the military’s presence in films, and the role of military characters in the unfolding storylines, is a key aim of the DOD’s Hollywood offices, but they don’t always get what they want. Christopher Nolan approached them about providing Osprey and Chinook aircraft for use in Tenet, and the National Guard and Air Force “indicated interest if military characterizations are rewritten emphasizing military mission.”
A few weeks later, it seems that Nolan simply stopped responding to the military’s phone calls, with one update commenting, “Likely cause is that producer/director were reluctant to make changes needed to gain DOD support.” This echoes what happened on Interstellar, Nolan’s previous sci-fi epic. Reports from the Navy’s Hollywood office record how he approached them about potential support, but the relationship broke down after he refused to share his script with Navy officials, having clearly learned from the extensive rewrites the military demanded on Man of Steel.
At the other end of the Hollywood scale is Tom Hanks, who has worked with different US government agencies throughout his career, from the CIA on Charlie Wilson’s War to Homeland Security on The Terminal, as well as several military-supported productions. Hanks’ name comes up multiple times in the documents, as the DOD provided help to his historical war film Greyhound, as well as his forthcoming post-apocalyptic drama Finch.
The strict criteria that the military apply when deciding whether to support a production results in a high number of rejections, which can have the effect of killing a movie or TV show. Among the rejections detailed in the documents are “documentaries about Vladimir Putin and about the trials at Guantanamo Bay” and a film about the Bermuda Triangle, where the DOD were “Not impressed by the quality of the writing nor the story itself.” Neither the Bermuda Triangle film nor the Gitmo documentary appear to have been made.
Other movies that were turned down include Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse as well as Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe, in the latter case because “premise is how the WH & DoD (mainly the WH) claimed that Bin Laden and Hussein conspired to create the 9/11 attacks, and fabricated evidence of Saddam collecting materials to fabricate nuclear weapons to use against the U.S. and its allies.”
Likewise, a feature-length documentary about Operation Eagle Claw – the failed attempt by US special forces to rescue some of the hostages held in Iran – was turned down after their request was forwarded to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, highlighting how high-up policy wonks are sometimes part of the decision-making process. This documentary also appears to have fallen by the wayside, unable to be produced due to the Pentagon’s censorious approach to pop culture.
However, the most egregious censorship revealed by the new documents came on the 2019 CBS drama series The Code, about Marine Corps lawyers prosecuting and defending cases brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Code was initially made without any military input, because the producers wanted to explore topics of which the DOD wouldn’t approve.
In the opening episodes the cases handled by the lawyers include a Marine-turned-congressman who is accused of murdering an Iraqi civilian execution-style, and the fallout from a Marine killing a Spanish citizen while drunk driving. Meanwhile, the widow of a murdered Marine decides to sue the Corps and challenge the Ferris Doctrine – a law that prevents people from suing the US military based on events that happened while on active duty.
These are precisely the sort of storylines that the DOD routinely removes from scripts for shows they support, such as NCIS and Hawaii Five-0. The documents record how on an NCIS: New Orleans episode they “Took issue with the latest NCIS NOLA script, in which a team of former U.S. Army rangers are portrayed as ‘killers for hire’.” An update days later reports that, “Filmmakers responded by saying they are working to remove all references to killers having been affiliated with U.S. Army Rangers.”
But this wasn’t possible on The Code, because the producers resisted numerous efforts by the military to get involved and have influence over the scripts. As the reports detail, “The showrunner turned down several offers of assistance by the Marine Corps Entertainment office during production.” An investigation by Task & Purpose found that the Marines kept trying to insert themselves into the production of The Code, but as one official put it, they were “essentially told to f-ck off” by the showrunners.
The documents go on to note that – somehow – Marine Corps leadership got hold of the early episodes of The Code before they’d aired. They were “displeased enough that they communicated what they saw as serious shortcomings in the depiction of the Marines.” The Corps imposed themselves on the production, and as a result, “CBS Television has indicated a desire to correct the problems in future episodes by accepting DoD assistance.”
The upshot of this was that the show took a turn and abandoned the controversial storylines of its earlier episodes, including the lawsuit around the Ferris Doctrine – though the suit is abandoned not due to pressure from the military brass, but so that the widow can embark on a romantic relationship with one of the key witnesses.
A few months later The Code was cancelled, having given up on the only thing that made it stand out in a crowded marketplace of criminal and legal procedurals. In essence, the DOD sabotaged a TV show because they didn’t like its politics.
While the likes of Christopher Nolan are powerful enough to sometimes resist the military’s overtures and manipulations, the DOD’s hostile takeover of Hollywood is gathering pace due to these aggressive, domineering tactics.
Tom Secker is a British-based investigative journalist, author and podcaster. You can follow his work via his Spy Culture site and his podcast ClandesTime.
ON July 29, the mainstream media in the United States admitted that the vaccines had failed. Not in so many words, but they might as well have. The Washington Post concluded: ‘It’s hard to do, but we have to become comfortable with coronavirus not going away.’
What changed?
Well, to start with, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report showing that fully vaccinated people transmit the virus and carry viral loads similar to those unvaccinated. This was hard on the heels of data from Israel, the UK, Iceland and Gibraltar showing that high vaccination rates did nothing to prevent widespread Covid outbreaks.
Of course, for those who get their information from non-mainstream sources, this comes as no surprise. We’ve watched the narrative turned on its head in just a few short months. To refresh your memory, here’s the evolution:
April 2021
Vaccines are 92 per cent effective against infection and 100 per cent effective at preventing serious disease. They are safe. Get your shots and you’re good for life.
June 2021
There are rare breakthrough cases, but the vaccines still protect against serious disease. There are very rare complications, but the vaccines are generally safe. Get your shots and you’re good for life.
Early July 2021
The variants are causing breakthrough cases. The vaccines generally protect against serious illness. The vaccines cause myocarditis and other serious complications. Efficiency wanes after several months but you don’t need a booster.
Late July 2021
Variants cause breakthrough cases and vaccinated people carry high viral loads. The vaccines may protect against the most severe cases. The vaccines cause myocarditis, GBS and several other serious complications. The most vulnerable and the elderly will need booster shots.
If the present trend lines continue, what’s next?
How about: Vaccines make it more likely you’ll contract Covid. If you are infected, vaccines make it more likely that you will suffer serious illness or die. The vaccines cause life-changing injuries in many people. You will need booster shots every few months.
If you’re still considering taking a vaccine, you should think carefully about what you’re getting into. When you take a Covid vaccine, you’re taking the first step down a path. With each step down the path, it gets harder to retreat. We know that there’s a point of no return. Once you cross it, you’ll be entirely dependent on regular Covid vaccines for life and you’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place: If you don’t get your shots every few months, you’ll die from the latest variant as soon as the antibody bump from your last shot wears off. But, if you keep taking the shots, your body will slowly (or not so slowly) become riddled with micro-thrombi (blood clots), and that condition will kill you in a few years. We don’t know where the point of no return is, but we do know this: The sooner you bale out from the vaccine path, the better your chance of being able to return to natural health and immunity.
Most importantly, think about what this means for your children. If there’s a one in 100 chance of serious adverse events for the mRNA vaccines, do you want your child to face two shots a year for the rest of his/her life? And what if the chance of serious complications is additive?
THE Covid vaccine rollout is to be extended to 16- and 17-year-olds across the UK – 1.4million children – it was confirmed this afternoon. Injections of the experimental gene therapy will begin within weeks, after approval from the government’s chosen scientists. The many others from around the world who have strongly advised against such a programme have been ignored.
A recent letter from the UK Medical Freedom Alliance of doctors set out the reasons why vaccinating children is not just risky but totally unnecessary:
1. The risk of death or serious disease from Covid-19 to children is close to zero.
2. Children play an insignificant role in transmission of Covid-19.
3. All Covid-19 vaccines used in the UK, including the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine most likely to be offered to children, are based on completely new gene technologies. They have not been licensed and remain experimental until Phase 3 trials have been completed in 2023.
4. Serious adverse events and vaccine-related deaths have been reported to Government databases in the UK, the US and Europe. As of June 9, 949,276 adverse reactions and 1,332 vaccine-related deaths had been reported to the MHRA in the UK. Some effects, such as blood clots and heart inflammation (myocarditis), have occurred specifically in young adults. The CDC in America is currently investigating more than 1,200 children and young adults with vaccine-related myocarditis and have issued a warning. In the US, several children under the age of 18 are reported to have died after a Covid-19 vaccine.
5. Medium- and long-term effects of Covid-19 vaccines, including effects on fertility, carcinogenesis, autoimmune diseases, are completely unknown, which is most relevant for children.
6. Vaccine manufacturers have an almost complete exemption from liability for any injuries or deaths that may be caused by their products.
7. In children, acquiring natural immunity will serve a better purpose, as this will last longer and cover a broad range of virus variants, contributing to herd immunity.
8. There is no precedent of vaccines successfully halting or mitigating an ongoing pandemic, and they may even risk the promotion of more virulent variants. Without the concept of ending a pandemic by vaccinating the entire population, there is no imperative for vaccinating all children.
We first learnt the Government were thinking about targeting children on July 19. But until today there had been some reassurance from the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) that ‘those newly eligible’ would include only vulnerable children aged 12 to 15 with severe neurodisability, Down’s syndrome or a severely weakened immune system, including some children with cancer and those with profound and multiple learning difficulties.
We were mistaken. Was there ever any intention for it to be restricted to these groups? If so, what has changed since then? Nothing on the evidence side. Who is pulling the strings here? Why is the government bent on such a reckless policy?
Given that there is no public health justification for this mass experiment on children, it now must be crystal clear to any doubters that the government is set on vaccinating the entire population regardless of age and with no consideration paid to the mounting serious adverse reactions, the lack of ANY positive safety data for children and absence of any on long-term risks and outcomes. The Pfizer trial data reported by Belinda Brown in this research article here is clear about the immediate adverse reaction.
Make no mistake, this decision is egregious, immoral and indefensible. All decent citizens must stand up to this vaccine assault on the nation’s children.
Does it take a genius to gather that the colossal failure of the USA’s war in Afghanistan is identical to the disastrous ‘war against COVID’? It’s certainly clear that it is pretty much the same people who devised the fatal strategies that led to a grandiose defeat in these two unnecessary conflicts. We deal with people who adhere to the concept of war of destruction. These are people who do not seek peace, harmony or reconciliation neither with nature nor with other segments of humanity.
Our pandemic ‘strategists’ believed that it was within their powers to wipe SARS CoV 2 from the face of the earth. They were similarly convinced that the Taliban could be eradicated. They were, obviously, catastrophically wrong.
But the progressives and the so-called Left also have an unforgivable part in these catastrophic tales. The Left weren’t responsible for the ‘strategies’ or the grand planning. They weren’t really participants in the neoconservative think tanks, they weren’t involved in Pfizer’s promise to fix the human genome. They weren’t advising Netanyahu, Trump or Johnson’s in 2020 as they weren’t amongst Bush’s advisers back in 2001. But they were the first to support the Ziocon ‘War Against Terror,’ mostly in the name of ‘moral interventionism.’ Similarly, they have been amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the current experiment in mass human [de-]population.
One doesn’t need to scratch the surface to notice that that the Jewish State also had a central role in these two humongous blunders. The neocon think tanks that pushed America to Afghanistan were of course made of ardent Jewish Zionists. Back in 2003 Ari Shavit wrote in Haaretz “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.” The people who volunteered themselves as the guinea pigs in Pfizer’s COVID experiment where of course the Israelis. Netanyahu’s Israel didn’t attempt to “live with COVID,” it instead treated the virus as a contemporary Amalek, an anti-Semitic plague that must be eradicated: the Mossad together with the IDF joined forces in the war against Covid. When it seemed as if number of COVID cases were going down, Israel was fast to declare a victory in the war against the virus.
But the reality is embarrassing. In Afghanistan the Taliban is stronger than ever. America left the country it promised to ‘liberate’ with its tail between its legs. In the fight against COVID, America is equally defeated. In the USA, a CDC study found vaccinated people made up 74% of cases in a beach town outbreak in Massachusetts. And In Israel, Delta has made a spectacularly successful aliya. The vaccinated are now overrepresented amongst Delta cases and equally represented amongst critical cases. A few days ago an Israeli hospital director admitted that 90% of his patients are vaccinated. “The vaccine is waning in front of our eyes,” he said.
It shouldn’t really be me who reminds my fellow peace loving brothers and sisters that loving one’s neighbor may as well mean seeking peace and harmony with the universe as a whole (viruses included).The modernist 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” But in the global Zionised universe in which we live, politics is merely the continuation of war. Keeping the world in a conflict is the current global mantra as people are submissive when fearful. This philosophy has sustained Zionism for decades. It kept the Jewish people united for two millennia but it came with a price. Jewish history isn’t exactly a story of tranquility.
During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.
“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”
His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”
“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”
It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”
Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”
When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”
In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.
The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.
In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.
Professors Running Scared of Students
To Dana Beyer, a trans activist in Maryland who is also a retired surgeon, such stories illustrate how vital it is that sex, not just gender identity — how someone perceives their gender — is taken into consideration in medicine. “The practice of medicine is based in scientific reality, which includes sex, but not gender,” Beyer says. “The more honest a patient is with their physician, the better the odds for a positive outcome.”
The denial of sex doesn’t help anyone, perhaps least of all transgender patients who require special treatment. But, Lauren says, instructors who discuss sex risk complaints from their students — which is why, she thinks, many don’t. “I think there’s a small percentage of instructors who are true believers. But most of them are probably just scared of their students,” she says.
And for good reason. Her medical school hosts an online forum in which students correct their instructors for using terms like “male” and “female” or “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed.” Students can lodge their complaints in real time during lectures. After one class, Lauren says, she heard that a professor was so upset by students calling her out for using “male” and “female” that she started crying.
Then there are the petitions. At the beginning of the year, students circulated a number of petitions designed to, as Lauren puts it, “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak.”
One was delivered after a lecture on chromosomal disorders in which the professor used the pronouns “she” and “her” as well as the terms “father” and “son,” all of which, according to the students, are “cisnormative.” After the petition was delivered, the instructor emailed the class, noting that while she had consulted with a member of the school’s LGBTQ Committee prior to the lecture, she was sorry for using such “binary” language. Another petition was delivered after an instructor referred to “a man changing into a woman,” which, according to the students, incorrectly assumed that the trans woman wasn’t always a woman. But, as Lauren points out, “if trans women were born women, why would they need to transition?”
This phenomenon — of students policing teachers; of students being treated as the authorities over and above their teachers — has had consequences.
“Since the petitions were sent out, instructors have been far more proactive about ‘correcting’ their slides in advance or sending out emails to the school listserv if any upcoming material has ‘outdated’ terminology,” Lauren tells me. “At first, compliance is demanded from outside, and eventually the instructors become trained to police their own language proactively.”
In one point in the semester, a faculty member sent out a preemptive email warning students about forthcoming lectures containing language that doesn’t align with the school’s “approach to gender inclusivity and gender/sex antioppression.” That language included the term “premenopausal women.” In the future, the professor promised, this would be updated to “premenopausal people.”
Lauren also says young doctors are being taught to declare their pronouns upon meeting patients and ask for patients’ pronouns in return. This was echoed by a recent graduate of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. “Everything was about pronouns,” the student said. The student objected to this, thinking most patients would be confused or offended by a doctor asking them what their pronouns were, but she never said so — at least not publicly. “It was impossible to push back without worrying about getting expelled,” she told me.
This hypersensitivity is undermining medical training. And many of these students are likely not even aware that their education is being informed by ideology.
“Take abdominal aortic aneurysms,” Lauren says. “These are four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn’t emphasized. I had to look it up, and I don’t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I’m expected to know. I’m not even sure what I’m not being taught, and unless my classmates are as skeptical as I am, they probably aren’t aware either.”
Other conditions that present differently and at different rates in males and females include hernias, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and asthma, among many others. Males and females also have different normal ranges for kidney function, which impacts drug dosage. They have different symptoms during heart attacks: males complain of chest pain, while women experience fatigue, dizziness, and indigestion. In other words: biological sex is a hugely important factor in knowing what ails patients and how to properly treat them.
Carole Hooven is the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us and a professor at Harvard who focuses on behavioral endocrinology. I discussed Lauren’s story with her and Hooven found it deeply troubling. “Today’s students will go on to hold professional positions that give them a great deal of power over others’ bodies and minds. These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists. To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving.”
A former dean of a leading medical school agrees: “I don’t know the extent to which the stories you relate are now widespread in medical education, but to the extent that they are — and I hear some of this is popping up at my own institution — they are a serious departure from the expectation that medical education and practice should be based on science and be free from imposition of ideology and ideology-based intimidation.”
He added: “How male and female members of our species develop, how they differ genetically, anatomically, physiologically, and with respect to diseases and their treatment are foundational to clinical medicine and research. Efforts to erase or diminish these foundations should be unacceptable to responsible professional leaders.”
There is no doubt the rules are changing. According to the American Psychological Association, the terms “natal sex” and “birth sex,” for example, are now considered “disparaging”; the preferred term is “assigned sex at birth.” The National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and Harvard Medical School have all made efforts to divorce sex from medicine and emphasize gender identity.
When Asking Questions Can Destroy Your Career
While it’s unclear if this trend will remain limited to some medical schools, what is perfectly clear is that activism, specifically around issues of sex, gender, and race, is impacting scientific research and progress.
One of the most notorious examples is that of a physician and former associate professor at Brown University, Lisa Littman.
Around 2014, Littman began to notice a sudden uptick in female adolescents in her social network who were coming out as transgender boys. Until recently, the incidence of gender dysphoria was thought to be rare, affecting an estimated one in 10,000 people in the U.S. While the exact number of trans-identifying adolescents (or adults, for that matter) is unknown, in the last decade or so, the number of youth seeking treatment for gender dysphoria has spiked by over 1,000 percent in the U.S.; in the U.K., it’s jumped by 4,000 percent. The largest youth gender clinic in Los Angeles reportedly saw 1,000 patients in 2019. That same clinic, in 2009, saw about 80.
Curious about what was happening, Littman surveyed about 250 parents whose adolescent children had announced they were transgender — after never before exhibiting the symptoms of gender dysphoria. Over 80 percent of cases involved girls; many were part of friend groups in which half or more of the members had come out as trans. Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to describe this phenomenon. She posited that it might be a sort of social contagion, not unlike cutting or anorexia, both of which were endemic among teenage girls when I was in high school in the ’90s.
In August 2018, Littman published her results in a paper called “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports” in the journal PLOS One. Littman, the journal, and Brown University were pummeled with accusations of transphobia in the press and on social media. In response, the journal announced an investigation into Littman’s work. Several hours later, Brown University issued a press release denouncing the professor’s paper.
Littman’s paper was republished in March 2019 with an amended title and other minor, mostly cosmetic changes. The journal has since confirmed that, while the paper was “corrected,” the original version contained no false information.
But Littman’s career was forever altered. She no longer teaches at Brown. And her contract at the Rhode Island State Health Department wasn’t renewed.
Littman is hardly alone. Trans activists have also targeted Ray Blanchard and Ken Zucker in Toronto, Michael Bailey at Northwestern, and Stephen Gliske at the University of Michigan for publishing findings they deemed transphobic. In a recent case, trans activists shut down research that was to be conducted by UCLA psychiatrist Jamie Feusner, who had hoped to explore the physiological underpinnings of gender dysphoria.
Nor is this limited to academia. Journalists who question the new ideological orthodoxy, like Abigail Shrier and Jesse Singal (with whom I co-host a podcast), have also been smeared for their work. After the American Booksellers Association included Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, in a promotional mailing to bookstores, activists went ballistic, prompting the ABA’s CEO to apologize for having done “horrific harm” that “traumatized and endangered members of the trans community” and “caused violence and pain.”
I had a similar experience in 2017 after writing about de-transitioners — people who transition to a different gender and then transition back — for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger. After the piece came out, people put up flyers and stickers around Seattle calling me transphobic; someone burned stacks of the newspaper and sent me a video of it. I lost many friends, and later ended up moving out of the city in part because of the turmoil.
But far more concerning than the treatment of journalists chronicling this story is the treatment of patients themselves.
Patients Are Suffering
Julia Mason is a pediatrician in the Portland suburbs who, unlike most doctors I spoke to, allowed me to use her name. Mason explained that she works at a small private practice and her boss is a libertarian. In other words: she won’t get fired for being honest.
Mason has been practicing for over 25 years, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she saw her first transgender patient: a 15-year-old trans boy who Mason referred to a gender clinic, where the patient was prescribed testosterone.
Since that first patient, she says there have been about 10 more requests for referrals to gender clinics. As this number increased, Mason started wondering about the advice her patients are getting at these clinics.
“A 12-year-old female came to see me, and the dad told me that they went to a therapist, and in the first five minutes, the therapist was like, ‘Yep. He’s trans,’” she told me. “And then they went to a pediatric endocrinologist who recommended puberty blockers on the first visit.”
Mason generally avoids prescribing puberty blockers, which inhibit the development of secondary sex characteristics like breasts or facial hair. The reason, she says, is that because there have been no controlled studies on the use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric youth, the long term effects are still unknown. (In the U.K., a recent review of existing studies found that the quality of the evidence that puberty blockers are effective in relieving gender dysphoria and improving mental health is “very low.”)
In girls, Mason says, blockers inhibit breast development, but “you end up shorter, and the last thing a female who wants to look male needs is to be shorter.” Other side effects may include a loss of bone density, headache, fatigue, joint pain, hot flashes, mood swings and something called “brain fog.” In boys, blockers inhibit penis growth, which can make it harder for them to achieve orgasm and for surgeons to later construct those penises into “neo-vaginas,” a procedure known as vaginoplasty.
Trans activists often claim the effects of puberty blockers are fully reversible, but this remains unproven, and studies show that the overwhelming majority of teens who start on puberty blockers later take cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females and estrogen for males) to complete their transition. The combination of puberty blockers followed by hormones can cause sterility and other health problems, including sexual dysfunction, and the hormones must be taken for life — or until detransition. Little is known about their long-term effects. While the line that blockers are “fully reversible” is oft-repeated by activists and the media, last year, England’s National Health Service back-tracked this unsubstantiated claim on its website.
Mason is one of several doctors who voiced concerns about the fast-tracking of adolescents seeking to transition — and the new normal in the medical establishment, which seems to encourage that fast-tracking.
In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that pediatricians “affirm” their patients’ chosen gender without taking into account mental health, family history, trauma, or fears of puberty. The AAP recommendations say nothing about the many consequences, physical and psychological, of transitioning. So perhaps it is not surprising that surgeons are performing double mastectomies, or “top surgery,” on patients as young as 13.
One leading clinician, Diane Ehrensaft, has said that children as young as three have the cognitive ability to come out as transgender. And the University of California San Francisco Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic, where Ehrensaft is the mental health director, has helped kids of that age transition socially.
But not all clinicians have cheered these developments. In a paper responding to the AAP guidelines, James Cantor, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, noted that “every follow-up study of [gender dysphoric] children, without exception, found the same thing: By puberty, the majority of GD children ceased to want to transition.” Other studies of gender-clinic patients, stretching back to the 1970s, have found that 60 to 90 percent of patients eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria; most come out as gay or lesbian.
In an email to me, Cantor said: “The deafening silence from AAP when asked about the evidence allegedly supporting their trans policy is hard to interpret as anything other than their ‘pleading the 5th,’ as you in the U.S. put it.”
Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic and a trans woman herself, also voiced skepticism about the AAP’s approach to would-be transitioners. Unlike Mason, Anderson says withholding puberty blockers from dysphoric children is “cruel.” But she is suspicious of the sharp spike in young people, and especially young women. While she doesn’t like phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “social contagion,” she said something is definitely going on.
“What makes us think that gender is the one exception to peer influence?” she told me. “For 100 years, psychology has acknowledged that adolescence is a time of experimentation and exploration. It’s normal. I’m not alarmed by that. What I’m alarmed by is some medical and psychological professionals rushing kids into taking blockers or hormones.”
Because Anderson has been so vocal, including a recent 60 Minutes appearance in which she discussed detransitioners, she regularly gets calls from frantic parents. She told me she’d gotten off the phone with the parents of a 17-year-old who had announced that they were trans and wanted hormones. “It’s alarming to these parents,” Anderson said.
Anderson isn’t opposed to pediatric transition when patients are properly diagnosed, but she wants to see more individualized care rather than the activist-driven, one-size-fits-all approach. That, however, goes against current AAP guidelines.
Will Science Prevail?
Medicine is not impervious to trends.
“In the 90s, when I was training, everything was about controlling pain,” said a pediatrician in the Midwest who declined to be named for fear of repercussions. “We were taught that it was really hard to become addicted to narcotics. Look where that got us.”
Around the same time, she says, there was a rash of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, something we now know is exceedingly rare in children. Before that, there was the recovered memory craze, multiple personality disorder, and rebirthing therapy, a bizarre treatment for attachment disorders that lead to the deaths of several children in the U.S. So how does this happen?
“Some idea will get picked up by major medical associations that put out reports and their members turn to those instead of the actual literature,” this pediatrician said. “And when you get too far ahead of the research, that’s when you get into trouble. That’s what’s happening now.”
For her part, Lauren, the medical student in California, is both hopeful for the future — and not. “On the one hand, I have this idea that the truth will eventually come out and science will ultimately prevail,” she said.
But the difference between things like rebirthing therapy or multiple personality disorder and the new gender ideology is that the latter is portrayed as a civil rights movement. “It seems virtuous. It seems like the right thing to do,” she said. “So how can you fight against something that’s being marketed as a fight for human rights?”
YOU may have read recently that ‘Britain is failing to protect its vulnerable citizens. Thousands of preventable deaths could be triggered every year.’ You may have supposed that some road safety organisation was at it again, worried about silent electric cars. Or maybe it was the RNLI having a go about inflatables on the beach. Possibly the opposition playing safe and attacking the crime rate or the NHS?
There’s a clue in the next sentence. ‘As global heating worsens and heatwaves become more frequent, the problem is likely to worsen significantly.’ This is Baroness Brown of Cambridge, a member of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), and she goes on to claim that by 2050 there could be three times as many heat-related deaths as there are today.
This is a Guardian piece about the CCC’s comments on a Met Office warning about hotter summers, so let’s stop here and take a deep breath of reality.
The number of heat-related summer deaths are monitored by Public Health England. The three years 2017-19 averaged 847, but in 2020 there were 2,556, in line with 2003 (2,334) and 2006 (2,323). Let’s be fair and assume global warming will continue, so over the next few years we may have a yearly average of 2,500, then (according to the CCC) on to 7,500 by 2050.
Back in Wonderland there’s apparently no need to worry. The Telegraphhas reassuring news from its Environment Editor, Emma Gatten. The CCC, she says, ‘called for the introduction of new regulations to ensure developers were not building homes that are uninhabitable as temperatures rise . . . Measures that can easily be incorporated when building new homes include avoiding large south-facing windows, including external shutters, trickle vents, green roofs, and green walls covered in vegetation.’
There we are, then, problem solved. However, the world that you and I live in has a season called winter when it gets cold even here in the UK, and there is, of course, an opposite effect. Again Public Health England has the data: ‘Cold-related deaths represent the biggest weather-related source of mortality in England, and on average, there are approximately 35,000 excess winter deaths each year in England and Wales.’
Being kind and using the CCC’s figure for 2050, there are still over four and a half times as many excess deaths in winter as in summer. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation looked at the problem some time ago. Not surprisingly, they found that ‘the magnitude of the winter excess was greater in people living in dwellings that appear to be poorly heated. The percentage rise in deaths in winter was greater in those dwellings with low energy-efficiency ratings, and those predicted to have low indoor temperatures during cold periods’.
There are wide variations on recommended indoor warmth in winter. The Met Office must employ all young, hot-blooded people, because they say ‘you should heat your home to the temperature of at least 18°C. This is particularly important if you have reduced mobility, are 65 or over, or have a health condition, such as heart or lung disease.’
For the last twenty years I have been cold from October to March, and have recently become a nonagenarian so will probably be even colder this winter. The figure of 18 is ridiculous. I live in a reasonably well-insulated house with gas central heating; the winter thermostat setting is 21 or above and even then the winter clothing level is four layers.
The heat pump threat has receded by five years, but these things are notorious for their inability to warm a house properly. The CCC want smaller south-facing windows but the cheapest source of additional heat even in winter is the sun. Any day that it’s available let it shine in through south-facing windows. Have shutters for summer.
The CCC say possibly 7,500 excess summer deaths by 2050. But they seem to be relying on our climate warming unbelievably quickly to save 35,000 of us going shivering to our doom every winter.
When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
From 1951 to 1963, the US tested nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada. Weapons researchers, not understanding the risks—or simply ignoring them—exposed thousands of workers to radioactive fallout. The emissions from nuclear reactions are deadly to humans in high doses, and can cause cancer even in low doses. At one point, researchers had volunteers stand underneath an airburst nuclear weapon to prove how safe it was:
The emissions, however, did not just stay at the test site, and drifted in the atmosphere. Cancer rates spiked in nearby communities, and the US government could no longer pretend that fallout was anything but a silent killer.
The cost in dollars and lives
Congress eventually paid more than $2 billion to residents of nearby areas that were particularly exposed to radiation, as well as uranium miners. But attempts to measure the full extent of the test fallout were very uncertain, since they relied on extrapolating effects from the hardest-hit communities to the national level. One national estimate found the testing caused 49,000 cancer deaths.
Those measurements, however, did not capture the full range of effects over time and geography. Meyers created a broader picture by way of a macabre insight: When cows consumed radioactive fallout spread by atmospheric winds, their milk became a key channel to transmit radiation sickness to humans. Most milk production during this time was local, with cows eating at pasture and their milk being delivered to nearby communities, giving Meyers a way to trace radioactivity across the country.
The National Cancer Institute has records of the amount of Iodine 131—a dangerous isotope released in the Nevada tests—in milk, as well as broader data about radiation exposure. By comparing this data with county-level mortality records, Meyers came across a significant finding: “Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate.” What’s more, these results were sustained over time. US nuclear testing likely killed seven to 14 times more people than we had thought, mostly in the midwest and northeast.
A weapon against its own people
When the US used nuclear weapons during World War II, bombing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conservative estimates suggest 250,000 people died in immediate aftermath. Even those horrified by the bombing didn’t realize that the US would deploy similar weapons against its own people, accidentally, and on a comparable scale.
And the cessation of nuclear testing helped save US lives—”the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might have saved between 11.7 and 24.0 million American lives,” Meyers estimates. There was also some blind luck involved in reducing the number of poisoned people: The Nevada Test Site, compared to other potential testing facilities the US government considered at the time, produced the lowest atmospheric dispersal.
The lingering effects of these tests remain, as silent and as troublesome as the isotopes themselves. Millions of Americans who were exposed to fallout likely suffer illnesses related to these tests even today, as they retire and rely on the US government to fund their health care.
“This paper reveals that there are more casualties of the Cold War than previously thought, but the extent to which society still bears the costs of the Cold War remains an open question,” Meyers concludes.
Ismail Haniyeh has been elected to a second term as head of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, two Palestinian officials told Reuters on Sunday.
“Brother Ismail Haniyeh was re-elected as the head of the movement’s political office for a second time,” one official told Reuters. His term will last four years.
Haniyeh, the group’s leader since 2017, has controlled its political activities throughout several armed confrontations with Israel – including an 11-day conflict in May that leftover 250 in Gaza and 13 in Israel dead.
He was the right-hand man to Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza, before the wheelchair-bound cleric was assassinated in 2004.
Haniyeh, 58, led Hamas’ entry into politics in 2006 when they were surprisingly won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating a divided Fatah party led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
Haniyeh became prime minister shortly after the January 2006 victory, but Hamas – which is deemed a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, and the European Union – was shunned by the international community.
Following a brief civil war, Hamas seized Gaza from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2007. Israel has led a blockade of Gaza since then, citing threats from Hamas.
THERE are two sources of support for those who find conspiracies behind the creation of the Covid State, who believe that it must all be about ‘something else’.
One is the ‘they know they are lying’ argument of former Pfizer executive and research scientist Mike Yeadon and others, who suggest that even if the politicians don’t fully realise that the Wuhan virus is not a global threat, their public health advisers surely do. They therefore MUST know that they are telling lies, day after day. If they are lying, why? Who or what is behind the Covid State’s lies? On this view, there must be something hidden and menacing in play.
The second source of support for seeing Covid conspiracies is the fact that so many of the decisions taken by democratic governments are so patently stupid and pointless. So much of what has passed for rational decision-making – ‘we are simply following the science’ – is risible. Locking up the healthy rather than protecting the vulnerable? Making people wear masks that, for decades, we have known not to work? Allowing people with life-threatening illnesses to die for want of attention from supposedly stretched hospitals and doctors? Wrecking the economy? Changing the rules every other day on a whim? Spending billions on contact-trace technology that achieves nothing save spreading further needless panic? The very idea that governments can control, let alone eliminate, rapidly spreading viruses?
Now, there are a number of explanations other than the two obvious ones – conspiracy or stuff-up – that seek to explain the flight from rationality of our politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers these past eighteen months. Elementary political science tells us that there are several models of decision-making seeking to explain why politicians do the things they do.
One theory is called ‘the rational actor model’, and it might well sum up what the ordinary punter believes to be abilities and motivations of governments. This model assumes that well-informed politicians with a clear understanding of the problem to be solved think through the options and make the best choice. Perhaps even use some cost-benefit analysis. Clarify the problem, list the options, weigh the issues carefully, consider likely outcomes, recognise the downsides of any actions taken, be consistent, measure success (evaluate) with standardised and agreed methods.
I know – try not to laugh. But the rational actor model probably best described how the bureaucracy used to work. Frank, fearless advice based on research and understanding of issues was offered to elected officials by disinterested public servants. That proposition is now as naïve as believing that their political masters are rational actors.
But you would like to think that politicians should aspire to be well-motivated, well-informed and determined to achieve the best outcome possible for the good of the country or state over which they preside.
Yet we seem to be falling very, very short of the ideal. Politicians are nowadays greedy, motivated by career, factionalised, prone to lying, controlled by outside interests, fearful of losing their power and seemingly willing to do anything to get off the hook. They are patently driven by the enjoyment of power, accessing the perks of office, protecting their mates, setting up post-political career opportunities and settling scores. There is little evidence that they are focused on problem solving (as per the rational actor model), even remotely interested in it or equipped to do it.
A second model of decision-making has been called ‘bounded rationality’. This is the idea that time-poor politicians facing complex problems do not seek the best policy, but are satisfied with an ‘acceptable’ solution, achieving as good an outcome as can be expected under the circumstances.
A third model of decision-making is called ‘incrementalism’. This suggests that no political decision is made in isolation. Every decision builds on what is already there. Its chief advocate (an American called Charles Lindblom) calls the approach ‘muddling through’.
A fourth model is that democracies consist of interest groups all vying for influence over decision-making, and that politicians simply respond to these interest groups in the decisions they make. They especially respond to loud, persistent, clever, monied interest groups. Like Big Pharma, perhaps? Or Big Tech? If this sounds corrupt, it is.
A fifth model of politics – public choice theory – suggests that politicians and bureaucrats have selfish interests like voters and like sellers and buyers in the marketplace that is the economy, and that they make decisions according to this self-interest. Leaders look out for number one. This is getting very warm, and isn’t remotely surprising. Nothing has been so clear during the Covid affair as the self-interest of politicians.
So, we have an array of theories trying to explain how politicians make decisions. But nothing, nothing, in the study of politics or of decision-making explains fully why governments all over the world simultaneously threw sanity out the window in seeking to deal with a middling, flu-like virus.
Two conclusions can confidently be reached, however. One is that to date there hasn’t been a sliver of very thin paper between the major parties on Covid policy. Right, left or centre, they are all equally panicked, all pandering to the fear in the community that they themselves have created, all scared witless – in the age of the social media pile-on – of instant electoral retribution. All are ignoring science, all are either crushing dissent or ridiculing those (few) who question their approach, and none are remotely able or willing to ask their advisers hard questions, and in doing so to act as our representatives in a quest for the truth.
The second conclusion relates to something called the ‘Overton Window’, which explains what governments are willing and unwilling to do when making decisions. How far they feel comfortable going. It is their window of opportunity (named after the guy who thought this model up), their area of safety, the constraints that stop them doing anything too ‘courageous’, as the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said.
Another name for this is the ‘meerkat theory of politics’. Meerkats emerge from their hidey-holes and look around to see what dangers there are and what possibilities are open to them. Our Covid politicians are like meerkats. They see what they might be able to get away with. They venture a little farther from the hidey-hole, but still look over their shoulders for electoral danger.
What the political class has done since March 2020 is massively to expand the Overton Window. The political science textbook has been thrown out and a new set of theories is needed to explain why freedom and economies have been destroyed.
We-the-people have allowed them to do this. We have let them throw away the rule book. Like the slowly boiling frog, we have sat there doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, while our freedoms have been trashed. Now we are willing to stay locked in our home for no good reason, to bump elbows with friends, to dob in our neighbours for doing nothing remotely wrong or dangerous, to watch breathlessly every new announcement by a health bureaucrat, to tell the Government our whereabouts, to bow before the violent actions of thug-police, to have experimental, yet-to-be-approved drugs injected into our bodies, and to abuse anyone who won’t do these things.
Whatever else they are, our leaders are not being remotely rational. And yes, as Mike Yeadon says, they ARE lying and they must know their decisions are stupid and, on balance, massively harmful.
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
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