LAPD officers are collecting social media information from citizens they stop
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2021
LAPD officers have been told to collect the social media information of all civilians they stop, whether or not they have been arrested or even accused of a crime. Critics have noted the social media information collected could be used for illegal surveillance.
A report on The Guardian revealed that the “field interview cards” LAPD officers use when interviewing civilians include a line for the collection of information on social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
A leaked internal memo revealed that Police Chief Michael Moore told officers that collecting the social media information was important for “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions.”
The police boss also warned that the cards would be reviewed to ensure that the social media information was collected. The collection of social media information started in 2015.
The Brennan Center for Justice, the civil rights non-profit that obtained the documents, warned that the collection of social media information by law enforcement agencies could be used for unjustified mass surveillance of civilians in the future.
“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center.
The organization reviewed another 40 police departments in the country but did not find evidence of the gathering of social media information.
The LAPD’s field interview cards have been the center of controversy in the past. Three officers were criminally charged for falsely accusing civilians of being gang members by checking a “gang member” box on the interview cards.
“The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling,” said Levinson-Waldman, speaking to The Guardian.
Hamid Khan, of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, noted that the data collected by the LAPD is shared with federal agencies, which have previously been accused of using “predictive policing” based on data provided by police.
Khan described the social media information collection as “stop and frisk,” warning that the department was doing it “with the clear goal of surveillance.”
Sweden 1. Faith 0
As the UK prepares to convert 12 year old children into human shields for teachers and geriatrics, Swedes enjoy a coffee together in the sun.
By Richard Lyon | September 4, 2021
HERE’S AN ASTONISHING THING about Sweden: you can hardly tell, from looking at its government’s population statistics,1 that it has COVID-19.
It’s astonishing because the entire foundation of the claim underlying the world’s descent into COVID-19 madness and authoritarianism is predicated on two controversial claims: that COVID-19 is unusually deadly, and that coercion and authoritarianism are necessary and effective in controlling it.
And yet here is a country that hasn’t succumbed to madness and authoritarianism. And here is a country in which you can hardly tell that COVID-19 is present.
Discovering Sweden is like discovering intelligent life in the universe after being told there can’t be any. It falsifies COVID’s catastrophic claims, and reveals a great deal about the institutions driving them.
The number of people who die in Sweden, after making some adjustments for “good” and “bad” flu years, increases by about 1,200 every couple of years. That’s partly because the population is increasing, partly because the population is ageing, and partly because the population is changing through immigration. It would have been astonishing if the number of people who died in Sweden in 2020 hadn’t increased.
I say “after making some adjustment for good and bad flu years”, because it’s by obscuring this that COVID catastrophists have weaponised Sweden and, ironically, coerced it into being an element of their narrative.
Flu, like coronaviruses, is a winter seasonal infection. In every country, there are “bad” seasons when relatively many vulnerable people die, and “good” seasons when relatively few do. 2018/19 was a “good” flu season in Sweden.2 3
Figure 1. Recorded COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were exaggerated by the carryover of vulnerable people from the mild 2018/19 flu season (A), and by either the replacement in 2020 of flu by COVID or miscoding of flu as COVID (B)
Consequently, the cohort of people who were vulnerable to respiratory infection when COVID-19 arrived in 2020 was enlarged by those would have died in an average or bad 2018/19 flu season, but hadn’t (‘A’ in Figure 1 above). Then, after COVID-19 arrived, it replaced flu as the cause of death in the 2019/20 flu-vulnerable cohort (‘B’, above). So the people in groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ who in 2020 would most likely have died of flu, died instead of COVID-19, or were mis-coded as having died of COVID-19.
This is important to understand. The core claim that COVID-19 is especially deadly depends in turn on the implicit claim that its deaths are in addition to normal deaths. No: the majority of its victims die from it instead of flu, cancer, stroke, dementia, heart disease, falling downstairs, or any one of an extended list of things that kill us when we’ve lived longer than the average human lifespan.
This explains why, simultaneously, many people appear to have died from COVID, yet overall death rates are not catastrophic. Here in the UK, the Government advisors estimate that up to two thirds of the fatalities in its vastly inflated prediction of 2020 COVID-19 deaths would have died that year anyway.4 COVID-19 arrived in the UK after an extended period of unusually low mortality: it contributed to a mortality rate in 2020 that was lower than it used to be every single year prior to 2008. In Sweden, you can hardly see it, if at all.
It also partly explains why coercion and authoritarianism have no observable impact on fatal infection rates.5 It’s not the openness of society that kills vulnerable people. It’s their vulnerability to all the other things that still kill them while they are locked down, and that coercion and authoritarianism has no effect on.
Using the same models used to justify imposing mandatory school and business closures, domestic confinement orders, and compulsory masks on UK citizens, UK Government advisors estimated Sweden would suffer 30,000 to 60,000 deaths in 2020 if they didn’t impose the same restrictions. Sweden politely ignored the advice. It didn’t impose “masks”, it didn’t significantly close schools and businesses, and it didn’t impose domestic confinement. At the end of 2020, had recorded 8,800 COVID-19 deaths.
Here’s the impact of those deaths on overall deaths in Sweden, in numbers:
Table 1. When corrected for annual variation in flu deaths, the rise in deaths in 2019/20 was almost identical to the rise in deaths in 2015/6 and 2016/7.
The displacement of flu deaths from 2019 into 2020 is clearly visible. We’ve computed the two year average to accommodate the inter-year variation in flu deaths, and calculated the change in that.6 The overall increase in deaths COVID-19 contributed to, relative to the rising trend, is barely distinguishable from noise.
“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life…Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, ‘Questions sur les Miracles’
Germans who keep refusing to quarantine could be put in detention centres under new Covid rules
— The Telegraph, 17 January 2021
Let’s remind ourselves of how one leading COVID catastrophists’ newspaper-of-record reports to its readers a death rate rise in Sweden that is barely distinguishable from noise, while inciting a McCarthyist witch-hunt against those who favoured Sweden’s approach:7
Their readers believe absurdities.
On the basis of absurdities like these, the UK Government is finalising plans to inject 12 year old children—without their parents’ consent—with unlicensed medical substances, designed to attack their immature immune systems in ways that are not yet fully understood, with observed but currently unquantified serious side effect risks, so that they can act as human shields for teachers and geriatrics.
It’s an atrocity.
There are no circumstances in a civilised society under which exposing children to harm to protect adults could be justified. But to the extent that it is, it is on the claim that this disease is unusually deadly, and therefore that such atrocities are warranted.
Sweden shows us it is not unusually deadly, and that they are not warranted. They represent for us the ending of “Lord Of The Flies”.8 As exhausted schoolboy Ralph lies on the beach, waiting to have his brains bashed out by the former Head Chorister (who comes to power by promising to slay an imaginary beast), he looks up to see a Naval Officer standing in the surf. Instantly, the children’s descent into madness and chaos is made shatteringly visible, even as the order of the adult world is restored. The spell is broken.
Sweden breaks the COVID-19 spell for us.
We should oppose COVID madness, coercion, and authoritarianism wherever we find it, and fight to rid ourselves of it until it has gone. It has no place in our world.
Statistics Sweden. “Population Statistics 2018-2021 (month) and 1998-2020 (year)” [link]
In the northern hemisphere, the winter seasonal respiratory infection season runs from July to June the following year, hence “2018/19”. Conflating the end of the 2019/20 season with the beginning of the 2020/21 season was one of many tricks that COVID catastrophism employs the UK to magnify the impression of COVID death in 2020.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden. “Influenza in Sweden – Season 2019–2020”, 2 October 2020 [link]
For references, see my essay “Look her in the eyes” [link]
For a discussion, see my essay “Christopher Snowdon’s smoking ruin” [link]
Is it a perfect measure? Of course not. But it doesn’t need to be. COVID catastrophism makes an extraordinary claim—that we should live permanently under emergency authoritarian rule because this is an especially deadly disease. That claim demands extraordinary evidence—evidence that should “hit you between the eyes”. It doesn’t.
Geoghegan, P. “Now the Swedish model has failed, it’s time to ask who was pushing it”. Guardian, 3 January 2021 [link]
People’s Party of Canada is the only federal election candidate that opposes vaccine passports
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 9, 2021
With the Canadian federal election less than two weeks away, only one of the top six parties has definitively opposed COVID vaccine passports and vowed to repeal them if elected; Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.
The other parties – Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party, Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrat Party, Yves-François Blanchet’s Bloc Québécois, Annamie Paul’s Green Party of Canada – have either expressed support for vaccine passports or not made a definitive statement on the issue.
The People’s Party’s COVID policy takes a strong stance against vaccine passports and includes a plan that details how the party intends to repeal and oppose vaccine passports and mandates if elected.
“Governments don’t want to admit that they were wrong and are imposing increasingly authoritarian measures on the population, including vaccine passports,” the People’s Party states in its COVID policy. “Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated will suffer under a regime of segregation, constant control, and surveillance. It is illusory to believe that the virus can be eradicated. We have to learn to live with it, without destroying our way of life in the process.”
The People’s Party also notes that “both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can get infected and transmit the virus, which negates the rationale for segregation and vaccine passports.”
If elected, the People’s Party has promised to:
- Repeal vaccine passports for travelers
- Repeal vaccine mandates and regular testing for federal civil servants and workers in federally regulated industries
- Oppose vaccine mandates and passports imposed by provincial governments and support individuals and groups that challenge such measures in court
In addition to this strong stance against vaccine passports and mandates, the People’s Party has also vowed to promote an approach to the pandemic that “guarantees the freedom of Canadians to make decisions based on informed consent, and rejects coercion and discrimination.”
The People’s Party also promises to not follow the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) – a group whose recommendations have been used by Big Tech to justify the mass censorship of debate and dissent on a wide range of COVID-related topics.
To achieve this, the party vows to fire the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam if elected and replace her with “someone who will work with provincial agencies to implement a rational approach to the pandemic, instead of following the recommendations of the World Health Organization.”
Bernier has consistently reiterated the People’s Party’s strong stance against vaccine passports by displaying banners with a “No Vax Passports” slogan during campaign stops, speaking out against vaccine passports, and attending vaccine passport protests.
“Vaccine passports are inefficient, unconstitutional and immoral,” Bernier told True North in August. “They will not prevent the spread of the virus because we now know that vaccinated people can also spread it. They would create two types of citizens with different rights. I don’t want to live in a ’show-me-your-papers’ society. If that happens, whether you are vaccinated or not will be irrelevant. Everyone will lose their freedoms and suffer in a surveillance and police state.”
By contrast, Trudeau’s Liberals have promised a $1 billion COVID-19 proof-of-vaccination fund to assist provinces in developing and implementing their own systems. Trudeau has described provincial vaccine passports as an “interim measure, that will perhaps last a year or so” before federal vaccine passports are promised to support businesses that are sued for forcing vaccine passports.
O’Toole’s Conservatives and Singh’s New Democrats have also expressed support for a federal vaccine passport while Blanchet’s Bloc Québécois supports vaccine passports for international travel.
Paul’s Green Party has yet to make a definitive statement on vaccine passports. In August, Paul questioned the Liberals’ motives in announcing a plan for mandatory vaccination two days before calling an election and called for information on “how the plan will accommodate people with legitimate reasons for not getting vaccinated.”
Local Green Party candidates have given conflicting answers on vaccine passports. Simcoe North Green Party candidate Krystal Brooks stated “I believe vaccine passports should be mandatory for essential workers to decrease the spread” while Kootenay-Columbia Green Party candidate Rana Nelson said “We, as in the Green Party, are not going to force vaccines.”
School Jabs are an Illegal Act of State Coercion, Despotic Quackery
By Tom Penn | TCW Defending Freedom | September 9, 2021
THE UK’s four chief medical officers seem likely to override the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation not to vaccinate under-16s – simultaneously rejecting Public Health England’s stance that ‘children under 16, even if they are clinically extremely vulnerable, are at low risk of serious morbidity and mortality, and, given the absence of safety and efficacy data on the vaccine, are not recommended for vaccination’.
Terrifyingly, we are now officially following nothing but perverted political impulse. Chief medical officer for England Chris Whitty is acting in direct contravention of the Covid-19-specific guidance contained within chapter 14a of PHE’s Green Book – its guide to vaccines and vaccination protocol – as cited above.
In ruthlessly pursuing the vaccination of children against Covid-19 – not on health grounds but in an effort to avert disruption to education – whilst singularly failing to address safety concerns such as the 1,609 vaccination fatalities reported to the MHRA’s Yellow Card Scheme, Whitty has shamelessly twisted the law of ‘Gillick competence’. Not because he and his foot-soldiers have been granted unchallenged authority to overrule a withdrawal of consent to immunisation, but because they are corrupting the ability of both parents and children to make an informed choice on the matter in the first place.
Chapter 2 of the Green Book opens with the statement: ‘It is a legal and ethical principle that valid consent must be obtained before treatment’, followed shortly by: ‘For consent to immunisation to be valid, it must be given freely, voluntarily and without coercion’ (my emphases).
If children and parents are being informed that the purpose of vaccination is to protect educational stability, then by paying heed only to the potential socio-domestic consequences of vaccination refusal, the CMOs are committing an act of medical coercion; thus surely breaking the legal principles involved in obtaining valid consent.
As if such a threat wasn’t intimidating enough, there is left hanging the veiled warning that household income may likewise suffer, as inevitably many parents will have to take time off work to remain home with self-isolating children.
There is no provision in the Green Book that says any immunisation protocol or safety guidance may be bypassed during an epidemic, pandemic or any other type of public health emergency – let alone a supposed educational one.
In fact, the JCVI’s report published on August 4 clearly states that: ‘Delivery of a Covid-19 vaccine programme for children and young people is likely to be disruptive to education in the short term, particularly if school premises are used for vaccination. Adverse reactions to vaccination (such as fevers) may also lead to time away from education for some individuals.’
So why are the four chief medical officers actively seeking to precipitate the very educational disruption they purport to be averting by vaccinating a demographic who simply do not require it?
There is further weight behind the JCVI’s stance that children are not recommended for vaccination, evidenced in a blunder of their own that merely adds emphasis to the low risk to young people from the virus: ‘In England, between February 2020 and March 2021 inclusive, fewer than 30 persons aged less than 18 years died because of Covid-19, corresponding to a mortality rate of 2 deaths per million.’
They neglect to mention the more detailed findings of the non-peer-reviewed study referenced: ‘Our findings emphasise the importance of underlying comorbidities as the main risk factor for death, as 76 per cent had chronic conditions, 64 per cent had multiple comorbidities, and 60 per cent had life-limiting conditions.’
The study concludes with an admission that six of the 25 children and young people (CYP) had no underlying health condition, but that owing to their hospital data being available only for the past five years, they may have had a comorbidity that could not be identified in the study.
An inconclusive verdict on these six with no apparent comorbidities essentially equates to zero healthy children having died from Covid-19 during the period in question.
By comparison, there were 158 recorded suicides in the age group 10-19 in England in 2020, according to Office for National Statistics provisional figures.
Although hard to believe considering the havoc he has helped wreak upon us all, Chris Whitty, a qualified physician, is apparently a ‘healthcare professional’. And in Broken Britain – a nation still in the grip, it seems, of a fraudulent medical emergency whose government are seeking extension to the exaggerated powers that sustain the entire scandal – this appears to mean that Whitty has clearance to circumvent the usual codes involved in lawful assessment.
That is, by psychologically swaying the demographic in question and coercing them into a medical procedure under the pretext of non-medical threats in the form of blighted educations and potentially unhappy homes.
Our Chief Medical Officer is asking parents and children to project themselves into the future, imagine the social and economic fallout of a shattered education, and then immunise themselves biologically against that mental construct in the here and now.
This is national-scale emotional and psychological manipulation – aka state coercion – and constitutes the unauthorised re-working of the lawful procedures involved in allowing parents and children to make a fully informed decision about an already reprehensible medical procedure. That is called breaking the law, and is the behaviour of a despotic quack.
Whitty is on the very brink of sanctioning grievous bodily harm, even death in some cases, to be inflicted upon the nation’s children in exchange for access to education.
Likewise he is verging on condemning vaccine-refusing children to a gruelling academic year of harassment and shaming from their peers, and has cruelly designated them the latest face of a virus politicised. As the headlines inevitably begin screaming of the post school-return casedemic, they will be the mainstream media’s whipping-boys and girls this time.
The virus will pass through the majority of children without them even knowing: ‘Fewer than 5 per cent of Covid-19 cases are amongst children and in general they appear to exhibit mild disease . . . and so Covid-19 vaccines are not routinely recommended for children and young people under 16,’ says the Green Book.
So remind us again, Professor Whitty, was it the Hippocratic or the Hypocritical Oath to which you solemnly pledged adherence for the good of humankind?
Oxford Scientist “It’s Illogical & Unethical To Force Jab On NHS Staff”
By Richie Allen | September 9, 2021
Speaking to SKY News this morning, Professor Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, said that it is illogical and unethical to “foist a vaccine upon people in the hope that you can reduce transmission of a disease.”
Speaking about the functionality of the jabs, Professor Gupta told Kay Burley:
“They were never meant to be used to stop transmission or to allow people in particular settings to make them risk free. So it is really not logical to use vaccines to protect other people. The vaccine protects you, which if you are vulnerable is a very valuable thing.”
Burley interrupted and asked Gupta to clarify that she does not believe that NHS staff should be forced to have the jab. Professor Gupta replied:
“I don’t think they should be forced to on the understanding simply because this vaccine does not prevent transmission. So if you just think of the logic of it, what is the point of requiring a vaccine to protect others if that vaccine does not durably prevent onward transmission of a virus?
Obviously there are all sorts of ethical and political issues surrounding this. It’s illogical to foist a vaccine upon people in the hope that you can reduce transmission of a disease.”
Burley asked her for her thoughts on jabbing 12 year-olds. Sunetra Gupta pulled no punches saying:
“I absolutely do not think that is logical at any level I mean leave alone the ethics of using 12 year-olds as barriers for infection for the community. The bottom line is that these vaccines do not prevent transmission.
In the case of the 12 year-old it benefits neither the individual who is not at risk of severe disease and death, nor does it benefit the community. To ask children to bear that risk is for me, simply unacceptable.”
No, Minister, Vaccine Passports Are Not Necessary to End the Pandemic
By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • September 9, 2021
Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi has insisted to MPs in the Commons that vaccine passports are necessary to end the pandemic. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.
While the U.K. has seen a spike in reported ‘cases’ in recent days, much of it is driven by the increase in testing as schools have returned. The positive rate, by contrast, shows a gentle decline.
There’s no sign here of vaccine passports being needed to prevent unmanageable spread.
What about elsewhere? Israel is a highly vaccinated country which got in there early with vaccines, so that upwards of 55% of the population has been double vaccinated since early April, and it has made extensive use of vaccine passports.
India, by contrast, is a low vaccination country which only recently broke through 10% double vaccinated.
How are they faring? Israel is currently experiencing a big surge in Delta infections, at a time when over 62% of the population is double vaccinated.
India was the first place to have a Delta wave, back in March and April (the variant, of course, was first identified there). New reported infections entered sharp and sustained decline around May 9th. At that point, fewer than 2.5% of the population were double vaccinated.
Clearly, then, vaccines do not prevent Delta outbreaks, and neither are they necessary to end them.
If you’re wondering about the small recent rise in India, it’s entirely concentrated in two states (on opposite sides of the country), Kerala and Mizoram, which stand out as having had very different reported infection patterns than the rest of the country since late July. As can be seen below, Kerala is now declining again while Mizoram (the other anomalous line) is behaving more erratically. This is not (yet) a new nationwide surge in infections then, though is worth keeping an eye on.
Another country worth looking at is Sweden. Its Delta surge duly appeared, but then, unlike in Israel, quickly seems to be fizzling out. Is this a result of having more robust herd immunity from allowing the virus to spread more freely?
Excess mortality in the country continues to be through the floor, meaning that August 2020 to July 2021 may well turn out to be a year of very ordinary levels of mortality, just as August 2019 to July 2020 did.
If this is the outcome in a country that famously imposed no stay-at-home order, closed no businesses or schools for under-16s, imposed no mask mandate, and has no vaccine passport, then what exactly is everyone afraid of? And what is Nadhim Zahawi on about?
New South Wales Health Chief Invokes New World Order In News Briefing
By Richie Allen | September 9, 2021
At a press conference today, the Chief Health Officer of New South Wales Kerry Chant was asked about contact tracing as the region prepares to emerge from yet another brutal lockdown.
Chant said:
“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in The New World Order. Yes it will be pubs and clubs and other things if we have a positive case there.”
The New South Wales government also announced that stay at home orders will be lifted for double-vaccinated citizens. The jabbed will enjoy more freedoms, while refuseniks will be told to confine themselves to their homes.
The un-jabbed will only be allowed to leave for essential shopping, exercise and medical treatment. Presumably, selfish refuseniks will be kept under virtual house arrest until they see sense and roll up their sleeves.
Good God this is really happening.
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics
By Glenn Greenwald | September 7, 2021
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) surprised even many of its harshest critics this week when it strongly defended coercive programs and other mandates from the state in the name of fighting COVID. “Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” its Twitter account announced, adding that “vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public.”
If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of “vaccine mandates” and “vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that “some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute”) to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:
[W]hen it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. . . . In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. . . . .
[Many claim that] vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others. . . . While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. . . .
While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. . . . . Where a vaccine is not medically contraindicated, however, avoiding a deadly threat to the public health typically outweighs personal autonomy and individual freedom.
The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”
What makes the ACLU’s position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.
The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: “Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today’s ACLU is now advocating for COVID.
In 2008, the group explained its purpose this way: “the following report examines the relationship between civil liberties and public health in contemporary U.S. pandemic planning and makes a series of recommendations for developing a more effective, civil liberties-friendly approach.” Its key warning: “Not all public health interventions have been benign or beneficial, however. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have encouraged abuses of state power. Atrocities, large and small, have been committed in the name of protecting the public’s health.”
2008 report of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
The immediate impetus for the ACLU’s 2008 report was two-fold: 1) the 2008 emergence of the avian bird flu pandemic, which produced highly alarmist and ultimately false headlines around the world about millions dying; and 2) new pandemic legislation and regulatory frameworks, enacted in the wake of 9/11, premised on the view, as the ACLU put it, “that every outbreak of disease could be the beginning of some horrific epidemic, requiring the suspension of civil liberties.”
The ACLU issued its 2008 report to warn that the worst possible way to respond to a deadly pandemic was through coercion and mandates. Instead, the group argued — as one would expect from a civil liberties organization — persuasion and voluntary compliance were both more effective and less likely to erode core liberties. As they put it:
The lessons from history should be kept in mind whenever we are told by government officials that “tough,” liberty-limiting actions are needed to protect us from dangerous diseases. Specifically: coercion and brute force are rarely necessary. In fact they are generally counterproductive—they gratuitously breed public distrust and encourage the people who are most in need of care to evade public health authorities. On the other hand, effective, preventive strategies that rely on voluntary participation do work.
The key dichotomy emphasized by the 2008 version of the ACLU was the difference between constructive and persuasive messaging regarding public health versus the use of law enforcement and forced mandates. Starting with the report’s title (“The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach”) through every section, the ACLU urges that mandates and coercion be dispensed with in favor of voluntary compliance and educational messages:
Government agencies have an essential role to play in helping to prevent and mitigate epidemics. Unfortunately, in recent years, our government’s approach to preparing the nation for a possible influenza pandemic has been highly misguided. Too often, policymakers are resorting to law enforcement and national security-oriented measures that not only suppress individual rights unnecessarily, but have proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of disease and saving lives . . . .
This law enforcement/national security strategy shifts the focus of preparedness from preventing and mitigating an emergency to punishing people who fail to follow orders and stay healthy.
Much of the report is devoted to an examination of how the U.S. government has historically treated pandemics. As it reviews each pandemic — including horrifically lethal ones such as the plague and smallpox — the ACLU concludes over and over that American health authorities excessively relied on coercion rather than education and persuasion, fueled by media-aided fear porn and alarmist narratives:
Lessons from History: American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.
Amazingly, the model that the ACLU identifies as the one that must be avoided is precisely the one that it is now urging be used for COVID. Compare, for instance, the ACLU’s defense of coercive mandates in its New York Times op-ed this week (vaccine mandates “rarely run afoul of civil liberties”) with this ringing endorsement of the need to preserve freedom of choice in its 2008 report:
This model assumes that we must “trade liberty for security.” As a result, instead of helping individuals and communities through education and provision of health care, today’s pandemic prevention focuses on taking aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick. People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.
What most worried the 2008 version of the ACLU was that authoritarian power vested in the hands of public health officials in the form of mandates and coercion will become permanent given that we will always live with such threats and endless pandemics. That was why, urged that iteration of the ACLU, we must opt for an approach that relies on education programs and voluntary compliance rather than state mandates.
“The law enforcement approach to public health offers a rationale for the endless suspension of civil liberties,” they explained. Using post-9/11 expansions of state power as its framework, the group explained that “the ‘Global War on Terror’ may go on for a generation, but the war on disease will continue until the end of the human race. There will always be a new disease, always the threat of a new pandemic. If that fear justifies the suspension of liberties and the institution of an emergency state, then freedom and the rule of law will be permanently suspended.”
The ACLU’s New York Times op-ed this week repeatedly stressed that coercive mandates are justified whenever “the disease is highly transmissible, serious and lethal.” But its 2008 report argued exactly the opposite. The report was critical of forced vaccinations and other mandates in prior outbreaks of smallpox — certainly a highly contagious and lethal disease — but then argued that when the disease reappeared in the late 1940s, New York City handled it much better by offering voluntary vaccines and education programs rather than coercive measures:
In contrast, New York City relied on a different approach in 1947, one that viewed the public as the client rather than the enemy of public health. When smallpox reappeared in the city after a long absence, the city educated the public about the problem and instituted a massive voluntary vaccination campaign. Not surprisingly, no coercion was needed. Provided with information about the need for and benefits of vaccination, and reassurance that the city was helping rather than attacking them, the citizens of the New York turned out en masse for one of the world’s largest voluntary vaccination campaigns. The campaign was successful, and the epidemic was quashed before it had a chance to spread broadly in the city or beyond.
In the scheme of repressive measures that worried the 2008 ACLU, “compulsory isolation and quarantine are among the most coercive non-pharmaceutical interventions that may be employed during a pandemic.” They minced no words about such policies: “civil liberties concerns arise when these interventions are imposed by law.”
The ACLU did not merely warn with words of the dangers of excessive pandemic coercion. They also legally represented at least one client who they viewed as the victim of public health hysteria and tyranny. In 2006, “a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient named Robert Daniels was involuntarily quarantined in Phoenix, Arizona for disobeying an order by Maricopa County health officials to wear a face mask in public at all times.” Even once Daniels was released and it turned out he had a less severe case of TB than originally assumed, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio publicly threatened him with prosecution for the pre-quarantine events.”
The ACLU’s lesson from that case, and similar ones it had handled, was clear: these cases “are cautionary tales that illustrate the counterproductive nature of a punitive, law enforcement approach to preventing the spread of disease.” Most important of all, said the civil liberties group, coercive steps — such as mandates and quarantines — not only endanger civil liberties but are less effective in improving the public health, because they convert the public from cooperative allies into enemies that must be controlled and punished:
These efforts require working with rather than against communities, providing communities with as healthy an environment as possible, health care if they need it, and the means to help themselves and their neighbors. Most importantly, to protect public health, public health policies must aim to help, rather than to suppress, the public.
A separate ACLU report from 2015, issued during the ebola epidemic, contained a similar message. It warned “against politically motivated and scientifically unwarranted quarantines, which the report found violated individuals’ rights and hampered efforts to end the outbreak.” Hysteria over ebola became so intense that the ACLU “found that people were illegally deprived of their right to due process under the 14th Amendment because the quarantines and movement restrictions were not scientifically justified.”
While both reports acknowledge that more restrictive measures can be justified under extreme circumstances, the crux of each is that voluntary compliance is better than coercion, that state mandates typically fail, and that the far greater danger is vesting too much power in the hands of the state, which it will never relinquish given the permanence of pandemics.
How the ACLU fell from those traditional and vital civil liberties positions to urging this week in The New York Times that “far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” is anyone’s guess. But what is beyond doubt is that it is a far fall indeed. And most of all, hearing the ACLU invoke the standard rationale of authoritarians — we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions, but these rights are not absolute — is nothing short of jarring.
Update, Sept. 7, 2021, 6:58 p.m.: Shortly after publication of this article, a former ACLU lawyer, Margaret Winter, noted in response: “It was NOT just ‘prior to covid’ that ACLU denounced vaccine mandates: Read ACLU’s 2020 position paper passionately and correctly arguing that vaccine mandates ‘exacerbate racial disparities and harm the civil liberties of all.’” Winter was referencing this ACLU report, from May of 2020, that warned of the serious dangers of “immunity passports,” under which citizens who already got COVID and thus had immunity would enjoy rights not available to others:
We at the ACLU have serious concerns about the adoption of any such proposal, because of its potential to harm public health, incentivize economically-vulnerable people to risk their health by contracting COVID-19, exacerbate racial and economic disparities, and lead to a new health surveillance infrastructure that endangers privacy rights. . . . This division would likely worsen existing racial, disability, and economic disparities in America and lead people struggling to afford basic necessities to deliberately risk their health.
While such a scheme is different in degree from vaccine passports let alone vaccine mandates — which the ACLU is now championing — its rationale for opposing such a system is fully applicable: “there are serious civil liberties and civil rights harms from making workplace decisions on that basis,” adding: “any immunity passport system endangers privacy rights by creating a new surveillance infrastructure to collect health data.”
Rutgers bans unvaccinated online-only student from virtual classes
RT | September 7, 2021
A US university student who chose to take classes remotely rather than be forced to get vaccinated against Covid-19 for on-campus learning has reportedly been barred from school despite doing his studies 70 miles (100km) away.
Logan Hollar, a 22-year-old psychology major, told NJ.com in an article published on Sunday that he was locked out of his Rutgers University email and related accounts when he tried to pay his tuition fees on August 27. He said he knows another student in the same situation.
As a result, Hollar has been blocked from participating since the first semester of what was supposed to be his senior year began on September 1. He transferred to the school last year and decided to take all his classes online because he didn’t want to be subject to the Rutgers vaccine mandate.
“I’m not in an at-risk age group,” Hollar said. “I’m healthy, and I work out. I don’t find Covid to be scary. If someone wants to be vaccinated, that’s fine with me, but I don’t think they should be pushed.”
The student’s ouster is an apparent contradiction to how jab mandates have been justified by US colleges. A legal ruling that upheld compulsory vaccines at Indiana University – which became a key precedent for inoculation mandates when the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal – argued that students who didn’t want to get the shots had other options. One of the options specifically mentioned was taking courses online.
A Rutgers spokeswoman told NJ.com the university’s vaccination policies differed between a “fully online, degree-granting program” and fully remote classes in which other students might be on campus for part of a course. It’s not clear how Hollar’s participation from his home in Sandyston, New Jersey, might spread Covid-19 to classmates or staff on campus in New Brunswick, halfway across the state.
The spokeswoman, Dory Devlin, noted that students can apply for medical or religious exemptions from the vaccine mandate – a process that takes two to four weeks, during which they are locked out of their accounts. However, Hollar didn’t claim a medical or religious reason; rather, he didn’t want to be forced to take a vaccine that he considered unnecessary, and opted to stay off campus to avoid having to comply.
Hollar said he sought answers from Rutgers as to why he had to be vaccinated to take online classes. One representative told him he could apply for an exemption to get reinstated, which he did. But with the clock ticking on the start of classes, he called back days later and was told the administration had decided not to grant waivers for anyone who requested them after August 23.
“I find it concerning for the vaccine to be pushed by the university rather than my doctor,” Hollar said. “I’ll probably have to transfer to a different university.” He added that he was content to be barred from campus while doing his coursework online.
I don’t need to be there. They could ban me. I just want to be left alone.
Last March, Rutgers became the first university in the country to mandate that students be vaccinated at all of its campuses. Hundreds of other US colleges and universities have imposed such orders, some of which waited for the Indiana ruling to establish a firm legal footing.
Hollar’s stepfather, Keith Williams, called the Rutgers decision “crazy,” adding, “I believe in science. I believe in vaccines. But I am highly confident that Covid-19 and variants do not travel through computer monitors by taking online classes.”
Social media users were similarly astonished, suggesting that the ban showed vaccine mandates weren’t motivated by safety concerns. “It’s not about science and health, it’s about control,” video producer Damon Salvadore said. Conservative pundit Blaire White mocked the university’s policy, saying, “I see we’re still following the science.”
San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to require vaccine passports for entry
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 7, 2021
The Grace Cathedral in San Francisco will soon have proof-of-vaccination as a requirement for entry. The vaccine mandate will apply to congregants and people attending other services and events at the church.
Leaders at the church said that the vaccine passport move is in line with guidance from public health officials on gatherings and events. However, churches are not required to follow the city-wide vaccine passport mandate, as there is a religious exemption in the state.
Grace Cathedral says it wants parishioners and other visitors to feel “safe,” the church leader said.
The cathedral, one of the largest Episcopal Cathedrals in the US, hosts multiple services and events, including yoga, attended by a large number of people.
Dean Malcolm Young told reporters that there has been a mixed reaction amongst parishioners about the vaccine mandate, but he feels most people support it. He added that everyone in the church should feel safe, and vaccine passports were the best way to do that.
The mandate will apply to all parishioners and visitors over the age of 12. Enforcement of the vaccine for non-church events will begin on Tuesday, September 7 and for those attending church services, the mandate will come into effect on September 29.
Political commentator Calvin Robinson, speaking on the Trans World Radio Christian network, called the decision “evil.”
“They are divisive in that they’re saying who can and who cannot attend Church and that is separating people from God, and therefore the definition of evil.”
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Book Review
The Genetic Deception — now in paperback (Second Edition)
Lies are Unbekoming | October 2, 2026
The genes the field promised were never there.
The genetic story of disease is a cover story.
The twenty-first century runs on it. Paediatric clinics. Cancer centres. Forensic laboratories. Family-planning counsel. It is used to explain illness, to assign blame, to foreclose questions. It protects the industries whose products and practices are what actually caused the harm.
It isn’t true.
In 2010, Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson looked at over seven hundred genome-wide association studies covering some eighty common diseases. The genes the field had promised were not there. The field invented a term, “missing heritability”, to explain the absence, and has quietly worked to bury the finding ever since.
The Genetic Deception is a book about what Latham and Wilson found. What the field did with it. And what the public was told instead. … continue
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- The Genetic Deception — now in paperback (Second Edition)
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- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
