Kids and Covid: A Roundtable
A frank conversation about the consequences of our pandemic policies.
Bari Weiss
Two years into this pandemic, we know something crucial that we didn’t know at its start: Children, miraculously, face a negligible risk for severe outcomes from Covid-19. And yet kids—from preschool to university—have borne the burden of our most draconian policies. While the rest of us have returned to bars and restaurants, pre-schoolers are still in masks. The Los Angeles school district announced last Friday that “masking will be required at all times, indoors and outdoors.”
The extent to which Covid policies have disrupted the social, intellectual and emotional growth of American kids—including some of the poorest and most vulnerable—is among the most morally urgent issues right now. (Leading doctors and public health experts agree: See this useful toolkit for parents just released by Dr. Lucy McBride and others.)
Were these measures necessary? Is the current cure worse than the disease itself? How are young people really doing? And what should concerned parents and teachers do to help?
On Monday, January 31st, at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST, I’ll be asking these questions and many more to three people who have skin in the game: AJ Kay, Jane Kitchen, and Alex Gutentag.
AJ Kay is a writer and mom of four who currently serves as managing editor of Collateral Global.
Jane Kitchen is a 19-year-old undergraduate student who recently transferred to Hillsdale College.
Alex Gutentag is a public school teacher in California and a columnist at Tablet.
This event is co-sponsored by Tablet and is part of their monthly series called “The Turn,” which focuses on the political homelessness of our current moment. If you missed the first event in the series, with Liel Leibovitz and Walter Kirn, you can catch it here.
Fact-Checkers Are Used to Confuse the Public:
Sharyl Attkisson, Epoch Times, By Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek, January 23, 2022
When does it end?
Five-time Emmy award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson was interviewed by Epoch Times regarding her research into fact checkers.
Attkisson criticized large news outlets for being a “mouthpiece” of the government or other special interest groups instead of challenging them or holding them accountable, particularly as it relates to the pandemic.
She said that soon after the pandemic began, she spoke to many scientists, government as well as private, about the virus and the course it was taking before she formed an opinion. She asked some of the scientists to speak out but they were afraid.
“They said they dare not speak out for fear of being controversial, and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn’t understand.”
Sharyl Attkisson said she has seen an increased effort to manipulate the public to appreciate censorship and disapprove of journalism. One of the strategies that has been employed is the use of third-party fact-checkers, she said.
“Nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group, [and] fact-checkers are no different,” Attkisson told
“Either they’ve been co-opted, in many instances, or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda,” said Attkisson. “This is all part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have.”
Attkisson said she first started to notice news being controlled in the early 2000s when the media company she was working for was actively trying to suppress certain stories.
“The pushback came to be more about keeping a story from airing or keeping a study from being reported on the news, not just giving the other side, not just making sure it was accurately reported,” she said of pharmaceutical company stories she was covering at the time.
In 2016 Attkisson heard former President Barack Obama say news needed to be curated, after which mainstream media outlets started to consistently use the term fake news to describe mostly conservative news stories that they deemed untrue.
“And I remember thinking that was such a strange thing to say, because there was no big movement among the public, that people needed to have their information curated, that someone needed to step in and tell us what to think, curate what was online. But … after that, if you look at the media, day after day, there were headlines about fake news and curation of what should and shouldn’t be reported.”
Crazy health restrictions ruin couple’s night out
The DC Rally and the Rise of the Resistance
JEFFREY A. TUCKER
By long American tradition, protest movements manifest themselves most fully in gatherings in Washington, D.C, starting at the Washington Monument and culminating in speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. At long last, after two years of astonishing attacks on fundamental rights that most everyone once believed were protected by the U.S. Constitution, this happened today, January 23, 2022.
It didn’t just happen actually. It wasn’t spontaneous. It was paid for, planned, organized, put together, and broadcast on online media. There was nothing but sincere love of what we used to call liberty behind these efforts. The speakers, organizers, and people who showed up took huge risks in order to salvage what is left of the Founders’ vision. They deserve every credit for this. Bless them.
The enduring question is: why did it take so long? Why did people not pour out into the streets on March 13, 2020, when the government first issued its lockdown directives that were put into place the next week and lasted for months after? How is it possible that governments around the country could have locked up the churches on Easter 2020, smashed 100K-plus small businesses, and kept many schools closed for the better part of two years and yet protests against lockdowns were few, far between, and mostly unattended?
Let us not forget that “social distancing” rules were structured to “keep people separate,” in the words of the crank doctor Deborah Birx who concocted all these protocols and talked Trump into accepting them. Combined with capacity restrictions, they amounted to a ban on public meetings. In many states, you could not gather with more than 10 people. This was enforced by the police and cheered by mainstream media.
So let us not be too hard on people for not living a life of utter defiance. In addition, in those days, people were utterly shell-shocked. They feared not only the virus (which data had already shown was not a threat to most people of working age) but aIso arrest, doxxing, and shaming. The George Floyd protests got the green light from the same institutions, so people used the occasion to let off steam, but that light quickly turned red thereafter.
The rest of the article click here
The Folly of Pandemic Censorship
As the latest anti-Substack campaign shows, more and more people are forgetting why free speech works
Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Both outlets came out with their scare pieces this morning. From The Guardian:
A group of vaccine-skeptic writers are generating revenues of at least $2.5m (£1.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of thousands of followers on the online publishing platform Substack, according to new research…
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said companies like Substack were under “no obligation” to amplify vaccine skepticism and make money from it. “They could just say no…”
The Post, citing “some misinformation experts say” — the pandemic version of “people familiar with the matter” — added:
These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints — potentially making the services less responsible for spreading harmful views, some misinformation experts say.
If these stories sound familiar, it’s because this same Center for Countering Digital Hate two years ago tried to pull the same stunt with The Federalist, using NBC to ask Google to crack down on them. Humorously, and typically — this happens a lot with these stories — that effort ended in fiasco. The piece NBC ended up writing boasting of the success of its “Verification Unit” in getting the site demonetized, entitled, “Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles,” turned out to itself be misinformation. The Federalist was never banned, only warned, and the issue was its comments section, not its articles.
…Substack is home to tens of thousands of writers and over a million paying subscribers, quadruple last year’s total of 250,000. The sites range from newsletters for comics enthusiasts to crypto news to recipe ideas. Like the Internet as a whole, it’s basically a catalogue of everything.
Still, panic campaigns in legacy press consistently focus on handfuls of sites, and with impressive dishonesty describe them as representative. I was particularly struck by a recent Mashable article that talked about a supposed “backlash” against Substack’s “growing collection of anti-trans writers,” which seemed to refer to Jesse Singal (who is no such thing) and Graham Linehan and — that’s it. Substack is actually home to more trans writers than any other outlet, but to the Scolding Class, that’s not the point. The company’s real crime is that it refuses to submit to pressure campaigns and strike off Wrongthinkers.
Substack is designed to be difficult to censor. Because content is sent by email, it’s not easy to pressure platforms to zap offending material. It doesn’t depend on advertisers, so you can’t lean on them, either. The only real pressure points are company executives like Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best, who are now regular targets of these ham-fisted campaigns demanding they discipline writers.
The latest presents Substack as a place where, as Mashable put it, “COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish.” The objections mainly center around Joseph Mercola, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone. There are issues with the specific critiques of each, but those aren’t the point. Every one of these campaigns revolves around the same larger problem: would-be censors misunderstanding the basic calculus of the freedom of speech.
Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official.
Whether it’s WMDs or the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco or the missile gap or the red scare or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, the worst real-world disasters always turn out to be driven or enabled by official falsehoods. In the case of Afghanistan (and Iraq, and Vietnam before both), the cycle of war disaster was perpetuated by a sweeping, organized, and intricate system of official lying, about everything from the success of missions to the efficacy of weaponry to the political devotion of supposed allies. The only defense against these most dangerous types of deceptions is an absolutely free press.
People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down, the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. Unfortunately, censors by nature can’t help themselves. Our official liars are always trying to learn from their errors. For instance, film of wounded, suffering, or dead American boys, as well as of the atrocities we committed, not only resulted in pressure to end the Vietnam War, but probably prevented future invasions of countries like Nicaragua, as voters recalled the sickening “quagmire.”
Military officials saw this, and when they finally got to go to war again, they banned the filming of coffins and instituted an embed system that closed off the bulk of adversarial reporting. Of course, that was not enough, because organizations like Wikileaks found ways to sneak out forbidden pictures. So, the powers that be imposed much tougher penalties on whistleblowers going forward. Instead of letting the Daniel Ellsbergs of the world write books and give lectures, the new reality for people like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden is permanent exile or imprisonment. The jailers seem quite proud of this, but the unofficial pseudo-ban on Assange coverage has only added to the impression of a not-free, certainly not trustworthy system of media.
Instead of seeing the root causes of this atmosphere of rapidly declining trust, officials keep pushing for even more sweeping campaigns of control, most recently seeking to make platforms like Google and Twitter arbiters of speech.
I’ve used Substack to show the amazingly diverse range of speech deemed unallowable on private platforms, from raw footage of both anti-Trump protests and the January 6th riots, to satirical videos no one had even seen yet, to advocates and detractors of the medication Ivermectin, to a Jewish tweeter’s pictorial account of Hitler’s life, to a now proven-true expose about the president’s son. The latter case is on point, because the widely distributed story that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was the actual disinformation. If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed.
This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years.
Thinking Points Memo Jan. 23, 2022
Toby Rogers
A koan
How many doses of a vaccine with negative efficacy does it take to stop a pandemic?
Where we are at
Day 678 of 15-days-to-flatten the curve.
Q: What’s the incubation period for the virus?
A: No one knows.
Q: What are the most effective treatments?
A: FDA, CDC, and anyone with critical thinking skills know but doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies will not let you have them.
Q: How are the vaccines working out?
A: Negative efficacy.
Q: That’s bad?
A: Literally worse than doing nothing.
Q: What’s Brandon doing?
A: Sending people 1 billion tests.
Q: Wait, tests!? Why?
A: Keep people hyped.
Q: Hyped for what?
A: More ‘rona, more vaccines, more masks, more totalitarianism.
Q: How are other governments responding?
A: Australia deported the healthiest guy in the country for making everyone else look bad. Canada is a prison state. France, Germany, and Austria are using fascism to push vaccines with negative efficacy. Blue states/cities are setting up Vaccine Apartheid. The Third World is doing great by using inexpensive off-the-shelf treatments that work.
Getting the word out
Children’s Health Defense republished my recent Supreme Court article.
The Brownstone Institute also republished my Supreme Court article.
100 questions they don't want to answer
The most troubling part of the pandemic to me is the lack of transparency and accountability. The authorities love to create mandates we must follow, but they refuse to be held accountable.
Steve Kirsch
Here’s a list of questions that you can ask your doctor, local, state, and federal lawmakers and health authorities. I haven’t had any luck getting any of these questions answered on camera so I can share the answers with you. Perhaps you will have better luck.
There aren’t 100 questions here yet, but there will be when I’m done with this. Check back in a few days for the update. Hyperlinks will be added later to all the references.
General questions
Incriminating Evidence is a collection of counter-narrative evidence. Can we go through that one piece at a time and can you explain how these are all wrong? Or conversely, perhaps you can find just one document that you can show is wrong in that article?
Censorship
President Biden has a Disinformation Dozen list. Why not debate these people instead of censoring them? Is it right for the leader of the free world to proudly proclaim a censorship list?
Facebook has removed vaccine victim support groups with over 200,000 users. Why was this done? Why didn’t the medical community say a word in protest? How is removing a support group for vaccine injured a benefit to society?
Will you sponsor a law allowing people who have had live saving content removed from large social media platforms to sue for statutory damages?
Accountability
Why won’t any member of the FDA/CDC outside committees debate me for $1M just to show up at the debate table?
Why are people trying to censor the doctors instead of debating them? Why weren’t any of the 270 signers of the letter asking Spotify to censor Joe Rogan willing to debate Malone on the issues they objected to?
Why won’t any local, state, or federal lawmaker or official agree to answer any of these questions in a live recorded video interview?
How can the CDC not find a single safety signal with these vaccines other than minor symptoms? It was the DoD who found the myocarditis signal.
Will the CDC ever admit there are thousands of adverse events and deaths?
Why did Steven A. Anderson of the FDA (who is the top person for safety monitoring for these vaccines) duck all my phone calls and emails when I asked if he wanted to see the troubling safety signals in VAERS?
Why did Janet Woodcock not follow through on her agreement to investigate the Maddie de Garay case?
Everyone knows there was fraud in the Phase 3 trial for 12-15 year olds. How come nobody is saying anything?
Jessica Rose’s paper on myocarditis was unethically pulled by Elsevier for no stated reason. Why is the academic community not saying anything?
Social media companies have removed the accounts of people who tried to expose the truth. This cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Will the social media companies be held accountable?
Is there a single member of congress who will object to Biden’s censorship list?
If the State Board removes the license of a physician for “misinformation” and said “misinformation” later turns out to be true, shouldn’t the affected physician be allowed to sue the State Board for treble damages and attorney fees?
Pandemic response
Why didn’t we just mandate everyone get the Fareed-Tyson protocol if they got COVID? This would have resulted in very few deaths. Why did the NIH refuse to investigate this?
Everyone knows about the Fareed-Tyson protocol today. Why not simply mandate its use now and drop the other restrictions?
When we found out the vaccines did nothing to prevent infection, the societal benefit ended at that point. Why didn’t we drop the mandates then?
Vaccine efficacy
There are over 9 studies that show the vaccines make it MORE likely (not less likely) you’ll be infected from COVID. Did they make a mistake in all 9 studies?
The latest UK and Scotland data show negative vaccine efficacy. Was there a mistake?
Vaccine safety
Why do 13 different method show that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the vaccines?
Why did the Pfizer trial report 24% more deaths in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Why weren’t there autopsies in any of those deaths? How can Pfizer be certain those deaths weren’t caused by the vaccines?
My neurologist has 20,000 patients and 2,000 vaccine injured. She’s been in practice for 11 years w/o a vaccine injury. This vaccine is over 20,000X worse than other vaccines. If the vaccine is so safe, how do you explain a 10% injury rate?
There are now over 1M adverse events reported in the VAERS system. Using CDC’s methodology, we know VAERS is ~40x underreported. That’s 40M adverse events and > 5,000 conditions that are significantly elevated. How can the CDC not spot a single safety signal (other than myocarditis)?
There are over 5,000 significantly elevated adverse events in the VAERS system. How come we aren’t giving people a list of these? If they weren’t caused by the vaccines, then what were they caused by?
How can the CDC not find any deaths caused by the vaccines, yet top pathologists like Ryan Cole and Sucharit Bhakdi claim that over 90% of the deaths within 60 days post-vaccination were likely caused by the vaccine. One of the world’s top pathologists, Peter Schirmacher, also found results consistent with their findings. Why should we trust the CDC? Did these pathologists make a mistake?
Why is the CDC “still investigating” all the cases where the autopsy showed the person was killed by the vaccine?
Why isn’t the CDC requiring that autopsies be done by pathologists trained in spotting COVID vaccine injury if the death was within 30 days of the vaccine?
Ryan Cole has been a pathologist for 26 years. He’s seen nearly 500,000 patients and done 550 autopsies. He recently found a saphenous vein in a patient’s leg 4 feet long that was SOLID with clots. He’s never seen anything like that in his entire career. Others in the patient were 6 to 24 inches long. This was in a patient who died just 3 days after a booster shot. If it wasn’t the vaccine that caused this, then what did?
If myocarditis after the vax is so rare, then how do we explain at least 4 myocarditis cases in a small private school (Monte Vista Christian School) among fewer than 400 boys?
Why are there so few autopsies?
Shouldn’t a 3 year old dying from cardiac arrest just one day after being vaccinated set off alarm bells? Does anyone care?
If the vaccines are so safe and effective then why do surveys of firemen and airline pilots show that 80% would choose not to be vaccinated if they weren’t forced to?
Biased news coverage
People who die within 60 days of the vax are 90% likely to have died from the vaccine. How come we never talk about when they were vaccinated in their obituary? Why are there so few autopsies in these cases?
1 Why does Jake Tapper use ad hominem attacks against Robert F. Kennedy, but will not debate him? Isn’t this unfair?
Corruption
Why did FEMA make a cash offer to Ernest Ramirez to declare his son’s death a COVID death? Did they have evidence the coroner got it wrong?
Maddie de Garay, who was 12 at the time, was injured in the Pfizer phase 3 trial. She’s paralyzed. She’s now becoming a quadriplegic. Why didn’t the FDA, CDC, or NIH investigate? That’s clinical trial fraud. Why aren’t we telling people that based on the clinical trial, there is a 1 chance in 1,000 your child could be paralyzed too?
Why aren’t any coroners trained on how to spot death from COVID vaccines?
Why aren’t all deaths within 4 month of vax being autopsied to see if the vaccine caused the death? Even if we just did this for 1 day?
Why is there no stopping condition? How many kids have to die from cardiac arrest before we stop the vaccines?
Why refusing to fill valid ivermectin prescriptions protecting health? What studies show that the risks outweigh the benefits? Don’t you have to cherry pick studies to show that?
Why was every single early treatment protocol using existing drugs/supplements suppressed by the NIH?
Why is ivermectin so expensive? One vaccine injured patient must pay $220 for 20 pills. Why is this not covered by insurance?
Intimidation tactics
If doctors are free to practice medicine, then why is only one doctor in California willing to write medical exemptions from the vaccine?
Mandates
Is it ethical to mandate a vaccine that is more likely to kill people than to save them?
Is it ethical to mandate a vaccine where most all of the vaccine injured cannot be cured?
Is it ethical to ever mandate any vaccine ever?
If the mandates are to protect society, why isn’t there a risk benefit analysis anywhere?
Why it is ok to mandate vaccination for kids when the data shows we kill over 100 kids to save 1. Was there an error in Dr. Toby Rogers’ analysis?
If you want to mandate something, why not mandate that everyone with COVID get early treatment ?
Why won’t anyone with a mandate accept liability?
1 Why must I be vaccinated to watch my daughter graduate from college? Why is testing not sufficient?
If you die from the vaccine, many insurance companies won’t pay for it since you opted for an experimental treatment forced by your employer. Is it right for the burden to be on you?
If the vaccines are as safe and effective as claimed, why do we need mandates?
Masks
1. Why are masks mandated when every randomized controlled trial shows that cloth and surgical masks are completely useless against COVID.
2. Can anyone show a study showing the risk reduction from an N95 mask varies over time within a room? It goes to zero after a short amount of time. What is it?
3. Why are we not educating the public about P100 respirators? Don’t we want to protect people?
Social distancing
1. Where is the study showing that 6 feet results in a benefit? How does that benefit decay over time?
Testing
1. Since there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread, why are we testing people who are asymptomatic?
2. Since there is no evidence the naturally recovered can infect others, why are we testing these people and requiring them to be vaccinated?
We are being mandated to take a vaccine for a societal benefit without ever being shown the risk-benefit analysis.
There is a reason for that. The benefit is negative. According to over 12 studies, the vaccines are killing at least 15 people for every life that the vaccines were projected to save. And we are permanently disabling even more. For kids, I’ve seen a risk benefit analysis showing we kill over 100 kids to save 1 kid from COVID.
NOBODY has the right to MANDATE that I must risk my life to save other people I don’t know. That’s unethical and immoral. I would not voluntarily choose to deprive my kids of their father.
NOBODY has the right to mandate that I take a vaccine which is likely to double my chances of being infected. The data now coming out of the UK and Scotland clearly shows this. In Study after study, the more you vaccinate, the more likely you are to be infected. Precisely the opposite of what we were told.
This is why Boris Johnson in UK recently dropped all COVID restrictions. “We will trust the judgment of the English people.” he said. Finally.
Why can’t we do that here?
People look to their doctors for advice on whether to take the vaccine. But doctors cannot speak the truth. If they do, they will have their licenses revoked for spreading misinformation. So they remain silent. This isn’t about what is best for patients. This is about silencing trusted professionals through intimidation tactics. That’s wrong.
The other thing that I found particularly troubling was the lack of transparency and accountability.
Nobody at the CDC, FDA, or NIH wanted to answer any of my questions on camera.
My member of Congress is Anna Eshoo. She refuses to meet with me or answer any of my questions. Not a single person in Congress who I have supported over the years will answer a single question I have.
So I offered $1M to the members of the outside committees of the FDA and CDC if they would meet with me just so I could ask a few questions on camera. They all refused.
…I’m a Dad to three kids. Two of them are in school. They are being forced by their schools to take the booster. That booster is more likely to increase the chance they will die or be infected. It’s wrong. Their schools will not answer any of my questions. Why not? Why are they so afraid to be held accountable? Why do they refuse to accept liability for their mandates?
While I have not been successful in having a single one of my questions answered, maybe you will have better luck than I have.
Until they answer these questions to your satisfaction, you should not comply with their mandates.