Judging by the speech Dwight Eisenhower gave when he turned over the presidency to John F. Kennedy in 1961, he learned something about power-seekers during his eight years in the Oval Office. He warned the American people of a looming “disastrous rise of misplaced power . . . by the military-industrial complex.” He foresaw that without a firm commitment to liberty and equality, money and power would become paramount, and American public policy would come to be dominated by a small group of “scientific-technological elites.”
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded . . . In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Eisenhower understood that such an occurrence would imperil the “mutual trust and respect” upholding the American “confederation of equals.”
“The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”
Eisenhower’s eloquence distills basic concepts that even a child can understand: allowing any one party, set of opinions, or narrative to dominate an entire society is a dangerous thing. It leads to an imbalance of power, which leads to exploitation and oppression. The only way to ensure a proper balance is to invite everyone to the table, and to let them speak with an equal voice. The only alternative is to allow policy to be decided by whoever holds the most power — and those people are rarely the good guys.
We’ve seen this unfold in the disastrous U.S. response to a new virus. Governments around the country have deployed measures without precedent, in ways that fundamentally contradict fundamental principles of American law and life. In short, the U.S. copied China.
On February 24, a World Health Organization “investigative joint mission” held a press conference in which it recommended that the world adopt “lockdowns” to manage Covid-19. China had formulated and tested a hypothesis, and the WHO rubber-stamped it. That hypothesis was this: “COVID19 disappeared in China because of the actions of the Chinese government. It could not have disappeared on its own due to pre-existing immunity, because there is none. Everyone is susceptible to this new virus.”
So that you can see this is not an exaggeration, here are some quotes from the press conference. First, the WHO admits that lockdowns are new to science — they are a hypothesis.
“So China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease. It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work.”
Then, the joint mission describes the evidence supporting its conclusion that China’s actions, based on its stunningly correct hypothesis, “turned around this disease.”
“So here’s the outbreak that happened in the whole country on the bottom. Here’s what the outbreak looked like outside of Hubei. Here are the areas of Hubei outside of Wuhan. And then the last one is Wuhan. And you can see this is a much flatter curve than the others. And that’s what happens when you have an aggressive action that changes the shape that you would expect from an infectious disease outbreak. This is extremely important for China, but it’s extremely important for the rest of the world . . .
There is neither effective drug nor vaccine for COVID-19 for the time being. However, the Chinese government and the Chinese people have used the non-pharmaceutical measures (or the social measures) including isolation, medical observation, social distancing, and personal protection and prevention. These measures effectively changed the course of the disease, as evidenced by the epidemic curves. I think this is one of the biggest achievements during China’s fight against the new coronavirus. In the report we have recommended this method to the international community.”
Although this is a new virus so there is no baseline to go by, China and the WHO conclude that the observed outcome was definitely attributable to lockdown. “It happened after, so it was caused by.” Post hoc, ergo proper hoc — the logical fallacy at the top of Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit.” Perhaps in its rush to justify its draconian actions, China forgot about basic logic? Perhaps they did not consider that there could be an alternative explanation for the disease’s disappearance, such as pre-existing immunity? There are other coronaviruses in existence, so they certainly should have. And as it turns out, they did.
“Since the coronavirus is a new pathogen, people of all ages do not have special immunity to it, and it can be inferred that all the populations are susceptible to this new coronavirus . . .”
We now know just how false this conclusion was. One study in Singapore published in May found that 100% of people who were exposed to SARS in 2003, and 50% of people who were never exposed to SARS, have cross-reactive immunity to SARS-CoV-2. The authors specifically pointed out how important this information was for purposes of policy decisions. The study was ignored by mainstream media, and no lockdown governor has ever talked about it.
Sweden rejected the Chinese hypothesis and was rewarded with brutal media smears. It held firm to its approach, and far from experiencing the “96,000 deaths” predicted by the models, Sweden has perfectly average mortality in 2020. Stockholm’s hospitals never overflowed, which collapses the whole purpose of lockdown — “flatten the curve” to “save the hospitals” — and singlehandedly disproves China’s hypothesis.
China and the WHO were wrong. There is significant population immunity to Covid-19, and that is why the disease dissipates without killing more people than an average flu season. It is not the first disease in history that needed a lockdown to abate. So why are our politicians still acting like that is true? Are they really this stupid?
Politicians have proved the truth of Orwell’s astute observation, “No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” They are currently hand-picking which industries will die and which will survive. Technology and media are doing well — Zoom is now valued the same as Boeing. The same entities selling lockdown are benefitting from it.
Abuse by government of public health “emergencies” is nothing new. In 1985, the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists (AAICJ) specifically recognized as much and convened to draft the “Siracusa Principles” to stem the “illegal and unwarranted State[s] of Emergency . . . [governments use to] repress and deny the fundamental rights and freedoms of peoples.”
Under the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, certain freedoms are guaranteed, including the pursuit of economic development, the right to a personal means of subsistence, the right to liberty, including freedom of movement, and the right not to be subjected to medical experimentation without consent (universal masks and new vaccines).
Under the Siracusa Principles, any infringement on these rights must be “interpreted strictly and in favor of the rights at issue,” “in direct response to a pressing public or social need, pursue a legitimate aim, be proportionate to that aim, [and be] terminated in the shortest time required to bring an end to the public emergency.”
“A measure is not strictly required by the exigencies of the situation where ordinary measures would be adequate to deal with the threat to the life of the nation . . . The principle of strict necessity [requires that] each measure shall be directed to an actual, clear, present, or imminent danger and may not be imposed merely because of an apprehension of potential danger.”
The state bears the burden of justifying each and every restriction it imposes on freedom, and under public health ethics, the most restrictive measure available is the mandatory isolation of sick patients. More stringent measures than this are impossible to justify with the examples of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, and other lockdown-less places out there, handling Covid-19 just fine with commonsense measures of the past.
Our governments are ignoring public health ethics. They have hijacked science, imposed life-altering edicts based on bad theories, manipulated everyone with media and technology, and now tell us we can never return to normal. What is the endgame? It can’t be good. Eisenhower’s prediction of an imbalance of power has come to pass. Lockdown is the ultimate seizure of control. Let’s hope it can be reversed.
* This article was originally published here
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