The bureaucrat/scientists who have been guiding the American response to the coronavirus - even Dr. Fauci acknowledges that the Trump Administration has accepted most of his recommendations (even if Trump hasn't always followed them on a personal level).
JUST IN: Dr. Fauci clarifies answer to “hypothetical question” where he said earlier mitigation would have saved more lives.
— ABC News (@ABC) April 13, 2020
“That was taken as a way that maybe somehow something was at fault,” Fauci says, adding that Trump followed the advice of doctors. https://t.co/P9xId2OutH pic.twitter.com/5OVyfzBccK
Many who have been closely following coverage of the 2nd wave of the virus hammering Europe have heard Europe's leaders explain to indignant reporters how their lockdown-free approach differs from an outright 'herd immunity' strategy question, as well as the growing acceptance of lockdown-free approaches to tackling the coronavirus (even as Sweden imposes new restrictions as Europe's second wave looms). Just yesterday in the UK, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said a return to 'lockdown' status within London was "inevitable", even as London's infection rate lags the hot spots in northern England (in and around Manchester, as well as a few other areas) by a sizable margin.
Leaders in Europe have all warned that returning to a national lockdown would be an absolute last resort, as their economies struggle to recover from the springtime mass closures that wrought unprecedented havoc on the real economy (even if it hasn't always translated over to the market).
But an even bigger threat to the status quo engineered by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and their colleagues around the world is the sudden emergence in academia of a credible, and vocal, chorus of dissent, as researchers who are luminaries in their field speak out against lockdowns.
Since the spring, libertarians have criticized governors and even President Trump for following in the footsteps of communist China, which clearly allowed the virus to spread unchecked for weeks, or even months, before stepping in. Fewer than 100k cases have been confirmed in China - a figure that many observers suspect is far short of the real number.
But we digress. As many of the springtime hotspots from around the world - densely populated areas like Madrid and Paris - suffer through second waves that are equally, if not more, punishing than the first round, more laypeople are starting to question: what was this all for?
And whatever happened to Dr. Fauci saying that the goal was to "flatten the curve" so hospitals aren't overwhelmed? Not force businesses to close for longer than 6 months, destroying the livelihoods of millions, as we hope and pray for the FDA to expedite approval of a vaccine.
Well, on Oct. 4, a group of scientists from Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and other distinguished academic institutions from around the world published the Great Barrington Declaration, a brief statement offering an alternative public policy approach. Instead of mandating business closures, lockdowns should be lifted, and a shift to "focused protection" should be implemented. Resources should be focused to protect the vulnerable (the elderly and those with CDC-designated risk factors). The young and health population should be allowed to live normally, with the hope that they would eventually build up immunity.
Critics have attacked the statement's recommendations, but their criticisms are mostly superficial or easily addressable. The most salient, in our view, is the notion that we don't yet know how long immunity from COVID-19 lasts, now that confirmed cases of reinfection have been found around the globe. To be sure, those cases are few and far between, and there's a substantial amount of anecdotal and scientific data suggesting that health care workers have developed lasting immunity.
But since the approach challenges the status quo in the US, a position that Democrats have embraced at risk of their political reputations, big tech has rallied to try and censor the Great Barrington Declaration. First Reddit buried discussion of the declaration; now Google has "memory holed" the declaration, as one Twitter user explains.
Here's the thread, courtesy of @boriquagato:
from the "make orwell fiction again" files:
— el gato malo (@boriquagato) October 10, 2020
google has memory holed the great barrington declaration
not only have they wiped it from the top results, they have salted it with false claims about "climate denial"
it's pure, simple propaganda
here's bing (who plays it straight) pic.twitter.com/kTdhH8zXia
He continues:
Simple, right? Here's the declaration, and here's the wiki page.
You can see the authors, kulldorf, gupta, bhattacharya's names and know this this was written by medical professors at harvard, stanford, and oxford.
there's no slant, not editorializing, it's primary source info.
now let's have a look at google.
pretty different looking results, huh? not only do they not lead with the declaration itself or its authors, they lead with dishonest hit pieces.
they try to tie it to climate denial and fake science.
um, no. this is "fake search."
the google results for "great barrington declaration" are simply not search results at all.
it's a propagandistic hit piece ducking the science, ignoring the credentials of the authors, failing to show the declaration, and spinning it as some kind of fringe cabal of "deniers."
it's staggeringly blatant once you see it, but will anyone?
or will they be fooled by this because it's subtle and you think google is a search engine, not a radicalized editorial column.
and it's now EVERYWHERE.
Reddit will not allow users to see it.
OMG 😯
— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) October 10, 2020
- reddit has censored discussion of The Great Barrington Declaration
- and Google has removed it from their search engine results (can only see articles about it now, as they cannot censor those
1984 is here?
Sign up here: https://t.co/lBaMxnQD1xhttps://t.co/1decFrnoCs
know what a man fears by watching what he tries to silence.
these groups know they have lost the debate.
they know that the facts and the science are not on their side.
and now they want to win by lying.
what choice have they left themselves?
when you have hitched your wagon to "credentialism" from buffoons like fauci and brix and ding and topol and then the REAL credentialed crowd shows up and calls you out, what can you do?
you're cornered by your own argument. so you have to hide this fact. it's fatal to you.
and oh how they are going to try to hide it.
at the risk of sounding tinfoil hatty: big tech has become an apparatus of totalitarian fascism.
this is what that looks like. you push a government line and "right-think" while politicizing all things.
When social media lies: @Facebook is throwing up a "fact check", saying that these COVID-19 survival rates are "false information":@Lyle_Genyk @FatEmperor @AlexBerenson pic.twitter.com/V6rVmqwFhc
— Tucker Goodrich (@TuckerGoodrich) October 9, 2020
government and business in the same bed to shape society for "it's own good."
that's what fascism is.
“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
when mussolini said that, he meant it as a positive.
"totalitarian" was a complement. and make no mistake, big business LOVES this.
it's profitable and certain and protects your market position and entrenches oligopoly.
big business does not like free markets. it likes "less competition and a thumb on the scale."
they LOVE fascism. this fascism is always and everywhere a leftist youth movement. it's not right wing, it's left. (yes, i know what wikipedia says, it's wrong. read your history on where these parties came from. they all emerged from socialist parties)
now it comes from san francisco. and this is the part we need to understand:
they thought they were the good guys. hitler, stalin, mussolini, all of them
they thought there were the way forward to a greater society, a more perfect nation, justice, & progress.
and the companies that helped them thought so too they are not sitting around twirling their moustaches in sinister fashion plotting the the downfall of the world.
it's far worse.
they honestly believe that they are the anointed whose great wisdom & intellect gives them a right & a duty to tell the benighted masses how to live
they have convinced themselves that calling fascism "antifa" means they are the good guys
but make no mistake, this is an attempt to rule you and it's showing its true colors now
they, like all despots, believe that they will be benign.
history is not kind to that presumption.
we seem to be at a crossroads.
we can either see this for the power play that it is and seek out new ways to get information and communicate and take back our data and our speech, or we can fall under this spell and become lost in this propagandistic house of mirrors.
search and social media do not have to be like this.
the can be peer to peer, open source, and provide personal agency.
remember that you are not google's customer, nor twitter's.
you are their product.
they sell you to their customers.
did you not ask who pays the bills?
but this can change and will change.
the more they adulterate and censor, the more incentive there is to leave their walled gardens and find a better way.
this is going to be the awkward adolescence of internet and social media.
but it needs to happen.
it's time to grow up.
* * *
Source: @boriquagato
