It’s a powerful piece so read it all. Here are some snippets:
COVID-19 has been used as the rationale for an extraordinary expansion of government power in the name of science: lengthy “lockdowns” of businesses and churches, vaccination mandates, government-imposed discrimination against people based on their medical choices, government-encouraged censorship of dissenting scientific views, and more. Perhaps you support some of these policies as necessary. Perhaps you don’t. But even if you support each and every one of the policies adopted, you ought to be concerned by how they have been imposed. Almost none of the policies were enacted by legislative bodies after an open public debate. Almost all of the policies were enacted unilaterally by executive branch officials asserting emergency powers or by unelected public health officials immune from public accountability.
COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future…
Lost in current debates is the fact that much so-called “misinformation” targeted for suppression actually represents legitimate differences of opinion held by scientists and policy experts. Other pieces of so-called “misinformation” are in reality true facts that those in charge would rather not be forced to address.
For example, it is fact, not fiction, that the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has had more adverse reaction reports filed for the COVID-19 vaccines than for any other vaccine since VAERS started collecting data in 1990. Indeed, as of mid-January, 55 percent of all adverse reactions, 59 percent of all hospitalizations, and 71 percent of all deaths reported to VAERS are from the COVID-19 vaccines. What these data mean is subject to legitimate differences of opinion. But the fact that the data exist is unquestionable. Yet if you spend much time discussing VAERS in social media or on YouTube, you are likely to be banned. John West, “The Rise of Totalitarian Science, 2022 Edition” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 31, 2022)
And if you go along with all that, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
In Canada, the natives* are very restless indeed. Lockdown protests have been going on for days. Few reports of violence, just large numbers of people fed up with crackpot medical totalitarianism:
- That’s from the national anthem: “O Canada, our home and native land”
You may also wish to read: Royal Society: Don’t censor misinformation; it makes things worse While others demand crackdowns on “fake news,” the Society reminds us that the history of science is one of error correction. It’s a fact that much COVID news later thought to need correction was in fact purveyed by official sources, not blogs or Facebook or Twitter accounts.