Tag Archives: Covid-19 response

Exclusive: Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were a ‘Huge Mistake’, by Ivan Pentchoukov and Jan Jekielek

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

If Trump doesn’t run in 2024, DeSantis has to be considered the betting favorite to take the Republican nomination. From Ivan Pentchoukov and Jan Jekielek at theepochtimes.com:

Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis listens to a report from a member of his administration during a meeting at the governor's office in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis listens to a report from a member of his administration during a meeting at the governor’s office in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1 last year, locking down the Sunshine State for 30 days amid global panic about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak. Sitting in his office exactly one year later, he told The Epoch Times that the lockdowns were a “huge mistake,” including in his own state.

“We wanted to mitigate the damage. Now, in hindsight, the 15 days to slow the spread and the 30—it didn’t work,” DeSantis said. “We shouldn’t have gone down that road.”

Florida’s lockdown order was notably less strict than some of the stay-at-home measures imposed in other states. Recreational activities like walking, biking, playing golf, and beachgoing were allowed, while what constituted an “essential business” was broadly defined.

“Our economy kept going,” DeSantis said. “It was much different than what you saw in some of those lockdown states.”

However, the governor now regrets issuing the order at all and is convinced that states that have carried on with lockdowns are perpetuating a destructive blunder.

After the initial 30-day lockdown in Florida lapsed, DeSantis commenced a phased reopening. He faced fierce criticism at each stage from establishment media, as well as segments of his own constituency beholden to the lockdown narrative.

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California’s Failed Response To COVID, by Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff

Posted on April 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

One man deserves a lion’s share of the blame: blow-dried, posturing, hypocritical, and incompetent Gavin Newsome. From Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff at aier.org:

Now that we’ve “celebrated” the first anniversary of COVID-19 in California, it’s a good time to take stock of the state’s response.

From the beginning, the Golden State has taken an aggressive stance toward the epidemic, including imposing the earliest shelter-in-place order in the nation; ceasing in-person schooling for the vast majority of public-school kids; shuttering churches, parks, and playgrounds; mandating masks, with hefty fines for violators; and forcing the closure of “non-essential” businesses that cannot operate using distancing technologies, such as videoconferencing. Even Disneyland has been closed since March 2020. In short, California has followed one of the strictest lockdowns in the country.

Though the state’s response received high marks in July from the “covidian” high priesthood, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the state has seen exploding coronavirus cases and deaths. Through March 28, 2021, 8.9 percent of all Californians have been identified as COVID cases—3.6 million cases. Since most infections are not recognized as cases, a much larger fraction of the population has been infected with COVID. Through March 29 this year, nearly 57,800 people have died in California with COVID.

To put these numbers in perspective, it helps to have a comparison state that has followed a very different policy. For that, we should consider Florida, which partially lifted its lockdown in May 2020 and then further relaxed restrictions in September (based in part on focused protection ideas advocated by us).

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Bipolar Corona-Politics Positive? The Covid Physician

Posted on April 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Perhaps the most serious consequence of Covid is that thought has broken down and been abandoned on a massive scale. From The Covid Physician at off-guardian.org:

Covid-19 Catch-22

We live in confusing times. The year began with a run on toilet tissue and ended in totalitarianism. Will it be looked back upon as an aberration, or precedent?

I had a patient this morning. More precisely, I telephoned him.

He suffered a myocardial infarction last year and is on anti-hypertensives. His last few BP measurements showed very good, stable control. He barricades himself in his home against the rogue cold virus each time the government locks-down. He expressed terror about the link between hypertension and an enhanced Covid-19 risk.

I would say he is, like the government, somewhat delusional about it or at the very least harbours some fixed false beliefs towards it. Hence, he measures his blood pressure many times a day. It fibrillates up and down with the propaganda. Masks are not enough for him. He refuses to leave his home until Johnson and Hancock lift lockdown. He asks me to increase his medications without seeing him.

The easy cure might be to turn off his TV and smartphone.

But, there is more bipolarity, more paradox, more human folly. He refuses to come out for a hypertension review until he receives his Covid-19 vaccinations. I ask him how he suggests doing that? Perhaps he could find it reasonable to specifically come for his vaccine and have an opportunistic BP? He pauses, and then refuses. Classic Joseph Heller, Catch-22.

Nothing surprises me these days in medical practice, so without a pause I remind him that we are not currently offering a bespoke domiciliary vaccination service. He remains insistent. As his doctor, I try to reassure him he is not at any great risk. I remind him we pay great lip service to all the viral psychological interventions such as porous ill-fitting mask, alcohol gel and … polythene apron.

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Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? by Whitney Webb

Posted on March 31, 2021 | 1 comment

Heart failure is the supposed cause of his recent death. Magufuli certainly is not the first world leader who’s stepped out of line and met an untimely demise. From Whitney Webb at unlimitedhangout.com:

While his COVID-19 policies have dominated media coverage regarding his disappearance and suspicious death, Tanzania’s John Magufuli was hated by the Western elites for much more than his rebuke of lockdowns and mask mandates. In particular, his efforts towards nationalizing the country’s mineral wealth threatened to deprive the West of control over resources deemed essential to the new green economy.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Tanzanian Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered the news that her country’s president, John Pombe Magufuli, had died of heart failure. President Magufuli had been described as missing since the end of February, with several anti-government parties circulating stories that he had fallen ill with COVID-19. During his presidency, Magufuli had consistently challenged neocolonialism in Tanzania, whether it manifested through the exploitation of his country’s natural resources by predatory multinationals or the West’s influence over his country’s food supply.

In the months leading up to his death, Magufuli had become better known and particularly demonized in the West for opposing the authority of international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) in determining his government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. However, Magufuli had spurned many of the same interests and organizations angered by his response to COVID for years, having kicked out Bill Gates-funded trials of genetically-modified crops and more recently angering some of the most powerful mining companies in the West, companies with ties to the World Economic Forum and the Forum’s efforts to guide the course of the 4th industrial revolution.

Indeed, more threatening than his recent COVID controversies was the threat Magufuli posed to foreign control over the world’s largest, ready-to-develop nickel deposit, a metal essential to electric car batteries and thus the current effort to usher in an electric, autonomous vehicle revolution. For instance, just a month before he disappeared, Magufuli had signed an agreement to begin developing that nickel deposit, a deposit that had been previously co-owned by Barrick Gold and Glencore, the commodity giant deeply tied to Israel’s Mossad, until Magufuli revoked their licenses for the project in 2018.

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Institutionalized Medical Malpractice & COVID, by Dr. Mark Sircus

Posted on March 31, 2021 | 3 comments

Most everything about the official response to Covid-19 has ranged from incompetence to malpractice to outright homicide. From Dr. Mark Sircus at lewrockwell.com:

It’s been over six weeks since Iowa dropped all state-level COVID restrictions, and surprise, surprise, hospitalized patients are down 54 percent. But if you try to Google this information, all you will see is death, dying, and it must be the end of the world because of COVID, which miraculously seems to be a cure for the flu.

Will medical wonders ever cease. Texas’ COVID numbers fall for the 17th day following reopening state and lifting mask mandate. If one believes in the media hype, then Why is Everyone in Texas Not Dying is a fair question and an important essay to read. The fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that surgical and cloth masks work to control coronavirus spread and a substantial amount that they do not. Read that ten times, but you will get blue in the face if you shout it out to the president or any Democratic governor.

Mowing Down Humanity With Fear, Masks, Solar and Social Deprivation

Humanity is under attack from pharmaceutical interests. When it comes to people like Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and other important spokespeople for the medical-industrial complex – nobody should listen to them. They are ‘dead’ wrong about most of their positions, do not listen to anybody, and are responsible for killing people with their massive misinformation campaigns. Why are they not treated like terrorists? Because they are medical and pharmaceutical terrorists, which means they get stay out of jail forever cards no matter what they do.

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The Disease Models Were Tested and Failed, Massively, by Philip W. Magness

Posted on March 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

This is just a thought, but if the coronavirus model failed, maybe we shouldn’t put too much faith in similar sorts of models (projections actually), like the ones that spit out projections of a global warming apocalypse. From Philip W. Magness at aier.org:

One year ago this week the world embraced a lockdown strategy premised on the epidemiology modeling of Imperial College-London (ICL). In a March 16, 2020 report by physicist and computer modeler Neil Ferguson, the ICL team predicted catastrophic death tolls in the United Kingdom and United States unless both countries adopted an aggressive policy response of mandating social distancing, school and business closures, and ultimately sheltering in place.

Ferguson’s model presented a range of scenarios under increasingly restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Under its “worst case” or “do nothing” model 2.2 million Americans would die, as would 510,000 people in Great Britain, with the peak daily death rate hitting somewhere around late May or June. At the same time, the ICL team promised salvation from the coronavirus if only governments would listen to and adopt its technocratic recommendations. Time was of the essence to act, so President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson both listened. And so began the first year of “two weeks to flatten the curve.”

It took a little over a month before we saw conclusive evidence that something was greatly amiss with the ICL model’s underlying assumptions. A team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden adapted Ferguson’s work to their country and ran the projections, getting similarly catastrophic results. Over 90,000 people would die by summer from Covid-19 if Sweden did not enter immediate lockdown. Sweden never locked down though. By May it was clear that the Uppsala adaptation of ICL’s model was off by an order of magnitude. A year later, Sweden has fared no worse than the average European lockdown country, and significantly better than the UK, which acted on Ferguson’s advice.

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‘It’s Complicated’: Dems Snark At DeSantis For ‘Taking Credit’ As Maskless Florida Booms, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 18, 2021 | 2 comments

The Democrats can’t stand seeing Ron DeSantis take a victory lap for his much less restrictive Covid-19 policies that left Florida in no worse shape than many Democratic states with more draconian policies. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

As Democrat lockdown governors Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo struggle like drowning mice to lead their states out of ‘science’-based pandemic restrictions while embroiled in political scandals, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) – who notably did not lock down his state – is looking so good that even CNN hit pieces can’t help but give him credit for a booming economy and low COVID numbers – even if they only go so far as to call it a happy accident.

In a Wednesday article titled “A year into the pandemic, Florida is booming and Republican Gov. DeSantis is taking credit,” CNN‘s Jeff Zeleny writes:

As many parts of the country embark on an uneasy march toward normalcy, Florida is not only back in business — it’s been in business for the better part of the past year. DeSantis’ gamble to take a laissez faire approach appears to be paying off — at least politically, at least for now, as other governors capturing attention in the opening phase of the pandemic now face steeper challenges.
 
Despite far fewer rules and restrictions, Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics. The state has had about 3% more Covid-19 cases per capita than the US overall, but about 8% fewer deaths per capita.

“If you look at what’s happening in South Florida right now, I mean this place is booming. It would not be booming if it was shut down,” DeSantis said last month as tourist season began to heat up. “Los Angeles isn’t booming. New York City’s not booming. It’s booming here because you can live like a human being.” 

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Almost a Year Later, There’s Still No Evidence Showing Governments Can Control the Spread of Covid-19, by Anthony Rozmajzl

Posted on February 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

Ask for proof that anything that governments have done to control the spread of Covid-19 has actually worked and no  hand. From Anthony Rozmajzl at mises.org:

As we approach the one-year anniversary of fifteen days to flatten the curve, we have yet to acquire any data suggesting that the past year of life-destroying lockdowns and politicized behavioral mandates has done anything to keep us safe from covid-19. While discussions surrounding the reintroduction of nationwide lockdowns seem to have ceased—it’s impossible to ignore the lockdowns’ disproportionately deadly effects and the numerous studies demonstrating their futility—the media still retain their grip on the narrative that nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as mask mandates, curfews, capacity restrictions, gathering restrictions, and others remain necessary to prevail in our fight against covid-19.

Government officials, in lockstep with big tech and nearly all major news outlets, have controlled the NPI narrative to such an extent that its proponents have simply sidestepped the burden of proof naturally arising from the introduction and continued support of novel virus mitigation strategies, happily pointing to the fact that their ideas enjoy unanimous support from the corporate media and government officials all over the world. This seemingly impenetrable narrative rests, of course, on the critical assumption that NPIs, or behavioral mandates, have protected us from covid-19.

The One Chart That Covid Doomsdayers Can’t Explain

If there is one visualization the reader should become familiar with to highlight the ineffectiveness of a nearly a year’s worth of NPIs, it would be the following chart comparing hospitalizations and deaths per million in Florida with those in New York and California, however we will be focusing solely on the comparison between Florida and California.

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The ZeroCovid Movement: Cult Dressed as Science, by Jenin Younes

Posted on February 23, 2021 | 1 comment

In the history of humanity no virus has ever been eliminated, and no virus will ever be eliminated. ZeroCovid is cover for perpetual medical totalitarianism. From Jenin Younes at aier.org:

This past year has given rise to some strange and novel methods of disease containment, including lockdowns and mask mandates. It is unsurprising that the natural next step in this progression has been the development of a movement known as “ZeroCovid.” Its growing influence is, perhaps, predictable given that for nearly a year we have been inundated by the views of so-called experts seeking to legitimize their myopic worldview that public health is determined solely by prevention of Covid-19. 

Rather than acknowledge to a weary public that their approach has been a failure, they are doubling down and attempting to save their reputations by claiming that the problem is not that lockdowns do not work, but that they have not gone far enough. 

There is, apparently, some diversity of opinion among the ZeroCovid crowd as to whether the term is to be interpreted literally, as some of its most impassioned and vocal proponents argue, or whether it simply means a more extreme version of the ideology that has dominated societies around the globe for the past year: the belief that suppressing the coronavirus is a singularly important goal, to replace all others and to be pursued with no or only minimal consideration of the effects of doing so. 

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Covid Cases, like Political Careers, are Dropping Like Rocks, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on February 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Ron DeSantis opened up Florida and he’s riding a big wave of popularity. Newsome’s and Cuomo’s careers are in the dumpbs. Maybe there’s some justice out there after all. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.org:

New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who bears so much responsibility for the mess in his windswept state, last year wrote a book celebrating his role in managing the Covid crises. Now he is facing several investigations and unrelenting media criticism for his management of nursing homes. Not only did he force infected patients back into homes, resulting in many thousands of deaths; he is alleged to have worked to cover up his role and doctor the numbers to make the grim toll look less bad. 

And he is not the only lockdown government facing serious problems. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is sinking in popularity and facing a serious effort to recall him – the state’s equivalent of an impeachment. It’s quite the fall from grace for a man who prided himself on his courage in locking his citizens in their homes. Meanwhile, the lockdown state’s Covid numbers look worse than Florida’s, a state with similar weather and demographics that has been fully and beautifully open since September. 

At the very time when once-loved heroes of the lockdowns are facing political crises, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is riding a wave of love within his state and around the country. He took a bold stand for science and his gamble seems to be paying off for him. People are pouring into the state in hopes of living a normal life. While commercial and residential real estate are in deep trouble in New York, home prices around Miami are up 25%. 

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