by | Feb 16, 2023 | Global, Health, Politics
After three years of lies about the COVID Pandemic from WHO, the US government, NIH, FDA, CDC, state and federal public health officials, Big Pharma, Corporatized Medicine, Big Tech, and other stakeholders being paid bonuses from our taxpayer dollars to control people through FEAR, there is a high probability we’re going to be told more lies to…........To Read More....
January 23, 2023 By Huck Davenport
We are now three years after the COVID-19 apocalypse began, and the CDC and WHO still refuse to acknowledge that the virus was created in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). But they, along with all our institutions, have lied so often and so egregiously that 72% of the public doesn’t believe them. If nothing else, that is a very positive sign. The evidence for the lab leak is as overwhelming as the evidence for a zoonotic origin is non-existent. For anyone trained in the art of biology to deny the lab origin betrays either deceit or, worse, willful ignorance.
Here I examine just
three facts that together, if not singularly, prove dispositively that
SARS-CoV-2 was a man-made lab creation. Not least of which is that they
told us exactly what they were going to do. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites composed of genetic material—codons that specify the specific amino acids (there are 20) used to construct proteins—that hijack the machinery of the cell to produce more viruses..........To Read More....
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pressured U.S. regulators to clear COVID-19 boosters without clinical trial data, according to newly released emails. CDC officials relayed to counterparts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in early August 2021 that they wanted authorization for Moderna and Pfizer boosters as data began showing that the vaccines weren’t working as well as initially promoted. The conversation took place on a call that was described by Dr. Phil Krause, a top FDA official, to several other FDA workers. “Take a deep breath before reading this next paragraph. On that call, the CDC evidently stated that they will assemble all the data they are aware of on third dosing in this setting and send it to us in the hope that we will (very soon) authorize the third dose for immunocompromised as part of the EUA,” Krause wrote in the Aug. 5, 2021, email (pdf). EUA stands for emergency use authorization..........To Read More.....
The Updated mRNA COVID Boosters Are a Bust, Two New Studies Show By Debra Heine - The new, heavily promoted mRNA booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna are not all they’re cracked up to be, according to two new preprint studies. The boosters perform no better against Omicron than the fourth jab with the original formulation,” a new study from scientists at Columbia University in New York City found. The updated Covid-19 booster shots have been advertised as “bivalent,” meaning they target the original coronavirus strain as well as the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants. However, the Columbia paper found that the newer Omicron variants easily evade both types of boosters, Alex Berenson reported on Substack................
With a series of 15-0 votes, academic physician-advisors to the CDC recommended the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines be added to the pediatric routine childhood vaccine schedule. These votes provided the CDC with advice to make the shots available to low-income children free of charge. Additionally, they are now on the schedule with measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc., as routine vaccinations that most states will adopt for their public school systems.
In the US, these decisions represent many “firsts”:
For example, does an unvaccinated child start with the obsolete Pfizer or Moderna products from two years ago and then two months later get a bivalent booster for a total of three shots in four months? What about a fully vaccinated child — does this mean annual boosters when the theoretical benefit, if any, only last six months?......To Read More....
By Rich Kozlovich
For those not old enough to remember Thalidomide, it was a drug that caused serious issues of deformity in new born children. It was considered a huge scandal in those days, and yet, as bad as it was, the numbers were minuscule compared to the damage these false vaccines are causing.
From the very beginning I've taken the position this "pandemic" has been nothing short of a political pandemic, and nothing to do with public health. Now we're finding out not only has all these mandates been politically motivated, we're finding out these "vaccinations" aren't vaccinations, they're experimental gene altering chemical compounds, that don't prevent infection, don't prevent transmission, and what's worse, they're killing people, as Study after study prove Covid “vaccines” are a risky gamble.
Here is part of a pertinent news story with this title: “FDA Withholding Autopsy Results on People Who Died After Getting COVID-19 Vaccines.” “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is refusing to release the results of autopsies conducted on people who died after getting COVID-19 vaccines. The FDA says it is barred from releasing medical files, but a drug safety advocate says that it could release the autopsies with personal information redacted.”
According to on , "the UK Government institution, the Office for
National Statistics (ONS), between January and March 2022, 62,801 people
had sadly died within an average of 48 days after receiving a booster
dose of the Covid-19 injection no later than 31st December 2021, and
4,781 of those deaths were attributed to Covid-19. "
There has been a lot of concern over these numbers. While correlation isn't necessarily causation, when numbers like this start showing up, action must be required. An awful lot of young men, healthy young men, among Army and Navy SEAL recruits, not to mention athletes, are dying suddenly, and without exlanation. Why? These figures should be generating some serious questions over these false vaccines, and yet the federal agencies responsible for this are sitting on the story.
We're finding that children, who are not very susceptible to this coronavirus and have a 99.99% survival rate when they do get it, that one in every 500 small children who receive the Pfizer “vaccine” are hospitalized by it, and yet the CDC votes to add COVID vaccine to routine childhood shots. And what was Pfizer's response to all this? Pfizer Plans 400% price increase. The goal now seems to be vaccines today, vaccines tomorrow, vaccines forever!
Yesterday the out-of-control Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 15-0 to add the Covid-19 vaccine to the CDC’s child and adolescent immunization schedule. I don’t think there is any scientific basis for this action. Covid has proved not to be dangerous to children and young people; certainly not to infants who are routinely undergoing vaccination. For reasons I frankly do not understand, our establishment has resolved to make as many people as people get covid vaccines as often as possible, despite the fact that they don’t seem to do much good. That has not been the case in many other countries.
There is hope for America's children as governors can 'Just Say No' to this CDC vax mandate. and it appears GOP Governors are pushing back, and believe it or not, there's an upside to this:
Data journalist and pollster Rich Baris posted to social media he predicts a “homeschool boom” following the news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee unanimously voted to add the COVID shot to the children and adolescent immunization schedule, a move that will likely lead many states to require COVID shots for school attendance.
Not only will they not be forced to receive these genetically manipulating chemical compounds, they're now going to actually get educated versus being intellectually and philosophically corrupted.
The data is compelling these chemical compounds aren't just ineffective, but dangerous, and this is an all important point. It takes between ten and twelve years before a drug has gone through FDA's required testing. These were introduced in less than two years testing and Pfizer's CEO admitted they never tested for transmission, and yet he had to know that was a requirement for any compound to be declared a "vaccine", at least until they changed the definition to accommodate these drugs. They didn't start testing for transmission until these compounds were already being injected into people's arms.
And that means what? They are yet to be approved by the FDA as they've not gone through the required testing, and at the same time these pharmaceutical companies are being protected by the federal government from being sued, here, here, here, and here.
What could possibly go wrong? EU Sets Out
Commitment to Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, Mask Mandates andLegally Binding” Global Pandemic Treaty. A lot can go wrong!
Great Reset. Green New Deal. Build Back Better. New World Order. Bilderberg. Davos. Council on Foreign Relations. World Health Organization. The list of secretive global societies and their mission directives for humanity are daunting. Many people who would prefer to be left alone to live their lives free from government interference have an understandable sense of impending doom.
The COVID Crisis showed Westerners how quickly (and easily) their governments would impose unilateral mandates against their will, destroying any illusion that self-congratulating "democracies" have any more respect for individual rights or bodily autonomy than the authoritarian regimes the West routinely condemns. If an unsuspecting citizen once took "freedom" for granted, forced experimental injections, arbitrary and capricious closures of private businesses, mass surveillance, vaccine passports, and government-sponsored censorship of dissenting medical opinion have demonstrated how rapidly undefended freedom slips away. Westerners were not prepared to take a vigorous stand for freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, or personal privacy. Their silence was interpreted as acquiescence to government control and rewarded with only more intrusive and authoritarian measures............To Read More...
Former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield explains it all for you.
"Everyone had to agree to the narrative,” enforced by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials that the COVID-19 virus came from a “wet market” in Wuhan and not the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). And Fauci “clearly misled Congress,” about funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV.
So says Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in a September 15 interview with Paul Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle newsletter. “The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side,” Redfield told Thacker. “The conspiracy is [former NIH boss Francis] Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.”
And quite possibly antithetical to criminal law. ..........Redfield is also on record saying, “These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.” As the physician, professor, and virologist explained, “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world,” a likely reference to the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. .............To Read More.....
Unvaccinated Troops Willing to Die for America Get Booted As Criminals Take Up Residence on Their Base - When 50 illegal immigrants showed up in Martha's Vineyard and disrupted the elite bubble that is the island home to the Obamas, the supposedly "sanctuary" community quickly sent the illegals packing. So much for "all are welcome," as the community's signs declared before their resolve to inclusivity was challenged by a dose of border crisis reality. But that wasn't the only double standard on display. These illegal immigrants, with little known about them beyond their countries of origin, certainly did not have their official CDC vaccine cards with them to prove they were fully vaccinated and boosted. Yet they were still taken to a military installation where a DoD vaccine mandate has been in effect since August 25, 2021. According to The Boston Herald:..................
“Fully Vaccinated” NFL Megastar JJ Watt Says His Heart Went Into “A-Fib” This Week, Had to Be Shocked Into Rhythm - By Oct. 2, 2022 - There was breaking news from the NFL that nobody will tie to the Covid-19 vaccines because that’s just not allowed. Arizona Cardinals All-World defensive end JJ Watt said his heart went into “A-Fib,” or atrial fibrillation, on Wednesday and had to be shocked back into rhythm.............A study posted on the NIH website last year listed atrial fibrillation as an adverse reaction from the Covid-19 jabs. According to the Mayo Clinic, atrial fibrillation “is an irregular and often very rapid heart rhythm (arrhythmia) that can lead to blood clots in the heart.” Covid-19 injections have caused millions of adverse reactions in the United States alone. Despite this, organizations like the NFL continue to push their players, coaches, and staff to get fully vaccinated and boosted, not because the vaccines have demonstrated efficacy but because that’s what the powers-that-be expect from them. .........
The Experimental mRNA Covid “Vaccines” — Are the Most Lethal Drugs in Medical History — US Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Decline - Athletes were the canaries in the coalmine, with several hundred dropping dead despite 80% having no symptoms or family history of heart disease. With the release of the latest statistics, the historic life expectancy drop can no longer be denied.............
There's a lot more of this available regarding these Sudden Unexplained Deaths, and I am perfectly willing to state not all these deaths are a result of these false vaccines if everyone else is willing to admit the data shows these genetic manipulating drugs have dramatically risen the number of unexplained deaths of perfectly healthy people.
When the pesticide chlordane was rolled out the environmentalists screamed ...cancer... cancer... cancer..., it causes cancer, without one iota of evidence, and in fact the rate of cancer didn't increase at all when chlordane and every other pesticide was introduced into society. If products cause some health problem it appears in a very short time in the data. It didn't, yet we're seeing massive unexplained deaths that are directly related to the introduction of these false vaccines, and they're still being pushed. This is our Thalidomide era, and I do wish someone besides me would say it, only it's going to be far worse than Thalidomide ever was, and farther ranging.
The most surprising change is perhaps the CDC’s regard for treating the unvaccinated. Per NPR:.........CDC Ends Differentiation of Unvaccinated Under Coronavirus Guidelines
Sarah Arnold Aug 11, 2022Nearly a year after the government forced Americans to receive a vaccine in order to live a normal life, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is back tracking what they originally said about the jab. First reported by the Epoch Times, the CDC is finally admitting that it gave false information about the Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine. The CDC has been caught with blood on their hands. .............CDC Admits Scary Truth About Vaccine
July 31, 2023 By Monica Showalter
Apparently, Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been embarrassing the Biden administration. As if such a thing were possible.
According to Politico:
The Biden administration spent $25,750 and authorized an additional $30,500 for media training and executive coaching for the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ROCHELLE WALENSKY, according to internal CDC expense authorization filings obtained by West Wing Playbook.
Starting in October 2021, Walensky enlisted longtime Democratic political consultant MANDY GRUNWALD for media training, conducted virtually, at a cost of about $500 per hour, according to the filings. In total, the CDC has paid Grunwald’s firm $16,000, with authorization to spend $14,000 more.
The expense authorization filings from the CDC require a stated “training objective.” And in that training objective field, Grunwald’s firm wrote that it would “assist [Walensky’s] team in crafting clear language to communicate CDC's public health guidance and coach Dr. Walensky to effectively deal with television interviews and other public communications."
That's a lot of money for a lot of stupid. ......To Read More....
U.S Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently asked the public how COVID-19 misinformation "in the digital information environment" had affected health outcomes, trust in the healthcare system and "likelihood to vaccinate," among other issues.
According to vaccine and healthcare policy experts who joined with Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, the misinformation is coming from inside the house.
They filed a comment in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proceeding, accusing the CDC and other health organizations of promoting falsehoods and shoddy research that "shattered the public's trust in science and public health," which will "take decades to repair."........To Read More...
A federal investigation into Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that public health officials suppressed Covid study findings for political reasons, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed in a 37-page report.
GAO investigators inteviewed at least a dozen directors and managers who were involved in the agencies’ Covid guidance. The government watchdog found evidence of “political interference” in scientific reports.
“A few respondents from CDC
and [Food and Drug Administration] FDA stated they felt that the
potential political interference they observed resulted in the
alteration or suppression of scientific findings,” GAO investigators
found.......To Read More.....
By Rich Kozlovich
On August 30, 2022 Craig Bannister posted this piece, Actor James Woods Slams CDC Speech Police: ‘You Nitwits Don’t Have Better Things to Do in the Middle of a Pandemic??!!’. So what prompted this outburst?
The CDC asked Americans “Are you using #inclusive language” and directed them to a CDC.gov webpage titled, “Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities.”
All in the middle of the crisis they created. It’s not surprising he called them nitwits. Think about these silly little issues facing the nation:
And the CDC is worried about the sensitivity of snowflakes? Some of words the CDC wants shunned, and their CDC-approved substitutes, include:
By Rich Kozlovich
In the last two years the CDC has come under attack for what can only be called scientific fraud and corruption over their positions and mandates regarding this pandemic. But let's try and understand this. This deep deep state infection didn't just start. For years this infection has permeated the CDC right along with all these agencies, including, and especially the EPA, which needs to be abolished, all of whom are supposed to be paragons of good science.
Years ago this article appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal article, Lyme activist questions federal study of pesticides in private yards, saying:
"A leading local advocate in the fight against Lyme disease and other tick-borne
diseases is calling a recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention “junk research” and a waste of taxpayer money. Jill Auerbach, chairwoman of the Hudson Valley Lyme Disease Association,
come on the heels of a CDC study that suggests spraying individual
properties with a pesticide does not reduce the rates of Lyme disease
and other tick-borne illnesses in the people who live there.........Auerbach said the study should have been designed to include a larger neighborhood, rather than individual yards....."
Auerbach was absolutely correct in her assessment. That money spent on this study was wasted research. It is also clear to me that this study must have been conducted by those who really didn't understand how important widespread pesticide use is in order to impact pests, or more likely didn't care, and seems more like to me to be a case of "Pre-conceptual Science". That's where you reach a conclusion before doing the research and then dismiss anything that disagrees with that conclusion. Ergo, since you never see or hear anything that demonstrates your pre-conceived conclusion is wrong, it must be right.
However - in the real world - making isolated pesticide applications will not resolve any pest problem if the surrounding areas are still filled with the target pest, and the consequences of ignoring the reality of pests and pesticides, cannot be ignored or dismissed. In the real world people get sick and many die, in large numbers.
Case Scenario One.
You are responsible for treating a twenty suite apartment building for roaches. Two of the apartment’s tenants refuse to allow you to treat their apartment and they both are filled with roaches. What happens? The other eighteen will still have a number of roaches each month when you return. Now, what if the numbers were reversed and only two suites were treated and the other eighteen left untreated. The migratory habits of roaches would bring them right back into the untreated suites in large numbers.
Here's the numerical dynamics of German
cockroaches. If you have 1000 roaches in a structure and you only kill
90%, that leaves 100. Half of them are female and half of them are
pregnant. At the end of 30 days you now have a numerical potential of
1010. Obviously, there would be a whole lot more than just a few
cockroaches in the treated suites in following month.
Now, let’s apply this real world situation and the problem of disease
transmission. Let’s suppose roaches could transmit Lyme disease.
What would give anyone reason to believe that the rate of disease would
be reduced since the overall pest pressure from the surrounding
environment would overwhelm any individual efforts, no matter how
effective.
I think this statement is important to understanding what is going on behind the scenes:
"Testing
whether spraying reduces the risk of tick-borne disease is critical
because people spend lots of money spraying their yards,” “These sprays
can be toxic to wildlife, pets and people, and people expect a strong
health benefit from doing so. The study’s finding … is very important in
evaluating what works and what doesn’t. This was money well spent, in
my opinion.
"
That was a quote from Rick Ostfeld, disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, who also said he didn’t think the study was poorly designed, which is what I would you expect from “independent” activists.
Well it was poorly designed! That is, if
you really wanted to know what the real impact pesticides have on ticks
and the transmission of Lyme disease. However, if your goal was to
give the impression that making pesticide applications are valueless for
the control of Lyme disease – this piece of junk science was an
anti-pesticide activist’s dream.
One more thing! Bifenthrin is a synthetic pyrethroid. All pests are
starting to show serious resistance to this chemical class. When we
lost organophosphates, due to EPA’s manipulation of the rules as
outlined in the Food Quality Protection Act, this problem with ticks,
Lyme disease and bed bugs became far more serious.
Here is the reality of this article and what these grant chasers will
not tell you. If you design a study that uses less effective chemistry
in small areas that are isolated and surrounded by areas where no
pesticide applications are made, but have large tick infestations, the
conclusion will be forgone. They will kill some pests in the treated
areas but those areas will quickly re-infest, and if that pest is a
disease carrier the rate of transmission will remain the same as if no
pesticides were applied. I could have told them that for free and saved
the taxpayers a half a million dollars.
Case Scenario Two.
You're hired by the government, to control mosquitoes you absolutely know can carrying any number of deadly afflictions such as, malaria, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, filariasis, tularemia, dirofilariasis, Japanese encephalitis, Saint Louis encephalitis, Western equine encephalitis, Eastern equine encephalitis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ross River fever, Barmah Forest fever, La Crosse encephalitis, Zika fever, Keystone virus or Rift Valley fever, all of which can be amazingly deadly to large numbers of people, especially children.
But
the government decides that pesticides are so dangerous, you're only
going to be allowed to make pesticide applications on one street and
miss the next six blocks. Would any rational person really expect to
see positive results in thwarting disease transmission? The answer is a
resounding NO! Now double that insanity with a requirement you must use a pesticide that's the least effective because of false claims regarding safety.
In my opinion, any honest person who is familiar
with pest control, pesticides, history, and with valid science, and reads this can only come to one conclusion. This
study is nothing short of conclusions in search of data!
The reality is this. The answer to all these pest problems was
effective, easy to use, inexpensive chemistry that was available to
everyone. If that isn’t part of the answer there will be no answer and
no amount research that leaves that component out will ever be anything
but junk science.
Barry Brownstein
– March 17, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is committed to a vaccine solution for COVID-19. Bureaucrats at the CDC believe you can’t be trusted to see “critical” data on COVID hospitalizations or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine boosters; you might “misinterpret” the findings and be less inclined to get vaccinated or boosted. The NewYork Times reports, “The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made public.” Perhaps the withheld CDC data mirrors recent Israeli data, which shows, for the second booster, vanishing efficacy.
When the new FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, says his top priority is to fight “distortions and half-truths,” he wasn’t referring to misinformation coming from government bureaucrats.
By withholding information, the CDC has been complicit in the firing of thousands of Americans from their jobs, many of them health professionals. You can hardly mandate something that doesn’t work as advertised and doesn’t prevent you from infecting others.
Dr. Pierre Kory explains how edicts from politicized bureaucrats have led to hospital protocols calling “for treating [COVID] with ineffective, expensive, and potentially unsafe drugs like Remdesivir.”
Ryan Cooper writes the “practice of shading the truth or telling straight-up falsehoods in service of some half-baked political end started from the first moments of the pandemic.”
University of California professor of medicine Dr. Vinay Prasad also decries the lies:
Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility.
Prasad writes, “We must carefully remove the power we have granted public health, which has often been misused.”
In Vasily Grossman’s great Russian novel Life and Fate, two scientists are talking about their frustration navigating the highly politicized bureaucracy where a political error could result in being purged. Of the current bureaucrat in charge of their lab, one scientist says, “he’s not such a bad type.” Grossman, through another character, adds this teaching lesson: “By the way, do you know the difference between a good type and a bad type? A good type is someone who behaves swinishly in spite of himself!”
Generalizing the lesson, bureaucracies incentivize employees to betray the public trust. Employees may feel bad about what they do, but they do bad things, anyway.
Grossman was writing about Stalinist Russia, but his observations can be easily applied to the CDC or Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Federal regulatory agencies and the bureaucrats running them are trampling on your rights. Columbia University Law School professor Philip Hamburger is one of the leading authorities on constitutional law. According to Hamburger, writing in his short book, The Administrative Threat, “Administrative power is a preconstitutional mode of governance— the very sort of power that constitutions were most clearly expected to prevent.” American bureaucrats are not fundamentally different from their counterparts in totalitarian societies. They are both unbounded by constitutional constraints; the only difference is in degree.
Before the Supreme Court decisions on vaccine mandates, Hamburger left no doubt about where he stood: “Rather than merely evaluate the Biden administration’s misdeeds—serious as they are—the Court should reflect upon its own wayward doctrines. Its departures from the Constitution have authorized, even normalized, the government’s departures. For this, the Court is to blame.”
Hamburger is referring to the normalization of administrative power. In The Administrative Threat, he is clear: “The Constitution establishes only regular avenues of power, and thereby blocks irregular or extralegal power. To be precise it blocks extralegal lawmaking by placing legislature powers exclusively in Congress, and it prevents extralegal adjudication by placing judicial power exclusively in the courts.”
Administrative mandates and rules are unconstitutional. “Through administrative power,” Hamburger argues, there now exists a third but “unconstitutional” way by which the “the executive purports to create legal obligation.” Administrative lawmaking is not justified as “delegated power.” Congress has no power to subdelegate its responsibilities to bureaucratic administrators. In short, administrative power, Hamburger writes, is “the very sort of power that constitutions were expected to prevent.” He warns that power wielded through government bureaucracies “binds Americans and deprives them of their liberty.”
Many citizens yield to administrative power believing we need experts, such as Fauci, to guide us. Hamburger cautions, “A person with specialized expertise will tend to overestimate the importance of that area and underestimate the significance of others. As a result, although experts can be valuable for their specialized knowledge, they cannot be usually relied upon for decisions that take a balanced view of the consequences.”
Hamburger was writing before COVID. Clearly, of the administrative agencies and bureaucrats threatening our liberties today, Dr. Fauci has led the charge. Fauci is arguably one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history.
To stem the tide of rising administrative power, Hamburger recommends that we “should bar judicial deference to agencies on questions of law or fact, as this violates due process and other constitutional limitations. Further, he recommends, “Congress should remove immunity for administrators — beginning with those who have desk jobs and agencies with a track record of violating constitutional rights.”
As Hamburger explains in his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, “Administrative law evades not only the law but also its institutions, processes, and rights.”
Among the horrifying passages in Life and Fate are those where Grossman describes in detail what went into building the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann didn’t pluck these horrors from thin air. Gas chambers were not among products sold in the marketplace. Thousands of actions had to be coordinated by a bureaucracy and military willing to follow insane and criminal orders. Tens of thousands of highly educated individuals had to follow orders.
Grossman has the character Obersturmbannführer Liss visit the Voss engineering works:
The Voss works had been entrusted with an important part of the order and Liss was satisfied with their work. The directors had devoted considerable thought to the project and were keeping precisely to the specifications. The mechanical engineers had improved the construction of the conveyors, and the thermal technicians had developed a more economical system for heating the ovens.
Writing in his illuminating but understated style, Grossman brings home the point that many well-educated individuals had to engage in this depraved process:
Liss refused an invitation to observe the experiments being conducted in the laboratory. He did, however, look through pages of records signed by various physiologists, chemists and biochemists. He also met the young researchers responsible for the experiments: a physiologist and a biochemist (both women), a specialist in pathological anatomy, a chemist who specialized in organic compounds with a low boiling-point, and Professor Fischer himself, the toxicologist who was in charge of the group.
Still, much more was needed. Grossman explains:
A railway track had been laid down, leading directly off the main line to the construction site. The tour of inspection began with the depots alongside the railway line. First, under an awning, was the sorting depot. This was filled with component parts of a variety of machines, tubes and pipes of every diameter, unassembled conveyor belts, fans and ventilators, ball-mills for human bones, gas and electricity meters soon to be mounted on control panels, drums of cable, cement, tip-wagons, heaps of rails, and office furniture.
Grossman continues with construction details and descriptions of people operating the camps. One such person was Private Roze, whose “job was to watch through the inspection-window; when the process was completed, he gave the order for the gas chamber to be emptied. He was also expected to check that the dentists worked efficiently and honestly.” The dentists were extracting gold dental work from those murdered:
At the end of each day one of the dentists would hand Roze a small packet containing several gold crowns. Although this represented only an insignificant fraction of the precious metal taken every day to the camp authorities, Roze had twice handed over almost a kilo of gold to his wife. This was their bright future, their dream of a peaceful old age. As a young man, Roze had been weak and timid, unable to play an active part in life’s struggle. He had never doubted that the Party had set itself one aim only: the well-being of the small and weak. He had already experienced the benefits of Hitler’s policies; life had improved immeasurably for him and his family.
The Party looked out for “the small and weak,” Roze reasoned. If Roze’s conscience was pricked, he could think, I am not a criminal; I am merely serving the “common good.” Grossman writes, “People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good.”
Complying with orders of bureaucrats to commit unimaginable atrocities, people can rationalize away their criminality. Grossman writes, “The air is full of the groans and cries of the condemned. The sky has turned black; the sun has been extinguished by the smoke of the gas ovens. And even these crimes, crimes never before seen in the Universe—even by Man on Earth—have been committed in the name of good.”
There are no gas chambers in America, and it is unlikely there will ever be. Yet, exercising extralegal power, an army of bureaucrats working for the CDC, FDA, OSHA have terrorized America, dividing Americans into the clean and unclean. As Laurie Williams writes, “An unelected government agency was allowed to classify us into ‘critical infrastructure’ and ‘nonessential,’ and confine many of us to our homes.” These bureaucrats, Williams adds, helped to teach us “to see each other as potential contagions, not potential collaborators.” These bureaucrats don’t have the terrible powers of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, yet I shudder to think what would happen if they were so empowered.
As with Private Roze, life is good for some who cooperate with COVID bureaucrats. Some have a vested interest in perpetuating the pandemic. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology fellow at Columbia University, recently observed why academics and bureaucrats don’t want to let go of COVID:
A constellation of scholars, bureaucrats and pundits seem invested in COVID remaining a “crisis” indefinitely. As the political scientist Oren Cass put it, many have been granted more money, prestige and institutional power than they have ever had in the wake of the pandemic. For them, a “return to normal” would mean a return to being largely ignored and exerting marginal influence over society. It would mean losing new revenue streams they have grown accustomed to, and so on. In light of this reality, it is perfectly natural that many experts, administrators and “talking heads” would be disinclined to return to “normal” – loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias. However, recognizing these impulses as banal (rather than nefarious) does not render them unproblematic. They can skew policymaking and expert advice towards continued invasive policies and a continued sense of panic in ways that are excessive and pernicious.
The will of the voting public will often do little to reverse policies of unbridled bureaucracies. In his seminal Democracy in America, written in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that in Europe the basis of power was “the upper echelons of society,” whereas power in America began with individuals acting in associations, local governments and then states. Today Tocqueville wouldn’t recognize an America where power resides so significantly in an unconstitutional federal bureaucracy.
Yet, Tocqueville saw that centralization might one day lead to “administrative despotism:”
After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
The despotism of which Tocqueville warned is dawning. Overcoming it may seem hopeless, but the power of bureaucratic despots depends on the power we give them. Perhaps thousands of scientists working for the CDC and NIAID know they are enabling the lies of their bureaucratic leaders. Among them may be those who remain silent and do their jobs, as did Grossman’s scientists, chemists, thermal technicians, and mechanical engineers. Some will find their courage. When we find our voice and say enough is enough, perhaps Congress will restrain bureaucracies according to the recommendations of Hamburger. Some states are already acting to rein in the power of their state health bureaucracies.
Of Stalin’s crimes, Grossman shows how silence was an enabler of lies and horrors: “We remained silent in 1937 when thousands of innocent people were executed. Or rather some of us—the best of us—remained silent. Others applauded noisily. And we remained silent during the horrors of general collectivization.” Is that what the battle for freedom has come to, that the “best of us” remain silent?
As we find our voices, the pendulum of power will shift back in a Tocquevillian direction. In America today, a decentralization movement is growing, advocating greater local control. Continued erosion of public trust in federal agencies and government experts will hasten that movement.
While we wait for others to wake up, Grossman believes we can choose “everyday human kindness.” “Ordinary people bear love in their hearts,” he wrote. “are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.” Kindness, Grossman adds, “is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”
Life is not evil, but bureaucracies often are cruel. America is regressing back to the early seventeenth century, Hamburger observes, in the manner of King James of England who governed via edicts from his Star Chamber. Of administrative power, Hamburger warns, “It is difficult to think of a more serious civil liberties problem for the twenty-first century.”
Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.
He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout.
To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com
Amelia Janaskie
David Waugh – February 7, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research
Twisting the truth is our current Federal Government’s modus operandi. Look no further than White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s latest political gymnastics when she claimed, “We’ve not been pro-lockdown – most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.”
While technically true (most actual lockdowns happened in America under Trump), the reality is that Biden praised pro-lockdown governors like Andrew Cuomo of NY, deified lockdown advocate Anthony Fauci as “America’s scientist,” and insisted throughout his 2020 campaign that lockdowns were necessary.
While our government officials may struggle with cognitive dissonance, Americans are taking notice as their trust in the federal government continues to plummet.
The Biden Administration aside, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) approach to the pandemic has been concerning, especially regarding its ability to offer reliable information to the public. The latest example of this trend occurs in a misleading infographic, which if taken at face value, conveys that wearing a cloth mask provides 56 percent more protection than no mask at all.
The CDC cites the results from its new study on masking, which states that “wearing a cloth mask (aOR = 0.44; 95 percent CI = 0.17–1.17) was associated with lower adjusted odds of a positive test compared with never wearing a face covering but was not statistically significant.” If one looks closely at the infographic, the hash symbol at the bottom indicates the results for cloth masks are “not statistically significant.”
Even though the CDC is technically honest in reporting this fact on the infographic, the situation still raises the question: if it admits in fine print that its infographic isn’t backed by reliable evidence, then why are they publishing it in the first place? Moreover, if the evidence suggests that wearing cloth masks has no statistically significant relationship with reducing the probability of testing positive, then why does the CDC continue to say we should use them?
Vinay Prasad, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, echoes this sentiment, scrutinizing the rigor of the study itself. According to Prasad, there are multiple issues with how the researchers conducted the survey, including significant response and selection bias. In a Cato working paper, Prasad, along with other researchers, highlights the main concern with broadcasting flawed research:
Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit [should] be truthfully communicated to the public.
Unfortunately, this behavior is typical for the CDC, which has debased itself to the level of partisan media outlets that spin the results of medical studies. Admitting that cloth masks don’t reduce the odds of testing positive would disrupt its existing narrative and result in political uproar against the CDC from the public and other highly influential groups, such as the Biden Administration and teachers unions.
Relenting on its stance will further erode the CDC’s recommendation for universal masking in schools, enraging teachers unions, who we know influenced its school mask guidance. Despite the growing evidence against masks, the CDC is intent on maintaining its position on school masking.
According to its official mission, the CDC “serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.” Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been many cases in which the CDC stepped outside its mission.
We must not forget the eviction moratorium. On September 4th, 2020, the CDC, citing the need to control Covid, stopped landlords from evicting tenants. The data backing this argument was shoddy, and the moratorium was later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
In addition to controlling landlords, the CDC also ignores research that opposes its position on the robustness of natural immunity. According to famed Johns Hopkins researcher Marty Makary, the results of the latest data on reinfection rates demonstrated that “natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.”
Yet, the CDC spun the truth when reporting on this study. They claimed “vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death,” based on a comparison between hybrid immunity (combination of prior infection and vaccination) with natural immunity. They did not clarify what the study’s results actually show: that vaccination does not significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization for those with natural immunity.
But why would they? These findings directly dispute the position held by the CDC and the Biden administration. The current CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will not budge on her position either. In October of 2020, she signed the John Snow Memorandum, which still states “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”
The American people can sense the lies. Their trust in the CDC is falling. Its lack of transparency damages public health in the long run, hindering its ability to provide effective messaging during future health emergencies.
If they want the trust of the American people, they have to work harder to regain it. Unfortunately, the CDC is beholden to special interest groups, which leads it to renege on its mission of providing accurate public health recommendations. The CDC faces incentives that prompt it to follow the concentrated interests of special interest groups at the cost of providing reliable information to the public.
The CDC’s actions have completely bewildered the American people. If it continues down this road, it will only erode what little credibility it has left.
Amelia Janaskie is a Research Associate at the American Institute for Economic Research.
She graduated from the College of Charleston Honors College in May 2020 with a B.S. in Economics and minor in English.
During her time in college, she was a Market Process Scholar with the Center for Public Choice and Market Process.
David Waugh joined AIER in 2020 and currently works as the Managing Editor. He is a Don Lavoie Fellow with the Mercatus Center and he previously worked as an associate for S&P Global Market Intelligence.
David is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College where he received a BA in Economics. While at Hampden-Sydney, he was a Senior Fellow with the Center for the Study of Political Economy and worked in the Economics department as a teaching assistant.
