Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
COVID Propaganda Roundup: The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.
Peter Hotez has meltdown over symposium reviewing Public Health™ COVID response
The theme of this roundup is four years late.
Four years late to the party, Stanford University has finally decided it might be a good idea to have some public discussion about what the governing authorities did to the population they are tasked with serving during the COVID-19 era.
Via Stanford Health Policy (emphasis added):
“Bringing together esteemed academics, public health practitioners, journalists, and government officials from all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate in conversation with one another with an eye toward reforms in science and public health to better serve the public.
With millions of lives lost, the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on the world. Despite decades of planning for the “next” pandemic, public health systems faced tremendous stress and often buckled and failed. Universities served as centers for valuable scientific work but failed to support their academic freedom mission by sponsoring vigorous discussion and debate on matters of pandemic policy. To do better in the next pandemic, we need to learn the lessons of the COVID-19 era.”
In response to this eminently reasonable gathering, we get the typical reaction we’ve come to expect from the overlords of the biomedical state.
Via Science-Based Medicine (emphasis added):
“If there was one thing that I would not have predicted—but, arguably, should have been able to predict—regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s the degree to which my fellow academics, particularly physicians and scientists, would contribute to public fear, misunderstanding, and doubt about public health interventions utilized to mitigate the worst of the pandemic. If I had been able to predict the level of complicity of my fellow academics in advocating for just letting the disease rip in a futile bid to achieve “natural herd immunity,” opposing tried-and-true interventions to slow the spread of respiratory diseases (e.g., masking) using a narrow fundamentalist interpretation of evidence-based medicine (EBM), promoting unproven “repurposed drugs” as near miracle cures, and even fear mongering about vaccines, I might have been able to predict that Stanford University would end up being the epicenter of such activities, if only because of its tight affiliation with the right wing think tank, The Hoover Institution. If that weren’t enough, then the fact that one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the document advocating a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic promising “natural herd immunity” in six months, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is Stanford faculty should have helped. So should the fact that Dr. John Ioannidis, formerly the greatest EBM guru (whom I once admired) who very early in the pandemic took a heel turn in favor of minimizing how dangerous COVID-19 was and advocating—you guessed it—”natural herd immunity” approaches to the pandemic.”
How dare anyone advocate the aggressively anti-science concept of “herd immunity”!
Respecting the Science™ means never looking back in history to learn anything when it might embarrass the governing authorities.
Peter Hotez has blocked me on X, so I had to do a little extra digging to get the Tweet.
Luckily, Kim Iversen covered it.
Here’s what he had to say about the COVID symposium, followed by a shameless plug for his propaganda book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist's Warning”:
“My goodness, what is happening at Stanford? This is awful, a full-on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contribute to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize COVID.”
I would say Hotez himself did a grand job of convincing anyone with half a brain to “shun vaccines” when he constantly shifted the goalposts on national television, as if the internet doesn’t exist and can’t easily archive his lies — not to mention the ironic aesthetics of a bloated, greasy used car salesman who takes his kid to Shake Shack for daddy-daughter time administering advice on personal health.
Francis Collins and wife destroyed at dinner
COVID justice has been a long time coming. And it’s probably still far off, because apparently no one cares except a tiny minority of the population like me and probably you.
So let’s start small, with this rule of thumb:
Mass murderers whose excesses exceed the worst Nazi scientists’ don’t get to enjoy their dinners in public.
Facebook admits to colluding with government on COVID-19 censorship
I’m not sure what Zuckerberg’s game is here, but whatever.
I hope what’s going on here is that he’s afraid of what a Trump administration might do to his stupid platform if he overcomes the landslide fraud by the Democrats that Mark will certainly help facilitate/cover up.
Via Associated Press (emphasis added)
“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to “censor” some COVID-19 content during the pandemic and vowed that the social media giant would push back if it faced such demands again.
In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg alleges that the officials, including those from the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”
The officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company didn’t agree, he said in the letter.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter dated Aug. 26 and posted on the committee’s Facebook page and to its account on X.”
One thing is for damn sure: silly letters to Congress four years too late aren’t going quench my thirst for justice.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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