RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/21/biden-lied-about-why-covid-tests-are-in-short-supply/

When Joe Biden was running for president from the basement of his Delaware home, he issued what he described as a seven-point plan “to beat COVID-19.” More than a year later, Biden announced his latest plan, which basically repeats everything he promised he’d do when running for president.

The big news announced on Tuesday was that the administration would buy and distribute half a billion at-home tests to anyone who asks because, he said, testing is key to getting COVID under control.

But Biden promised the same thing last year. In fact, the very first item on his seven-point plan was to “fix Trump’s testing-and-tracing fiasco to ensure all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free testing.”

Biden said he’d “double the number of drive-through testing sites … scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude … stand up a Pandemic Testing Board like Roosevelt’s War Production Board (to) produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”

Yet the news today is filled with stories of people who can’t get tests.

At his press briefing Tuesday, a reporter asked Biden if the lack of sufficient tests was a failure. “No,” was Biden’s response. “COVID is spreading so rapidly. It just happened almost overnight.” He denied that it took too long to ramp up testing, saying that “the Omicron virus spread more rapidly than anybody thought … All of a sudden it was like everybody rushed to the counter.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dangerous-push-to-give-boosters-to-teens-vacccine-covid-19-omicron-vaxx-requirement-mandate-11640107759?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.

Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males 16 to 24, 56 developed myocarditis after their second Pfizer dose (or 1 in 7,830, at least seven times the usual rate). True, most cases were mild, but in the broader group of 136 people (including older and female patients) who developed myocarditis after the vaccine, seven had a “complicated course,” and one 22-year-old died. Moderna’s vaccine carries an even higher rate of heart complications, which is why some European countries have restricted it for people under 30. But in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indiscriminately push for boosters for all young people.

Those recommendations came over the objections of the agencies’ own experts. The last vote by FDA advisers, in September, rejected the proposal 16-2. FDA leaders revisited the proposal in November and simply bypassed the experts. So did the CDC, whose advisers had rejected boosters for people not at high risk. Two top FDA scientists, including the head of the agency’s vaccine efforts, quit around the time of the September vote over White House pressure to authorize boosters for all. They wrote in detail about their concerns.

A study by Oxford researchers, published last week in Nature Medicine, validated those concerns. It found young people suffered myocarditis, pericarditis and arrhythmias more frequently from Moderna’s vaccine than from Covid itself. And the long-term cardiac effects of boosters in young people are unknown.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/modern-sciences-broken-bargain/

It’s up to us to ensure progress serves our ends.

The founding manifesto of the modern scientific enterprise—Vannevar Bush’s 1945 classic Science: The Endless Frontier—laid down a promise: that federalizing the academic sciences would protect the universities as bastions of free inquiry and curiosity-driven research. Without such support, Bush argued, the academic sciences would be captured and enslaved by government and corporate political interests. That argument was persuasive to the political authorities of the time. Now, seven decades later, that promise stands broken. Science’s “endless frontier” has become Big Science, a self-aggrandizing cartel organized around the aggressive pursuit of federal money.

Science is grounded in Enlightenment virtues. Its core attributes are unfettered freedom of intellect; cultivation of curiosity; skepticism; dispassionate reason; and dedication to evidence. A robust modern science immensely enriches our society. In return, our society affords the sciences enormous privilege and prestige. This mutually beneficial bargain held for many generations. Scientists were free to roam the intellectual frontiers, the public mostly watched from a respectful distance, and both science and society flourished. That bargain is now unraveling, damaging both science and the society that supports it.

Less and less do the sciences serve as bulwarks of reason against political and corporatist aims. To the contrary, the sciences are becoming stridently politicized, acting as a vanguard for an authoritarianism of “expertise”. Increasingly, science is being used as a cloak to shield political agendas from normal scrutiny and debate, thereby betraying the scientific ideal.

These trends, and the reasons for them, are not hard to discern. Scientists’ careers are no longer charted by the esteem of peers, but increasingly by conformity to institutional and political interests. The natural immunity of tenure, which is intended to protect university scientists’ intellectual freedom, is being systematically gutted. Adhering to science’s core virtues, listed above, is becoming a career hazard. In the face of this, fellow scientists either remain silent, or become eager participants in a masquerade of “consensus.” Public trust in science, which turns on the common perception that scientists are avatars of dispassionate and independent inquiry, is becoming increasingly tattered. The COVID-19 spectacle is demonstrating just how fragile that public trust is.

https://reason.com/2021/12/20/against-faucism/

Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.

“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.

“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.

When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/abigail-shrier-on-freedom-in-an-age

A few weeks ago, my friend Abigail Shrier—who you surely remember from this essay or this investigation—was invited to give a speech at Princeton. Abigail is the author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” a bestselling book that, for obvious reasons, is also a lightning rod.

This being a college campus in 2021, you can imagine what happened next. The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police were called in because of threats.

But despite the limited audience, Shrier’s message that night was loud and clear: don’t buckle in the face of the mobs. Don’t become a sock puppet to your institution or employer or social circle. Tell the truth. Speak your mind. Reclaim your freedom.

It’s a speech that deserves to be heard by as many people—especially young people—as possible. So today, we share it with all of you in the hopes that you’ll pass it along.

And if you’d rather listen to Abigail read it, just click here:

…….

The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is:  What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?

So, perhaps I’ll begin by telling you a little bit about myself mainly because I’m not so different from many of you.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-courts-covid-vaccine-test-sixth-circuit-osha-mandate-11640034808?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote that Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mouseholes. But that’s essentially what a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals majority said Congress did late Friday when they lifted a stay on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccinate mandate.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last month stayed OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard” after finding the agency exceeded its legal authority by requiring that employees of private employers with 100 or more workers be vaccinated or tested weekly. The Biden Administration appealed to the Sixth Circuit, where numerous other lawsuits were consolidated.

Judges Julia Smith Gibbons and Jane Branstetter Stranch rescued the mandate by deferring to the Administration. They say Congress gave OSHA the power to issue emergency orders to protect workers from “grave dangers.” The Labor Secretary merely must find “that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents” that are toxic or physically harmful and that an “emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

Covid meets the dictionary definition of an “agent,” the majority says, ergo OSHA can issue its mandate. The majority also says new variants support OSHA’s determination that Covid still poses a grave danger, and it is not “appropriate to second-guess that agency determination considering the substantial evidence, including many peer-reviewed scientific studies, on which it relied.”

But the question the judges are asked to decide isn’t whether Covid is a grave danger, as Judge Joan Larsen explains in her potent dissent. The question is whether OSHA acted within the law as written by Congress. It certainly didn’t as we read the law.