The Post-Partisan Emporium

COVID Insanity: A Further Surge Omar Khan An Opening Salvo A viral strain cannot be a peg by which we assess what we can and cannot achieve, who we can or cannot be, or the contours of social, economic and national destiny. Moreover, all the largely evidence free, almost madcap nostrums rolled out, have failed. Sweden, where they were ignored (no lockdowns, no mask mandates, no school closures) and where sanity prevailed, boasts a lower all-cause mortality in 2021 than in 1991 (and many intervening years since). In the East Coast of the US, both infections and deaths are higher this “vaxxed” autumn than the preceding autumn. The same is true in the UK. Baffled we may be, but data is data. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates have all flopped and backfired. Governments devastated their own societies with illogical, unsound, unscientific policies that we will be decades recovering from, and whose precedent will cast a shadow over civil liberties for quite some time to come. The ...

Frontline Doctors Stand Up to Authoritarian Public Health Officials Max Borders Imagine you’re a doctor. You go into work every day for long hours and figure out how to treat Covid. You are saving lives and doing so patient by patient. Each patient has individual needs that sometimes require custom care, but you know early treatment works.  Suddenly, faraway bureaucrats demand that you abandon your best practices and fall into line around their  grand plan . Suddenly your patients can’t get what you prescribe. Media apparatchiks diminish, invalidate or mock everything you’ve learned and are doing.  And all of it is being carried out in the name of “science.” The Physicians’ Rebellion More than 10,000 physicians and medical scientists have signed onto a  Declaration  that accuses public health authorities of, well, doing it wrong–and to devastating effect.  “WHEREAS, public policy makers have chosen to force a “one size fits all” treatment strategy, resultin...

Covid, lockdown and the retreat of  scientific debate Martin Kulldorff S cience is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth. With something like lockdown – an untested policy that affects millions – rigorous debate and the basics of verification/falsification are more important than ever. Academics backing lockdown (or any major theory) ought to welcome challenges, knowing – as scientists do – that robust challenge is the way to identify error, improve policy and save lives. But with lockdown, science is in danger of being suppressed by politics. Lockdown moved instantly from untested theory to unchallengeable orthodoxy: where dissenters face personal attack. Understandable on social media perhaps, but it has now crept into the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in a recent article about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). The GBD, which I wrote, together with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford and Dr. Sunetra Gupta at O...

The Big Green Lie At the next Convention on Biological Diversity summit, world leaders plan to agree turning 30% of the Earth into “Protected Areas” by 2030. Big conservation NGOs say this will mitigate climate change, reduce wildlife loss, enhance biodiversity and so save our environment. They are wrong. Protected Areas  will not save our planet. On the contrary, they will increase human suffering and so accelerate the destruction of the spaces they claim to protect because local opposition to them will grow. They have no effect on  climate change  at all, and have been shown to be generally poor at preventing wildlife loss. It is vital that real solutions are put forward to address these urgent problems and that the real cause – exploitation of natural resources for profit and growing overconsumption, driven by the Global North – is properly acknowledged and discussed. But this is unlikely to happen because there are too many vested interests that depend on existing con...

Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature  Advances with Launch of New Asset Class A project of the multilateral development banking system, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange recently created a new asset class that will put, not just the natural world, but the processes underpinning all life, up for sale under the guise of promoting “sustainability.” BY WHITNEY WEBB Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)  announced  it had developed  a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle  meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then  maintain, manage and grow  the natural assets they commodify, with ...