XPost: uk.legal, soc.culture.israel, talk.politics.guns
XPost: alt.survival, talk.politics.misc
Peeler wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:12:47 +0000, clinically insane, pedophilic, serbian bitch Razovic, the resident psychopath of sci and scj and Usenet's famous sexual cripple, making a total ass of herself as "Mary E. Riendeau SHEIN is jew paedophile BARRY SHEIN's circumcised shitshke vife", farted again:
Yup.
Indeed.
Yup, BOTH of you ridiculous gay neo-nazi shitheads are indeed VERY VERY sick assholes, miserable whiners ...and total laughing stocks! LOL
Indeed, they are pathetic manginas.
To write about a much more intellectually stimulating topic, Jeff
Jacoby writes about a COVID mea culpa.
A pandemic mea culpa from Francis Collins
A key figure in the government’s COVID-19 response admits that he was willfully blind.
By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist,Updated January 21, 2024, 3:00 a.m.
Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of
Health, at a 2021 ceremony where Vice President Kamala Harris got a dose
of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of
Health, at a 2021 ceremony where Vice President Kamala Harris got a dose
of the COVID-19 vaccine.ANNA MONEYMAKER/NYT
It comes three years too late. But Francis Collins, the former head of
the National Institutes of Health, has finally admitted that the
COVID-19 lockdowns caused a massive amount of harm — harm to which he
and other government public-health experts, such as Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were oblivious
because they were obsessed with doing things their way.
The mea culpa came last summer during a conversation hosted by Braver
Angels, an organization that promotes dialogue among Americans with
sharply different ideologies and political loyalties. Collins, who as
NIH director played a central role in shaping Washington’s response to COVID-19, was paired with Wilk Wilkinson, a Minnesota trucking manager
and podcast host who strongly opposed how government officials addressed
the pandemic. The 90-minute exchange, moderated by Boston College
professor Martha Bayles, was recorded six months ago but only recently attracted attention when excerpts were posted on social media.
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The whole conversation was interesting, but one segment in particular
was jaw-dropping. Collins described with remarkable candor just how narrow-minded, how willfully myopic, he and other high-level public
health officials had been as they dealt with the crisis.
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“As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying
to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with
people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking
about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota a
thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard,” confessed Collins, who retired from the NIH at the end of 2021. “We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City
or some other big city.”
That was a stunning admission. What he said next was even more scandalous. Advertisement
“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that
is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens. So
you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You
attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s
lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way
that they never recover from.”
“Collateral damage,” said Wilkinson.
“Collateral damage,” Collins agreed. He and his colleagues were locked
in what he now concedes was the “public health mindset” — a monomaniacal approach that blinded them to the injuries they were causing. “A lot of
us had that mindset, and that was really unfortunate.”
Was it ever.
As early as March 2020, Fauci recommended a nationwide lockdown and
called for a “dramatic diminution of the personal interaction” in daily activities. He warned that “life is not going to be the way it used to
be in the United States,” while insisting that was “best for the
American public.” Collins said at the time that the only correct
approach was “one that most people would find to be too drastic because otherwise it is not drastic enough.”
Now, of course, it is far too late to mitigate any of the pain endured
by millions of Americans hurt by the government’s high-handed edicts and recommendations. Those curbs and controls began with the declaration of
a federal emergency and travel ban, which in turn spurred many states to
order their own restrictions.
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The coast-to-coast lockdown destroyed tens of millions of jobs and at
least 200,000 small businesses. It exacerbated numerous social ills,
worsened mental illness, and took a deadly toll in missed cancer
diagnoses and untreated heart disease. The prolonged school closures
inflicted unprecedented damage on children. The social distancing and
mask mandates were enforced with a ruthlessness that at times turned
despotic. And countless men and women — from ordinary citizens to noted epidemiologists to elected state officials — found themselves demonized, censored, or shunned for challenging those who attached “zero value” to their concerns.
All this damage was caused not by the pandemic but by politicians who
abdicated their judgment and left it to public-health experts. Whether
out of panic, pigheadedness, or perversity, they declined to balance
costs against benefits, a basic function of policymaking. Instead, they insisted they would “follow the science” — as though scientists were endowed with an infallible road map to navigate COVID’s complex
interplay of disease, economics, education, psychology, and politics in
a nation of 330 million people.
The great economist and social historian Thomas Sowell has often
observed that “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” That
is a fundamental reality in all policymaking. There are pros and cons to everything government does. For officials responding to the pandemic,
there can hardly have been a more shocking intellectual failure than the
one to which Collins now confesses: attaching “infinite value” to
stopping the disease and no value at all to everything else.
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The same sort of thinking can be a pitfall in many other areas. Focus on reducing fossil fuel use at any price, for example, and the results will
be stunted economic growth and continued misery for many of the world’s poorest people. Assign maximum importance to achieving racial diversity
in student admissions and the result is affirmative action preferences
so lopsided that they violate the Constitution. Allow the prevention of
another 9/11 to override every other consideration, and the CIA ends up torturing prisoners in secret “black sites” beyond the reach of law.
From crime to homelessness to addiction to national defense, there are
always costs to be weighed against benefits. And if acknowledging
tradeoffs is indispensable to the work of government, it is especially
so at times of crisis.
Toward the end of the Braver Angels conversation, Collins acknowledged
another way in which he and many of his inside-the-Beltway colleagues blundered.
It was folly, he said, to think that Washington knew what was best for
the whole nation. “The fact that we could put blanket recommendations
across this incredible wide, broad, and diverse country and expect them
to be right . . . obviously could not have been correct. And yet that’s
what was done.”
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COVID-19 would have been a terrible destroyer in any case. But it was
made all the more catastrophic by the failure of politicians and experts
who not only were sure they knew best but were unwilling even to
consider other views. Americans’ respect for public-health experts took
a beating during the pandemic, and it is a black mark on Collins’s
legacy that he was so complacent about the harm the government’s
policies caused. For belatedly admitting where he went wrong, he
certainly deserves credit. Let him continue to speak out, to warn other scientists against falling into the same trap, and he’ll deserve a lot more. Jeff Jacoby can be reached at
jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.
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