Kennedy, DeSantis and a Covid Reckoning Election. By Ramresh Thakur.
We seem to have come to some sort of a crossroads with respect to Covid.
Lockdowns (without border closure) were a drawn-out pain for little gain:
Along one road lies a wealth of studies demonstrating the negligible benefits of most of the key pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions. …
A study by Kevin Bardosch used a “harm framework” to look at 600 publications. He concluded that “the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead,” exactly as many of us warned from the beginning. …
In June a major peer-reviewed meta-analysis from the Institute of Economic Affairs by US, Swedish, and Danish researchers concluded regarding stringent lockdowns that, in the words of co-author Steve Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University, “the lives saved were a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs imposed.” In his judgment, “When it comes to Covid, epidemiological models have many things in common: dubious assumptions, hair-raising predictions of disaster that miss the mark, and few lessons learned.” The comprehensive 220-page book found that draconian measures had a “negligible impact” on Covid mortality and were “a colossal global policy failure that should never be imposed again.” …
An article in Vaccines indicates that repeated Covid injections induce the production of IgG4 antibodies that may reduce immunity to the Covid spike protein. This would help to explain rising infections, hospitalisation, and deaths with successive doses of the vaccines.
A Virginia study, for example, found that vaccinated veterans are more likely to be hospitalised or die than unvaccinated veterans, with boosters raising the risk even higher. …
Israel’s health ministry confirmed that the number of people aged 18-49 without underlying diseases to have died from Covid is precisely zero. …
But lockdowns could occur again:
Yet, on another path going forward, there remain many disquieting indicators of the continuing hold that the failed and discredited narratives have on policymakers and publics. This suggests that the insanity could be serially repeated at short notice.
- Only 34 percent of British people believe the pandemic is over and 56 percent think it’s ongoing, according to a mid-April YouGov poll.
- Following Rochelle Walensky’s resignation, Biden’s pick as the new CDC director, Mandy Cohen, is a lockdown, mask, and vaccine fanatic. …
- Many of the worst offenders on lockdown, masks, and vaccines have been honoured with gongs while the likes of Oxford University’s Carl Heneghan and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya were monitored by the UK government’s Counter-Disinformation Unit and heavily censored on social media.
- Governments remain stubbornly resistant to investigating the concerning phenomenon of excess deaths showing up in many countries. …
- Yet a more sinister long-term threat to individual liberties and global freedoms is the WHO push for a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations that would grant it legally binding authority over national governments. …
Liberty:
Writing in The Mail on Sunday on 3 May 2020, Lord Sumption, the recently retired UK Supreme Court Justice, said that Covid-19 was neither “the greatest crisis” nor even “the greatest public health crisis in our history. But the lockdown is without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history.” …
The US 2024 presidential race could become about covid, especially if RFK and DeSantis win their primaries:
Because of the dominant influence of America on the rest of the democratic world, the US presidential contest has unique global resonance, even though the rest of us lack a vote in the contest whose outcome has the potential to shape our lives quite profoundly.
From this perspective, for someone who strongly resisted the insanity of the public policy response to a serious but not existential global health crisis, the ideal Republican and Democratic champions would be DeSantis and Kennedy. No one else comes close in the two parties to their record in forceful opposition to lockdowns, masks and vaccines.
If DeSantis and Kennedy were to triumph in the primaries against the odds, it would mean the campaign became a referendum on Covid for the voters of both major parties. It would further signify that the two heroes of the Covid resistance won the public debate, and whoever is elected president come November 2024 will have a clear mandate to revert to pre-Covid normalcy. …
Biden is on the nose:
Biden is vulnerable to attacks from Democratic opponents during the primary … Contradicting his marketing in the 2020 election as a moderate conciliator and unifier, he has governed as a radical race-baiter who has deepened the nation’s polarisation. The rate of immigration across the southern border is a virtual demographic invasion and the Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have become political millstones for many candidates. His physical presence around young girls stirs distaste and unease and he is an out-and-out fabulist. …
Trump has real competition this time, particularly on covid
Trump has never before come up against a Republican opponent with such a substantial record of accomplishments, nor one as well-funded and well-prepared. DeSantis gained national profile for converting a marginal 0.4 percent victory in 2018 into a 19.4 percent landslide in 2022, turning America’s biggest swing state from rosé to ruby red. That is a striking contrast with Trump’s string of successive losses since 2016. …
Trump’s instincts, like that of Boris Johnson in the UK, may have been libertarian. The fact remains that both leaders allowed themselves to be manipulated into policies that have produced disastrous consequences and both must be called out and held accountable.
By giving Covid such a high profile, Trump paints a target on his own back for DeSantis to shoot at. The most lethal arrows in the Governor’s quiver are how he stood up to Fauci while Trump failed to fire him. DeSantis attacked Trump for turning over the country to Fauci in March 2020 that “destroyed millions of peoples’ lives.” …
The Trump indictments change US politics to resemble 16th century England, with its cycles of imprisoning political opponents:
With two criminal indictments of Trump, the protective shield has been well and truly lifted from former presidents. Do the Democrats understand the wind they have sown to reap the whirlwind? We can expect a descent into cycles of retaliatory indictments of defeated opponents and challengers by victorious presidents.
Second, with the blatant abuse of the prosecutorial power of the federal government increasing numbers of Americans will come to regard the administration as illegitimate.
No amount of deflections about whataboutery will stop people from comparing the kid glove treatments of Hillary Clinton with the email server scandal, and of Vice President Biden’s equally cavalier approach to classified documents …
Every time Biden is proved corrupt, they throw another indictment:
For some, for example South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, the timing is also suspicious as it comes amidst further revelations about possible bribery involving Biden when he was vice president. The indictment conveniently deflects attention from the Biden family pay-to-play scandals involving the vice president. …
Lose-lose:
If Trump triumphs in the primary but loses the 2024 election, tens of millions of Americans will be convinced, with more plausibility than in 2020, that the creeping criminalisation of presidential politics crippled Trump’s campaign and robbed him of a second term.
If Trump wins despite or perhaps with an assist from the brazen weaponisation of the criminal justice system, he will begin the second term as a defendant in possibly several criminal cases.
Mark P. writes:
Quiet, hard-working patriots could have worked in 2019. But we are in a new order, where RAW POWER has replaced the rule of law.
They saw how far they could go during the plandemic and were ecstatic, so now are completely unrestrained by fact, truth or law. Biden, Hillary, the PWC scandal in Canberra, Fauci, Katy Gallagher — NONE of these will end in jail, and believe me they have noticed.
Looking down range, it’s every man for himself and the permanent jackboot is our future. Unless of course the average punter gets a big fat red pill and the chances are slim. I think next up is a “cyber attack”, grid “failure” followed by lockdowns on steroids. The slow boil version would be 15 minute cities then 10 minutes, then 5, then zero.
