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How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives (by Alex Berenson) (2021)

This splendid book is both a comprehensive review of how the world got everything wrong about Covid-19 (or, if you have a conspiratorial bent, how the plague was weaponized by authoritarian forces to cow and terrify us into submission), and a story of how one man kept yelling from the back of the truck that this emperor had a spiked crown but no clothes. Or in his words, “how media hysteria, political partisanship, overreliance on unproven technology, and scientific illiteracy brought the United States and the world to the brink of breakdown.”

The author is a former staff writer for the New York Times, a fact that we think, somehow, the Times wants to forget, who became (by his own admission) obsessed by the virus and the noise circling its spiky little wreath.  As will become clear, the monopolies that control our information have no time for him – here’s an extract of his Wikipedia entry: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines. He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

As will also become clear, his false claims tended to be outrageously true.

We will summarize the various points he makes, but our earnest and urgent exhortation is: read this book.

Of the virus itself, Berenson points out that:

• The protein spikes of the virus made it easier to attach to human cells and therefore replicate via its host;
• Respiratory illness is notoriously, historically, hard (i.e. impossible) to control or contain;
• It did not disrupt the food chain or overrun hospitals, despite reporting to the contrary;
• It killed fewer American children than drowning, cancer, abuse or a dozen other conditions (yet schools and colleges were locked down more than anything, and a generation of ‘snitches’ was born);
• 80x as many Italians died from flu in 2014/15 & 2016/17 than of Covid-19;
• Jane Fonda described Covid as “God’s gift to the left” (which proved prescient, as it removed Donald Trump from office);
• It killed slightly more people than diarrhea or Alzheimer’s disease in 2020, and was less threatening than stated; and
• It generally threatened only those who were very old, fat, sick, or all three.

Of the reportage, the author notes:

• The statements by compromised experts as to the origin of the virus were accepted without question (and evidence that Dr Fauci and others had funded Wuhan gain-of-function research was stifled);
• The NY Times called the murder of a 27 year old Iowa man (Jordan Haynes) a Covid death;
• CNN deprecated Americans for panic buying of masks yet praised China for doing so;
• Any policy initiatives or suggestions by the Trump administration, some actually sensible, were derided;
• Pres. Trump’s much-mocked prediction that the Covid death rate would turn out to be under 1 percent was correct;
• The much-hyped ‘Long Covid’ was about as credible as chronic fatigue syndrome;
• “[H]ospitalizations were a far better real-time indicator than deaths“;
• Covid deaths were never put “in the context of overall mortality“;
• Vaccine hesitancy was mocked and condemned, and the unvaccinated blamed, pilloried, dismissed from work, declined treatment and shunned by polite society;
• U.S. States that eased lockdowns were savaged with dire (and false) predictions of mass quietus; and
• Virtually all the doom-saying in the mainstream media was wrong on every aspect of the plague, and wrong by a long chalk.

On the response by the various authorities:

• WHO tweeted on 14/1/20 that the Chinese had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission;
• In January, China bought-up billions of masks and other protective equipment, causing world-wide shortages;
• A 2006 study of flu pandemics demonstrated that quarantines, travel bans and school closings of more than 2 weeks were likely counterproductive;
• Lockdowns turned out to be “useless, if not counterproductive” (e.g. by increasing indoor and at-home transmission);
• Modelling for virus containment was an aid, not a substitute for decision-making;
• CDC gave evidence (27/2/20) that masks were useless (and cloth masks may even be counterproductive), yet soon enough the world had mask mandates foisted on it (“Even now no one has explained convincingly why public health authorities changed their views in a matter of days, and in lockstep“;
• WHO’s initial advice was to ‘flatten the curve‘ to retain capacity in hospital systems, that transmogrified into suppression;
• Imperial College of London (led by Neil Ferguson), had a long track record of vast over-estimating of death, but recommended suppression as policy;
• It was decided to use ‘hard-hitting emotional messaging‘ and ‘social disapproval‘ to ward off complacency;
• NYC Governor Cuomo gave daily press conferences on the virus for over 100 straight days, while moving old folks from hospitals to nursing homes to die in the thousands;
• Old people were not protected whilst the young were locked-down;
• Panic in March and April 2020 led to global shut-downs: “Businesses and schools shut. Elective surgeries were canceled. Our diversions vanished. No professional sports. No restaurants or movies or haircuts.”
• “Their explicit goal was to keep everyone home by giving them nowhere to go. Exceptions included grocery stores, gas stations, and, of course, Target and Walmart, which wound up with a huge advantage over smaller retailers that had to close.”
• Covid deaths were weighted as against normal morbidity (and duly reported) but ignored were greatly increased deaths from suicide and drug overdoses;
• Millions were spent on (non-targeted) tests and contact tracing – “the respiratory equivalent of trying to track chlamydia at an orgy“;
• US Government borrowing ballooned to almost $27 trillion by September 2020;
• They lied that vaccines would eliminate infection and transmission and tried to impose vaccine mandates (‘civil conscription’);
• Herd immunity and natural selection (the lessening severity of the virus over time) were almost never discussed and by inference, not considered; and
• Generally our masters demonstrated wild and erratic inconsistency, spread deliberate lies to manipulate societal response/compliance, and grabbed evermore power in the name of health and safety. (Berenson: “why did I have to wear a mask when I was walking into a restaurant, but not after I sat down? Why were coffee shops closed but malls open?“[

Big Tech & Big Pharma:

• Blocked videos, books, articles and groups that questioned the value of lockdowns;
• Made a fortune from the plague, along with smaller internet-based companies like Pinterest and Zoom;
• Suppressed information re cheap and available therapeutics, and the origins of Covid-19;
• Care of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, recipient of a $279m grant from the Gates Foundation, predicted hospitalizations from Covid in NYC at 4 x above the reality (in the same week);
• Ran “aggressive advertising campaigns to normalize social distancing and quarantines“;
• Released dubious test results showing 90+% efficacy for their vaccines, hardly using the elderly in trials, pressuring regulators to approve them at ‘warp speed,’ and suppressing evidence of side effects such as blot clots and myocarditis;
• Rejected Berenson’s booklet re lockdowns for Kindle Direct (Amazon);
• Removed talks (You Tube) by senior White House medical advisors;
• Erased anti-lockdown protests (Facebook); and
• When the vaccines turned out to be mere health supplements, not vaccines (losing utility in “a matter of months“), introduced ‘booster shots’ and convinced authorities to force them into unwilling arms.

Put your head over the crenellated parapet of Covid and you’re going to take hits.  The NY Times, Berenson’s former paper, disowned him; some family and many friends & colleagues shied away; he was subject to death threats and vitriol on social media (including Twitter, natch, from which he was ejected); the legacy media vilified him for giving interviews to the fascist media (i.e. Fox), the only TV station to show interest; and he became catnip for hit-pieces such as in The Atlantic, which called him, in an 1 April 2021 article, “The Pandemic’s Wrongest [sic] Man” (their cover photo below).

Berenson concludes with a cris de cœur for truth, free debate, and calm. He cites Donald Henderson, a man who helped to eradicate smallpox, one of the few viruses we have seen off:

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”  We add an earlier cited quote from the book, by a famous disrupter: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

And The Varnished Culture will add that life henceforth must be better than that summed-up by Albert Camus in The Plague: “Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.”

“Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters” By Steven E. Koonin (2021)

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This book posits facts, hypotheses, and urging which we are not qualified to judge.  It is also full of graphs that gave us acute conjunctivitis.  So what we will do here is attempt a summary of what Mr. Koonin is saying, much of which he says very well, and attempt to explain our reaction to the work, located somewhere on the spectrum between skepticism and a resigned capitulation to doom.

Koonin is a professor of theoretical physics and was the Undersecretary for Science in President Obama’s Department of Energy.  That, we guess, does not make him a climate scientist per se, but that branch of science seems to be nascent, protean, absurd or fraudulent, depending on your outlook.  Unsettled concerns global warming / climate variability (or change).

The author accepts the mantra of Climate Change and a degree of forcing by anthropogenic activity.  But he thinks we don’t know nearly enough to be drawing firm conclusions about what climate we can expect in the future, how we can respond, and whether the weather (‘extreme’ events) are linked to our modern, filthy, narcissistic materialism.  He also doubts that mere reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, even to zero, is going to be of great assistance, since the concentration of CO₂ is a greater problem than emissions per se.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just put out out its further raft of apocalyptic predictions on Monday 9 August 2021.  But if you read Koonin, you see the following:

“…Even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for purpose.”

and

“The uncertainties in modeling of both climate change and the consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions make it impossible today to provide reliable, quantitative statements about relative risks and consequences and benefits of rising greenhouse gases to the Earth system as a whole, let alone to specific regions of the planet.”

“There are high levels of uncertainty involved in detecting trends in extreme weather” [e.g. droughts, forest fires, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, etc.]  “…the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate.” [In fact, the more you study the infernal graphs, the more the Earth’s climate appears to be cyclical in the long-term, such that an assessment of one slice of a cycle will give you the result you choose, rather than the reality].

As for the biblical boiling and surging of the oceans (where the heat goes to hide):

“…the dynamics of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are quite uncertain…absent some very dramatic acceleration, it would take two hundred years to achieve even the lowest mapped rise of 30 cm (one foot)…” [Based on a NOAA tide gauge record for Honolulu].

Apart from the virtual worthlessness of modeling (‘always wrong but sometimes useful’), the media mangling facts, deliberately to make an earnest point, deliberately to juice-up copy, or from sheer ignorance, doesn’t help, and neither do slacktivists, many upon whom western civilization has an emetic effect; and scientists that feel the need to megaphone their theories rather than quietly submit them to honest peer review; or their grant-reliant, rent-seeking institutions and journals. And then there are the demagogues who aim (per H. L. Mencken) “to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

“Over the course of this century, cumulative emissions (that is, the total amount emitted) from the developing world will be larger than those from the developed world…under current trends, every 10 percent reduction that the developed world makes in its emissions (a reduction it has barely managed in fifteen years) will offset less than four years of growth in the developing world…the aggregate impact of the reductions pledged by all nations would reduce global emissions by less than 10 percent in 2030…the world is very unlikely to zero out its net emissions by 2075, let alone by 2050…”

Koonin’s warning about uncertainties would probably get him fired if he were still in government: a number of his colleagues have already accused him of running straw men arguments, or pooh-poohing his quibbles about modeling. (He mentioned to some about the actual, not reported, climate assessments, and was immediately asked whether he was a Trump supporter). But no one seems to have credibly challenged his central thesis that the models are an ingenious, heroic, yet consistently failed attempt to predict what (or even reliably reproduce what we know went before!) the largest, oldest, most mysterious, and most complex system on earth – that is Earth – is going to do, and whether we have much say in what she does.

Koonin closes with a chapter on Plans B, given that the requisite reduction in emissions is doomed, and won’t reduce carbon concentration in a hurry even if achieved. But the B-plans seem to be straight out of James Bond.  In any case, whatever your beliefs about Climate Change, everyone – from Greta Thunberg to Ian Plimer, from George Monbiot to Bjørn Lomborg, from those who vote Green to those who leave their greens untouched beside their T-Bone steaks – should read this book, if they haven’t already.