Dear Jim:

It is certainly possibly to respectfully disagree about matters, and to amicably hold to differing opinions . However, as has been said, one may argue about opinions, but not about facts. What has been so deeply troubling for me over the past years is the difficulty so many people have in “facing facts”. They wish to relegate facts to the realm of opinion and present their “point of view” about things that are absolutely indisputable. To me, one might as well debate the existence of gravity. I am sorry if this seems a bit strong, but lives now hang in the balance over the issue of whether one is willing to accept facts or not. Regrettably, in spite of this, many people still are determined to hold to their opinions and ignore facts. 

In this article by David Bell, former W.H.O. consultant, formerly from Australia, now a senior Brownstone fellow and director of a biotech company in Washington State, powerful statistical evidence cited in a recently published U.K. journal shows that the directors of the pandemic were well aware that the policies they were pursued were likely to be harmful. They were called out by many world-class epidemiologists, such as Jay Battarchya (now FDA Director), Martin Kuldorff (now head of ACIP), Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Scott Atlas, and Sweden’s chief epidemiologist at the time, Anders Tegnell. They all pointed to the same outcomes that were revealed to be clearly true by the epidemiological statistics cited in this paper — namely that implementation of the 2020 public health measure was statistically far more likely to harm the public than to protect them. Their forecasts were based in similar statistical analyses from 2020, most of which could not be published at the time (Ioannidis managed to get one paper published nonetheless illustrating the futility of lockdowns, masking, and social distancing) because of the control the big corporations had on medical publishing. 

I would urge you to read in full Bell’s article, and subject it to your most rigorous critical analysis. Here is the link: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-covid-response-was-not-a-mistake-it-was-just-wrong/. If you find errors of logic or inaccuracies, I would certainly be willing to acknowledge them. I would encourage one to also have a look at the embedded link to the paper itself by Simon Wood et al, published in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society. The findings for me are only corroborative of what has been long ago published in many books, lectures, and articles by countless experts, completely ignored by the press, but not by discerning and inquisitive individuals who have striven to find the basis of what on face value appeared to be nonsensical public health interventions (You can safely shop at large stores (essential) but not small stores (non-essential). You can eat in a restaurant without a mask, but must mask up when entering or leaving). Keep in mind that scientific credibility never rests on “proof” but on the strength of the evidence. The Bradford Hill criteria are largely accepted as sufficient to demonstrate meaningful scientific evidence. These include strength of association, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility, coherence, experimental evidence, and the presence of analogous evidence. 

It is fair to object that it is impossible to critically evaluate these articles without training and expertise in epidemiology. I would certainly accept that response as a valid excuse not to engage with the facts. But, if you do not feel capable of engaging with the facts, you are not nevertheless entitled to have an opinion about them. Consistency requires that you admit that you must disqualify yourself from having an opinion about matters one claims to have a lack of expertise in.

One reason I have been so passionate about taking action on a public health level is seeing people hold firmly to opinions while refusing to or being Incapable of engaging with the factual material. Since people do not appreciate the risks, I feel responsible (rightly or wrongly) for protecting them from the consequences of their own ignorance. It has been particularly hard to be ridiculed, censored, and persecuted for my efforts to protect others in this way, even as they tenaciously hold to the opinions that imperil them. It is of little solace to be vindicated after the fact, especially when people not only fail to acknowledge that that they had they had been wrong, but also that they had made a colossal error in judgment that should give them pause when it comes to accepting other supposed truths without critical review of the evidence. 

If all this sounds a bit over-confident, please keep in mind that I have never brow-beaten anyone with my “version” of the truth, only encouraged others to have a look at it. My invitation to openly look at the facts has been summarily rejected with great consistency, and often with some disdain through much of the pandemic, particularly the first three years. 

Bell’s article reveals what should be shocking for anyone reading it for the first time: that the pandemic managers deliberately implemented policies the clearly knew would have harmful effects on the public, while disingenuously asserting the opposite — that it would protect the public from harm. This is not to say that every politician or person in authority understood this — only that the key policy drivers in most of the world were incontestably aware of this fact. Some may object, “But why would they deliberately try to harm the public?” This question is merely an admission of the fact that one is unable to accept that there are bad people who ascend to positions of power who do terrible things. History would suggest that such a view of political leadership is massively naive: The Roman Emperors, The French Revolution, Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy, the British policies in India in the nineteenth century, to say nothing of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other sociopaths in power who get others to do their anti-social bidding. No, the evidence proclaims loud and clear that the COVID-19 response was a massive attack on humanity by the power brokers of the world, who used governments to do their bidding. If we refuse to accept this, we have taken off our bullet proof vests as a hailstorm of bullets heads our way. Those of us who still have our vests on can’t save all those who refuse to wear them.