You little Monkey, how cute are you?
Many people in this country and the world are still traumatized from the last disease panic, still avoiding human contact and still masking up. But for most of the world, normalcy is returning, even in the presence of terrible collateral damage.
And at this very moment, there are two major developments.
First, the World Health Organization is right now finalizing a treaty to codify its preeminent place as the oracle of pandemic response, while instituting regulations that codify a lockdown-style policies as public-health orthodoxy.
Second, governments and media have seized on another infectious disease to terrify the public. It’s monkeypox, which has been endemic in Africa for a very long time but which seems to be making appearances elsewhere.
And we are see the germ game played out in real time once again, Just this morning, the US president announced that “everybody” should be concerned and stay on guard.
These topics and others have been on the lineup this week, along with a report on Brownstone at One Year. This email includes the full text below following links to latest content.
Germophobes to the Left and Right BY STEVE TEMPLETON. With two years of overreaction to and media obsession with the myriad of ways that COVID-19 can kill or permanently disable people, there’s reason to believe a major subset of the population that was faithfully adherent to public health edicts about non-pharmaceutical interventions will remain mentally scarred.
Monkeypox Was a Table-Top Simulation Only Last Year BY MICHAEL SENGER. The global Monkeypox outbreak—occurring on the exact timeline predicted by a biosecurity simulation of a global Monkeypox outbreak a year prior—bears a striking resemblance to the outbreak of COVID-19 just months after Event 201, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic almost exactly like COVID-19.
Sweden’s Strategy Once Again Proven Correct BY IAN MILLER. France, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain and Italy all had lockdowns, varying levels of vaccine discrimination, mask mandates and strict entry requirements. All fared worse than Sweden. The lockdown and mask apologists simply offered no explanation for this.
Monkeypox: The Next Big Scare BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL. Health authorities in the two continents have thus far identified only a few dozen cases. And while there’s no reason for concern at the moment, here’s what convinced me to put this on your radar. The U.S. government decided to order millions of doses of monkeypox vaccine.
Fighting Windmills: The DOD’s Battle Against Covid BY SCOTT STURMAN. The DOD mindset of applying obsolete information to contemporary, rapidly changing problems threatens the defense of the country more than Covid 19.
Indiana Attorney General Responds to Call for Covid Misinformation BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. Todd Rokita, Indiana Attorney General, has responded with a detailed report on covid misinformation. To assist in the preparation of this report, he called upon Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. The full report was published on May 2, 2022, and submitted to the Surgeon General’s office.
A Primer on the WHO, the Treaty, and its Plans for Pandemic Preparedness BY DAVID BELL.
These proposed rules and structures, if adopted, would fundamentally change international public health, moving the center of gravity from common endemic diseases to relatively rare outbreaks of new pathogens, and building an industry around it that will potentially be self-perpetuating.
The FDA’s Audacious Move to Boost Kids Aged 5-11yrs BY MARYANNE DEMASI. Some members have raised concerns that the drug regulator has repeatedly moved ahead with decisions on booster doses without holding open public discussions and say the agency is relying less and less on its independent experts for advice before approving drugs.
The WHO Changes Guidelines to Favor Lockdowns BY WILL JONES. The report says this recommendation will be incorporated into the WHO’s “normative work,” meaning it will be part of official WHO guidance to states in responding to a pandemic. Worse still, it says it’s already being implemented – it doesn’t need a treaty or the agreement of member states to do this, it’s already happening.
Elites Meet to Plan Your Health: The Role of the Council on Foreign Relations BY KILEY HOLLIDAY. Launching CFR’s global health program provided Gates with the opportunity to market his brand of disease prevention to an audience of America’s most powerful people in business, media, law, and government—to convince these people that his vision of global health should be a national priority. And we have seen the results firsthand.
The FDA/WIC Role in the Baby Formula Debacle BY DANIEL KOTZIN. If the FDA and WIC did what they were established to do, instead of devoting an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy to self-promotion and vaccine-promotion, perhaps there wouldn’t be so many babies in America suffering from malnutrition.
What Does the Pandemic Treaty Do? BY MICHAEL SENGER. The Pandemic Treaty is everything the WHO has already been doing—but more of it. So what’s actually at stake if the treaty is passed? Everything. The real significance of the Pandemic Treaty is that its passage is a ratification and approval of everything the world has experienced over the past two years during COVID-19.
The Covid Stories Project BY SAM WALD. Even if the act was open to preserving the experiences of all Americans, we cannot and should not trust the government to accurately document the fallout of policies created by politicians and bureaucrats, many of whom remain in power. The same government that perpetrated these restrictions cannot impartially determine how we remember them.
Lockdowns, Closures, and the Loss of Moral Clarity BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Perpetual decline and fall is not inevitable. It is fixable but every powerful force out there, especially mainstream media, seems to stand against that. It is all designed to demoralize us and cause us to give up. We cannot accept this fate. There is still time, providing that we understand what is happening and the grave consequences of letting it all take place without a fight.
Australia: Champion Covidiot BY GIGI FOSTER. No, Australia’s “trust in institutions” has not served it well during this period. What has happened is that we have seen how corrupt and/or incompetent the people in charge of our institutions really are, and – to our horror – how our misplaced trust in those institutions has led to an abject failure of our systems of democratic oversight and accountability.
The Case Against the CDC as We Know It BY MICHAEL BRYANT. That the CDC isn’t telling the truth to Americans on important matters of public health is in plain sight. It is no surprise that polls show public confidence in the CDC plummeting and, in the minds of many, the agency’s once honorable bubble has burst.
Can We Now See that Economics Does Not Diverge from Public Health? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. They wrecked social and market functioning and cannot fathom why we have a demoralized population, a mental health crisis, falling financials, soaring inflation, and shortages of goods and services that are essential to life. This is what the experts recommended and yet here we are today.
Congress and the Pandemic Response: An Interview with Thomas Massie BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. In this interview, Congressman Massie shares the inside story of those absolutely critical first weeks of lockdowns, providing a deep and penetrating look into why he believed what he did and what fallout that brought down on him during a national hysteria.
The Memo that Closed the Nation’s Schools BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. “Just watch kids with runny noses and coughing and sneezing and touching one another (especially the younger ones),” the memo says. “You couldn’t design a better system to spread disease. Schools and daycare centers are clearly amplifiers of disease transmission…. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves searching for perfect solutions to address all these challenges associated with the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of school closure.”
Can We Find Our Way Back to Freedom? BY JULIUS RUECHEL. Even the most inalienable of rights will shatter like thin glass if a righteous majority feels morally justified in stampeding over them to reach for some utopia beckoning on the horizon. Even the clearest of principles will be rationalized away if an indebted majority becomes dependent on a morally bankrupt system.
Brownstone Institute at One Year
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
Twenty-six months ago, we hoped that the period of darkness would end quickly once it became obvious that pandemic policy was a mistake of epic proportions. Sadly, in the meantime, something more terrifying has been revealed to us. For many among the ruling class, it was not a mistake but an aspiration: to destabilize, disorient, confound, gain power, and fundamentally reverse the progress of centuries.
By the time Brownstone Institute was first imagined one year ago, the crying need for an alternative voice and institution was already apparent. The lockdowns had been rolled back in many parts of the country and the world but the machinery of compulsion and coercion was seeking new targets. Mask and vaccine mandates had become the rule with the new administration, despite the absence of evidence for their effectiveness in pandemic control. The economy was nowhere near recovered but had not yet fallen into another crisis as a result of brutal policies.
The biggest crisis of all could be called intellectual. There was vast confusion in the air, as a demoralized public scrambled to find meaning in it all. They turned to media sources in vain because all but a handful of outlets had been wholly captured. They assured everyone that all of this was wise and necessary, and only political deviants and dangerously selfish people would dare question it.
Tragically, many institutions and individuals who should have spoken out long before remained silent, mostly out of confusion but also out of fear. Even from early in the lockdowns, it was obvious that the people we had largely counted on to explain and interpret the world around us had been blindsided by the seeming emergency of the pandemic.
We hadn’t really had experience with that in our lifetimes. Another way to put it: in the past pandemics had largely come and gone without massive upheaval, so even smart people presumed that this one must be different else why would so many intelligent people at the top insist on such an extreme reaction?
As for the fear part, people were losing their jobs for daring to dissent. The corporate/police state had shown muscle against defiance as never before. What is sometimes called the bio-fascist state was on the march, with demands that everyone accept the government’s shot else be excluded from all public life. Doctors who spoke out were quickly canceled. We were only months away from the demonization of noncompliance: the claim that the continuation of the pandemic itself was due to those who refuse shots and masks and otherwise try to live a normal life.
By then it was obvious that this was not just about pandemic response; the whole project of human freedom itself was at stake. With Brownstone Institute, we had the idea to create a sanctuary for research and knowledge in the midst of a crisis that we knew would be ongoing for a very long time.
Over the course of the summer, Brownstone Institute quietly gathered some of the best minds among scientists, economists, journalists, historians, and medical doctors, all of whom had demonstrated a commitment to speaking out when it mattered most. To gather the necessary funding to operate on a minimal level was another challenge and continues to be.
Then we began to build. We took a very systematic approach with the intention of being in this struggle for a very long time. The point was not to create an “activist” institution on one or two topics but rather one that could speak to all the issues that would unfold from the crisis that began in March 2020. The point was to build an intellectual refuge, both as a means of granting intellectuals freedom but also in becoming a light of hope for the world.
Public awareness of Brownstone’s work began August 1, 2021. For many people it signaled that most important thing: hope, a sign that the world had not actually gone crazy. There were people willing to step up and report with facts and evidence. There still survived a group out there that was willing to say what is true. The value of freedom had not been entirely forgotten. And with this effort, perhaps too were not fated to live in an arbitrary despotism.
Since then, Brownstone has published more than 1,000 articles plus a globally influential book with several more on the way, held conferences both public and private, assembled a very large social media following, and constructed canonical research reports on all topics related to the pandemic response, all with the goal of countering the dominant narrative, finding our way out of the thicket of confusion, and inspiring a new enlightenment with the conviction that history is what we make of it.
This work has been very widely cited in academic articles, court filings, legislative hearings, popular rallies, and tremendous amounts of writing and speaking, and been read and shared by many tens of millions of people the world over. You know this because you have shared it yourself, with the confidence that credible information is capable of overcoming even the most aggressive media propaganda.
Sure enough, the crisis of our times has upended all sectors of public life and dramatically changed our private lives too. Politics will not be the same, as partisan loyalties lasting decades have shifted based on the issues that have unfolded so dramatically over more than two years. The culture has changed with the loss of trust. Our educational institutions are in upheaval. Our health-care system is a mess but so is medical science itself, having been taken over at the top by people with an agenda other than a genuine concern for public health.
Meanwhile, the most salient effect of terrible policies has affected the economy, which is the very pith of our daily lives. There is a direct link between the pandemic response, supply-chain breakages, inflation, and the impending (or continuing) recession. Already the financial press is talking about a lost decade. Imagine that: two weeks to flatten the curve turns into ten years! And notice too how all the assurances that things will get better soon (chip shortage, goods shortage, gas prices, inflation generally) never turn out. That’s because so much is broken and so deeply.
There is a struggle going on right now over who will write the orthodox story of our times and who will be tagged as heretical or “revisionist.” We see it played out daily in all sectors of society.
One side says we didn’t lock down soon enough and hard enough, we didn’t impose mandates and mask with enough ferocity, and hence the state and the ruling class needs permanent power, more of it, and should centralize and codify that power.
The other side, present in small ways at the beginning but largely forged as a public presence by Brownstone since its founding, is that we need a restoration of traditional public health principles along with social and market functioning, individual rights, and a decentralized system for action and knowledge dissemination, all informed by respect for human dignity and the principle of freedom.
These two positions are incompatible. Only one story will win. Let us hope it is the true one. If history is written by victors, we simply cannot let them claim victory. The stakes are extremely high, more so than ever before in our lifetime. Surrounded by such calamity, and facing such a task, how can we not throw ourselves into the intellectual battle?
The question that has long weighed on many people is the large one: can we truly make a difference? Maybe the forces allied against freedom – and there are so many – are too powerful to overcome.
What this pessimistic outlook forgets is the awesome power of ideas. The urge to censor is a tribute to that power. They know that if people hear a compelling alternative, history can turn on a dime. Public opinion – not the polls but the deeper beliefs of the large majority over what kind of lives we want to live – will be decisive.
After one year, Brownstone Institute has made huge strides, from an inauspicious founding to dramatic growth to broad and global influence. Deep gratitude goes out to our many benefactors who have made the work possible. It is an inspiration to join with so many who have hope for the future and are willing to take the steps necessary to bring it about. We have just begun.