Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Day 326: Bowing Down to The Science

As Christmas fast approaches, the world is at 79 million cases. The US is approaching 19 million cases, with a third of a million deaths. COVID deaths are a contributing factor in our record-breaking annual death toll of over 3 million all-cause deaths. Massachusetts has risen to #18 among the states; our cases are up 1.5% today.

COVID variant B.1.1.7. continues to freak out UK and their neighbors, but its true scientific significance remains unclear.

Today Bruce Pardy complains in the Financial Post about that not-so-true science known as "The Science" before which we all must genuflect, whatever heretical beliefs we may maintain in private (or on blogs):
Scientific groupthink is now in vogue. Doctors who question the wisdom of pandemic lockdowns run the risk of being censored and cancelled. Thankfully, some are made of sterner stuff, such as Matt Strauss, a critical care physician and assistant professor of medicine at Queen’s University, and an early signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration is a statement now endorsed by over 12,000 medical and public health scientists and over 38,000 medical practitioners expressing concerns about the science of prevailing COVID-19 policies. It asserts that lockdowns are producing devastating effects on short- and long-term public health that are disproportionate to the threat from the virus. As Strauss wrote in The Spectator in October, “mandatory government lockdowns amount to a medical recommendation of no proven benefit, of extraordinary potential harm, that do not take personal values and individual consent into account.”

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