The COVID Response: Meet Dr. Fauci’s Replacement

Was She as Wrong About the Facts as He Was? 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, arguably the most likeable non-elected government official in recent memory, resigned last year from his role as director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) amid mounting criticism of his handling of the COVID pandemic.

While looking for a replacement, the NIH appointed Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak as acting director. And last week, he announced Fauci’s permanent replacement – Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

In introducing Dr. Marrazzo, Dr. Tabak said, “Dr. Marrazzo brings a wealth of leadership experience from leading international clinical trials and translational research, managing a complex organizational budget that includes research funding and mentoring trainees in all stages of professional development.”

To be sure, Dr. Marrazzo has impressive academic credentials. (A bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard, an MD from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from the University of Washington.) Academic credentials are meaningful for people that aspire to be academics, but when it comes to a job that matters as much as this one does, what’s more important is specific experience, past performance, and personal characteristics like honesty and integrity.

In the case of Dr. Marrazzo, I have concerns about what she has said and done in the recent past. In researching her, I discovered that she was a big proponent of mask-wearing. In fact, as late as May 2021, she was quoted as saying that she wears a mask indoors. Click here.

She also promoted the government vaccination misinformation. In July of 2021, she was blaming the spread of COVID on the unvaccinated, saying, “So much transmission in our community because a majority of people are not vaccinated. The opportunity for little kids to get infected is much higher than where the vaccination rate is much higher.”

Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s clear to me that Dr. Marazzo has been promoting the company narrative since day one. This, by the way, is not completely surprising. Her role as head of NIAID, like Fauci’s, is not to tell the truth but to say what the organization thinks the public should be told. Her role is not that of a doctor or a scientist, but of a public relations spokesperson.

I’m hoping I’m wrong. I’m hoping she will stand up for the truth. I’m withholding judgement for the moment. We’ll see soon enough.

Who Is This Taylor Swift Person?

If I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song, I wasn’t aware of it.

I’m just too old. And, happily, out of touch with the pop music scene today. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. I mean, by the time she hit the charts, I was in my sixties.

When you get to a certain age, the brain is tired of doing the thousands of things you made it do for so many years. Like remembering why you ended up here, in the hardware store. Or why you interrupted such a nice dinner party to blurt out what you just said.

It’s time, you think, to air out the knowledge warehouse and reduce the number of memories that have, over the years, cluttered up every nook and cranny. By having fewer memories, you reason, your brain will have more time and energy to do what it still must do. Like find the car keys. Or remind you to put on your shoes.

Purging the brain is the order of your age. So, you do that, even if you would prefer to hoard it all. But even if you have that mentality, it still makes zero sense to take in more memories. Especially with music. In your adolescence and young adulthood, you collected more music memories than you will ever need.

Which is why, despite her rising fame, I never gave Tayler Swift any of my attention. Furthermore, her clean-cut, wholesome, “pretty” look suggested to me that she would be a quickly passing fad.

I was wrong. Swift signed her first record contract in 2005, at the fragile age of 14. Teenage stars – TV stars, movie stars, and music stars – generally have a short arc of fame. Two or three years. Five years, at best. But here we are, 18 years later, and Taylor Swift is more famous and more popular than ever. In fact, there is an argument to be made that she is the most successful rock/pop star of all time.

Here’s a good example: Take a look at this amazing list of the amazing number of music industry records broken by Taylor Swift.

A Long-Awaited Truth About COVID from a Surprising Source: the NYT! 

I have predicted many times that the mainstream media will eventually have to tell the truth about COVID, which would mean correcting so much of the fake news that they, and the rest of Corporate Media, have been irresponsibly regurgitating for the past four years.

I’ve also said that they would never admit that they were so wrong for so long. They would have to at least start to tell the truth when the impossible statements coming out of the WHO and the CDC were no longer possible to make.

Here they are, doing just that, acknowledging some of the now undisputed facts about COVID that I was writing about almost three years ago, including the biggest fake news of all – the way the CDC told the medical industry to count COVID deaths: If you die with COVID, you die from it, even if the actual cause of death was unrelated.

I can’t applaud them for this, however, because they should have figured it out when I did (which they very well may have). And the only reason they are saying it now is so that years later they can pretend they didn’t purposely promote the fake mortality counts until they were impossible to defend.

Click here.

The COVID Response: What We Got Wrong

Another Finding That Contradicts the CDC Narrative 

Several of my friends (and perhaps hundreds of my readers) think my take on COVID is crazy, as in conspiratorial. Trusting the mainstream media implicitly, they send me clips or links now and then that support their view: COVID was a huge pandemic that killed millions. And were it not for the vaccines, we would still be in the midst of plague-level mortality, as we were from the end of 2019 to the end of 2022.

Usually, what they send me are statements and reports that I’m already familiar with – and which have been refuted so thoroughly that I don’t have the heart to tell them.

Sometimes, when the information they send me is more recent, I take the time to check it out.

The latest such info I got was several links to statements from the CDC about how, even though the vaccines aren’t “100% effective,” getting a full and complete round of the recommended vaccines has been proven to lower the risk of contracting COVID again.

Based on the history of how poorly the vaccines have done so far, I was doubtful about this “new” finding. So, I did some research. And what I found was that the data shows that this information (which turned out to be based on old CDC claims) was not only wrong, but doubly wrong.

A substantial study by the Cleveland Clinic on the effect of getting all as opposed to just some of the CDC-recommended vaccines found that those people that had fewer vaccinations actually had less chance of contracting the virus.

Click here if you want to follow up on this.

More Enjoyable Than Depp vs. Heard. More Sinister than the Watergate Conspiracy. More Believable Than… Well, You’ll Either Believe It or You Won’t! 

If you are a reader of any city paper whose name includes the word “Times” or a watcher of any news channel starting with a C, you may have heard nothing about the deposition of John Durham.

John Durham 

Here’s the skinny.

John Durham is the special prosecutor chosen in 2020 to examine the FBI’s role in the four-year Congressional investigation into former President Trump’s involvement with Russia’s “interference” in the 2016 elections.

His testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is six hours of drama. And well worth watching. While the Democrat interrogators do their best to discredit Durham, he is remarkably calm and composed in responding to their accusations. He seems to be the trustworthy person without a political agenda that almost everyone agreed he was before he began his investigation.

The scope of the deposition is limited to what Durham found out about the involvement of the FBI. But along the way, all sorts of other things have come out. Like…

* The whole Russiagate investigation had its origin in the Steele Dossier, a document named for the primary source of the material in it that was damaging to Trump.

* Ironically, the Steele Dossier was, in part, Russian disinformation (in that Steele was a Russian agent). But its purpose was to bring down Trump, not Hilary Clinton. It was cooked up prior to 2016 by the Hillary Clinton election campaign to tarnish Trump’s credibility. Many of the facts in it were outright fabricated, and, other than some smaller “gotcha” violations on the part of a few Trump loyalists, there was no solid evidence to back up any of the claims.

* If Trump managed to get elected in 2016, the conspirators had a Plan B. It was to time-release bits and pieces of the dossier, as well as introduce other stories (such as that very weird bit about drinking urine) over the term of Trump’s administration to either get him impeached or, at least, undermine his presidency.

* The Russiagate conspiracy lasted four years and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Nothing came of it because 90% of the “evidence” it was based on turned out to be a document that the author admitted to having created out of whole cloth. And that was obviously known by the people at the top of the misinformation campaign from the very beginning. And certainly, by the time Adam Schiff was working 24/7 trying to make the allegations stick, most of the rest of Congress (including most Democrats) knew it for what it was. But Schiff continued lying to the very end, even after the NYT, CNN, and the other media that treated Russiagate like a genuine scandal had to concede that the whole thing was a big, embarrassing fraud.

* And if all that isn’t enough to give even the most dedicated Biden supporter some pause, it’s now known that the FBI was aiding and abetting the Russiagate conspirators throughout the entirety of Trump’s administration.

In 2020, after the Republicans took control of Congress, they formed a committee to investigate the Steele Dossier and the rest of the Russiagate probe. And for all that time, some very embarrassing (for Democrats) facts have been coming to light. But they were not reported by the mainstream media, so a discussion about the egregiousness and enormity of the story was never had on the public stage.

Thanks to Robert Mueller’s work, many of the facts of the story are out. And they are definitely, as I said, much scarier and crazier than the Watergate facts. But if you research the story today by starting with the Mueller Report, what you’ll find is that 90% of what is being published about it is calling the whole thing a big nothing-burger.

I’ve spent only so many hours looking into this. I’m sure there are facts I’ve missed and perhaps conclusions I’ve drawn that weren’t justified by the facts. Still, it’s difficult not to be stunned by how appalling this has been.

Here is Congresswoman Harriet Hageman talking about her own stunned emotions in sitting through all these revelations.

Of course, if you are a card-carrying member of The Holy Church of Trump Is Satan, you won’t be inclined to find any of this credible. But before you discard it completely, look at this summary of a three-year investigation into the reporting on Russiagate by Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-Prize winning NYT reporter.

Will any of this change anyone’s mind? If the Democrats retain the White House and the Senate, this whole amazing story of political corruption will be ignored until it’s forgotten. But even if the Republicans take both houses and the presidency in 2024, there’s no assurance that it will ever be exposed. Because to do that, you need a lot more than testimony and a few jail terms. You need a media that is willing to admit that they had it all wrong from step one.

The COVID Response: What We Got Wrong

The NYT’s COVID Tracker Is Back!

It seems that the NYT has resumed making updates to its COVID tracking pages. CA forwarded the first one to me, showing that there are still 684 deaths per week attributed to the virus.

But remember… that number is still based on the CDC’s original mandate that if someone dies with COVID, they are to be officially recorded as dying from COVID. Which means that people that were obese and/or diabetic and/or sick with cancer who tested positive for COVID when they were checked into the hospital are reported as having died from COVID. It also means – in theory, at least – that someone pulled out of a motorcycle accident with severe internal bleeding could be counted as yet another COVID death.

I know that that sounds preposterous. I’m sure you are thinking I’ve lost my mind. But it was the protocol adopted by the CDC.

Since this crazy protocol first came out, I’ve been looking for something to tell me that it was a hoax. I’ve found nothing. What I’ve found instead is several reports that tried to estimate by what degree it has exaggerated the COVID death count. According to those calculations, making up for the double-counting, the CDC reported count is a huge overstatement. If reported correctly, it would be reduced by about 70%. That means the weekly death count is about 200, not +/- 700 as shown in the NYT’s COVID Tracker.

That’s not nothing. It’s 10,000 deaths a year. But to put it in perspective, it’s about one-third the annual death count from the flu.

Totalitarianism: What, Exactly, Does It Mean? 

“The essential characteristic of totalitarian governments is that 100% of the population lies 100% of the time.”

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson 

That’s what Dr. Jordan B. Peterson said in this interview. (Or something like that.)

He was speaking about the culture war that has been raging in the past six years, spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements. And how, since then, the battle has shifted from arguments about competing ideas that are indisputably true (i.e., Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter) to ideas that are indisputably false (i.e., Slavery Is the Invention of White Men and Men Can Have Babies). And he was saying that this drift towards “telling and believing lies” was and is a symptom of a culture that is drifting towards totalitarianism.

When his interlocutor challenged him on this assertion, he doubled down on it, saying that in a totalitarian state, 100% of the people lie 100% of the time.

100% of the population 100% of the time?

That sounded to me like intentional hyperbole. But Peterson isn’t the sort of person that typically exaggerates his claims. He has achieved prominence as a public intellectual by knowing the facts and making thoughtful and measured statements. On top of that, he has spent years studying political and social ideologies.

Totalitarian and totalitarianism are words one hears all the time today. What’s interesting about them is that they are used by people on both sides of the aisle to negate and, if possible, cancel their opponents. (This is also true for the word fascism, which perhaps we’ll investigate in a future blog post.)

And since there is a good chance these words will keep popping up in future conversations, I thought I should spend some time trying to understand what they really mean.

First, a bit of word history…

The word “totalitarianism” dates to the fascist era of the 1920s and 1930s. The lexicographers say it was first used by Italian political theorists, including Giovanni Gentile in Italy and Carl Schmitt in Germany, to refer to Mussolini’s rule. And the little history I’ve read on the subject says that Mussolini’s ideas were based on right-wing utopian ideas of how countries should be run. So, put one check in the right-wing box as a descriptor of totalitarianism.

But the word was next picked up to describe the rule of communism in Russia, especially under Joseph Stalin. The intellectual validation for totalitarianism came from Lenin through Marx and then Stalin, where it came to mean (and to justify) a fully developed communist ideology, using Marx’s phrase, “the dictatorship of the proletariat” to mean the dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party.

It was also used to describe the governments of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933–45) and China under Mao Zedong (1949–76). Not to mention these.

Currently, the Kim dynasty in North Korea and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (from 2021) can reasonably be described as “totalitarian.”

A definition… 

What this boils down to, for me, is that the word can be fairly used to describe governments from either side of the left-right political divide. The key phoneme here is total. You can find dozens of definitions of the word online, but Wikipedia’s is as good as the rest:

“Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control… over public and private life.”

That definition is unlikely to be debated. The only debatable issue is how much control a government must exert to earn the descriptor “totalitarian.”

Based on my research, here are nine characteristics to be considered when determining whether any government is totalitarian:

Characteristics of totalitarianism… 

1. total single-party rule
2. state-controlled communication
3. widespread oppression
4. police-directed terror
5. utopian vision
6. enforcement of state-dictated ideologies
7. mobilization against enemies
8. self-aggrandizing leadership
9. a controlled economy

You might wonder about #5. How can governments that tortured and killed millions be said to have been based on a utopian vision?

As an ideology, totalitarianism can be linked to a variety of perennial values and intellectual commitments. The best-known example is Plato’s Republic, which promoted a caste-based society in which both social and moral order are to be maintained and fostered through strict political control and eugenics.

For much more about the history and philosophy of totalitarianism, click here.

The COVID Response: What We Got Wrong

Moderna and Its Investors Made Billions Selling a Fake Vaccine 

I’ve been critical of our government’s handling of the COVID epidemic since the beginning. And I think every criticism I had in year one was validated when the facts came in.

I was reluctant to criticize the vaccines, but I was reading a lot of smart people (and talking to some, too) that were very critical of them from the start. And as it turned out, they did not do what Fauci and the government health establishment said they would do. They did not give us immunity from catching COVID. Nor did they keep us from spreading it.

As for the claim that they lessened the symptoms, I am doubtful. There is no scientifically valid way of determining whether or not it was true. And we know that even before the vaccines, the symptoms ranged from mild to terrible.

In looking at the research and the arguments that drew from them, I often encountered accusations from critics that the entire overreaction to COVID by the government and the media was purposeful and planned by the drug companies that made the vaccines and supported by their advertising. (Which paid for lots of commercials and research subsidies.)

So, now I’m starting to think that, yes, this huge overreaction could have been the work of Big Pharma – which, by the way, made billions from it.

Here’s one little piece on this.

The COVID Response: What We Got Wrong

Have Your Ears Been Ringing?

For as long as the COVID vaccines have been available, the CDC has received some complaints about ear-related problems. In a recent study, researchers reviewed 500 cases of screened patients and found that 61 of them (14.5 %) had reported one or more ear or hearing-related symptoms within four weeks of vaccination. That included 21 (5.0 %) with hearing loss, 26 (6.2 %) with tinnitus, 33 (7.9 %) with dizziness, and 19 (4.5 %) with vertigo.

“Self-defense is not just a set of techniques; it’s a state of mind, and it begins with the belief that you are worth defending.” – Rorion Gracie