Why the COVID hustlers double down on failure

Written by Tom Woods on December 30, 2020. Posted in Current News

One of the most interesting COVID commentators, and an outstanding number cruncher, on Twitter goes by a pseudonym so his life doesn’t get ruined.

You can follow him @boriquagato.

For today’s instalment I’ve taken his most recent thread, edited it lightly for clarity, and reproduced it here.

So until you see “Woods here again” below, everything that follows from this moment on is his.

Global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI’s (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, and school closures. These have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science. This was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

Let’s look.

Above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. There is 0 R². This means that the variables play no role in explaining one another. We can see this same relationship between NPI and all-cause deaths; this is devastating to the case for NPI:

Correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation is proof that there was no material causality. Barring massive and implausible coincidence, it’s essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

This would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science. There is no science here or any data. These are the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

This has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by May that it’s hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses. Everyone got the same R curve.

Lockdowns were a panic response. They came long after disease growth curves had rolled over and had no effect overall. It’s clear when you plot Google mobility data vs disease curves. (This is from May.)

R² was ~0. This was all proven by May and strongly argued by April. This data is literally overwhelming. There is just no evidence that lockdowns work.

Spain and the Netherlands had radically different responses, but got R (the basic reproduction number) curves that were all but indistinguishable. This issue crops up everywhere. Mitigation has zero effect.

Similarly, there is no evidence that opening again had any effect either.

And this was all known. Every set of longstanding pandemic guidelines contra-indicated lockdowns…until this year, when we suddenly abandoned 100 years of science and started making stuff up and moralizing about it as though it were canon….

Donald Henderson, who led the war against smallpox, wrote in 2006 that “there are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods to slow the spread of influenza…. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; restriction of movement of populations) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”

The same is true of masks. Just last year the WHO surveyed this and found that community masking does not work. Nothing has changed.

[He has lots of links and charts on masks, so if you’re interested in that I recommend reading the entire thread. –TW]

And now that it’s becoming clear that asymptomatic spread is vanishingly rare, we can really put the final nail in the NPI coffin. This is the vector these interventions mean to head off. But it was never a serious source of infection.

The simple fact is this: nothing we have done has made any meaningful difference. COVID is seasonal and regional. When your season comes, it comes. NPI is not why California and Peru and eastern Europe did not get hit in the spring. It was just regional.

Then your season comes and everyone moves together. We’ve been mistaking baby oil for sunscreen in places where it was still nighttime. Then noon came and it was revealed for what it really was.

Croatia, for example, is open. No lockdowns, no curfews, no mask laws. Open. Life there is normal. People are trying to claim this is causing a COVID spike. It’s not. They look, gasp, just like every other country around them, most of whom are locked down, masked, etc. NPIs do nothing.

This means that all this moralizing about “you just want grandma to die” and the censorship of evidence counter to the “big lie” that lockdowns work has been at best a disastrous mistake, and at worst a cynical ploy to wreak havoc and cover past errors.

Politicians are now doubling and trebling down on lockdowns and masks because to do otherwise is to admit that they bought us $10 trillion of sugar water as medicine and wrecked our lives and livelihoods for no sound reason. They will never do that.

This is why they have shifted the debate to morality and censorship: to mask the fact that the science and the data call them liars. Repeat “I’m on the side of science” enough and scare people endlessly and you can generate social belief. But it’s pure propaganda.

These mitigations do not work to stop COVID or to reduce overall deaths. This is the most expensive peacetime policy debacle in human history and they all want to do it again. Say no. Stand up. This is not medicine, it’s poison. This does not save lives, it wrecks them.

It’s easy to sell false hope to scared people. There are whole industries that prey on the desperation of parents with sick kids. But sometimes there is just not much you can do, however much you want control and want to “do something.” This is one of those times.

And we need to accept that. Many times, the best way to “do something” is to do nothing. “Something” in this case has been an absolute disaster. We panicked into unprecedented global self-harm.

It’s time to stop. This is just making it worse.

Stay brave. stay free. stay safe.

Woods here again.

With 2020 coming to an end, I would like to thank everyone who has sent me a kind note this year thanking me for my writing and podcasting. This year the volume of correspondence expanded so much that it’s been impossible for me to answer all of you and still have any time left for family. But I appreciate the feedback and encouragement very much.

The most common refrain: thank you for keeping me sane.

I have an entire community dedicated to that, and it’ll help keep you informed (and immune to propaganda) as well as feeling like you’re not alone. It’s the Tom Woods Show Elite.

As we enter a new year, I hope you’ll join us: http://www.SupportingListeners.com

Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Expose The Lies About COVID19

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Please DONATE TODAY To Help Our Non-Profit Mission To Defend The Scientific Method.

Trackback from your site.