This is my response to Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, by Emily Oster, published in The Atlantic on October 31st, 2022. After some personal anecdotes, she starts to approach the core point of her article.
In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Yet some of us did know. We explained our arguments against the efficacy of masks. We criticized the playground closures and outdoor activity restrictions. We pointed out the health benefits of exercise and going outdoors for fresh air. We were called COVID deniers and anti-mask fanatics in the pages of your publication, Emily. Dissenters found themselves doxxed and subjected to harassment, not because they were wrong, but because they were disobedient.
But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
This is why we must always be cautious of self-righteous authoritarians who demand power for some greater good. They are flawed humans prone to error regardless of their real or stated intentions and expertise. That is precisely why it is times of emergency when we must be most skeptical of authority. We must listen to those who point out the unintended consequences of policies like lockdowns and arbitrary "social distancing" mandates.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.
People always have a choice. People must accept the responsibility for the consequences of their choices, both good and bad, if they want respect and honor. It's easy to make "hard calls" when someone else pays the price. The label of "misinformation" has been used to dismiss criticism instead of offering real disproof. We saw time and again the mainstream voices finally admitting facts after months of social media banning us mere mundanes for pointing them out too soon.
Facebook meme, creator unknown
You still insist the MRNA vaccines were what ended the pandemic. You refuse to seriously address the skeptics even after all this time, and still consider us peddlers of misinformation intent on denying science and endangering others through disobedience. This undercurrent of pompous disdain runs throughout your essay, Emily. No data matched the mainstream consensus opinions and "scientific" predictions. There is still no obvious correlation between vaccine compliance rates and COVID rates.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
You need to understand the mistakes of the past so you do not make them again. The Great Barrington Declaration and its signatories were ridiculed, not for denying the virus existed, but for dissenting from the approved response.
Yes, we need to work together to rebuild, but anyone outside the faction of unquestioning lockstep obedience has been smeared, insulted, and coerced for 2-1/2 years, Emily. There was real suffering as a result. People lost jobs, small businesses, and uncounted opportunities. They were kept from necessary medical treatment. Many were kept from the bedsides of dying loved ones. Others were driven to substance abuse or even suicide themselves thanks to the pressures imposed by your mistakes. You drove wedges between friends and families, inflicting scars that have not yet healed. That cannot be forgotten. It isn't even all in the past. You did this, and it can't be undone. The wounds remain.
You want amnesty, forgiveness, a clean slate. You do not demonstrate regret or repentance. You deny culpability, and do not offer even token restitution. Your pleas ring hollow, like those of every bully caught in the act, sorry only for not getting away with it. You frame the entire argument as mistakes on your side versus misinformation on the other. Do I sound bitter? I suppose so. I feel the pain of loss and suffering inflicted by you and your ilk. You want it all to just... go away.
You don't really own up to anything in your article, but for what it's worth, I forgive you, Emily. I will not forget what you have done, though, and I will do everything in my power to avoid being under your authority to do it to me again.
Readers, if you feel the same, this is your opportunity to take some steps toward more independence if you haven't yet begun.
If you are reading this, you are on HIVE, so you're presumably aware of alternatives to the legacy financial system that was used to punish Canadian protesters and bribe Americans with "stimulus checks" so they would turn a blind eye to unprecedented money supply inflation for the benefit of crony corporations.
The pandemic revealed how poor even the best public schools were, and students fell dramatically behind in academics. Seriously consider education without government schools. Khan Academy and your local library can provide a solid foundation with minimal effort.
Try to find a job or side hustle that can be recession-resistant and pandemic-proof. Build your community so you can cooperate with your neighbors instead of relying on distant bureaucrats in an emergency. Store food, water, and medicine. Work toward greater self-sufficiency and local resiliency.
We can learn the real lessons of COVID instead of just pretending it didn't happen.
Could not agree more! Considering the exhaustive length of my own arguments with paranoid pompous proponents of medical tyranny, I have only two words for Emily.
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As long as no one is held accountable, the same blunders will occur again and again.
Imagine the uproar if someone said we needed blanket amnesty for slavery, Jim Crow, and massacres of Native Americans. The perpetrators and victims of those crimes are almost all long dead, but people still point out the lingering effects of those past injustices.
The COVID policies were smaller in scale, wider in application, and shorter in duration, but they are in some cases still ongoing. The perpetrators and their victims are almost all still alive. The guilty want a free pass for their well-meaning mistakes because responsibility is too heavy a burden?
'Blunders', you say.
Interesting theory, but personally I never ascribe to incompetence what can more aptly be assigned to malevolence.
There will not be Amnesty.
In fact, when more VAXXXed start losing their minds (from lack of blood flow...) and your parents or your children died from VAXXX related side effects, there will be blood in the hospitals. PFiser will not be able to do business.
When those who believed you, find out you lied. Knowingly lied, then news people will be hunted down by those who were deceived and had their lives cut short. Emily, i suggest you change your name, move to a different state, take on a completely different job and never speak of Covaids again. It will save your life.
And how dare you say we didn't know, Emily!
Frauchi's first paper showed how more people were killed during the Spanish Flu by wearing masks, than by the flu.
And every real virologist was screaming that this was wrong.
The guy who developed the "Covaids" test (PCR) said it was not for detecting Covaids.
I also knew that it was already too late to try to contain it. The "two weeks to flatten the curve" was too late.
Booo Emily.
Well said, but for the following.
I just don't believe in ghosts. If I did, I'd agree with you. The urban mythos is that ghosts come back to haunt their killers.
On target with that assessment @jacobtothe. Thanks for posting within Free Speech Community
Brilliant!
Kudos.
Thank you.
BTW, don't miss this series:
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/08/20/houston-we-have-a-problem-part-1-of-3/
It's the "smoking gun" proving that the vaccines are murder...
😄😇😉
You pointed out some things, but fell short of really driving home the scientific evidence of harm that emerged very quickly as the jabs rolled out, and also that there is a positive correlation between the jabs and covid, which is shown to be causative, because the jabs cause people to get covid. They have negative efficacy. They were never vaccines at all. They were never even tested to see if they stopped transmission.
Every talking point of the jabbers was a lie.
Worse, you don't even address that much of the evil harm that these people committed isn't over. Not only the medical harm that resulted from reduced care, but also the massive increase in many diseases that continue killing people today, and totalitarian policies that continue to be implemented in many jurisdictions around the world. For instance, in New Zealand the government wants you to turn in people that disagree with the extreme totalitarian policies it adopted and afflicted Kiwis with as suspected terrorists.
Does that sound like it's over? It's not over.
Two things. Forgiveness requires repentance. Absent repentance, which means reforming one's character and absolutely intending to never again commit such acts, forgiveness is meaningless. It's basically just encouraging people that do bad things to keep doing it because they got away with it. Second, not only have these people not repented, these totalitarian policies continue today. Censorship hasn't stopped, and the banned haven't been restored. People still get banned today for citing scientific information from peer reviewed studies that do not support the enemedia narrative.
You don't bare your chest and declare to a murderer it's ok as they plunge a knife into your chest. That's not forgiveness at all. That's permission.
I vehemently disagree with that quote, and consider it cowardice. I strongly recommend you rethink it, based on the facts I have herein related.
These people are killers. Mass murderers. They're still killing people like the friends I have lost, today, and they intend to keep on killing people. For money, power, or just brownie points from malevolent masters bent on enslaving us all.
You better grow a spine, or we're all going to be growing daisies above our faces.
Thanks, but no thanks.
My goal was only to rebut the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the original article. I wanted to keep the rebuttal simple. I am comfortable saying the data we saw does not match their predictions, so I stopped there. I am cautious of making counter-claims that stretch beyond my ability to verify and support with data. Feel free to pile on as you see fit, though.
Forgiveness does not require anything of the guilty party. It is the choice of the victim. However, if a perpetrator of injustice wants to request forgiveness, it is entirely reasonable to ask them to show repentance and offer restitution. I don't argue against that.
I tried to save the life of a beloved friend, twice in the week after his second jab taking him to the ER. He saved my life once. I am deeply traumatized by the murderous lies of the enemedia, and I do not seek to rebut anything. I want to end the killing before they kill my kids. Oster did everything she could to kill my kids, and got my friend killed.
There are fewer threads binding me to society today, and I do not want to snap when they do. I am less polite IRL than I am here, but I cannot describe to you the fist in my gut when I read those words. Edit:
I do not mean to be harsh [I don't care if I'm harsh, TBQH. ed.], but I reckon lives are at stake, lives I would gladly sacrifice mine to save, and I want you to understand what it means to tell these murderers that it's ok to kill my kids.That's what forgiving them now means. You're giving them permission to keep doing it.
It's not ok. I'm not ok with it. I'll never, ever be ok with it.
Regarding negative efficacy and the jabs, have a look at this. Then there's the lethality of the jabs compared to it's claimed efficacy from the pfraudulent data Pfizer submitted with their application to the FDA, which Harvard and Johns Hopkins, murderers themselves, have pointed out are orders of magnitude more lethal than covid in this study. There's plenty more that Steve Kirsch has published on his substack, Dr. Robert Malone has published on his substack, and Dr. John Campbell is posting today on his Youtool videos (I'm not linking to Youtool. If you search it, you'll find Campbell), at least until he gets banned for telling the truth too. But my current favorite is Karen Kingston, for the letter she sent Acting Director Janet Woodcock, which Karen posted on her substack here.
All the above is free to the public. I admit I have been perhaps more likely to look for this information due to the extremity of my butthurt, and can accept that the enemedia not only don't trumpet these studies but do their best to suppress knowledge of them, and non-scientists can have difficulty understanding them. I suppose you didn't mean to not find this information, but perhaps that is different than meaning to find it and failing.
I hope this helps explain the visceral reaction I have to what seems to me to be granting permission to my enemies to kill my children. You may not have meant it that way. I don't think you meant to make it not that way enough. I don't think you can say what you did in a way that does.
I do appreciate your measured response, and that we can simply disagree regarding what forgiveness is and how it's granted, except that forgiving murders before they're committed is granting permission to murder.
That's what it is. It's your license to kill.
Let's also just forgive and forget Hitler ;)
Well, Godwin's Law has been invoked, but I'm sure his apologists would insist he, too, was acting for some "greater good," and fascism was the style of the day. How could he have known better? Every Jew, Slav, Gypsy, homosexual, communist, and political dissident who was slain or forced into hiding was just a big "oopsie" at worst in a well-meaning struggle to emerge from an economic depression and crippling burdens imposed after WW1. We just need to shrug and let it go instead of entering a doom loop of worrying about the mistakes of the past.
But seriously, people probably do need to stop this habit of comparing everyone they dislike to Hitler. It's like the boy who cried, "wolf." When real fascism needs to be condemned, people are too numb to pointless labels and posturing to take heed. People also tend to cheer on authoritarianism and militarism if they like the flag waved by the tyrant. Nationalism and partisanship are blinders.
The only thing where Hitler really helped me is in understanding that everybody does their best, and nobody (almost) is consciously evil.
I think this is key to understanding the present.
And I agree with you, if 'evil' is only measured through fascism, one is wide open for a bad surprise. Maybe totalitarianism would describes better what has happened and what is happening.
I would argue we do have a form of fascism now. Hitler's Germany wasn't even a good example of that ideology. Look more to Franco and Mussolini. Maybe even FDR, although it would be vehemently denied today.
People try to create checklists of symptoms to define fascism instead of exploring the core political and economic concepts which bring about those symptoms. Doug Casey described it as nominal private ownership of both the means of production and consumer goods, but with heavy state control behind the scenes: subsidies, quotas, price controls, trade regulation, surveillance, taxation, etc.
Regardless, totalitarianism and authoritarianism come in many flavors and degrees of de facto control, but the core of coercion is always the same.
I've got the impression that most concepts share quite many great core-principals, be it fascism, democracy, anarchy... and in theory they all could work very well.
But they also seem to share the same deficiancies in the ways they are practised; they all tend towards becoming totalitarian and/or authoritarian. Simply speaking: It's all about power, and that corrupts.
People also attach strong values to these words, like democracy is the best, anarchy is chaos, communism is BAD, without realizing that in our reality they are not such different concepts at all.
Ok, not much anarchism does actually exist, but I guess with today's actors it wouldn't turn out much different.
I argue anarchy exists all around us every day. The government enforcers aren't everywhere. Society functions in spite of the State, not because of it. The fundamental question is one of consent versus coercion, not how coercion should be applied. The latter is the root of most political discourse, including many self-professed ansrchists.
I couldn't agree more.
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