“There’s a single truth to science, and it’s just what I decide, so sit down, shut up and listen, cause you ain’t qualified. To question the great Frenchie and doubt the truth he spits. Science is a bit like myth, except we mix in facts and figures. That’s how we can quickly diss, guys with other answers.”
-from The Sciency Song in my new book The Great Stupidity
Today during a County legislative session determining whether a mask mandate should remain in place, three hand-picked doctors, so-called "medical experts," testified that there is absolute undeniable proof that the use of masks in all indoor locations will slow hospitalization from COIVID. They claimed to have data, which they didn't explain, even though every legitimate piece of data would contradict their conclusion. They said there is no nuance in this, and that they are right. Many of legislators and members of the public who testified deferred to their expertise, even as they cited other untruthful "facts" that have become normalized by our media. I was given a two-minute slot and, as a front-line doctor and someone who has written scholarly books about COVID, lambasted their position, calling it dangerous and deceptive. No other doctors testified against the mandate. To my utter joy, the council voted against the mandate.
And then, despite the democratic and well reasoned vote, the County Executive and its doctor simply stated: sorry, we don't care about democracy, we're doing it anyway. “Masks and masking requirements have been demonstrated to be effective at decreasing COVID transmission and hospitalizations,” Health Officer Dr. Nilesh Kalyanaraman said to justify extending the mandate through the entire month. But, that's not true, it's a blatant lie, there's not a single study showing that masks reduce hospitalization and protect public safety. Can he ban guns because people die of those? Ban cars when there is an auto accident? Force the obese to eat a certain way and ban smoking, since those two "bad choices" fill most of our hospital beds? Those might help public health, but he doesn't have the authority to do it. Yet, he is permitted to overturn the rule of the democratically elected council, spit out an utter medical lie as justification for his act, and no one has the ability to stop him? Is that where our democracy is today?
And despite the accuracy of my testimony, my involvement leaves me in a precarious spot, as I disputed a gospel that our media, our doctors, and our leaders has told us is undisputable. The last time I did that, the Board of Medicine threatened to take away my license. Will it happen again? Am I now going to be labeled as a dangerous circulator of misinformation? That's also how democracy seems to work in the land of COVID. Censorship is alive and well.
Recently a medical journal on the internet called Medpage Today published a piece by Kristiana Fiore, “Worst COVID liars still have their licenses,” calling out any doctors who have dared to question vaccination, Fauci’s COVID policy, or anything that contradicts the current gospel that our TV doctors have spread across the land. I have attached a copy of the article below since it’s hard to access.
Says the author, many “closely tied to COVID disinformation campaigns -- including Simone Gold, MD, JD; Scott Atlas, MD; Sherri Tenpenny, DO; and Stella Immanuel, MD -- remain free to continue to misinform their patients and the public, even as the Omicron variant surges.”
Misinformation to this author is scientific data and facts that contradict what Anthony Fauci and the CDC declare as being unassailable truth. Scott Atlas, who is on Fiore’s hitlist as a spreader of misinformation, is one of the most vigorous and scientifically scrupulous policy analysts in the nation; he won’t dare cite a fact until he is sure it’s right and he’s cleared it with others who are equally vigilant. His strategy for containing COVID focused on protecting the vulnerable and not harming kids, and he insisted that all measures be backed by evidence before they are instated. Because his prescription—which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and also not driven our nation into a ditch of fear and economic peril—contradicted the Fauci/Birx gospel of shutting down everything and scaring everyone, he is called a medical liar.
So, Scott Atlas is a medical liar for daring to tell the truth and for caring enough to want to protect those most vulnerable to COVID while not harming everyone else? How much more Orwellian can it get!
As I watched the January 6th coverage on the news, I felt a bit queasy. For months CNN has been running a segment called: “The Threat to our Democracy.” It was all about January 6th, clearly a horrific event in which thugs and their deposed President sought to intimidate free and fair elections. But as I heard Jake Tapper and others on CNN talk about this threat to democracy, their hypocrisy stung me hard. No one more that Tapper—a guy I used to respect—has so fueled the fire of misinformation in this nation, labeling anyone who questions Fauci an anti-science liar, advocating censorship and unprecedented executive control over our lives and liberties, and never scrutinizing Fauci or his facts or even mentioning that we’re dying in larger numbers than any other nation under Fauci’s watch.
You wonder if Jake Tapper or any of his CNN cohort—including Brianna Keiler who called Scott Atlas a mass murderer for his daring to suggest that we should be focusing on protecting the vulnerable—have looked at any of the facts, the studies, and the evidence. Clearly, they haven’t, as science to them is whatever Fauci and the squadron of deceptive doctors invited on their shows says is truth. This is science? And misinformation is any fact that contradicts the dogma they deem to be unassailable?
In the song I started this blog with, from my book The Great Stupidity, which is a parody of the Black Death, a scientist called the great Frenchie insists that science is only what he says, and he dismisses and even kills anyone who dares to question his singular truth, especially those who have it right.
Frenchie’s arrogant claim to being the mantle of truth is in parallel with Tapper and the CNN bunch, who declare that January 6th was the worst threat to our democracy, even as they have for almost two years shredded our democracy to pieces, defamed anyone who dared to ask questions, labeled as dangerous anyone who spoke up against the mandates and executive over-reach, and were blind to the fact that none of their scientific truths worked to slow COVID or reduce death. I almost lost my medical license for daring to tell the truth. Others have fared worse. According to Fiore and Tapper, we’re medical liars and should be censored, maybe even lose our licenses, because we cited inconvenient facts. And January 6th is the greatest threat to democracy? Here’s what Jake Tapper said recently:
“There are these purveyors of misinformation out there and they’re not just on the right. Robert Kennedy Jr. is one of the most notorious ones and I haven’t seen the president or anyone say, ‘Look, people…’ Like, he’s scolding the people that are being lied to, as opposed to the liars, you know what I mean?”
Rob Kennedy, by the way, is not an anti-vaxxer; he merely asks questions, demands evidence, and insists that the good and bad of vaccines be truthfully expressed. He responded to Jake Taper’s insulting and misinformed diatribe: “We both feel passionate about our views on vaccine mandates. Let's have a debate for the benefit of Americans. We can debate your enthusiastic support of censorship and our divergent opinions on Dr. Fauci's effectiveness as the covid pandemic manager.”
To which Jake Tapper—whose weak grasp on facts would put him at a huge disadvantage to Kennedy who actually reads studies and understands facts—said: “Truly embarrassing. No, I’m not going to lend credence to a conspiracy theorist whose views are so false, unhinged, and dangerous to public health his own siblings feel the need publish op-eds against him.”
Yes, if you ask too many questions, you’re a conspiracy theorist, an anti-science nut job, a medical liar. Because, yea Jake, Anthony Fauci has been so scientific and on-target as he has led this nation to the highest COVID death toll in the world and the highest death toll from the quarantine. I can see why you wouldn’t debate anyone who opposes the Fauci line. Best to demonize them and call them liars.
Democracy to Jake Tapper and the CNN fear-mongerers means to suppress any views that contradict theirs and to label them as nut-jobs who should be silenced.
You have to wonder if saving the world from January 6th to CNN means that democracy can only survive when we curtail free speech and speak in binary absolutes of us against them, truth against misinformation. That seems to be their message, and they’re using COVID and January 6th to advocate the most anti-democratic, anti-science measures that this nation has ever seen. The January 6th thugs couldn’t have harmed our democracy nearly as much as Tapper and his CNN crew have done for the past year and a half.
Robert Kennedy wrote an expose on Jake Tapper that shows his and CNN’s strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Citing CNN’s partnership with Pfizer, he says: “This arrangement has transformed CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper into a propaganda vehicle for Pharma and effectively reduced Mr. Tapper to the role of a drug rep — shamelessly promoting fear porn, confusion, and germophobia, and ushering his audience toward high-yield patent pharmaceuticals. Tapper’s main thrust during the pandemic has been to promote levels of public terror sufficient to indemnify all the official lies against critical thinking. All that Pharma money naturally requires that Mr. Tapper kowtow to Dr. Fauci, and the CNN host’s slavishness has helped make Tapper’s show the go-to pulpit for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director. It’s a safe place for Dr. Fauci to hit all Jake’s reliable softballs out of the park.” It’s frankly difficult to argue with that assessment.
Oh, but Robert Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist and medical liar, and Jake Tapper is a proud fighter for democracy, so of course Kennedy must be wrong!
I have no idea if CNN or Tapper are in the hands of the drug lords; I do know that they treat Fauci as though he is the singular mouthpiece of science, that all Fauci’s misinformation about who is vulnerable and all the gimmicks and feckless (and dangerous) measures Fauci has advocated without providing a single slither of evidence to support him must be true and everyone who questions it must be a liar. Tapper, the journalist, doesn’t question anything Fauci says, he just accepts it as fact, and thus his fact-checker disputes as a lie anything that challenges Fauci’s God-like words. And in this way, Tapper and CNN have been the greatest threat to science and democracy that I have ever encountered in my lifetime. I talk about it a lot in my book Geriatrics Vengeance Club, and even have a CNN song mocking their deference to Fauci and their obsession with lighting the fuse of fear in this nation. Good for ratings, bad for truth and humanity and science.
Kennedy quotes journalist Celia Farber who followed Fauci for 25years: “The bootlicking competition at CNN is pretty nauseating. It’s ruinous for both democracy and for public health.”
Our democracy is a precious gift. Without a doubt, Donald Trump and those who raided the Capital posed a threat to democracy on January 6th, but their actions were so obviously wrong and so simple to demonize that we as a nation can feel certain that we’ll be on guard for that threat again.
What is more dangerous than a bunch of thugs raiding the Capital is a concerted, subtle, and well-orchestrated assault of our democracy by those in power, mostly by our media and many of our leaders, who point to January 6th and anti-maskers as being a singular danger, while they systematically endorse censorship, demonization of scientific truth, intimidation of anyone who dares question the demigod they have put in power, and unprecedented executive power that takes away free choice and liberty all under the guise of being scientifically and medically necessary.
This is the type of threat to democracy we saw in Germany and Italy in the 1930’s, the kind of threat that George Orwell warned us about, a threat that Giorgio Agamben would likely say is as pernicious and vile as the Capital raid itself. “A society that exists in a perennial state of emergency cannot be free. We live in a society that has sacrificed freedom for so - called ‘security reasons’ and has hence condemned itself to living in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity,” writes Agamben. “What we are now living through is more than just a staggering imposition on everybody’s freedoms; it is also a massive campaign to falsify the truth.”
Medical liars, misinformation, conspiracy theorists; this is all the language that people like Jake Tapper use to suppress freedom as he disingenuously assails January 6th as a testament to his love of democracy. In the process, he has ruined our chance to fight this virus scientifically and humanistically, put a dagger in our most cherished democratic institutions, viciously marginalized all those who have tried to lead this nation down a measured and sane path, and undoubtedly hypnotized a large group of people into believing that there is one truth, what I have called The Religion of COVID, and those who oppose that singular truth are vile heathens who need to be suppressed.
Welcome to CNN’s democracy. January 6th failed miserably, but a much more insidious and potent threat has invaded the very core of our society, and those who are perpetrating it are the very ones who claim to be democracy’s greatest saviors. How horribly ironic!
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