Over 3,500 doctors and health care experts just came together as one to plead for the world to end the punishing and unneeded lockdowns and replace them with “Focused protection.” Included on this growing list of sane, unbiased, and compassionate experts are doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.
Prior to these courageous infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists authoring and signing The Great Barrington Declaration to warn of their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” I had spoken with two doctors who strongly reiterated points made to me months before regarding the pandemic.
The first point – and question – the two stressed was why the lockdown “experts” were not doing a better job of contrasting COVID-19 with the 1968 H3N2 “Hong Kong” pandemic? A virus which very much mirrored COVID-19 in that it was highly contagious and was especially dangerous to people over 65 with pre-existing conditions. A virus, which, when it ran its course, proved fatal to approximately 100,000 Americans out of a then population of about 200 hundred million, and upwards of four million worldwide.
Both doctors believe COVID-19 to be somewhat milder than the 1968 H3N2 pandemic. And yet, as they stressed, the nation did not “lockdown” in 1968 and 1969. Nor did the rest of the world.
The critical point one of the doctors made was that back then, “While caringly and responsibly treating the ill, the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the 99 percent was not destroyed in the process.”
Today, that commonsense and medically-sound assessment has been turned completely on its head. Today, maybe protecting the one percent or less has become the unbreakable dictate from the “Legion of Lockdown” which has inflicted great harm upon the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the 99 percent.
What is the difference between 1968 and now?
Poisonous politics, social media, and click-bait, with unhinged anti-Trump politics leading the way.
With regard to the “anti-Trump politics,” one of the doctors admitted to me that the “vast majority” of his colleagues were vehemently and openly opposed to President Trump and desperately want him out of office. So much so, that if Trump advocated for or against any position or treatment regarding COVID-19, some were more than willing to take the opposing view simply out of spite.
As for evidence of that anti-Trump, unprofessional, and unethical thinking, one need only look back to early June when over 1,000 health care “professionals” signed a letter endorsing mass “anti-racism” protests during the height of COVID-19, a tactic which even Dr. Anthony Fauci – the new oracle to the far-left on all things infectious disease – warned would be a “perfect recipe” for a surge in coronavirus cases, which proved to be exactly the case.
In 1968 – as the doctors behind The Great Barrington Declaration are advocating now – the world treated and protected the ill with the rest of life going on as normal. In 2020, we have been introduced to – and even forced to worship – the theology of masks, lockdowns, contact tracing, informers, fines, and prison time. Any science-based contrarian opinions of this new theology offered-up from highly accomplished doctors – again, such as those now behind this powerful new declaration – are condemned, censored, and out-right banned by much of the mainstream media and the high-tech enablers of the lockdowns.
High-tech enablers who, according to some reports, have raked-in billions in pure profit during the pandemic.
How did we get to the point where bias now rules over reason and the literal welfare of the vast majority of people in so many varied ways and fields?
Actually, quite easily.
Over the last five-plus decades, liberals and the far-left have come to dominate the media, entertainment, and academia. Over the last two-plus decades, they have also come to dominate medicine and science.
The recent Biden endorsement from Scientific American after 175 years of political neutrality being the latest example of this ideological sell-out.
“Dominate” being a more polite way of saying they have gained a complete strangle-hold on those critically important arenas.
They have gained this “strangle-hold” through an unethical, illegal, deliberate, well thought-out, and merciless campaign of discrimination against Republican, conservative, libertarian, and traditional faith-based thought.
This liberal to far-left domination of the media, academia, entertainment, science, and medicine is not just applicable to the United States. It is a reality in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and numerous other nations.
As the former CEO of Sweden’s public television broadcaster SVT cravenly said when learning that President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19: “I’m afraid, we’ll probably have to say that he’s going to make it…In Sweden, there is a kind of a consensus that Trump is dangerous and an idiot…No one likes Trump in Sweden.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines groupthink as: “A pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.”
With their almost global control over the media, academia, entertainment, science, and medicine, the left has personified that definition for decades.
That said, all of us still control the most important subset of that definition. That being “self-deception.”
Be it at the height of a pandemic or any other time in which a crisis – real or manufactured – overwhelms our lives, thinking for ourselves and doing our own homework will always be the best “cure.”
With that in mind, COVID-19 survivor President Trump said it best:
“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Instead, as the doctors and health experts associated with The Great Barrington Declaration are begging: Let’s treat it…properly…and live our lives.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the novel: The Dawn of a Nazi Moon: Book One.
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