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The Trustees Have Failed

The Trustees Have Failed

Via Techno Fog substack,

A Story of Generations

I often reflect on the concept of generational responsibilities. That each generation, whether mine or yours, has the same type of supportive role to the other for…

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3 years ago

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The Trustees Have Failed

Via Techno Fog substack,

A Story of Generations

I often reflect on the concept of generational responsibilities. That each generation, whether mine or yours, has the same type of supportive role to the other for the common good, although the obligations may be different. Let me put this another way:

Every generation is the caretaker of the generations that came before, and the trustee of those who will come after. 

To explain by example: a child enters this world under the care of their parents. And the parents leave this world being cared for by their children. These are general observations (and aspirations) that leave out everything in between and all those little moments that define care.

To be more specific, and to hopefully state the obvious, caring for a child isn’t just a roof over their head and three meals a day. It’s teaching them values, being an example for them to follow, making them feel safe. It is making a marriage work for the benefit of the children and not divorcing for the convenience of the adults. Ensuring, as best we can, their future.

Then as we age, we see our parents start to fight with the parts of their daily lives they once did with ease. Their struggle is our struggle, though the struggles are different. Each day a brush more diminished until we say goodbye.

Both stages are touched by sadness, as if a gentle hand squeezed yours. Dare I say acute melancholy. Parents watching their children slowly grow up and children watching their parents slowly grow old.

I say all that for a reason. Take the relationship of a parent and a child and put it in generational context: being a trustee of those who are here, and for those to come, means ensuring that the younger generations have the tools to build their future. The institutions established by our ancestors serve the same purpose. The common good endures when we pass.

Do we judge trustees and institutions - and by extension, generations - by what they preserve and pass on?

It’s dangerous to criticize a whole group in these times (accusations of stereotypes or whatever) and I hope you understand that a generation can be criticized even if every member of the generation didn’t do wrong. If the one generation sold out younger generations (and they did sell them out), it doesn’t mean they’re all greedy. It’s the forest and not the trees, the big picture and not each individual pixel. I’ll even concede this is the flaw of all generations, though perhaps some did it better than others.

Greed and the Price of College

With that said, turn your eyes to the trustees who abused their power. Over the past 30+ years the cost of attending college – both private and public – has grown exponentially. The numbers below are 2019 figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and reflect the increase of the cost of higher education.

Per these Department of Education figures, students are now paying anywhere from approximately $72,000 to $170,000 to get a four-year degree. An increase of $39,000 to nearly $90,000 without taking into consideration the interest on the loans. Put into simple terms, a student may be billed $100,000 for college but over the long term the cost can double.

Meanwhile, wages haven’t kept up.

The Cost of Student Loans: The Numbers and Beyond

The student loan horror stories are everywhere if you care to look. You probably know people struggling with student loans who endure in silence. These are college graduates giving plasma to pay for groceries. One woman I spoke with documented how her husband has paid twice the original balance of the student loan – and still owes an amount so large that they will likely pay through retirement.  These are debts that are never meant to end.

There’s the story of a 1990s law school graduate borrowed around $55,000. He struggled to make ends meet and now owes “well over $300,000.” Maybe the servicing companies can rob his corpse when he dies. This is what happens when you start viewing people as objects: you extract from them everything you can and leave them to deal with the fallout. Servitude until death.

Debt and Misery

If you haven’t faced crippling student loan debt then it’s hard to understand what these young people face. Economically, they can’t buy homes because their savings – which would go towards a down payment – are paying the interest on the student loans. If we get creative with a driving metaphor, plans for the future take a backseat to high balances and high interest. In the worst cases the future is locked in the trunk, being driven beyond the city limits to be shot and burned in some remote field.

Psychologically, the results of loan debt can be devastating. Hope is for the young – except for those with student loans. They just have resignation. It’s the anxiety of drowning, fighting to stay near the surface as the $100,000 weight around their neck pulls them down. It’s the hopelessness and despair of paying everything you can afford month after month after month and watching the principal barely move. It’s a week’s worth of bologna sandwiches and eggs and instant oatmeal so you can pay your bills or treat yourself to an actual meal at an actual restaurant. It’s walking outside and praying your car hasn’t been repossessed.

The Greed Starts at the University

All of this is a great profit machine for the colleges. The University of Texas at Austin has an endowment of $31 billion. An in-state student at that school can graduate with over $75,000 in debt, counting tuition and living expenses. The trustees - those running the universities - are doing well for themselves.

Over on the east coast, Harvard’s endowment is an obscene $40.9 billion. It appears that the purpose of the endowment is to serve itself – to eat and grow to as large a size as possible, to expend as little as possible and get as fat as the market allows. Gluttony.

Costs are only cut when the cuts serve their interests. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Harvard instituted austerity measures and caused quite the controversy within its student body when it considered laying off its dining workers (technically contractors) without some sort of compensation. It took a bit of protest for Harvard to cut them something – the school wasn’t exactly volunteering to help those workers living paycheck to paycheck. While this went on, Harvard’s president and investment team continued to earn millions of dollars a year. True compassion from a liberal institution where only 1% of its professors call themselves (perhaps privately, if not publicly) “conservative.”

The United States government has been no help. In fact, they helped feed this monster – and have failed to stop students from being consumed by its appetite. In 2005, Congress exempted “all forms of student debt, public or private . . . from discharge in bankruptcy, absent a showing of ‘undue hardship.’” Not an easy task in bankruptcy court.

The Blame Goes Around - and Comes Back to the College

Contrary to popular belief in some conservative circles, however, all the blame for the increased cost of a college education doesn’t lie on Congress or the government as a whole. Certainly, the availability of guaranteed and loans allowed costs to increase and the student loan crisis to flourish. But the greed starts with the schools. The availability of loans didn’t require prices to rise.

To this you may say that the students took out these loans and should be on the hook for their debt: “Personal responsibility!”

I don’t necessarily disagree with that. There’s a moral duty to pay debts that we all recognize. Perhaps we should also consider there are moral duties governing lenders. If we continue on the path of personal responsibility, here’s another question to consider: What is the responsibility of those who created and benefit from this perverse system?

I’ll also add that there’s danger in the extreme. We allow for credit card debt to be discharged at bankruptcy. We allow for corporations to go through bankruptcy and be restructured. Personal or corporate bankruptcy all involve bad decisions with debt or in some cases an economic downturn. Sometimes both. Sometimes shit just happens.

Why treat student loans so different? Could it be to protect not the debtor, but the colleges making obscene profits and the institutions financing and collecting the debt?

This isn’t to say that I’m proposing the answer right now, though the answer requires some concerns to be addressed. This is a societal problem that requires an equitable solution. One that allows for balances to be paid without the punishing interest. A solution that puts some of the burden on the colleges and not just the students. An easier forgiveness of debt for those who absolutely need it. There must be a better way to solve the problem the trustees created.

Debt: The Inheritance of Future Generations

Now consider that all generations have a duty to preserve our inheritance for those yet to be born. What will their inheritance be?

Reckless government spending and the accumulation of national debt is the best example of a breach of that duty that will be paid by future generations. The U.S. national debt (as of February 2021) is nearly $28 trillion dollars. That comes out to $84,000 per citizen and $222,000 per taxpayer. The US federal debt to GDP ratio has increased from 34.72% in 1980 to 128.89 in 2020. And it continues to grow, as seen in these December 2020 figures.

What costs will future generations bear for the extravagance of today? We have an idea of the answer, even if there are disagreements on the specifics. Those with forked tongues undoubtedly advancing the interests of their masters or their political allies take the counter-intuitive position that debt doesn’t matter.

We know otherwise. The ancients told us debt is slavery. (Proverbs 22:7: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”) It is death: “To die is a debt we must all of us discharge.”

Many experts at least agree that these dangerous levels of debt can lead to inflation, prolonged recessions, high unemployment, and in quite possibly the ruin of America. And our mediocre ruling class, those who are good at getting elected and bad at governance, continue to spend. They get all the benefits and incur none of the costs.

A Contrast

Yet as the younger generations get much grief (some of it being deserved) for taking loans and selfies, for entitled behavior, for demanding promotions with little experience, look what happens when they are asked give things up for the benefit of others. The COVID-19 pandemic and shutdowns, which are ongoing as I write this, have been a real-time demonstration of generational priorities and sacrifices. It is a generational contrast.

The offerings of ordinary folks made during the pandemic– the sacrifices of the cooks, the janitors, the servers and bartenders, the small business owner – are substantial. This isn’t just a couple missed paychecks. This is about people getting no income when they already have so little. It’s auctioning restaurant equipment and locking the doors. This is paying half the month’s rent because you need the rest of your money for gas and groceries. It is the generation without wealth – in large part, the younger generation – making the sacrifices.

And the sacrifices are for whom? The older generation, the generation that is most at risk from COVID-19. The “greater good.”

When considering the sacrifices of the young during COVID – those sacrifices made for the “greater good” – how much worse is the older generation’s refusal to sacrifice small economic gains so younger generations wouldn’t be burdened with student loan debt for the next 20+ years?

Where do we go from here?

Things need to change. These are policies not based on the common good, or dare I say love, but on greed and cynicism. A country has no future if the future spends its life paying for the past.

A hope emerges from this: that we one day relate to younger generations in the same way parents relate to children. That we look to ourselves as trustees. That we see ourselves as guardians of an inheritance. That we look to others not as objects but as fellow citizens.

That we remember we are caretakers of those who came before and trustees for those who will come after.

Tyler Durden Sat, 02/20/2021 - 21:30

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International

Chronic stress and inflammation linked to societal and environmental impacts in new study

From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors…

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March 12, 2024

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From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors can cause chronic inflammation in our bodies. Chronic inflammation is linked to serious conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer – and may also affect our thinking and behavior.   

Credit: Image: Vodovotz et al/Frontiers

From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors can cause chronic inflammation in our bodies. Chronic inflammation is linked to serious conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer – and may also affect our thinking and behavior.   

A new hypothesis published in Frontiers in Science suggests the negative impacts may extend far further.   

“We propose that stress, inflammation, and consequently impaired cognition in individuals can scale up to communities and populations,” explained lead author Prof Yoram Vodovotz of the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

“This could affect the decision-making and behavior of entire societies, impair our cognitive ability to address complex issues like climate change, social unrest, and infectious disease – and ultimately lead to a self-sustaining cycle of societal dysfunction and environmental degradation,” he added.

Bodily inflammation ‘mapped’ in the brain  

One central premise to the hypothesis is an association between chronic inflammation and cognitive dysfunction.  

“The cause of this well-known phenomenon is not currently known,” said Vodovotz. “We propose a mechanism, which we call the ‘central inflammation map’.”    

The authors’ novel idea is that the brain creates its own copy of bodily inflammation. Normally, this inflammation map allows the brain to manage the inflammatory response and promote healing.   

When inflammation is high or chronic, however, the response goes awry and can damage healthy tissues and organs. The authors suggest the inflammation map could similarly harm the brain and impair cognition, emotion, and behavior.   

Accelerated spread of stress and inflammation online   

A second premise is the spread of chronic inflammation from individuals to populations.  

“While inflammation is not contagious per se, it could still spread via the transmission of stress among people,” explained Vodovotz.   

The authors further suggest that stress is being transmitted faster than ever before, through social media and other digital communications.  

“People are constantly bombarded with high levels of distressing information, be it the news, negative online comments, or a feeling of inadequacy when viewing social media feeds,” said Vodovotz. “We hypothesize that this new dimension of human experience, from which it is difficult to escape, is driving stress, chronic inflammation, and cognitive impairment across global societies.”   

Inflammation as a driver of social and planetary disruption  

These ideas shift our view of inflammation as a biological process restricted to an individual. Instead, the authors see it as a multiscale process linking molecular, cellular, and physiological interactions in each of us to altered decision-making and behavior in populations – and ultimately to large-scale societal and environmental impacts.  

“Stress-impaired judgment could explain the chaotic and counter-intuitive responses of large parts of the global population to stressful events such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic,” explained Vodovotz.  

“An inability to address these and other stressors may propagate a self-fulfilling sense of pervasive danger, causing further stress, inflammation, and impaired cognition in a runaway, positive feedback loop,” he added.  

The fact that current levels of global stress have not led to widespread societal disorder could indicate an equally strong stabilizing effect from “controllers” such as trust in laws, science, and multinational organizations like the United Nations.   

“However, societal norms and institutions are increasingly being questioned, at times rightly so as relics of a foregone era,” said Prof Paul Verschure of Radboud University, the Netherlands, and a co-author of the article. “The challenge today is how we can ward off a new adversarial era of instability due to global stress caused by a multi-scale combination of geopolitical fragmentation, conflicts, and ecological collapse amplified by existential angst, cognitive overload, and runaway disinformation.”    

Reducing social media exposure as part of the solution  

The authors developed a mathematical model to test their ideas and explore ways to reduce stress and build resilience.  

“Preliminary results highlight the need for interventions at multiple levels and scales,” commented co-author Prof Julia Arciero of Indiana University, USA.  

“While anti-inflammatory drugs are sometimes used to treat medical conditions associated with inflammation, we do not believe these are the whole answer for individuals,” said Dr David Katz, co-author and a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine based in the US. “Lifestyle changes such as healthy nutrition, exercise, and reducing exposure to stressful online content could also be important.”  

“The dawning new era of precision and personalized therapeutics could also offer enormous potential,” he added.  

At the societal level, the authors suggest creating calm public spaces and providing education on the norms and institutions that keep our societies stable and functioning.  

“While our ‘inflammation map’ hypothesis and corresponding mathematical model are a start, a coordinated and interdisciplinary research effort is needed to define interventions that would improve the lives of individuals and the resilience of communities to stress. We hope our article stimulates scientists around the world to take up this challenge,” Vodovotz concluded.  

The article is part of the Frontiers in Science multimedia article hub ‘A multiscale map of inflammatory stress’. The hub features a video, an explainer, a version of the article written for kids, and an editorial, viewpoints, and policy outlook from other eminent experts: Prof David Almeida (Penn State University, USA), Prof Pietro Ghezzi (University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy), and Dr Ioannis P Androulakis (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA). 

Journal

Frontiers in Science

DOI

10.3389/1239462

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A multiscale inflammatory map: linking individual stress to societal dysfunction

Article Publication Date

12-Mar-2024

COI Statement

YV is a cofounder of, and stakeholder in, Immunetrics, Inc. and a consultant to Anuna AI. PFMJV is the founder of, and stakeholder in, Eodyne Systems s.l. and Sapiens5 Holding BV. DLK was employed by Tangelo – Intend, Inc. Neither these companies nor the funders mentioned above were involved in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication. The companies mentioned above also did not provide funding for the study. The remaining author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors YV and PV declared that they are editorial board members of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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International

Acadia’s Nuplazid fails PhIII study due to higher-than-expected placebo effect

After years of trying to expand the market territory for Nuplazid, Acadia Pharmaceuticals might have hit a dead end, with a Phase III fail in schizophrenia…

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March 12, 2024

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After years of trying to expand the market territory for Nuplazid, Acadia Pharmaceuticals might have hit a dead end, with a Phase III fail in schizophrenia due to the placebo arm performing better than expected.

Steve Davis

“We will continue to analyze these data with our scientific advisors, but we do not intend to conduct any further clinical trials with pimavanserin,” CEO Steve Davis said in a Monday press release. Acadia’s stock $ACAD dropped by 17.41% before the market opened Tuesday.

Pimavanserin, a serotonin inverse agonist and also a 5-HT2A receptor antagonist, is already in the market with the brand name Nuplazid for Parkinson’s disease psychosis. Efforts to expand into other indications such as Alzheimer’s-related psychosis and major depression have been unsuccessful, and previous trials in schizophrenia have yielded mixed data at best. Its February presentation does not list other pimavanserin studies in progress.

The Phase III ADVANCE-2 trial investigated 34 mg pimavanserin versus placebo in 454 patients who have negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The study used the negative symptom assessment-16 (NSA-16) total score as a primary endpoint and followed participants up to week 26. Study participants have control of positive symptoms due to antipsychotic therapies.

The company said that the change from baseline in this measure for the treatment arm was similar between the Phase II ADVANCE-1 study and ADVANCE-2 at -11.6 and -11.8, respectively. However, the placebo was higher in ADVANCE-2 at -11.1, when this was -8.5 in ADVANCE-1. The p-value in ADVANCE-2 was 0.4825.

In July last year, another Phase III schizophrenia trial — by Sumitomo and Otsuka — also reported negative results due to what the company noted as Covid-19 induced placebo effect.

According to Mizuho Securities analysts, ADVANCE-2 data were disappointing considering the company applied what it learned from ADVANCE-1, such as recruiting patients outside the US to alleviate a high placebo effect. The Phase III recruited participants in Argentina and Europe.

Analysts at Cowen added that the placebo effect has been a “notorious headwind” in US-based trials, which appears to “now extend” to ex-US studies. But they also noted ADVANCE-1 reported a “modest effect” from the drug anyway.

Nonetheless, pimavanserin’s safety profile in the late-stage study “was consistent with previous clinical trials,” with the drug having an adverse event rate of 30.4% versus 40.3% with placebo, the company said. Back in 2018, even with the FDA approval for Parkinson’s psychosis, there was an intense spotlight on Nuplazid’s safety profile.

Acadia previously aimed to get Nuplazid approved for Alzheimer’s-related psychosis but had many hurdles. The drug faced an adcomm in June 2022 that voted 9-3 noting that the drug is unlikely to be effective in this setting, culminating in a CRL a few months later.

As for the company’s next R&D milestones, Mizuho analysts said it won’t be anytime soon: There is the Phase III study for ACP-101 in Prader-Willi syndrome with data expected late next year and a Phase II trial for ACP-204 in Alzheimer’s disease psychosis with results anticipated in 2026.

Acadia collected $549.2 million in full-year 2023 revenues for Nuplazid, with $143.9 million in the fourth quarter.

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Government

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare…

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March 12, 2024

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Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15. The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when the orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather. 

It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people who the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge – mayors, governors, and the president – that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights. 

And they did, not only in the US but all over the world. 

The forced closures in the US began on March 6 when the mayor of Austin, Texas, announced the shutdown of the technology and arts festival South by Southwest. Hundreds of thousands of contracts, of attendees and vendors, were instantly scrapped. The mayor said he was acting on the advice of his health experts and they in turn pointed to the CDC, which in turn pointed to the World Health Organization, which in turn pointed to member states and so on. 

There was no record of Covid in Austin, Texas, that day but they were sure they were doing their part to stop the spread. It was the first deployment of the “Zero Covid” strategy that became, for a time, official US policy, just as in China. 

It was never clear precisely who to blame or who would take responsibility, legal or otherwise. 

This Friday evening press conference in Austin was just the beginning. By the next Thursday evening, the lockdown mania reached a full crescendo. Donald Trump went on nationwide television to announce that everything was under control but that he was stopping all travel in and out of US borders, from Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. American citizens would need to return by Monday or be stuck. 

Americans abroad panicked while spending on tickets home and crowded into international airports with waits up to 8 hours standing shoulder to shoulder. It was the first clear sign: there would be no consistency in the deployment of these edicts. 

There is no historical record of any American president ever issuing global travel restrictions like this without a declaration of war. Until then, and since the age of travel began, every American had taken it for granted that he could buy a ticket and board a plane. That was no longer possible. Very quickly it became even difficult to travel state to state, as most states eventually implemented a two-week quarantine rule. 

The next day, Friday March 13, Broadway closed and New York City began to empty out as any residents who could went to summer homes or out of state. 

On that day, the Trump administration declared the national emergency by invoking the Stafford Act which triggers new powers and resources to the Federal Emergency Management Administration. 

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.

The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the Vice President, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being, and health of the American people. HHS is the LFA [Lead Federal Agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.

Closures were guaranteed:

Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Issue widespread ‘stay at home’ directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews. Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.

In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”

The National Security Council was put in charge of policy making. The CDC was just the marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.

The timing here is fascinating. This document came out on a Friday. But according to every autobiographical account – from Mike Pence and Scott Gottlieb to Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner – the gathered team did not meet with Trump himself until the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Saturday and Sunday. 

According to their account, this was his first real encounter with the urge that he lock down the whole country. He reluctantly agreed to 15 days to flatten the curve. He announced this on Monday the 16th with the famous line: “All public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”

This makes no sense. The decision had already been made and all enabling documents were already in circulation. 

There are only two possibilities. 

One: the Department of Homeland Security issued this March 13 HHS document without Trump’s knowledge or authority. That seems unlikely. 

Two: Kushner, Birx, Pence, and Gottlieb are lying. They decided on a story and they are sticking to it. 

Trump himself has never explained the timeline or precisely when he decided to greenlight the lockdowns. To this day, he avoids the issue beyond his constant claim that he doesn’t get enough credit for his handling of the pandemic.

With Nixon, the famous question was always what did he know and when did he know it? When it comes to Trump and insofar as concerns Covid lockdowns – unlike the fake allegations of collusion with Russia – we have no investigations. To this day, no one in the corporate media seems even slightly interested in why, how, or when human rights got abolished by bureaucratic edict. 

As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.

They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots. 

Only 8 days into the 15, Trump announced that he wanted to open the country by Easter, which was on April 12. His announcement on March 24 was treated as outrageous and irresponsible by the national press but keep in mind: Easter would already take us beyond the initial two-week lockdown. What seemed to be an opening was an extension of closing. 

This announcement by Trump encouraged Birx and Fauci to ask for an additional 30 days of lockdown, which Trump granted. Even on April 23, Trump told Georgia and Florida, which had made noises about reopening, that “It’s too soon.” He publicly fought with the governor of Georgia, who was first to open his state. 

Before the 15 days was over, Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses, and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration. 

There was never a stated exit plan beyond Birx’s public statements that she wanted zero cases of Covid in the country. That was never going to happen. It is very likely that the virus had already been circulating in the US and Canada from October 2019. A famous seroprevalence study by Jay Bhattacharya came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined. 

What that implied was two crucial points: there was zero hope for the Zero Covid mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through endemicity via exposure, not from a vaccine as such. That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington. The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working. 

By summer 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd. Public health officials approved of these gatherings – unlike protests against lockdowns – on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than Covid. Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive. 

Meanwhile, substance abuse rage – the liquor and weed stores never closed – and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as the Bakersfield doctors had predicted. Millions of small businesses had closed. The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was near worthless. 

It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out – thanks to the wise council of Dr. Scott Atlas – that he had been played and started urging states to reopen. But it was strange: he seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, Tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening. 

By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late. Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves, and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground. 

At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, Covid would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted. The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire US workforce. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before HR departments around the country had already implemented them. 

As the months rolled on – and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic – it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit. Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remains classified. 

After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when, and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame. 

Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him. There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none have focus on the lockdown orders themselves. 

The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore. 

In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire. The essential struggle in every country on earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of permanent administration apparatus of the state – the very one that took total control in lockdowns – and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible to the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights. 

How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times. 

CODA: I’m embedding a copy of PanCAP Adapted, as annotated by Debbie Lerman. You might need to download the whole thing to see the annotations. If you can help with research, please do.

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Jeffrey Tucker is the author of the excellent new book 'Life After Lock-Down'

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 23:40

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