Coronavirus Survives On Banknotes For Up To 4 Weeks, Study Finds, As Cash Usage Plunges

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Coronavirus Survives On Banknotes For Up To 4 Weeks, Study Finds, As Cash Usage Plunges Tyler Durden Mon, 10/12/2020 - 04:15

We highlighted an intersting development on Saturday that appeared to go largely unnoticed by the general public, despite its potentiall profound implications for the global economy. The BoJ joined the Fed and the ECB in launching a pilot program to explore the use of a digital currency inspired by bitcoin and its many rivals.

Just one day later, Bloomberg revived concerns about paper money contributing to the spread of COVID-19 by publicizing the findings from a new study suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 can persist on banknotes and coins for weeks. The research appears to be credible: it was conducted by Australia's top biosecurity laboratory, which published  a report highlighting the risks of paper currency, touch screens and handles like doorknobs.

As the CDC releases revised guidelines claiming that close contact with the infected trumps surfaces and aerosol - or 'airborne' - transmission as the primary means of infection, the study from the Australian Center for Disease Preparedness suggested that the virus is actually "extremely robust", allowing it to survive for up to 28 days on smooth surfaces like glass or the material used to print banknotes.

However, the rate of survival on surfaces declined dramatically when the temperature climbed to above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Farenheit).

Virus survival declined to less than a day at 40 degrees Celsius on some surfaces, according to the study, published Monday in Virology Journal. The findings add to evidence that the Covid-19-causing coronavirus survives for longer in cooler weather, making it potentially harder to control in winter than summer. The research also helps to more accurately predict and mitigate the pandemic’s spread, the researchers said.

“Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 can remain infectious on surfaces for long periods of time, reinforcing the need for good practices such as regular hand washing and cleaning surfaces,” said Debbie Eagles, the center’s deputy director, in an emailed statement.

The coronavirus tended to survive longer on nonporous or smooth surfaces, compared with porous complex surfaces, such as cotton.

The research received funding from Australia’s defense department. It involved drying the coronavirus in an artificial mucus on different surfaces, at concentrations similar to those reported in samples from infected patients, and then re-isolating the virus over a month. The study was also carried out in the dark, to remove the effect of ultraviolet light, as research has demonstrated direct sunlight can rapidly inactivate the virus.

The time taken to achieve a 50% reduction in the amount of virus present on the surfaces studied under different temperatures is tabled below:

"The research may also help to explain the apparent persistence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 in cool environments with high lipid or protein contamination, such as meat processing facilities and how we might better address that risk," Trevor Drew, director of the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, said in the statement.

The virus's extended survival time on stainless steel surfaces could help explain all those outbreaks traced to meat processing plants. The research, which was backed by the Australian department of defense, also concluded that SARS-CoV-2 survives for far longer on surfaces than the seasonal flu.

These findings revive memories of American banks decontaminating banknotes, a practice that was apparently pioneered by Beijing and the PBOC, which aggressively disinfected paper money, while using the pandemic to further push the Chinese people toward relying 100% on electronic payments.

Sadly, these warnings will likely serve a similar purpose in the West, including Europe and the US, as policymakers see a "cashless society" as having many benefits: It would force criminals to rely less on cash and more on digital currencies like bitcoin, while keeping more of the world's money inside the banking system.

We're already seeing this trend play out in practice: After COVID-19 hit the UK, the rate of cash transactions tumbled by nearly half compared to the same period during 2019.

In the US, cities like NYC and San Francisco had to force local businesses to keep accepting cash during the pandemic as coin shortages and other issues caused cash transactions to drop. Their reasoning? That forcing customers to use plastic discriminates against the poorest consumers, as the NYT explains

But as far as monetary policy makers are concerned, the greatest utility of a purely digital currency is that it opens up vast new opportunities for CBs to deliver monetary stimulus directly to consumers (with the backing of their respective Treasuries, of course, as the reality on the ground increasingly resembles the theoretical ideal of MMT). Interested parties should peruse the latest research from DoubleLine's Bill Campbell, "the Pandora's Box of Central Bank Digital Currencies."

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Barrett to declare that Supreme Court should not make policy in opening statement on Monday: Report

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"I come before this Committee with humility about the responsibility I have been asked to undertake," Barrett will say.

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The Assumption of a Pandemic

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The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed. ~C.S. Lewis

In regards to our first worldwide “pandemic”, many are ASSUMING several very big things in their reasoning when they support the official authoritative narrative:

1. the threat is real, and is caused by what they say it is caused by.
2. if real and properly identified as the real cause, the threat is as contagious as they say it is, and is spread in the manner they say it is.
3. if real and properly identified as the real cause, the threat is as deadly as they say it is.
4. that testing is pointing at the actual cause, and is highly accurate.
5. the uniform countermeasures and treatments enacted by governments and centralized medical monopolies are scientifically proven as effective against the real cause.
6. the countermeasures enacted by government are proportionate to the actual threat.
7. that monopolies such as the government, the CDC, the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, etc, are unbiased with nothing to gain financially and/or politically from a pandemic.
8. actual medicine, such as has been proven to be 90% effective by a French study with hydroxychloroquine, is not being suppressed for financial and/or political reasons.
9. that the statistics aren’t being manipulated or overstated for financial and/or political gain, and are accurate.
10. that hospitals treating said patients don’t receive financial incentives for total covid-19 case load, following standardized treatments, and for labeling deaths as a specific cause of death.

As a critical thinking instructor, these are just a few questions that immediately pop into my mind to ask about our core assumptions, but few people are actually asking them. Why are they not being asked?

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What Will It Take for Masks and Face Shields to End?

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

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Making Sense of the Madness – Globalist Revelations

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I joined John Chambers at Making Sense of the Madness last night to take a look at the Global Criminal Swamp, starting with a TV clip from SkyNews Australia, where Brad Hazzard, the Health Minister of Australia’s most populous state, notorious for its draconian, police-state enforcement of COVID restrictions, claimed that the new place of danger from COVID is now our own homes – and then he had a Freudian slip, when he referred to the “New World Order”, when he meant to say the “New World of COVID”. But the two terms are largely interchangeable.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how the Globalists have managed to pull off this massive hoax. During the past 8 months, the people of the world have been broadsided by a highly-coordinated perpetration of fraud and global violations of the law by the very institutions charged with making these laws. The scale and scope of the scamdemic are staggering!

What better place to find clues than on the World Health Organization website, where we see an important term they use: “Stakeholders”, which sheds light on their recruiting methods, in their own words:

“Who are our stakeholders?

“Diverse global health stakeholders engage with WHO.

“We work closely with decision-makers: Ministries of Health, government agencies, other government departments at the national level.

“We also work with influencers: health partnerships, foundations, intragovernmental and nongovernmental organizations,  civil society, media, professional associations, and WHO collaborating centres.

“Our engagement with the United Nations at the global, regional, and country level is also a major asset.”

I think this indicates the recruitment avenues for people like this Brad Buzzard in Australia and a lot of local politicians and local health officials, like Bill DeBlasio in New York City and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, to name just a few who are propagating this Flu d’État, which is based on a virus that has never been isolated – as admitted by the CDC, itself on page 39 of their “Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel” document, published last July.

As reported yesterday by Jon Rappaport, who has been studying fake pandemics and the manipulation of pandemics for over three decades, he writes, “Buried deep in the document, on page 39, in a section titled, ‘Performance Characteristics,’ it says: ‘Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA…’

“The key phrase there is: ‘Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available…’

“Every object that exists can be quantified, which is to say, measured. The use of the term ‘quantified’ in that phrase means: the CDC has no measurable amount of the virus, because it is unavailable. THE CDC HAS NO VIRUS.

“A further tip-off is the use of the word ‘isolates.’ This means NO ISOLATED VIRUS IS AVAILABLE.

“Another way to put it: NO ONE HAS AN ISOLATED SPECIMEN OF THE COVID-19 VIRUS.

“NO ONE HAS ISOLATED THE COVID-19 VIRUS.

“THEREFORE, NO ONE HAS PROVED THAT IT EXISTS.

“…And using this test, the CDC and every other public health agency in the world are counting COVID cases and deaths…and governments have instituted lockdowns and economic devastation using those case and death numbers as justification.”

AND THIS brings me to a video that I ran this week that went viral of German lawyer, Reiner Fuellmich who’s been a member of the bar in both Germany and California for 26 years and who discusses the findings of the International Corona Investigative Committee that was formed on July 10, 2020 by lawyers, doctors, and scientists and who jointly reached the conclusion that COVID-19 may be the greatest crime against humanity in history.

Dr Fuellmich, who has successfully litigated against Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen lays out a legal case of Crimes Against Humanity for enforcing lockdowns based on the fraudulent use of PCR test results – which, as we just noted, do not prove the existence of the COVID-19 virus.

He says, “As more and more independent studies and expert statements show, under the rules of Civil Tort law, all those who have been harmed by these PCR test-induced lockdowns are entitled to receive full compensation for their losses.”

Due to the preponderance of evidence, the government will be held responsible for the damages it inflicted upon the population and the crimes committed by various health authorities and the WHO must be legally qualified as actual crimes against humanity, as defined in Section 7 of the International Criminal Code and he suggests that the path forward to compensatory damages and to political consequences is through the Class Action lawsuit.

Which brings me to the many, many US Federal and state laws that are being violated by these COVID actions on the part of local governments, such as Title 18 US Code §1038 about false information and hoaxes, where you go to prison if you provide false information or misleading information relating to biological hazards, with a maximum penalty of life in prison if these frauds result in death – which they have!

Peggy Hall of TheHealthyAmerican.org has been doing amazing work, here, 1) identifying the MANY, MANY Federal and State laws being violated and 2) naming all of the officials who are violating these laws and 3) starting class action lawsuits against them.

The amount of laws being broken right now by the governments that made these laws, in order to perpetrate this false emergency is beyond head-spinning.

She cites two Federal Laws, Title 18 US Code §1038 and  Title 18 US Code §1040, which is Fraud in Connection with Major Disaster or Benefits – which is what’s what’s happening: They’re declaring an emergency, in order to get money, so that’s fraudulent. The penalty for that is 30 years in prison.

Then, she cites several California State Laws, which I’ve been told would be virtually identical to Michigan Laws, since the blueprint of the California legal code was lifted from that of the State of Michigan. However, every state should have their own laws on their books, that are basically the same, so my naming the California ones here can give you clues where to look in the legal code of your own state.

There’s California Penal Code §504, for fraud, when a public officer appropriates and uses any public property or funds fraudulently. So, even if they are using these funds to put up billboards to “stay 6 feet apart” – that is a crime of embezzlement.

California Penal Code §148.3 – is the California statute that makes it a crime for a person to report a false emergency…which is 100% the case, with COVID-19, where they’ve never even isolated the virus and whatever it is has an extremely low death rate of .02%

She also notes that the California Emergency Services Act Article §8630 says, ‘The governing body shall determine the termination of the local health emergency at the earliest possible date that conditions warrant.’

The problem is – there is no emergency, there never has been an emergency, yet they persist in breaking the law, with Bill DeBlasio ordering another lockdown yesterday in several zip codes of Brooklyn and Queens and officials everywhere from the UK to Australia threatening to impose new lockdowns.

Clearly, these lockdown-happy local government officials are working for the UN and not for their constituents.

Some of you may have seen the interview with Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, talking about how she only works with those who are with the “New World Order.”

Then Susan Bradford comes on with some head-exploding facts, going all the way back to the history of how the Deep State infiltrated the US Government via the Federally-recognized Native American tribes, the intelligence agencies and the insurance companies and how AIG (American International Group, Inc.) is a great example of this.

AIG Founder, Cornelius Vander Starr ingratiated himself to the Rothschilds, who formed and used the MI6 and the OSS, together with insurance agencies – to create not just secret agents but secret insurance agents – to leverage their positions and to always keep them on the best side of every trade, disaster, war – you name it.

Many other mind-blowing details, here – don’t miss it!

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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The Average American Is Recorded 238 Times A Week

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The Average American Is Recorded 238 Times A Week Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2020 - 22:50

Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

Cameras are everywhere...

Do you have a cell phone? Unless it’s an old antiquated flip phone, there’s a camera. Public parks, roadways, the parking garage at your favorite shopping center, police officers wearing body cameras, school…they are everywhere.

There was a time when Americans viewed the presence of security cameras in a private business as a creepy Orwellian intrusion into their private lives. They didn’t want to be recorded and watched as they did their shopping or when they went into the bank to cash their paychecks. Those days came and went and Americans accepted and adapted those cameras.

Then along came public surveillance cameras and traffic light cameras. And, once again people felt their lives were being infringed upon. Not only were private businesses still conducting the surveillance, but the government was now watching too. This left many people feeling as though their privacy rights had been taken away from them.

All that changed when 9/11 happened. Suddenly Americans couldn’t be stopped from stuffing their concerns over privacy as far down the toilet bowl as they could.

Two decades later the “Privacy Train” has left the station.

Everywhere we go, there are cameras. Whether it be a camera in a retail store, at a stoplight, inside a hospital, inside an Uber car, inside a restaurant, possibly even inside your own home. Oh, and let’s not forget the doorbell cameras. like the ones surveilling the entire neighborhood without their consent. If you have a smartphone, it’s tracking everywhere you go and that data is being used to compile incredibly detailed information about you.

Cameras are everywhere…including in our own hands. While the images being posted on social media may just be static images, they are still pictures of someone who may not even know that image was posted.

According to Social Media Statistics 2020: Top Networks by the Number Facebook alone has over 300 million photos uploaded DAILY.

People are not only being recorded, they are recording themselves and one another.

And this may sound like some crazy high-tech thing that doesn’t really affect us personally, but consider the ramifications on OPSEC if your every move is tracked and your every purchase is documented.

You won’t believe how often the typical American is recorded every day.

An article published by the Daily Mail reports that the typical American is recorded by security cameras 238 times a week. The information was obtained from Safety.com whose security team conducted a study on surveillance technology. That figure includes:

• Video taken at work: average employee spotted on cameras 40 times per week

• Video taken on the road: Americans are filmed 160 times while driving

• Video taken in stores

• Video taken in homes and neighborhoods: 14 times per week

For Americans who travel a lot or who work in “highly patrolled areas,” the number of times they are recorded on film could reach over 1000 times per week. According to the research, it can be difficult to know how many traffic cameras are passively filming or permanently storing footage. Another result of the study was that people underestimate how often they are recorded.

A survey from IPVM  in 2016 found that most people assumed they were being recorded less than five times a day. The example of a typical day was taken from that report:

This example is a running total, including the number of cameras likely present at each stop:

• 8:00AM: 4 Cameras – Get a cup of coffee –  4 cameras in Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts

• 8:30AM: 24 Cameras – School or office – cameras in parking lot and interior, you will be picked up at various angles by 20 cameras at least.

• 12:15PM: 30 Cameras – Stop at ATM before lunch for cash.  Bank will have exterior cameras, ATM will have close-up camera

• 12:30PM: 38 Cameras – Go get lunch – 4 cameras at lunch spot, plus 4 more easily ay surrounding businesses

• 5:00PM: 45 Cameras – Leave work, go to gym to work out. Camera at check-in desk, plus in 6-8 in workout area

• 5:45PM: 46 Cameras – Stop to pick up dry cleaning.  Camera at front register

• 6:00PM: 52 Cameras – Stop for gas.  Cameras at pumps and in store

• 6:15PM: 54 Cameras – Quick car wash.  Cameras at entry and in-bay

• 7:00PM: 58 Cameras – Pick up kids from practice/game.  Cameras in school parking lot or on building exterior

Lawmakers and civil rights advocates are concerned about the growing state of surveillance.

But, of course, civil rights advocates do not have a real voice in American society. And, lawmakers are the ones who have facilitated the surveillance state, to begin with. So, unfortunately, if you are someone who was hoping to get back some of your rights, don’t hold your breath.

Dan Avery, author of the article on the Daily Mail writes reports that by next year, there will be approximately one billion security cameras operating around the globe. And 10 to 18 percent of them will be in the United States. In 2019, with 70 million cameras in the US, there was at least one security camera for every 4.6 Americans, putting the US as the second-highest ratio. China, being the first, has 4.1 cameras per person. (China, of course, is the country most infamous for social credit scores but many believe that the US is not far behind.)

Some people advocate these surveillance cameras as a vital tool for safety and security, and an important law enforcement device. However, in an article on All Together concerns about inequality, false results, and unethical use of this technology:

“There’s strong evidence that many of the systems in deployment are reflecting and amplifying existing forms of inequality,” said Sarah Myers West, a postdoctoral researcher at AI Now Institute, an interdisciplinary research center at New York University dedicated to understanding the social implications of artificial intelligence. “For this reason, it’s critical that we have a public conversation about the social impact of AI systems, and AI Now’s work aims to engage in research to inform that conversation.”

Joy Buolamwini, an MIT graduate, AI researcher, and computer scientist, provided firsthand research to inform the conversation. Buolamwini, a Ghanaian American, wrote a thesis, “Gender Shades,” in 2017, after she was misidentified while working with facial analysis software. The software didn’t detect her face until she put on a white mask, she said, “because the people who coded the algorithm hadn’t taught it to identify a broad range of skin tones and facial structures.” The software returned worse results for women and darker-skinned persons.

“We often assume machines are neutral, but they aren’t,” she said in a Time magazine essay about her discoveries. Her thesis methodology uncovered large racial and gender bias in AI services from such companies as Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. In response, Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League to “create a world with more ethical and inclusive technology.”

Owners of smart home security cameras may be in jeopardy.

Those smart home security cameras may not make you as safe as you thought they would.

“Some popular home security cameras could allow would-be burglars to work out when you’ve left the building, according to a study published Monday.” CNN Business

An International study carried out by Queen Mary University of London and the Chinese Academy of Science discovered they could tell if someone was home, and even what they were doing in the home, just by looking at data uploaded by their home security camera, without monitoring the video footage itself. And of course as we just published, the microphones embedded in your smart devices can record you and are being used more and more often by police.

An article written by Brandon Turbeville in 2011,“New Report: ‘Recording Everything’ Details How Governments Can Shape The Dynamics Of Dissent,” details how this data is being stored, at a surprisingly low cost to do so.

According to Turbeville, given the prices (in 2011) and the projected decrease in cost in the future, the United States would be able to store the location data of everyone in the country for a whole year for approximately $18,000, the cost of a low-wage job.

The average American is now videotaped and recorded more times in a day than a Hollywood star fifty years ago.

Clearly, we are no longer entering a “growing” surveillance state, we are already in one.

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Doomsday Camps Set To "Activate" Due To Risk Of Election Violence

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Doomsday Camps Set To "Activate" Due To Risk Of Election Violence  Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2020 - 23:10

As the country inches closer to the Nov. 03 presidential election, federal agencies, city governments, and local police forces are preparing for political and social instabilities, no matter the election outcome. 

Concerns are mounting that mass protests, violent confrontations between extremist groups, and widespread property damage could be seen on election day and days after. If the outcome of the election is undecided, chaos could linger for weeks, if not months. 

The prospects of civil unrest around election day have prompted a chain of US survival communities to "activate" - opening their doors for members to hunker down in bomb shelters, with an abundance of weapons and ammo, and years worth of food.

Reuters reports Fortitude Ranch doomsday camps in West Virginia and Colorado will open both facilities to members on election day because of the threat of social unrest. 

Fortitude Ranch's October newsletter suggested "looting and violence" across major US metro areas, similar to what was seen over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd, could follow the elections next month. The newsletter warned social instabilities could transform into long-term issues. 

Reuters quotes the survival camp's CEO Drew Miller as pointing out that chatter on social media suggest election results could tilt the country into civil war. Miller did not rule out that possibility... 

"This will be the first time we have opened for a collapse disaster, though it may end up not being so," said Miller in an emailed statement. "We consider the risk of violence that could escalate in irrational, unpredictable ways into widespread loss of law and order is real."

Readers may recall, in April, we highlighted soaring demand for Fortitude Ranch's doomsday bunkers came as the virus pandemic resulted in nationwide lockdowns. We then suggested, given the socio-economic implosion, that a "social bomb" was getting ready to explode across Western cities. And it wasn't until late May, after Floyd was killed by police, that unrest broke out in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the country.

Fortitude Ranch describes itself as "a survival community equipped to survive any disaster and long-term loss of law and order," and its actual location(s) are unknown to non-members.

"Fortitude Ranch is a survival community equipped to survive any type of disaster and long-term loss of law and order, managed by full-time staff. Fortitude Ranch is affordable (about $1,000/person annually) because of large numbers of members and economies of scale. Fortitude Ranch is especially attractive to join because it doubles as a recreation and vacation facility as well as a survival retreat. Members can vacation, hunt, fish and recreate at our forest and mountain locations in good times, and shelter at Fortitude Ranch to survive a collapse," the company's website said.

At the moment, Fortitude Ranch has two locations in West Virginia and Colorado, with ten more locations expected in the coming years. The goal is to create a nationwide network of doomsday bunkers. 

The countdown has started. All levels of government to doomsday bunker facilities are now preparing for what could be a violent November. 

 

 

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Masking, Propaganda, & The Outrage Mob's Murder Of Academic Freedom

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Masking, Propaganda, & The Outrage Mob's Murder Of Academic Freedom Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2020 - 23:30

Via Off-Guardian.org,

If you believe in academic freedom, as well as free speech overall, please consider signing this petition, and sharing it with others who believe that higher education must be free from censorship of any kind, whether by the state, corporations, foreign interests, pressure groups, or by the university itself.

A full professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication (since 1997), and a recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, Prof. Miller teaches a course on propaganda, focusing not only on the history of modern propaganda, but - necessarily - on propaganda drives ongoing at the time.

The aim is to teach students to identify such drives for what they are, think carefully about their claims, seek out whatever data and/or arguments have been blacked out or misreported to protect those claims from contradiction, and look into the interests financing and managing the propaganda, so as to figure out its purpose.

On Sept. 20, after a class discussion of the case for universal masking as defense against transmission of SARS-COV-2 (in which discussion she did not participate), a student took to Twitter to express her fury that Prof. Miller had brought up the randomized, controlled tests - all of those so far conducted on the subject - finding that masks and ventilators are ineffective at preventing such transmission, because the COVID-19 virions are too small for such expedients to block them.

Prof. Miller urged the students to read those studies, as well as others that purport to show the opposite, with due attention to the scientific reviews thereof, and possible financial links between the researchers conducting them, and such interests as Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation. Prof. Miller followed up by providing the links to the former studies (not easily found on Google, though they have all appeared in reputable medical journals), and other materials, including a video of a debate on the subject.

The student was so outraged by Prof. Miller even mentioning those studies that she called on NYU to fire him:

I hope @nyuniversity, @nyusteinhardt, and @mccNYU agree that this professor should not be trusted with educating and advising students, and I hope they take immediate steps to relieve him of these duties. 8/

— Julia Jackson (@julia_jacks) September 21, 2020

Having contacted NYU’s bias response line to report him, and getting no satisfaction there, the student kept on tweeting her demand for Prof. Miller’s termination, due to his “unhealthy amount of skepticism around health professionals,” and a range of other posts that she had seen on News from Underground, Prof. Miller’s website, and found no less insidious, misreporting that their sources were “many far right and conspiracy websites,” and therefore, evidently, not worth reading.

The student’s call provoked a storm of tweets, many attacking her, and others thanking her - one of which was posted by Prof. Miller’s department chair, promising to act on her demand:

"Julia, thank you for reporting this issue. We as a department have made this a priority and are discussing next steps.”

Soon after this pledge of institutional support, the dean of NYU’s Steinhardt School (in which Prof. Miller teaches), together with a doctor who advises them on COVID-19 policy, emailed each of Prof. Miller’s students (without putting him on copy), starting with a ritual nod to “academic freedom,” then hinting that the studies noted in that class were dangerous misinformation. To set them straight, the two advised the students to consult the “authoritative” CDC—specifically, its list of several recent studies finding that masks are effective against COVID-19.

(That the CDC itself, as well as Dr. Fauci, had, until April, publicly adhered to the consensus of those “dangerous” studies went unmentioned.) The two concluded with a stern reminder that the students are obliged to mask on campus (although Prof. Miller had made quite clear that he was not suggesting that they break NYU’s rule, which he observes himself.)

Thus that student’s tweets immediately prompted NYU to take her side, and several media outlets to attack Prof. Miller for his dissidence, without interviewing him. The following week, NYU followed up by urging him to cancel his propaganda course next term, and, instead, teach two sections of his course on cinema. Their rationale was that it would be “better for the department,” because enrollment in the latter course is always high; but then so are the enrollments for Prof. Miller’s propaganda course, which has earned the highest praises from its students.

For testimonials from Prof. Miller’s students click here.

Below is the text change.org petition, you can sign it here.

We the undersigned support the academic freedom of Prof. Mark Crispin Miller, now under siege at New York University for urging students in his propaganda course to read scientific literature on the effectiveness of masks against transmission of COVID-19.

We see his situation as but one example of a growing global trend toward rigid censorship of expert views on urgent subjects of all kinds; so this petition is not just in his defense, but a protest on behalf of all professors, doctors, scientists and journalists who have been gagged, or punished for their rights to freely research, study, and interpret data on a variety of matters regardless of their controversial nature.

Censorship is nothing new. We have been edging toward it ever more for decades, as both academia and the media have long discouraged free investigation and discussion of urgent public questions of all kinds, as those who would attempt to tackle them empirically have been slandered as “conspiracy theorists” or “truthers” and other slurs deployed to shut them up, or purge them as purveyors of “misinformation,” “fake science” or “hate speech.”

Such censorship has blocked the sort of open, civil, reasoned give-and-take without which higher education—indeed, any education—is impossible, as is scientific progress overall.

We see Prof. Miller’s situation as a flashpoint in the struggle not just to reclaim but to protect free speech and free inquiry. NYU officials have no right to intervene in Prof. Miller’s courses or message his students surreptitiously undermining his integrity as an instructor.

They have no right to deprive him of the courses he was hired to teach and they should not join in a public smear campaign against the very rights they should uphold at a university.

That so stated, we urge that NYU respect his academic freedom, and thereby set a good example for all other schools with faculty who dare contest official narratives. Otherwise, “education” there will be mere training for compliance, stunting students’ minds instead of opening them - a practice fatal to democracy, and, finally, to humanity itself.

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The Great Barrington Declaration And Its Critics

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The Great Barrington Declaration And Its Critics Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2020 - 03:30

Authored by Jenin Younes via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Early this week, three of the world’s top epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration, a short treatise that advocates a controversial approach to managing the coronavirus pandemic. Professors Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University argue that societies across the globe should reopen immediately and completely. 

Instead of observing measures designed to slow the spread of the virus, the young and healthy should resume normal activity in order to incur herd immunity and thereby protect those vulnerable to severe illness. The authors urge the adoption of this strategy, which they call “Focused Protection,” in light of increasing evidence that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. . . Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.” 

As of this writing, the Declaration has been signed by 3,089 other medical and public health scientists, 4,532 medical practitioners, and around 70,000 members of the general public.

While these scientists are not the first to express such views, given the degree to which their stance conflicts with the prevailing wisdom that everyone has a moral obligation to participate in efforts to “stop the spread,” it is not surprising that they have already encountered significant opposition.

Among their primary detractors is Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who considers their proposal akin to a suggestion that society “cull[] the herd of the sick and disabled. It’s grotesque.”

 It is hard to see where Gonsalves reads into the Declaration, which seeks to balance the interests of all demographics, a call to “cull[] . . . the sick and disabled.” This accusation is merely part of the drama in what has become coronavirus theater.

Gonsalves’s more measured, and conceivably legitimate, argument is that, since around fifty percent of the United States population is vulnerable, those most likely to experience severe illness cannot simply be separated out from the rest of society. Some version of this notion – that the strategy is logistically unfeasible and therefore must be discarded– is the most prevalent critique of the document. Gonsalves and others, for instance Dr. Michael Head at University of Southampton, also contend that the declaration’s premise is false, because no one in the scientific community is calling for either extended or extensive lockdowns.

But this latter claim is simply untrue. Many prominent scientists have called for extreme lockdowns in the United States, as recently as last month. While they claim this would eradicate the virus entirely, it is becoming increasingly evident that such suppressive measures last only as long as they are in place. 

Once lifted, the virus simply resurges, as has been demonstrated by countries such as Peru, which initially implemented one of the world’s most extreme lockdowns and now has one of the worst outbreaks. Melbourne, Australia, has been under a severe lockdown for over a month, despite having declared early victory against the virus. The United Kingdom has been enacting various forms of shutdown for several weeks after having been more or less open for the summer, and the mayor of New York City and governor of New York State have been threatening to impose localized lockdowns in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in which cases are rising. Thus, whether endorsed by the scientific community or politicians, forced closures of schools and businesses are the default mechanism for managing rising cases in many parts of the world. 

Lockdowns are no strawman, contrary to the claims of Gonsalves et al.

As for Gonsalves’s more compelling concern, it is true that protecting vulnerable members of society who do not reside in nursing homes, while allowing the rest to go about their lives, is not a simple feat. But the many scientists who conclude that, therefore, Focused Protection is not viable are woefully misguided. Initially, some portion of the vast resources that societies are expending to lock down could be diverted to this project. But more importantly, the critics’ position drastically underestimates the harm lockdowns inflict on a society. 

Oxfam recently published a report concluding that 130 million more people will probably die of starvation due to supply chain disruptions resulting from lockdowns around the world. As Time magazine explains, that is exponentially more people than will succumb to the virus itself. The CDC has estimated the probable occurrence of more than 93,000 “non-Covid ‘excess deaths’ this year, including 42,427 from cardiovascular conditions, 10,686 from diabetes and 3,646 from cancer. Many are due to government shutdowns of non-essential medical care.” That is in this country alone. 

Likewise, mental health is deteriorating; substance, child and domestic abuse are increasing; and children, especially those who come from families without means, are falling behind in school. Countless businesses have closed, many for good, spelling financial disaster for their owners and hardship for employees. All of this is due to lockdowns, despite the common misattributions in headlines to the “coronavirus” itself. 

While Gonsalves and the other critics are quick to argue that Focused Protection is “grotesque,” at no point do they address the crux of the matter, which is that the harms of locking down and social distancing, especially to the young, outweigh the benefits. Their opposition stems from the myopic worldview that led to lockdown and social distancing strategies in the first place: that the pandemic is a uniquely horrible problem that justifies sidelining all others in the quest to solve it.

Instead, as we have seen over the past seven or eight months, the coronavirus is just one among countless difficulties that the world faces; when contemplated dispassionately, it does not stand out the way that, for instance, nuclear war or a truly apocalyptic pandemic would. At 1.05 million deaths over the past nine or ten months, the coronavirus appears to be a problem along the lines of, for example, traffic accidents, which cause 1.35 million deaths per year, or tuberculosis, which results in 1.5 million deaths annually. 

Most of us understand and accept that preventing these deaths must be balanced against other interests. If, for instance, we banned vehicular travel in order to avoid deaths resulting from traffic accidents, but doing so caused 130 million deaths from supply chain disruptions, we would immediately recognize this as a failing proposition. Clearly, the same logic ought to apply here.

Critics of the Great Barrington Declaration correctly observe that we will not be able to prevent every death from coronavirus among the vulnerable. But their argument rests on the false assumption that preventing coronavirus deaths is more important than anything else, and while efforts can be made to mitigate collateral damage, in the end all must give way to this overarching goal. 

Rather, like all else in life, mitigation efforts must be balanced against the injury those measures cause. Since lockdowns will probably cause more deaths by starvation alone than the coronavirus, never mind the myriad other harms, the critics’ position simply does not withstand any scrutiny. By contrast, the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration expressly recognize both sides of the equation and seek to minimize coronavirus deaths among the vulnerable and suffering inflicted upon the nonvulnerable. It should be obvious which is the better approach.

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