Posted on 04/21/2021 4:15:24 PM PDT by george76
It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us.
The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.
Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.
The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.
Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe.
The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true.
Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes.
This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America.
It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse.
The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way.
In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies.
The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again.
As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology.
When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once.
Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one:
When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.
That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.
It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”
The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming.
Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government.
More accurately ...
All of northern lockdown states came. We had huge out of state crowds in Florida through out the year.
I live in Florida and numbers during hot months — including May-September were double or more (off season) -— NOT just couple weeks in Spring.
If you try to “flatten the curve” you just elongate the curve. I get that we didn’t want a million cases all rushing into hospitals within a two week period. But early on we didn’t know much about treatment or contagion or the Typhoid Mary types who are asymptomatic carriers.
Though I would be careful drawing any conclusions drawn between islands like Taiwan, Hawaii, Singapore, Australia etc to other countries that share borders and where people travel extensively and internally.
If we had an effective treatment, particularly an outpatient treatment, perhaps all of this could have been avoided. But the institutions didn’t really look very hard for one.
Let 'er scold.
Words are cheap.
But the b!tch better stay six feet away!
The response to this so-called pandemic, was all politically motivated. The health and well-being of the public was not even considered.
And that is why the masks and lockdowns didn't work.
Around where I live, not very many people have worn masks during this pandemic. That's because the lay country commissioners who mandated the masks, set up a requirement for employees of businesses to be fined if they didn't comply.
But what they didn't do was to extend that fine system to the customers. So from the get-go, no one would wear masks because there was not any financial penalty for not wearing one.
Business owners and employers didn't want to anger or drive away their customers so they stopped enforcing the masks mandate from the county.
People basically went about there business as if nothing had changed.
In reality, nothing had changed.
I’d like to see stacks of bureaucrats politicians and media filth in a burn pile a mile high. Every single one who did this needs to pay the price.
My thoughts as I read this. The lockdown paradigm became dominant because the powers that be, like Bill Gates, favored it.
Why did they favor it? because it gave them power to dictate how people live.
How did it become dominant? Because those who championed it would get funded more than those who opposed it. The same way Anthropogenic Climate Change became the dominant theory in so many disciplines.
The Democrats need to pivot on this issue and convince the American idiots through a full court media press that opposition to lockdowns and mask wearing is racism and white supremacism. If you don’t comply, then you don’t believe that black lives matter.
“Governors, especially totalitarian leaning blue state governors, locked down everyone and negated the purpose of the lockdowns to begin with.”
Democrat Governor of NC yesterday said he would be able to “give us our summer” when 2/3 of the state’s population is vaccinated.
I will be enjoying my summer as a free American and not some subject of a commie regime.
And, I might add, I will enjoy my summer without getting a vaccine as a requirement.
The democRATS have used this pandemic to divide our country between the oppressed and free Americans.
I pity those Americans in states like yours where the governors have a God complex thinking they can micromanage your lives.
“I pity those Americans in states like yours where the governors have a God complex thinking they can micromanage your lives.”
The state legislature attempted to intervene and take away his emergency power. Of course he vetoed the bill.
Thanks george76!
The original idea of masking as I understood involved three factors, each of which has not proved to be decisive in the virulence of COVID-19:
1) Immune system naiveté- The virus is new, but not so new as to kill off large segments of the population.
2) Fomite Transmission- The risk is considered to be “very low” even according to the CDC.
3) Aerosols- By which I mean long range small droplet transmission. Not happening.
Even if all three factors were in fact as bad as feared, the only purpose of the mask and distancing was to “flatten the curve.” There was supposed to be a way to not overwhelm the hospital system. Remember the NYC hospital ship? Remember Franklin Graham’s emergency hopital? Nobody thought we wouldn’t need it.
The critical factor in transmission is inoculum! That means you get it by close contact for a prolonged time because you gotta get enough of it at once. I cannot say that masks make it worse, but somebody needs to look at that.
Here is the latest I have on inoculum:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7686757/
Masks come up in the last paragraph before the conclusion. They are NEVER going to say masks don’t work, but at least they can imagine better strategies that actually will help.
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