Free Republic

The nation’s corporate media have mostly downplayed or ignored the U.S. economy’s remarkable performance following the COVID-19 lockdowns earlier this year. The nation’s corporate media have mostly downplayed or ignored the U.S. economy’s remarkable performance following the COVID-19 lockdowns earlier this year. They have completely ignored how pandemic-related economic restrictions in many states have prevented the ongoing recovery from being even stronger.In just five months, the unemployment rate has fallen by 45 percent from its April peak of 14.7 percent, and the economy has also regained just over half of the 22.2 million jobs lost in March and April. This...

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met. The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,”...

Davos billionaires want socialist ‘Green New Deal’ via the back door.. Former Australian Senator Cory Bernardi presented a piece for Sky News Australia in which he claimed that the agenda behind the COVID panic was for elite Davos billionaires to bring about a “great reset” that would see permanent social and economic changes. Noting that there is “something unusual about the continuing pandemic panic,” Bernardi cited medical experts who “now acknowledge that lockdowns don’t work” and asked viewers to “consider if there is another agenda at work.” Indeed, in a recent interview with the Spectator, the World Health Organization’s special...

...Lockdown travel restrictions have prevented many farmers from planting or harvesting crops, and denied them access to markets to sell their produce and to buy seeds and tools. Pastoralist communities have been unable to move their animals to seasonal sources of food and water, affecting the health of their livestock and its value at sale. The middlemen who collect vegetables from farms and take them to market have been unable to visit, depriving many farmers of a vital source of income....The closure of street food vendors in South Africa, which support an estimated 500,000 livelihoods and provide food for 70...

Sky News host Rowan Dean says the next World Economic Forum in Davos has morphed from a “jet-setter climate gabfest” into a sinister “anti-democratic enterprise designed to destroy your job, steal your prosperity and rob your kids of a future”. “It's a hardcore leftist eco-horror show replete with quasi fascism,” he said. Mr Dean highlighted what he described as a “disturbing trend among many of the world's left-wing elites to increasingly conflate COVID-19 with climate change. “Many are going so far as to suggest that all the measures applied to the coronavirus, the lockdowns, the destruction of businesses, the suppression...

The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying countries should be careful how quickly they re-open. WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said that such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine The Spectator reported in a video interview. “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said.

Government officials in Sweden announced this week that the government expects to maintain its mild restrictions on gatherings “for at least another year” to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.Unlike most other European countries and nations around the world, Sweden declined to initiate a nationwide lockdown or mask mandates, opting instead for a policy that restricted large gatherings and relied on social responsibility to slow transmission of the virus.For months, Sweden was criticized for its decision to forego an economic lockdown.“Sweden becomes an example of how not to handle COVID-19,” CBS declared in its headline in a July article.Sweden had...

On Oct. 4, 2020, three preeminent experts — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford University — delivered the following declaration, calling for a different approach to dealing with the novel coronavirus than the lockdown model: As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted...

What makes Trump look worse before the election: trying to get a deal with no success, or pointing out that the other side doesn’t want a deal for political reasons and pulling out of talks? President Trump announced on Twitter that he was shutting down stimulus talks with Democrats until after the election because they were “not negotiating in good faith.” “Pelosi is asking for $2.4 Trillion Dollars to bailout poorly run, high crime, Democrat States, money that is in no way related to COVID-19,” wrote Trump.The president continued: “Immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill...

We hear all the time about how COVID shut down the economy. That is incorrect; COVID did not shut down the economy, the political response to COVID shut down the economy. There were a series of policy choices at all levels of state and local government across the land. The economic damage from those choices is immense. This is not a natural disaster, it is a man-made disaster. National data show that U.S. real GDP fell at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter, and was followed by 32% decline in the second quarter. This is the worst...

We can't have people prudent about COVID, or rational about COVID, or thoughtful, or courageous about COVID. That does not produce the social outcomes that these people want. Being scared of COVID does. In a Monday tweet celebrating his release from the hospital after testing positive for COVID-19, President Trump wrote: “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” He followed it with this similarly upbeat video statement: In a Monday tweet...

Governments in Western countries must end the draconian Covid-19 lockdowns and low-risk people must be allowed to “resume life more or less normally,” according to leading epidemiologists from the world’s top universities including Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. On Monday top international epidemiologists Dr. Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya from Stanford joined Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle to announce their latest initiative to reopen society and resume life in the West for those who are not vulnerable to the coronavirus. Said Kulldorff: “Most of my colleagues in infectious disease are in favor...

Despite no study anywhere and ever, peer-reviewed, double-blind, or whatever has shown masks to be 100 percent effective in blocking the spread of COVID-19, the jackals in the Democrat Party and the legacy media (sorry for the redundancy) are blaming President Trump for contracting the Chinese Wuhan virus, saying he had it coming and invited it through his propensity for not wearing a mask in certain situations. These buzzards circling his bedside at Walter Reed Medical Center have long called his campaign rallies “super-spreader” events, unlike the riots and protests which are magically COVID-proof. No medical journal or institution has...

The political drama in Michigan reveals how essential it is in a republic that the citizens defy unconstitutional and illegal orders of their government. The news broke late on Oct. 2 that the Michigan Supreme Court had invalidated Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s authority to issue executive orders related to Covid-19 after April 30. This was a victory for the rule of law, for the separation of powers, and for the liberties of the American people (okay, maybe just the people of Michigan).Whitmer had declared a state of emergency on March 10 and extended it through a series of executive orders, on...

A CORONAVIRUS vaccine may work but will need years to take effect if it does. Even in this best case scenario, Covid-19 will probably never be truly eradicated. With these beliefs, it may seem odd to find Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden's lockdownfree approach to dealing with the pandemic, so optimistic. Or to see Stockholm in full swing, with open bars, live music and smiling, unmasked faces. That's because state epidemiologist Mr Tegnell believes that so long as people are sensible, normal life can continue. Health officials say they want to treat the Swedish people as "subjects, not objects"...

Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) said President Donald Trump had “failed spectacularly” with his repose to the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “State of the Union.” Whitmer said, “We know Joe Biden has been tag this virus seriously and following the virus. The Trump administration, on the other hand, is not doing that.

In 1932, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states “laboratories of democracy.” Different states can test out different policies, and they can learn from each other. That proved true in 2020. Governors in different states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic at different times and in different ways. Some states, such as California, ordered sweeping shutdowns. Others, such as Florida, took a more targeted approach. Still others, such as South Dakota, dispensed information but had no lockdowns at all. As a result, we can now compare outcomes in different states, to test the question no one wants to ask:...

The Michigan Supreme Court on Friday struck down a 1945 law that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has been using to keep the state locked down since April. Whitmer has repeatedly extended a “state of emergency” for the past several months and pointed to a World War II-era law to do so, most recently lengthening it until October 27. But today, the basis for the ongoing lockdown was ruled unconstitutional. WHOA. Michigan Supreme Court rules against @GovWhitmer's use of 1945 emergency powers law in #COVID19 pandemic, says 145 law "is in violation of the Constitution of our state because it purports...

Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague Friday “Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data” about COVID-19, claimed NBC News political reporter Monica Alba in a Monday article.Within hours of NBC posting its story, numerous ideologically allied outlets had amplified it. Here are some screenshots of the Google News results for the story just a few hours later:“Everything he says is false,” NBC News quoted Redfield as saying of Atlas’s coronavirus recommendations. That’s just not true, top epidemiologists told The Federalist.“Dr. Redfield is a prominent and respected scientist, so I respect his opinion,...

When President Trump advocated reopening the economy, he warned that the lockdowns might have more of an adverse impact than COVID-19. Some assumed he was only talking about the economic implications but he also noted the risk of drug overdoses and suicides. We have seen increases in both of those types of deaths, along with significant mental health impacts.. the tragedy of extended lockdowns is compounded by people not seeking medical care. United Kingdom is noting this trend .. Unexplained deaths in private homes are nearly nine times higher than those from Covid-19 amid fears that many people are still...