Free Republic

During the “Overtime” segment of his “Real Time” show on Friday, Bill Maher expressed concern over massive levels of government debt, said that we’re not in a pandemic anymore, and stated that it’s questionable whether we should have had such a drastic response to the pandemic when there are legitimate arguments that lockdowns had no real impact. Maher stated, “Well, we have problems we haven’t had in a very long time like inflation. And certainly, we have been running up the debt, but not the levels that we have in recent years where we just sort of went, oh, numbers...

From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations. While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them. Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures....

‘It’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later.’ Lockdown is over, but the scars of isolation aren't going away. Lily May Holland, 16, remembers the long, lonely days during lockdown when her parents, both doctors, were at work. She’d watch “Gilmore Girls” and “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy” over and over. She stopped eating and started doing Chloe Ting workouts. “I’d have gum and a smoothie all day,” she said. They lived in the sticks north of Charlottesville, Virginia, on a dirt road between farms and trailer parks and the occasional Baptist...

Infants have “been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”. Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report. Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities. Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly,” the...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted there is an adolescent mental health crisis due to the draconian coronavirus protocols they recommended. According to new survey data released Thursday, more than 44 percent of American teens reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” while nearly 20 percent seriously considered suicide, and nine percent actually did attempt suicide in 2020.

In an interview on the BBC [cut] "I don't want to use the word ‘lockdowns.’ That has a charged element to it. But, I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we're seeing with infections," he said, noting that the U.S. is currently moving toward normalcy. "Having said that, we need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along," Fauci noted. "And then, if things change and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalization, we should be prepared and...

After weeks of panic-buying for fear that the Communist authorities would order another lockdown, President Xi has apparently tossed his “targeted” approach aside and ordered a lockdown in Shanghai, the country’s largest city and its financial hub.,/A>The city of 26 million will be locked down “in two stages” over the span of nine days as authorities try to quash surging COVID numbers. The lockdowns were ordered after the city reported a new record number of infections on Saturday. During that 24 hours period, the city recorded 2,631 new asymptomatic cases, which accounted for nearly 60% of China’s total new asymptomatic...

Dr. Scott Atlas, former medical advisor to the Trump administration, lamented the damage caused by Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdowns. He also denounced the globalist-backed medical tyrants responsible for these draconian measures. Atlas gave a presentation about the disastrous effects of COVID-19 policies on March 23 to students of Michigan State University. He referenced several studies that revealed the full extent of the damage caused by lockdowns. These include excess deaths, severe mental health issues and lasting economic damage to the lower echelons of society. Atlas also pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic drew a clear line among those brainwashed and...

The outrageous prices at the grocery store and gas stations – the highest ever recorded and increasing at rates too fast to calculate with precision – are yet more collateral damage from the initial lockdowns two years ago. The story unfolds over two years but the line of causality is direct. Apparently it’s going to get much worse. I wonder if at some point, no one will remember how this all began. Maybe everyone has already forgotten. I asked a friend: do you think people understand the relationship between the March 2020 lockdowns and the wild price increases two years...

How the C-Suite Embraced Lockdowns and Economic WarBy David Stockman Economics 9 minute readA while back, corporate America was bending over backwards to appease the Virus Patrol with lockdowns, mandatory masking and threats to fire anyone who didn’t take the Jab.This was supposedly owing to the “science,” but it has long been evident that the latter was a limpid cover story. Big Business complied because the business culture of the corporate elites has become deeply confused and even corrupt.Their stocks being vastly overvalued owing to the Fed’s relentless and egregious monetary expansion, the C-suites have lost track of their #1...

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) railed against him chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci for warning about a return of restrictions due to a new strain of COVID-19. Paul said Fauci was “flat-out wrong” to push for more restrictions. He called Fauci a “menace” who “hasn’t been right really about anything since the start” of the coronavirus pandemic. “[I]f you believe in Dr. Fauci, what you should do immediately is go get stickers and make sure they are on the floor, everywhere you go, and a yardstick so you know you are...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans this week that they could soon face additional COVID-19 lockdown measures should a new strain of the virus cause case numbers to increase. Fauci, who also serves as an adviser to President Biden, said the BA.2 subvariant could soon increase the rate of infections in America. He suggested that Americans should "be able to pivot" back and forth between a more common way of life and the measures that were taken in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus at the height of...

Lockdown in Chinese manufacturing hubs Shenzhen and Changchun threatens to worsen inflation in the U.S. and to disrupt global supply chains. The U.S. imported nearly $48 billion of goods from China in January, the latest month for which data is available. Last year, imports of Chinese goods totaled $506 billion, the second-highest level of imports from China on record. The Chinese government has placed the city of Shenzhen on lockdown for at least a week and ordered everyone in the city to undergo three rounds of covid tests. The lockdown has halted many manufacturing operations in Shenzhen, including those of...

In a roundtable discussion in Doral, Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis warned that COVID rules will suddenly return after the midterm elections if Democrats are allowed to remain in power. “The minute those elections are over,” he said, “they will impose mandates if they feel the need to do that. They will impose restrictions.” Criticizing the recent lifting of restrictions in blue states as mere political moves aimed at bolstering failing election campaigns, the Florida governor said, “So when you start to see them kind of re-evaluate or say all this, just understand this. The science didn’t change. The medical science...

The New York Times said vaccinations, booster shots and masks have not caused a major difference in case rates between parts of the country with different levels of COVID-19 precautions in a Wednesday morning newsletter. The article compared COVID-19 case rates for Democratic and Republican areas, noting that Democrats were more likely to wear masks, get vaccinated and boosted, avoid public spaces and shut down in-person schools over virus fears. “These factors seem as if they should have caused large differences in case rates. They have not. And that they haven’t offers some clarity about the relative effectiveness of different...

Dr. Naomi Wolf is a bestselling author, columnist, and professor; she is a graduate of Yale University and received a doctorate from Oxford. She is cofounder and CEO of DailyClout.io, a successful civic tech company.Reprinted with permission from NaomiWolf.substack.com. Some people who love me advised me not to write this essay, and not to use its current title. “Take the high road,” I was advised. Usually that is a good idea, but not in this case — not at this moment. In this essay I need to talk about some people — mainly privileged people, people who could make a...

Said he was told to stay silent on doomsday modeling.. A senior epidemiologist has publicly apologized to his daughter’s generation for failing to more strenuously oppose “morally wrong” COVID lockdown measures such as school closures that caused massive damage to children. The stunning admission was made by Professor Mark Woolhouse, who revealed to Sky News that he was told to “correct” his views after he criticized doomsday COVID models. The Edinburgh University academic said “plain common sense” was a “casualty” of lockdown and that his daughter’s generation “has been so badly served by mine.” Decrying harmful lockdown measures such as...

The good news is that COVID is on the wane. Dr. Anthony Fauci, seeing his control of the nation slipping through his fingers, attempted to continue the fright mongering You may be done with Covid, but Covid is not done with the United States He is even likely to push a 4th injection. The problem is what is the Biden regime going to do to maintain control over the proletariat? We have a pretty good idea. With impeccable timing the 6-foot 4-inch Lurch lookalike private jet flying tax dodging climate czar says never mind inflation, war, the border, fentanyl, Ukraine...

On August 6, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that the agency claimed showed “Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection.” This assertion came amidst a public battle with Sen. Rand Paul, as the CDC released this data from Kentucky, Paul’s home state. Yet after indisputable scientific evidence continued to pile up in favor of natural immunity, the CDC finally capitulated on January 19, 2022, recognizing the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination alone: “Between May and November 2021, people who were unvaccinated and did not have a prior COVID-19 infection remained at the highest risk...

As the mainstream narrative about the origin of COVID-19 falls apart, it’s time to put other widely accepted facts about the virus—and the devastating measures they were used to justify—under the same scrutiny. On March 13, 2020, the public school district where I teach announced that all classrooms and buildings would be closed for two weeks. Then two weeks turned into two months, and two months turned into over a full year without in-person instruction. My school serves a diverse population of low-income students in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is impossible to overstate the severity of this disruption...