Free Republic

In 2020, countries across the world followed in the footsteps of China and locked down hard against Covid-19. Liberties were drastically curtailed. As was economic activity, forcing governments to borrow tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds each to keep businesses and furloughed workers afloat. In Europe, one notable exception to this was Sweden. The Swedish government, despite facing heavy criticism, decided against imposing tight restrictions on social activity. The evidence now overwhelmingly suggests that Sweden made the right choice. SNIP>>>> Although we could not explore every possible impact of the various lockdown measures, our conclusions were straightforward: countries...

Dr. Phil went on the View today to promote a) his new book and b) his new show. As a former daytime TV host, Dr. Phil seemed to get a lot of leeway from the ladies of the View who mostly seemed to be trying to help him promote his stuff. But that changed toward the end of the segment when the discussion turned to the influence of social media on children. ... Dr. Phil very briefly made the case that, starting around 2008, smartphones led kids to become observers rather than participants, something which he connected to "the highest...

On Friday, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) said that the fact that they cut taxes and “kept things open during COVID” has helped the state grow its population and the state has managed to balance its budget because it has attracted more people to the state. On CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Lamont stated, “We inherited a $2 billion deficit. The first thing thing I wanted to do five years ago was make sure we didn’t raise taxes. That’s what the five previous governors had done. Now, it’s five years later, we’ve got our budget balanced. We’re making investments. And we’re able...

Americans have lost trust in some of the most important roles in a society, including those in the medical industry, teaching, and especially positions of institutional power. A Gallup poll in Honesty and Ethics conducted at the end of 2023 asked 800 respondents to rate the ethical standards of and their overall trust in a series of professions. "How you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields?" the survey asked. In terms of "very high" trust, all professions but one took a hit compared to previous years. The poll measured the downward trends dating...

Doctors have released a damning new report on America’s “failures” during the COVID pandemic, revealing that keeping schools closed for longer than necessary and forcing people to mask outside led the country to experience “eye-wateringly high” death rates compared to other first-world nations. Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Drexel University professor Ana Roux said the pandemic “failures began at the top” with poor communication from the federal government, which demonstrated a “surprising inability to generate reliable information, communicate it in a timely and consistent manner and translate it into sound policy.”

Many Americans are only now beginning to realize the devastating impacts that COVID lockdowns had on our society, as many businesses struggle still to recover and children try to catch up with missed learning opportunities. But what if the pandemic was just a trial run for more drastic restrictions and lockdowns related to climate change? After decades of arguing that the world is at a climate tipping point, Democrats may try to enact restrictions to stop perceived global warming at an order of magnitude larger than the COVID-19 measures imposed during the height of the pandemic. And considering the pandemic’s...

We are witnessing a vicious assault by enemies of all that is good, and our president is having to act in ways unprecedented in decades, maybe centuries. The biblical nature of good versus evil cannot be discounted as we examine what is happening on the streets of America. It’s Marxism in the form of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement versus our very capable and very underappreciated law enforcement professionals, the vast majority of whom are fighting to provide us safe and secure homes, streets and communities. When the destiny of the United States is at stake, and it...

Matt Walsh spoke for millions of freedom-loving Americans when he called Biden “a rotting bowl of oatmeal” following the president's vaccine mandate speech on Sept. 10, 2021. Walsh told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that Americans cannot be forced to take the COVID-19 vaccine. He also announced his organization’s “do not comply” lawsuit against Biden on his video program at the Daily Wire. Walsh’s argument that Biden had no more integrity than a rotting bowl of oatmeal may be used by voters again this year based on his newer pandemic-groundwork preparations. These include his Housing and Human Services department adding an...

TRUTH #1: The real cause of Jan 6 was systematic & pervasivecensorship and wrongdoing in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidentialelection — Covid, lockdowns, Antifa riots, Hunter Biden laptop, andirregularities in election conduct. https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1743733841502556457

Four years after the pandemic hit, officials are just starting to tell the truth about their panicked and destructive reaction to it. The lockdowns that were imposed worldwide (with the exception of Sweden and a few other countries) ran contrary to the longtime conventional wisdom that the main responsibility of the public-health system in a pandemic is to keep people calm and society functioning. Our public-health officials did the opposite. Intentionally. The hysteria they generated led to hundreds of thousands of non-Covid excess deaths, massive economic and social harms, and, worst of all, an unprecedented disaster in education. Francis Collins,...

The Biden-Harris regime has announced a new “White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience.” This new council is charged with preventing such problems as we experienced in the famous “supply chain crisis” of 2021 and early 2022 that preceded, and contributed to creating the current economic downturn. Granted, the Biden-Harris regime had already created a “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force” in the first months of 2021, virtually as soon as they changed the names and dress sizes on the White House letterhead, and that didn’t seem to help. Maybe they’re hoping we forgot about that one. But then again, maybe...

The World Health Organization has been urgently pushing a new Pandemic Treaty, officially known as the “Zero draft report of the Working Group on Strengthening WHO Preparedness and Response to Health Emergencies to the Seventy-fifth World Health Assembly.” A Republican Congressman, Dr. Rich McCormick from Georgia, slammed the need for such a pandemic treaty and specifically referenced the World Health Organization in a much-needed speech on the House floor. Much like other international organizations, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, World Health Organization, is vying to gain more authority through pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response accord,” Rep. McCormick said....

Today, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future. Joint statement from the governors: COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities. We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that...

A study conducted at Bangor University found that people with "communal personalities" – who were more caring, sensitive and aware of others' needs – adhered the most rigorously to the lockdown protocols. These types of people displayed the highest levels of continuing disturbance to their mental wellbeing during the post-lockdown period. In contrast, people with "agentic personalities" – who are more independent, more competitive and like to have control over their lives – were less compliant with the lockdown protocols. These types of people have been able to bounce back better from lockdown mode. In Scotland, disabled people were secretly...

Disabled Scots felt like their lives were ‘not worth saving’ during the pandemic after Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders were secretly imposed on many of them, an inquiry has heard. As Covid began to spread, GP receptionists even called up those with disabilities to try to persuade them to sign up to the orders, which inform doctors that they do not want their lives saved in an emergency. Glasgow Disability Alliance chief executive Tressa Burke also told the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry how some of her members were left so isolated during lockdowns they feared their bodies would not be discovered...

The Times lamented the learning losses stemming from the closures after pushing for the closures during the pandemic's height. The New York Times editorial board penned a new editorial on Saturday stating that the school closures enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic "may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education." The editorial provided a reflection on the "significant" learning losses stemming from keeping around 50 million kids out of the classroom because of the virus, and urged elected officials and the education community to move quickly to heal some of the damage. The...

A restaurant that refused to shut down during COVID-19 restrictions and didn't require documentation of vaccination had its charges dropped after finally getting its day in court. The crown dropped charges against Jesse Johnson, owner of Without Papers Pizza, after just 10 minutes of action in the courtroom, Media Bezirgan reported. The Calgary, Canada, business faced shutdowns and charges from the Alberta provincial government after it refused to close while also declining to participate in Canada's vaccine passport program, which required two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to eat indoors at restaurants. "These bastards, they literally tried to break me...

Gavin Newsom is celebrating the second French Laundry moment of his governorship practically on the anniversary of the first one! In November 2020, all humanity in his fiefdom was supposed to be on lockdown. Californians .. be ready to answer waspish Where's your mask!! epithets, and not to eat with anyone outside their bubble — especially not for Thanksgiving because you'll kill Grandma! Three years ago this very week, LA reporter Bill Melugin posted photos showing Gavin Newsom, his wife, and all manner of lobbyists, including a health care lobbyist and California Medical Association lobbyist, collected at the French Laundry...

It’s been a continuing mystery for three years, at least to me but many others too. In October 2020, in the midst of a genuine crisis, three scientists made a very short statement of highly public health wisdom, a summary of what everyone in the profession, apart from a few oddballs, believed only a year earlier. The astonishing frenzy of denunciation following that document’s release was on a level I’ve never seen before, reaching to the highest levels of government and flowing through the whole of media and tech. It was mind-boggling. For proof that nothing in the document was...

It’s almost — almost, given what we know about how the U.S. government function at what interests it actually serves (spoiler alert: it’ not yours) — unbelievable that this is a real news story at this late date in 2023, having gone through a years-long series of lockdowns and injection mandates and “died suddenly” post-vax deaths and all the rest. But here we are.Really? Peter Daszak is in charge of yet another NIH effort to “prevent” viruses from jumping from bats to people by putting infected bats and people in daily contact?It’s even worse than it looks—and it looks utterly...