Thank you for your indefatigable efforts over the last five years. You are among a small group of people whose goal was to use an inquiring mind and tell the truth. I am reading David Zweig's book and have to put it down often because the sorrow and anger at how American citizens were treated. The Public Health establishment, uncompassionate and unscientific, with the enabling unquestioning media drove the narrative everyday with fear and anxiety. Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis and Sweden were without question the leaders in showing that Public Health's last concern was the health of the public. Even my own supposed red state of Alabama is still being lead by Scott Harris who has not lost power but has gained power. He assumed the position of President of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials last fall proclaiming the importance of trust and transparency. He remains unrepentant and unaccountable because of our feckless legislature. Alabama public health, which is dismal, is entirely controlled by doctors with no political accountability. I am glad that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is head of NIH and Dr. Vinay Prasad will be at the FDA.
Harris being from Alabama was probably a key part of his elevation. The desirability of circling the wagons and defending yourself and your colleagues at all costs is, I think, one of the big things that public health officials took away from 2020-2022. Protect your reputation and your job: make that your biggest priority. In Alabama, Harris had a harder time doing that than his peers in the Northeast and West Coast. So he got rewarded for sticking to his guns.
I had not thought of it that way. He protected his peers and institutions (Alabama Department of Public Health -ADPH, CDC, FDA, UAB) more than citizens. One Alabama media outlet included this statement, “ADPH has an obligation and a duty to the citizens of Alabama to promote, protect, and improve Alabama’s health. ADPH’s goal is never to restrict freedoms and rights, but it’s imperative to keep Alabama’s families and communities safe at all costs.” “all costs” doesn’t include facing criticism (he bans all social media comments) from the citizens adversely affected by his decisions. “all costs” doesn’t include responding to and providing information requested by citizens. Alabama citizens alone carry “all costs” in his world. “All costs” is an arrogant statement trying to negate all the misery caused by his mandates, edicts, ukase, diktats, and mendacities. Despite his goal to “never to restrict freedoms and right” Dr. Harris did, in fact, destroy our freedoms and rights for a long time and he would do it all again.
Thank you for this and your other work. I reread your timelines on the experts claims about effectiveness of vaccines and post vaccination myocarditis. It’s great work. But as I read it it pulled me back to a time when I regularly followed the medical literature that drew different evidence based conclusions from the department of public health I was working in. Failure to block transmission was a hill I died on. No argument was winnable with the experts. That’s when I quit public health work. The damage done by withholding, lying, ignoring and enforcing is prevalent today with trust in health agencies in the toilet and vaccination rates for other infectious diseases below rates needed to prevent endemicity. I get a knot in my stomach whenever I think back to that time when evidence based decisions were ignored.
Reading your pieces on Twitter and Substack were beacons of
hope to me all those years. Echoing what’s already been said, thank you, Kelley. I’m engrossed in “In Covid’s Wake” now, written by two Princeton professors, self-described progressives. Imagine that back in those years. Though I did see a fellow driver masked, alone in his car, yesterday at a stoplight :)
"In many ways, the five-year anniversary of Covid has felt like a turning point in the Covid discourse, where it’s now acceptable for mainstream people to acknowledge at least some of the excesses of our Covid response."
Agreed, and thank you for all of your contributions.
I wish it felt like that where I live!! Still very much a WIP, I'm afraid... (with Trump's reelection setting the natural process back a bit, I'm afraid... 😬)
The work is not done, but it's become a lot more acceptable to talk about how crazy some of our mitigations were - like masking young children in day care or filling skate parks with sand. And more "experts" are willing to admit that long-term school closures were bad policy and that vaccine mandates may have backfired (as many of us predicted).
the left has fully pivoted to 'there was just so much we didn't know, we really had no idea of severity, etc, etc' effectively moving the gaslighting forward, ignoring the fact that they ridiculed all of us that read the existing abstracts for 'doing our own research'. But so it goes.
That's why it's important that we keep talking about this, and where books like David's and In Covid's Wake are helpful - to help show that we actually DID know a lot, and officials made bad decisions based on the data we had. We threw out the plans, we didn't analyze risks/benefits, and we silenced any opposing views to create a false consensus that we were "following the science."
Thank you for your indefatigable efforts over the last five years. You are among a small group of people whose goal was to use an inquiring mind and tell the truth. I am reading David Zweig's book and have to put it down often because the sorrow and anger at how American citizens were treated. The Public Health establishment, uncompassionate and unscientific, with the enabling unquestioning media drove the narrative everyday with fear and anxiety. Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis and Sweden were without question the leaders in showing that Public Health's last concern was the health of the public. Even my own supposed red state of Alabama is still being lead by Scott Harris who has not lost power but has gained power. He assumed the position of President of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials last fall proclaiming the importance of trust and transparency. He remains unrepentant and unaccountable because of our feckless legislature. Alabama public health, which is dismal, is entirely controlled by doctors with no political accountability. I am glad that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is head of NIH and Dr. Vinay Prasad will be at the FDA.
Harris being from Alabama was probably a key part of his elevation. The desirability of circling the wagons and defending yourself and your colleagues at all costs is, I think, one of the big things that public health officials took away from 2020-2022. Protect your reputation and your job: make that your biggest priority. In Alabama, Harris had a harder time doing that than his peers in the Northeast and West Coast. So he got rewarded for sticking to his guns.
I had not thought of it that way. He protected his peers and institutions (Alabama Department of Public Health -ADPH, CDC, FDA, UAB) more than citizens. One Alabama media outlet included this statement, “ADPH has an obligation and a duty to the citizens of Alabama to promote, protect, and improve Alabama’s health. ADPH’s goal is never to restrict freedoms and rights, but it’s imperative to keep Alabama’s families and communities safe at all costs.” “all costs” doesn’t include facing criticism (he bans all social media comments) from the citizens adversely affected by his decisions. “all costs” doesn’t include responding to and providing information requested by citizens. Alabama citizens alone carry “all costs” in his world. “All costs” is an arrogant statement trying to negate all the misery caused by his mandates, edicts, ukase, diktats, and mendacities. Despite his goal to “never to restrict freedoms and right” Dr. Harris did, in fact, destroy our freedoms and rights for a long time and he would do it all again.
Thank you for this and your other work. I reread your timelines on the experts claims about effectiveness of vaccines and post vaccination myocarditis. It’s great work. But as I read it it pulled me back to a time when I regularly followed the medical literature that drew different evidence based conclusions from the department of public health I was working in. Failure to block transmission was a hill I died on. No argument was winnable with the experts. That’s when I quit public health work. The damage done by withholding, lying, ignoring and enforcing is prevalent today with trust in health agencies in the toilet and vaccination rates for other infectious diseases below rates needed to prevent endemicity. I get a knot in my stomach whenever I think back to that time when evidence based decisions were ignored.
Thank you!
Reading your pieces on Twitter and Substack were beacons of
hope to me all those years. Echoing what’s already been said, thank you, Kelley. I’m engrossed in “In Covid’s Wake” now, written by two Princeton professors, self-described progressives. Imagine that back in those years. Though I did see a fellow driver masked, alone in his car, yesterday at a stoplight :)
Thank you for all you have done. Great to know there are bright, courageous people out there.
"In many ways, the five-year anniversary of Covid has felt like a turning point in the Covid discourse, where it’s now acceptable for mainstream people to acknowledge at least some of the excesses of our Covid response."
Agreed, and thank you for all of your contributions.
I wish it felt like that where I live!! Still very much a WIP, I'm afraid... (with Trump's reelection setting the natural process back a bit, I'm afraid... 😬)
The work is not done, but it's become a lot more acceptable to talk about how crazy some of our mitigations were - like masking young children in day care or filling skate parks with sand. And more "experts" are willing to admit that long-term school closures were bad policy and that vaccine mandates may have backfired (as many of us predicted).
the left has fully pivoted to 'there was just so much we didn't know, we really had no idea of severity, etc, etc' effectively moving the gaslighting forward, ignoring the fact that they ridiculed all of us that read the existing abstracts for 'doing our own research'. But so it goes.
That's why it's important that we keep talking about this, and where books like David's and In Covid's Wake are helpful - to help show that we actually DID know a lot, and officials made bad decisions based on the data we had. We threw out the plans, we didn't analyze risks/benefits, and we silenced any opposing views to create a false consensus that we were "following the science."