ARE WE SICK OF GOVERNMENT YET?

The corona tyranny offers arguments for separating science and state, and school and state.

Let's follow "the science."

"A new Pew Research Center survey finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there's been a continued decline in public trust in scientists," the organization reported last week. "Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This share is down 8 percentage points since November 2021 and down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak."

A full third of Americans say science is a wash, equally positive and negative. Eight percent say it's mostly negative. The plunge in support since the appearance of COVID-19 is no coincidence; that's when some scientists, especially those in official positions, began wielding "science" as a shield against debate and a tool for control.

It seemed reasonable in 2020 to heed widespread calls to "follow the science." With the outbreak of the pandemic why not let people versed in studying and dealing with disease set the tone? Pretty quickly, though, politicians and public health officials began justifying drastic and controversial measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closures as dictated by "the science."

"The phrase became associated with safetyism and overcaution, like people would use it sarcastically when they saw someone running through a field wearing an N95 mask," Faye Flam, a science journalist who launched the "Follow the Science" podcast and came to regret her choice of name, told The Washington Postlast year. "So much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics — the phrase can come off as sanctimonious, and the danger is that it says, 'These are the facts,' when it should say, 'This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.'"

"Sanctimonious" is a good description for officials who wield "science" to shield against criticism.

That's Reason's J. D. Tuccille, and his article goes on to note that in the same way people shop for academic principles, they can shop for scientific principles, raising the possibility that sponsored research is censorship per se.

Overt politicization, after court cases, following the publication of company documents, revealed officials and experts purporting to "follow the science" while actually indulging their own preferences and suppressing dissent.

Up to this point, the eroding credibility of science was largely a partisan matter. Democrats "followed the science" to restrictive public-health policies. Republicans, who generally favored a lighter public-health touch, doubted that public health officials wrapping themselves in science as if it was priestly garb could be trusted. Surveys showed the predictable outcome.

He concludes, "[A]n enormous amount of good will has been lost."

Indeed so, and those losses were preventable.  Consider the protracted school closures the corona tyranny gave us.  "In a new op-ed, The New York Times claims the evidence on learning loss is 'startling.'"  That's always how it is when your priors are so tight and the contrary evidence so strong.

The evidence is anything but startling though they position it as such.

It’s hard to describe how angry this “revelatory” piece of writing makes me.

No, I don’t feel any sense of redemption. I just feel angry that it took them this long. And that the journalistic outlet fails to acknowledge their own complicity in these devastating results.

To anyone paying attention, it was clear what would happen along.

But the propagandists of New York's Times thought they were Following The Science.  Apparently in a conflict between The Children^TM and The Science^TM the kids were expendable.

It was all obvious — the learning loss, the disengagement from education overall, the depression and anxiety and suicidality due to severe isolation (often summarized as “mental health impacts”), the chronic absenteeism, the drop out rates, the graduating without being able to read, the abuse at home, the loss of community and hope . . . I could go on. And on. And of course, the poorest, most vulnerable children were harmed the most.

But if anyone pointed that out in real time, we were called racists and able-ists and eugenicists. Among many other career-destroying smears.

It’s nice that The New York Times has caught on now. But in this accurate oh-so-too-late piece, they fail to acknowledge their own complicity in extending and furthering the devastating, ineffective and morally abhorrent school closures during 2020-2021, with restrictions to children continuing for more than a year after schools actually opened everywhere in the Fall of 2021.

They elevated the voices of those who furthered fear with a schools needs to be closed or else all the children and teachers will die hysteria.

Jennifer Sey thought she was of Woke World until she discovered she was not, and she's got more reason than many to be angry as her company fired her.  She doesn't quite call the Times fake news, or the Failing New York Times, but she arguably could.

The New York Times consistently published government and Big Pharma issued press releases as if they were journalism. They platformed the spokespeople of these entities and their paid influencers furthering unwarranted fear and packaging it as “the science.”

If a normie like me could read and interpret the data available since March 2020 and know that not only would closed schools be incredibly harmful to the most vulnerable children, but that their risk from covid was thousands of times less than an elderly person, then certainly the science desk at The New York Times should have been able to do so.

Simply pushing the narrative that “everyone was at equal risk” was journalistic malpractice.

There was plenty of malpractice to go around during the corona tyranny, and the opportunities to point out and turf out the responsible parties, whether in regime media or among the rent-seekers or regime science or politicians, abound.