A Covid Nuremberg, for the Sake of Justice By Brian Simpson

Lance Welton, has given his human biodiversity spin to the claim made by professor Emily Oster in recent article in The Atlantic, that there should be a Covid pandemic amnesty. He covers much of the same ground that we all have, but goes further is suggesting, as some US lawyers have done, that there needs to be a Nuremberg 2.0. This is I think very appropriate, since the main thing that the elites violated in the Covid mandates was people’s right to informed consent, subjecting them to an experimental vaccine that had untold side-effects. Hence there needs to be criminal penalties for the harms that have been done. The crime of the century cannot be forgiven, otherwise justice is a joke.

https://vdare.com/articles/no-emily-oster-we-don-t-need-a-covid-amnesty-we-need-a-covid-nuremberg

“When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit in 2020, the Ruling Class quickly shut down dissent and laid down quasi-religious dogmas and policies we now know weren’t just misguided but harmful: the virus emerged from a Chinese wet market and did not leak from a lab; we are all in this together and the virus affects all races similarly; everyone on the planet must wear a mask in public indefinitely; and, of course, everyone on the planet must be vaccinated. The punishments for heresy ranged from name-calling to being deplatformed on Twitter and YouTube. Police brutalized those who protested masks and lockdowns.

Amnesty? pic.twitter.com/Jg7Flrj0IJ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 1, 2022

But now the Ruling Class wants a COVID “Amnesty” for what they did to us. But we don’t need an Amnesty—we need COVID Nuremberg trials.

The Ruling Class, which stated with such fanatical satisfaction that it was right, was wrong, as is usually the case with ideologues who refuse to listen to contrary opinions. Many of us really felt what it must be like to live in a paranoid dictatorship: massive restrictions on what one could do, the compulsion to wear uncomfortable masks, and self-appointed “Karens” who demanded “social distancing,” even outdoors. Recall that cops tased a mom at an Ohio high school football game for not wearing a mask.

INSANITY: Mom aggressively arrested, tased for not wearing mask at Ohio high school football game (the mom was socially distanced and suffers from asthma, but apparently neither mattered) pic.twitter.com/nAdZrEd4Lj

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 25, 2020

Understandably, the suggestion that we must Amnesty the Ruling Class and its leftist Mainstream Media Information Ministry has invited no small amount of fury [Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, by Emily Oster, Atlantic, October 31, 2022].

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” the subhead of the piece says. That’s a great idea for those who fought to stop those of us of inquisitive disposition from getting to the truth, most notably by deplatforming on social media.

Oster [Tweet her/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.] a card-carrying member of America’s Ruling Class as a Harvard-educated economist now at Brown University, writes that she and her family even wore (home-made) masks when outdoors hiking, a precaution that she now acknowledges was ridiculous:

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Um, some of us did know, but that not insignificant fact aside, Oster now sues for peace:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too.

Like using man-eating police dogs on COVID protesters?

Some of us suspected early on that the virus leaked from a lab. I myself filed an article with VDARE.com in February 2020 arguing that COVID-19 was a lab leak, but couldn’t publish it—or even refer to its existence—until the official Narrative suddenly changed in May 2021, because VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow—rightly—feared being shut down by social media if he ran my piece (cf. Zero Hedge Twitter bans Zero Hedge after it posts coronavirus conspiracy theory, CBS, February 3, 2020). The officials, meaning Anthony Fauci and others at the highest levels, were wrong and very probably simply lying: they knew the evidence strongly suggested a leak.

This applies equally, albeit less noticed, to the Ruling Class reversal on race. While Oster and her crowd were masking up for outdoor (!) excursions, some of us spent our time tracking data and publishing pieces that showed, for instance, that the virus affects races differently, partly for genetic reasons. Months later, a government report vindicated that claim. In other words, we were right all along, and the race deniers were wrong. COVID affects the races differently.

When the pandemic began, the U.N. confidently stated that “COVID-19 does not discriminate; nor should our response.” That self-righteous piece of virtue-signalling didn’t age well [COVID-19 does not discriminate; nor should our response, Officer for the High Commission for Human Rights, March 20, 2020]. This was flatly wrong.

In contrast, I began to attach a mantra to my coverage of COVID and race:

If COVID-19 is not an Equal Opportunity disease, that means our race-denying Ruling Class is frightening most people too much—and not warning some people enough. This will not merely cause unnecessary chaos—it will cost lives.

This is exactly what happened.

Even the Washington Post has now acknowledged the truth, although it amusingly insisted the disparity is due to racial “injustice,” such as black people being poor [Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shifted, by Alikah Johnson and Dan Keating, October 22, 2022].

But in England, the virus affected poor whites less severely than wealthier Hindus, which implied, obviously, that the difference is genetic. People originally from hotter countries are less evolved to deal with flu, and they are less healthy because their dark skin, in a dark-winter ecology, places them in an evolutionary mismatch where they can’t synthesise enough Vitamin D to help fight infection. Yet two years of higher fatalities among minorities were required for British authorities to confess that truth.

Now, at last, the U.K. government admits that COVID adversely affects minorities more than it adversely affects whites [Updating ethnic contrasts in deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), England: 10 January 2022 to 16 February 2022, Office of National Statistics, April 7, 2022], but this was denied back in 2020.

The suppression of the truth, based on the wilful, ideological lie that “race is a social construct,” undoubtedly killed people. Why should we “Amnesty” those who contributed, directly or indirectly, to those fatalities?

Of course the thoroughly Establishment Emily Oster favors an “Amnesty.” It’s an Amnesty for the Ruling Class and its Enforcers, who at best were dogmatic and at worst simply lied to pretend that they were in control of a chaotic situation. As one critic has mockingly paraphrased her: “Hey, these were just honest mistakes, anybody could’ve messed up like that, it’s all good” [Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID, by Eugyppius, eugyppius: a plague chronicle, October 31, 2022].

“The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know,” Eugyppius acidly complained about the masking:

We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves.

But even though we now know that masks interfered with children’s language development and learning in school, they are still required in some places [Masks Still Don’t Work, City Journal, by Jeffrey Anderson, August 8, 2022]. Masks are about psychology, control, and a religious sense of “doing something” to appease the evil Covid God.

Never forget pic.twitter.com/4XaLJ6yH9O

— Trudy Seivwright MD (@SeivwrightTrudy) November 3, 2022

In early 2020, using the virus as an excuse, our de facto Deep State government, the authoritarian left, the Regime Media, and their enforcers in Big Tech, declared war on us. They erected a tyranny and upended the freedom to pursue the truth. “Liberty” was put on hold and replaced with fanatical dogma that could not be freely questioned. That indirectly led to unprecedented rioting by a traumatized, locked-down population, and quite likely skewed a presidential election, due to the economic shutdown and spike in COVID-justified mail-in voting.

We do not need a COVID Amnesty. We need a COVID Nuremberg.

For more of my reporting on COVID-19 and race:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/no-amnesty-for-lockdowners_4834331.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge&src_src=partner&src_cmp=ZeroHedge

Now that we can talk to our friends and neighbors about it, the reality is sinking in. What our public health experts and politicians did to this country was egregious. Inspired by the totalitarian lockdowns in Wuhan, China, and urged to replicate that policy by the World Health Organization in a report that Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health approved, all constitutional rights were thrown out by the government.

The churches were shut. The schools were closed, in some places for as long as two years, thus sacrificing the education of a whole generation. We faced restrictions on house parties. We couldn’t visit the elderly in homes, not even their sons and daughters who were paying the rent. There were even restrictions on travel between states: Quarantine rules made it impractical.

Health authorities specifically demanded the need to close all venues where people congregate. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Once people were allowed to crawl out from their domestic holes, they were forced to mask up (even though we had zero evidence that this would achieve anything!) and eventually get vaccine shots that everyone said would end the pandemic but obviously didn’t.

It’s been nearly three years of imposed hell. We now live with the after-effects, including terrible inflation, learning loss, drug addiction, rising crime, cultural nihilism, and wholly justified public fury, which are driving the Democrats to doom on Nov. 8 because it was the Democrats who leaned in and perpetuated all these policies long after they obviously failed.

So sure, people are upset. The right answer would be for our health authorities and politicians to apologize and beg for forgiveness. But nothing like that has happened. They just keep on pretending that all of this was fine. There has been no repeal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s claimed power to quarantine you next time, and the Biden administration’s own pandemic planning scheme is to prohibit states from opting out the next time around.

So let’s discuss Emily Oster’s piece in The Atlantic in which she claims that everyone needs to immediately comply with some kind of amnesty that she has declared. We’re supposed to forget it all and move on. And why is this? Because, she says, there was so much uncertainty. They just didn’t know about the virus. It was the fog of war, after all, and everyone did their best.

“We didn’t know,” she wrote, and then kept invoking the supposed “uncertainty” of the times, a word she deployed five times. Why, if she (or they) were so uncertain, did they so quickly decide to wreck all liberty in the United States? The so-called precautionary principle would suggest that government should undertake no such policy because of the obvious harms it would impose. They did it anyway.

Here’s the problem. This is complete rot. We knew from February 2020 of the risk stratification of the disease’s serious outcomes. It was in all the papers. We had the data. We knew from the Diamond Princess experience in February 2020 that there were no deaths of those younger than the age of 70 on the ship. That comported with every bit of information we had at the time. Based on what we knew at the time, there was absolutely no case for locking down at all and every reason to not do this.

For that matter, Oster could have merely read the news. MSNBC on Jan. 30, 2020, reported that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s health adviser, said: “Everyone in America should take a very big breath, slow down, and stop panicking and being hysterical. We are having a little too much histrionics on this.”

On March 4, 2020, Slate reported: “There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless. … Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest.”

On the same day, Psychology Today reported: “Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know. … It’s scary to think that an invisible enemy is out there to make you sick. But your doctor is not panicking, and you don’t need to, either.”

We can even turn to Fauci himself, who wrote as follows on Feb. 28, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine: “The overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1 percent) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10 percent and 36 percent, respectively.”

On March 17, 2020, legendary epidemiologist John Ioannidis broke it all down: “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco. … One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.”

Wow, talk about prophetic! All of that happened. He knew this not because he was clairvoyant, but because he has a working brain. You can’t just shut down society without egregious consequences that affect health, economics, social relations, and so much more. In other words, authorities acted with extreme measures that were in no way justified by the data and did so with measures they knew for sure would massively damage the social fabric.

For that matter, we’ve known about the damage of lockdowns since they were first pushed in 2005–06. Famed epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that such measures would turn a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe!

So here we are, living amid catastrophe. There are no apologies. There’s only coverup. Now, you might ask the following: Why, if the mainstream media from late-January through mid-February 2020 were counseling calm and urging against lockdown frenzy, and even Fauci was saying that we didn’t need a vaccine to get out of this pandemic, was there a sudden shift? What new evidence came in that caused Fauci, along with his minions and inner circle, to surround Trump in early March 2020 and demand that he greenlight the lockdowns?

Why did this happen? I have my own theories, but they’re only that. My suspicions are that 1) Fauci and his gang believed that they were culpable for the pandemic due to the National Institutes of Health’s funding of the Wuhan lab and so pushed the lockdowns in the hope of stopping the spread or just causing a chaotic diversion of attention, and 2) getting Trump to wreck the economy would be the surest path to unseating him in the November 2020 election. On the second point, it so happened that the manufactured disease panic allowed changes in absentee voting rules that ultimately led to Trump’s defeat.

Now, you could call this a conspiracy theory. I sincerely hope it isn’t true because it would be a scandal for the ages. And perhaps I’m wrong here, and there’s some other reason for the egregious actions that wrecked millions of businesses and lives. I would like to know what it is. But as for Oster’s excuse that we just didn’t know—that we believed that the virus was worse than it was, that masks would stop the spread, and so on—that claim is utterly baseless. So, too, does her demand for “amnesty” for the lockdowners fall flat.

We knew. We knew for sure, based on existing data what the nature of the threat was, and we knew for sure, based on historical experience and common sense, the deep damage that would be caused by the lockdowns. The plea of ignorance here simply doesn’t hold up to any evidentiary standard.”