The draconian measures implemented as a result of the COVID-19 panic will probably end on June 1.
This mad experiment in shutting down society will be over. We will be allowed to go back to work and back to play. But it won’t be the same.
Some marginal, mostly mom and pop type businesses will not reopen.
The amount of money poured into the system by the Federal Reserve will result in higher prices for the goods and services we will buy. That is real price inflation will soar but it may not be reflected immediately in government inflation indexes since there may be heavy discounting of things we won’t be interested in buying such as cruises that will be counted in the indexes. Prices will only go up for the things we are buying.
But an equally significant change will be of a different nature.
The former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, with associates, has come out with a paper, National
Coronavirus Response: A ROAD MAP TO REOPENING.
Gottlieb is heavily tied in with the pharmaceutical industry (On his Twitter page he lists affiliations with Pfizer, Illumina, Aetion, Inc. and Tempus Labs.) and he is a key behind the scenes adviser to the Trump administration.
The key sections of the paper that every American should be concerned about are these:
The CDC should work with state and local health officials, health care providers, CMS and health insurers, and other public-health stakeholders to create a national plan for how mass vaccination will be carried out across the country. This plan should identify who
will administer vaccinations, where vaccines will be offered, and how data will be collected on vaccination rates, as well as possible adverse events from the vaccine. Indemnification of vaccine developers and manufacturers should also be considered. Congress could enact legislation to support a process for compensation of any individual who has an adverse event from the vaccine, which requires medical care.
In other words, he is talking about mass vaccinations where it is not clear the vaccinations will be safe. Otherwise, why is he calling for an indemnification of vaccine developers and manufacturers? And why is he also calling for legislation to compensate anyone who has an adverse reaction?
Note well: He doesn’t go into details about his call for a mass vaccination but there is the hint that he has in mind that everyone should be forced to get the vaccination. Got that? Manufacturers get indenmnified against adverse reactions to a vaccine that you may be forced to get—even though you may not be part of the at-risk group that would suffer serious consequences if infected by COVID-19.
As Bretigne Shaffer has written:
Do we want to live lives in which we get to make our own choices and decisions, or do we want to live the kind of lives where our choices are made for us, by some centralized authority?…Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said that a vaccine could be available for widespread use within 12-18 months. And then what? Will everyone be required to be tested for Covid-19? And to have this vaccine? Regardless of any possibly dangerous side effects, regardless of how quickly it has been developed and tested? regardless of the waiving of product liability for those who make the vaccines?…
How about: No.
The most critical issue in all of this is not, and never was, determining the most effective way to deal with crises like this one (and if it were, there is more than enough evidence from this outbreak alone to entirely disqualify state action from that competition.) This is not about whether government-ordered lockdowns “work” to stem the spread of a deadly virus. Nor is it even about how deadly that virus is or is not.
The much more important issue is: What kind of world are we creating when we allow a government to have this kind of power?
And don’t for a minute think that Gottlieb isn’t thinking big about this vaccine.
He is thinking globally:
The CDC, the US Agency for International Development, the State Department, and other US stakeholders should continue to work with WHO and other international organizations and national leaders to plan for how the US will assist other countries (particularly low- and middle-income countries) with obtaining vaccine and implementing mass vaccination. Support from the United States and higher-income nations will be critical for controlling the virus globally and saving lives around the world, as well as reducing the impact that future waves of the pandemic may have
on the US population.
But it doesn’t stop there. Things get worse toward the conclusion of the paper:
We need to move away from a decentralized system that promotes unequal implementation of preparedness measures across the nation and toward more coordinated execution of response. We should develop clear and effective plans for the implementation of public-health measures such as quarantine and the unification of actions made by state and local health departments. Outbreaks are matters of regional—and more typically national—concern Preparedness for public-health emergencies should
be elevated as a function in the White House, with a coordinating function analogous to the director of national intelligence.
That is he is calling for authoritarian national healthcare dictates by the president when there are “emergencies.” Will diabetes, obesity, smoking, attention deficit disorder, “improper” social attitudes eventually be called emergencies? We are talking about a move down the road of old school Soviet Union-style authoritarianism here.
As Thomas DiLorenzo has warned us:
A third category of neo-communism is the “public health” professions. Yes, there are many employees in all these government agencies who are statisticians and nerds and not ideologues. And yes, the FDA, NIH, ETC. have often become corrupt tools of crony capitalists which is not exactly the same as communism. But just look at what their end game has become with this minor cold virus. These are the people who produce “studies” claiming that gun ownership is a disease — a mental disease. Their impulse is always to either ban or mandate consumption, especially of vaccines. The female cheerleaders for mandatory vaccines are, ludicrously, many of the same “feminists” who would scream “my body, my choice!” when it comes to abortion, and then turn around and scream bloody murder at anyone who voices objections to dozens of mandatory vaccinations of, first, everyone’s children, and then everyone in general. Then their slogan becomes “Your body, NO choice!!”
The “public health professionals” are the architects and “intellectual” supporters of the totalitarian police state that the U.S. has become in just the past two weeks. The virus will disappear almost completely with the warmer weather, as the cold and flu season ends, at which point they will tell us that it is not the ultraviolet rays of the sun but their police state that did the trick. They will pat themselves on the back, the media will cheer them and make them celebrities, and they will therefore be encouraged to declare “public health emergencies” ever more often. “Public” health is the health of the state.
A few short weeks ago it would have been hard to imagine that the governments of the United States would shut down most of the economy but it has happened. Down the road, it may come as a shock to us what they call a healthcare emergency.
Governments have discovered that the masses respond very well to health fears. They will in the future be prepared to trigger health “crises” real, imagined or manufactured when the masses need to be brought into line or just when some egomaniac president needs a distraction. Not to mention the power freaks who will always be calling for more controls over the people–and will use the COVID-19 panic as a reason to expand control.
–RW