Apparently, according to Tom Woods, the USA Surgeon General asked all 50 States to submit examples of covid misinformation and detail the damage it did.
That incredibly astute and brave and good man the Indiana Attorney General stepped up to the plate and delivered this. Send it to every one of our pitiful collection of politicians, I’d suggest:
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita acknowledged the harms done by misinformation, and then proceeded to list “the following examples of disinformation from the CDC and other health organizations that have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.”
Beautiful.
The document then lays out the problems with lockdowns and masks, refutes the claim that the jabs could prevent transmission (the basis for the various vaccine passports and mandates), and criticizes the authorities for overcounting Covid deaths and denying natural immunity.
Then, too, it criticizes the practice of mass asymptomatic testing: “Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals with contact tracing and quarantining of people who test positive has failed to substantively slow the progress of the epidemic and has imposed great costs on people who were quarantined even though they posed no risk of infecting others.”
“Three facts are crucial to understanding why this policy has failed,” it continues. “First, even close contacts of someone who tests positive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus are unlikely to pass the disease on. In a large meta-analysis of household contacts of asymptomatic positive cases, only 3% of people living in the same home got sick.
“Second, the PCR test that has been used to identify asymptomatic infections often returns a positive result for people who have dead viral fragments, are not infectious, and pose no risk of infecting others.
“And third, the contact tracing system becomes overwhelmed whenever cases start to rise, leading to long delays in contacting new cases. At precisely the moment when contact tracing might be needed, it cannot do its job.
“At the same time, quarantining people is costly – for workers without adequate sick leave, absenteeism due to contact tracing means pay cuts, lost opportunities, and perhaps even an inability to feed families. For children, it means more skipped lessons and missed opportunities for academic and social growth at school, with long-run negative consequences for their future prospects. In the UK, an official government review determined that its 37 billion pound investment in contact tracing was a waste of resources. The same is undoubtedly true in the United States.”
Then it takes on the implicit and sometimes explicit claim and goal of total eradication of Covid, even though it bore none of the characteristics of a disease that could be eradicated. The process of trying to do so, meanwhile, would cause incalculable damage:
“First, we have no technology to reduce the spread of the disease or meaningfully alter disease dynamics. Lockdowns and social restrictions fail because only people who can afford to work from home without losing their job can comply over long periods….
“Second, there are many animal hosts for SARS-CoV-2 and evidence of transmission between mammals and humans. One USDA study in late 2021 found that nearly 80% of white-tailed deer in the U.S. had evidence of COVID-19 antibodies. Dogs, cats, bats, mink, and many other mammals can get COVID-19. So even if the disease were eradicated among humans, zoonotic transmission would guarantee that it would come back.
“Finally, eradication takes a global commitment from every country – an impossible goal since COVID-19 eradication is far from the most pressing public health problem for many developing countries.”
So as usual, the real misinformation comes from the official sources, and the statement by the Indiana Attorney General is a rare case in which this problem is publicly acknowledged and countered.