The Brownstone Institute

 

The Brownstone Institute provides many original and profound points of views 

including one that I have lately made my ‘Delende Carthago’: 

The People are at war not (only) with the private psychopath individuals and the entities they mastermind 

but the States !!! (here)

Another powerful text concerning our children is this:

The Tribe that Wants Kids Forever Masked

Brownstone Institute’s scientific director is former Harvard Prof. Martin Kulldorff, one of the most qualified public health pandemic experts in the United States but, to the narrative-shapers, he’s become a pariah. Here’s why …

 

'Science and Public Health Are Broken'

BY TYLER DURDEN

FRIDAY, FEB 18, 2022 - 04:40 AM

Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times 

(excerpts)

As a prominent epidemiologist and statistician, Kulldorff has worked on detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks for two decades. His methods are widely used around the world and by almost every state health department in the United States, as well as by hundreds of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Kulldorff has also worked on vaccine safety for decades, developing globally used methods for monitoring adverse reactions in new vaccines.

His résumé on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website is 45 pages long and includes a list of 201 peer-reviewed published journal papers. His work has been cited more than 27,000 times.

Since 2003, Kulldorff worked at Harvard Medical School, first as an associate professor of population medicine and later as a professor of medicine.

In November, Harvard and Kulldorff abruptly parted ways.

Kulldorff prefers to keep the reasons private, but it’s hard to ignore that he placed himself in the crosshairs of the pandemic narrative early on in the “15 days to slow the spread” lockdown and has since paid the price.

It’s quite something for a public health scientist at the top of his game to admit that “both science and public health are broken.”

(…)

 

The Great Barrington Declaration

His early efforts culminated in the Great Barrington Declaration, published with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in October 2020. The declaration called for a more nuanced approach to the one-size-fits-all restrictions that had been imposed on much of Western society.

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

The two other authors are also amply qualified in the field. Gupta is a professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

Kulldorff said the Great Barrington Declaration proposed nothing new.

“It’s just the basic fundamental principles of public health that existed in the pandemic preparedness plan that was prepared many years before,” he said. “It’s sort of astonishing that it wasn’t followed from the very beginning of the pandemic.”

Conventional public health science had deemed it unnecessary and potentially harmful to close schools and small businesses, to impose masking on the general public, and to quarantine healthy people.

Kulldorff said the document wasn’t for the politicians, or scientists, or even the doctors—although thousands of each signed it.

“The most important audience was the public,” he said, “because it’s the public that ultimately will end these misguided public health policies. It’s the public, regular people, who are suffering the consequences.”

 

He said the authors wanted to advise the average person that their intuition was correct, that the restrictions weren’t based on public health science—”so when you oppose them, you’re standing on firm scientific ground.”

“The key thing was to break the pretense that there was scientific consensus for these lockdowns—which there wasn’t.”

The appearance of a scientific consensus was formed through high-profile public health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Deborah Birx, as well as corporate media along with  the stifling of opposing viewpoints.

“There’s really no public health arguments against the declaration. So if you want to criticize it, you have to … make up lies about it and then attack that, as well as slander the people behind it. And they did both of those things,” Kulldorff said.

(…)

 

Collateral Damage

One of the major precepts behind the Great Barrington Declaration is that public health is wide-ranging and needs a long-term view, yet many influential scientists had a singular focus on COVID-19 outcomes.

“One of the principles of public health is, it’s not about one disease, like COVID, it’s about all of public health,” Kulldorff said.

That singular focus resulted in government officials filling skateboard parks in California with sand and locking up children’s playgrounds with chains and yellow police tape. Millions of children were sent home from school and for almost two years were forced to learn virtually from home.

Meanwhile, teen suicide rates have increased, drug and alcohol abuse has increased, domestic violence has risen, while childhood vaccinations decreased and cancer screenings plummeted.

Health experts warned in May 2020 that as pandemic-driven hardship puts added strain on the mental health of Americans, as many as 154,000 extra lives may be lost due to drug or alcohol abuse and suicide, or “deaths of despair.”

People were dying from cardiovascular diseases that, in normal circumstances, they would have survived, Kulldorff said,”because maybe they were afraid to go to the hospital, or they went too late.”

“So these are all tragic consequences, collateral damage, of these COVID measures, restrictions that were imposed,” he said. “And you can’t just do that for a whole year or two and expect that it doesn’t have other enormously bad outcomes on public health.”

Kulldorff anticipates that many of the ancillary health impacts have yet to surface.

In January, a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of lockdown data concluded that lockdowns didn’t save lives.

(…)

 

What’s Next ?

Kulldorff is dedicating his next chapter to helping restore trust in science and public health—both of which he calls “broken.”

“So it’s the heads of the funding agencies, the heads of the big journals, and the university presidents and deans who all went into the same bubble thinking that they knew what was right, and which turned out to be wrong,” Kulldorff said.

“But all scientists now are going to have to suffer from that, because, for good reasons, the public won’t trust scientists anymore.”

He’s working with the Brownstone Institute as the scientific director to navigate how to shore up public health again. He’s also part of Hillsdale College’s new Academy for Science and Freedom, which he says will promote and defend the importance of open, free scientific discourse.

“It’s very clear that if we want to have vibrant science, and a vibrant scientific community, we have to reform the way science operates and the way public health operates,” he said.

But, Kulldorff said, it’s up to the public—the truckers, farmers, nurses, pilots, and parents—as well as rank-and-file scientists to effect real change.

It’s also time to compassionately help each other heal from the psychological and mental wounds, he said, especially those still living in constant fear of COVID and those who have been self-isolating for two years now.

“I think we shouldn’t blame those who were afraid, because they were major victims of this pandemic strategy,” he said.

“We shouldn’t blame people for believing Anthony Fauci and the CDC—that was the natural thing to do. We just have to help them realize that these measures were misguided so that never happens again.”