Mens Rea

Yesterday, at home, I suddenly heard sirens from every direction. Because it takes ten seconds to open Pulsepoint and Broadcastify, I quickly found out that someone had called 911 and reported an enormous fire in my small suburban town — a fire that was possibly already moving from house to house, filling the neighborhood with heavy smoke. Our one-engine fire department has automatic mutual aid agreements with a bunch of other communities, so four fire departments sent a small army out on the first assignment: many fire engines and many ladder trucks and many ambulances and several battalion chiefs.

And then the first engine arrived in the neighborhood, and the distinctly bored captain reported over the radio that there was “nothing showing” — no sign of a fire. It took them another minute to find the guy grilling in his back yard who had produced enough smoke to make one of his neighbors spiral down into panic.

It can’t be exaggerated how normal this is. Here’s a call from today:

Beats me what happened there, but that’s a shit-ton of initial resources from four fire departments racing toward something huge — and then wrapping it all up in 16 minutes, start to finish, which means it wasn’t something huge. Similarly, if you spend twenty years as a cop, you’re going to go to hundreds of burglaries in progress that end with some version of “I didn’t realize Bob and Sue had a housesitter this week.” Governments constantly respond to bad information, then figure out what’s really happening and adjust their response to the reality they discover when they show up and poke around.

So at some point in the first few months of the pandemic, when we’d built giant overflow hospitals in our convention centers and the US Navy had parked a hospital ship at the Port of Los Angeles, and when those extra hospital beds were mostly unused, I made various local inquiries, and a little bird showed me an email message that was supposed to be confidential. At some very early point, around the moment the first case was being announced in Los Angeles County, the county health department had conducted a briefing by teleconference for city government officials. I don’t remember every detail — this was a little more than two and a half years ago — but the health department had informed the city officials that in thirty days, something like 800,000 people in the county would be dead or dying. Would be, not could be. They didn’t present it as an outer-limit possibility or an avoidable scenario. They just said, flatly, that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die. Pretty much right now.

Aaron Kheriaty writes about this moment in his new book about the emerging biosecurity state, which I’ll keep urging everyone to read. In the opening months of 2020, Kheriaty — a psychiatrist — was the director of the ethics program at the UC Irvine health system, and he joined a panel of medical ethicists from other University of California hospitals to begin planning for the nightmare of a pandemic that would kill far more people than the hospitals could possibly help. When you have to look into a crowd of a thousand dying people and pick the few you can try to save, how do you make the choice? They worked, he writes, “against the clock” — knowing that the first wave was coming at any moment. And then the hospitals remained “eerily empty”:

For a week or two we figured this might be the calm before the storm. We waited. Two weeks stretched into three, then four; March slid into April. The lockdowns continued but the hospital stayed quiet… Although covid hospital admissions eventually rose that summer, we had waited for an overwhelming surge that never arrived.

But the lockdowns continued, and the mask mandates continued, and the whole emergency effort segued into a race to develop vaccines and a race to implement vaccine mandates. The ordinary cycle of emergencies — panicked first report, arrival of new information, adjustment of response — was broken. All over the country and all over the world, the terrified initial assessment never met the arrival of new information; as the limits of the emergency became clear, officials refused to take notice of them — racing to get vaccines to very young children, for example, to save their lives from THE DEADLY VIRUS! Somehow they panicked themselves, then kept going for three years. I’ve made some guesses about why, but let’s keep going.

And so, in November of 2022, public health officials are still warning that you should be wearing a mask in your own home, to protect your children from that deadly virus that apparently is still equally dangerous to healthy young children and really sick old people:

Harrison Faulkner @Harry__Faulkner

WATCH: Dr. Kieran Moore is now telling parents of toddlers to wear a mask inside their own home if they have the sniffles. "Should I be masking at home?" "I'm sorry, but you should."

But then we get to the remarkable moment at which governments begin to purge data. They responded at first on the basis of the Imperial College models and the supposed 3.4% fatality rate:

…but never began to exercise greater restraint and prudence as those guesses were aggressively discredited. If you’re wondering if public health officials are now aware that their response was unhinged and far more damaging that it ever needed to be, here’s the answer:

The foreign data set was gutted this week in VAERS and the cancer signal was halved, the myocarditis dose 3 response signal was lost and 994 spontaneous abortions/still births were dropped

Government officials are now purging data on the effects of the corporate-state response to the pandemic. They’re working to hide what they’ve caused.

Dr Clare Craig (not one of her impersonators) @ClareCraigPath

US vaccine adverse event reports have vanished.

jessicar.substack.comThe foreign data set was gutted this week in VAERS and the cancer signal was halved, the myocarditis dose 3 response signal was lost and 99…For starters...

They know.