Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance

Thank you my friend MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. for posting the perspective from author Heather Mac Donald who is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal who delivered a lecture at Hillsdale College, Michigan

Spot on assessment by Heather Mac Donald six months ago. Unsurprisingly it fell on the deaf ears of the mainstream media and the radical 'progressive' democrats including their corrupt-it-seems-Governor Gretchen Whitmer and their allies in malfeasance.

Bret and Heather 58th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: A Vaccine Like No Other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifPjaVL_1yw



'The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on June 18, 2020, for a Hillsdale College online symposium, “The Coronavirus and Public Policy.”
Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.
Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.
This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.
On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.
Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.
Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.
If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.
The lockdown mandates employed mind-numbingly arbitrary distinctions. Wine stores and pot dispensaries were deemed “essential” and thus allowed to stay open; medical offices were required to close. Large grocery stores got the green light; small retail establishments with only a few customers each day were out of luck. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer notoriously used her red pen within megastores to bar the sale of seeds, gardening supplies, and paint.
It was already clear when these crushing mandates started pouring forth that shutting down every corner of the country was a reckless overreaction. By mid-March, two weeks before the Imperial College model was published, Italian health data showed that the coronavirus was terribly lethal to a very small subset of the population—the elderly infirm—and a minor health problem to nearly everyone else who was not already severely ill. The median age of coronavirus decedents in Italy was 80, and they died with a median of nearly three comorbidities, such as heart disease and diabetes. The lead author of the Imperial College model has admitted that up to two-thirds of all coronavirus fatalities would have died from their comorbidities by the end of 2020 anyway.
Three months later, this profile of coronavirus casualties still holds true. Public health interventions could have been targeted at that highly vulnerable population without forcing the American economy into a death spiral.

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Yes, all of this could've been stopped, the National Guard should've been put to use and stopped all of the riots, COVID-19 responses from Governors across the Country has almost completely disabled the economy, the crime rate is high, but this is just the beginning. A little know paper written by who else "Mr. Faucci" during the early 1900's with the Spanish Flu pandemic people didn't die from the Flu, they died from bronchial pneumonia from wearing 'MASK".

I no longer need to write any rebuttal to the progressive left and their co-conspirators. I will offer this piece which sums up my feelings about government at every level during 2020, the "experts" and their myopic pandemic response, and the cowards that let our cities burn. Heather McDonald has in my opinion written the most important piece in America since the US Constitution. Pity the progressive left, and the "useful idiots," won't have the courage to read it to the bitter but truthful end.