386 Comments

Not a big fan of Tucker C. He can be arrogant , misleading and often just plain annoying. However, I watched the segment and he was clearly being sarcastic - but as a wise person once told “there is truth in all sarcasm”. It is also true that he has not only been mostly “correct” about the virus from the start, his show has done more positive than negative in that he has given voice to those who have been silenced by the mainstream media.

On the other hand, Joy Reid might be a nice person but as a journalist she has been totally irresponsible. She has pushed the party line, created division and has been mostly wrong about almost everything. Sad thing is she probably knows she is feeding the public BS.

Expand full comment

Tucker has replaced Donald Trump in the left wing’s attack dog mentality. He often makes his point using sarcasm, but just as the left took Trump literally every single day, they are doing the same thing to Tucker Carlson. The problem for them is that he has far more viewers than anyone on MSNBC or CNN, and try as they might to cancel him, FOX has stood by him. And now they’ve given him another platform on their paid streaming site, Fox Nation. Since the start of the pandemic Carlson has asked legitimate questions that no one else is asking. He has taken the CDC to task for its contradictory advice. And now that the vaccine is available to anyone who wants it he has questioned the continuing mask charade, which suggests that the vaccine must not work in some people’s minds. It’s a legitimate point and undermines the vaccine for those who haven’t taken it yet.

Expand full comment

It is unfortunate that a moral equivalency is established between the two sides. I understand this tendency to try to appear nonpartisan and reasonable. In some cases, however, the two sides are not so equivalent and the issue of masks is one of those.

The data to support the use of masks is nonexistent. This is not to say that studies don’t exist to claim to support their use. But a close examination of those studies demonstrate they are of the lowest quality and do not in any convincing way support the use of masks. I recommend going into the CDC website and closely analyzing every single study they list (there is probably about 40-60). You will find they represent the most amateur research methods available to clinicians (small sample sizes, lack of control populations, short duration of observation).

What is even more unfortunate is that the climate of fear among physicians (of which I am a part) is so great that any questions risk stigmatization, employment blowback, and possible job loss.

I caution all those who have adopted masks as a type of middle ground between draconian lockdowns and an open society. Half-way wrong is not the same as being existing in truth.

Expand full comment

I was with you for the most part until several insistences you made. First the insistence on getting the vaccine. Yes, the chances of a short term illness or death from them is very low, but the long term risks, especially of the mRNA vaccines are completely unknown. I am 32. I am relatively healthy. If we find out in 5-10 years or even a year that there are major consequences of injecting proprietary coated mRNA into out bloodstreams, and the youngest of us face consequences of poorer life quality for that, what then? The choice is up to the invidividual. And I say that having had all the vaccines required of my up to this point in my life. The science behind the new vaccines are even extremely fascinating to me. I am just not convinced that I need it. Just as much as it is an outlier for people to die from vaccine complications, it can be argued that it is just as rare for the youth and those my age to die from COVID. Take the risk of COVID, something we have learned a lot better about how to deal with, and which through modern medicine still has a very low chance of extreme complications, or take the chance of new vaccine technology who's long term affects aren't well known? It's a trade off, but we all should have the choice to make that trade off AND not have civil liberties "controlled" based on that choice.

Expand full comment

Yes Barri the level of stupidity from a whole lot of people is astonishing, but I won’t be getting a vaccination. Why? Because my doc says that this Vax exacerbates shingles. I’ve had the shingles vaccine and booster and recently I got very bad shingles and then another mild case after that. I’m not going to amp up shingles to avoid getting something that has a like 99% recovery rate. Who knows, I might have already had it asymptomatically.

And BTW, CDC guidelines, mimicked by almost every health dept, say wear a mask indoors IF you can’t maintain a 6 ft distance (now I guess they say 3 ft, go figure). Well that certainly morphed like lightning into wear a mask AND socially distance and now to be super careful wear TWO masks.

You could never get covid outside. Yet too many stalinistic mayors shit down playgrounds and tennis courts for months and months. And like sheep, America went along. Personally I’ve had enough and I act like I’ve had enough.

Expand full comment

After 15 months, we have overwhelming evidence that masks do little if anything to stymie the spread of the virus. By continuing to ignore this obvious evidence we delay better understanding of how viruses which cause ILI truly behave and spread.

Instead of blindly chanting "we know they work" every time they are mentioned, we should be exploring why they don't work. Is it the way we wear them? The filtration sizes? The virus behavior? Do we know how many virus particles are exhaled per breath? How many virus particles are inhaled per breath? How many virus particles are needed to infect? Does the constant touching and reuse degrade them and that is why they don't work? Is it the fit size, the gaps on the sides and bottom rendering them near useless?

I understand the initial adoption, the reliance on weak studies was all we had to go on. But we have better studies now, we have mountains of real world scenarios, and it's clear we have all been adopting a talisman and nothing more.

There is one RCT to my knowledge - the Danish mask study. It isn't perfect, but the best we have (so far) in the gold standard of scientific study. Meanwhile the CDC ignores this and points to absurdly bad studies like the "Kansas Mask Study" and "Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Restaurant Dining with County-Level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates" - studies which no doubt will be used for decades to come in meta-science critique examining data drudging, p-hacking, bias, and possibly outright fraud. These studies are so insanely bad they'd make Diederik Stapel and Andrew Wakefield blush. At least, much like Stapel's fraud, they aren't doing direct damage (like Wakefield) but they are convincing a future generation of scientists that viruses behave in a way which know is incorrect, and that could do a different sort of damage - like if we had clung to Miasma to explain Cholrea a few more decades type of bad.

I always wondered how the scientific community clung to Bloodletting for 200 years after William Harvey published De Motu Cordis, now I am getting the answer.

Expand full comment

Bari, when you talk about the vaccine, it would be great to present both sides of the argument. It's entirely reasonable that some people want to wait for the regular FDA approval (and no liability protection!) before taking the vaccine. BTW - What are your thoughts on Geert Vanden Bossche? https://youtu.be/BNyAovuUxro . Oh, and btw, I wish you'd watch the whole segment of Tucker, as opposed to relying on twit, which takes a hyperbole out of context. Still love your writings, but this one was disappointing - not for the opinions, but for the one sidedness and quality of the examples.

Expand full comment

I always love reading your thoughtful pieces, Bari, however on this one, the masking of our children should be of grave concern. And the testing of this vaccine on children and babies even more so. Just watch the video of the teenage athlete who passed out at the finish line while wearing a mask. I'm on Substack (started here this past month) and I just wrote about this in my essay: https://khmezek.substack.com/p/happily-slipping-into-our-straightjackets. There are ill effects, mentally and physically, on children wearing masks. There are studies on this, but we shouldn't even need studies to logically figure this out. Children are wearing masks eight hours a day at school, including when they play outside. Personally, I don't think it's too drastic to call this child abuse. I had a grandmother tell me recently her twelve year old granddaughter is so terrified of breathing the air that even when she leaves school and is walking home with her grandmother with no one around, she refuses to take her mask off. She is already at the age when girls tend to suffer from self-doubt. I'm a grandmother myself and I am thankful my daughter and her husband will not mask or vaccinate their children. My daughter has been living in Slovenia for the past year and her boys who are in preschool run around mask free. They are moving back to Los Angeles and the only preschool they could find that didn't mask children was a private Christian one, so that is where they will send their kids. All the others say children must be masked until they are vaccinated.. I find this to be horrific. (And this is already too long to explain why but I do in my essay) In 1996 I founded a creative writing program for incarcerated youth in Los Angeles and worked with youth for many years both inside government facilities and within the community. I've devoted much of my writing to speaking out about the drugging of our children. In this piece that I just wrote I go into that history, how we have so easily succumbed to drugging our children and using them as scientific guinea pigs and how this has led to a passivity in simply believing what we are told by drug companies and government and handing our children over to them. Sorry for the lengthy comment but it's a subject I feel passionately about.

Expand full comment

I live in Texas where things are, and always have been, much more relaxed than in blue areas. That said, there are still people who are devoted to The Cult of Mask and are saying they will continue to wear it until they "feel it's safe" (although they cannot articulate the criteria which would bring that about) and more importantly place heavy pressure on others to do the same. This includes my church which requires masks. I have decided that I am drawing a line in the sand on June 1 and I will no longer comply in order to make others feel comfortable. I will politely and respectfully but insistently and firmly refuse to wear a mask myself, and I will vocally advocate for mask rules to be lifted everywhere I frequent. We have had vaccines available for everyone over the age of 16 for months now. Everyone who wants one can have one. Children do not suffer from the virus in any statistically relevant fashion so the lack of a vaccine for children is irrelevant. It is not loving or kind, and it is corrosive to both individual and community sense of probity and common sense, to participate in someone else's paranoid fantasy and continuing to wear masks is doing exactly that. I won't be forced to live in untruths to try to make people comfortable in them, and I won't set that example for my children.

Expand full comment
founding

Bari, in general I think this is a good post. However on a couple of things I think you need to dig a bit deeper and develop some nuance:

1. There are serious scientific questions/issues around vaccinating young people and children as well as vaccinating those who have already had COVID. I suggest you watch Darkhorse podcast 78 with Brett Weinstein and Heather Heyerling to bone up. Brett and Heather are both PhD evolutionary biologists who have spent considerable time and energy understanding these issues and trying to communicate them.

2. If one digs into the data about the current situation about India and normalize it with respect to population, the perspective is much less alarming than the media and the talking heads portray. Factor in the fact that India's healthcare system is chronically overloaded and unable to deal with much out of the ordinary and the picture changes even more. India needs help and we should help, but the perpetuating the current frenzy is the wrong way to go about it.

Expand full comment

The left is the least science based demographic. From organic foods to believing C02 is a pollutant or rheostat for climate. Leftists are emotional thinkers and their politics their religion much more so than on the right. Want to find idiot anti-Vaxxers—go to a Whole Foods. Hatred of nuclear energy and opposition to petroleum in all forms—leftists joe six pack of IPA doesn’t understand basic science much less anything advanced.

Expand full comment

"Believe Science?" What science? Science: systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation, (dictionary.com) Science is dynamic, constantly changing and this entire year we've experienced continued censorship by BigTech, BigPharma, and MSM of any open discussion with world renowned Epidemiologists, or any MD that would challenge the C-19 narrative. This viru$ has been used to Divide and Conquer for control. The use of semantic yoga to make the vaxxine more acceptable is mind boggling. 1. It's not a vaxxine, it's a MRna gene therapy. 2. It is only Emergency Use Authorized. 3. People have to sign away liability. Not once was there a mention of "informed consent". The FDA studies will be completed late 2022 and 2023. The virus for those under 50yrs. has 99.96 survival, for those over is approximately 90% survival. The average of C-19 death is 78yrs, average age of death in the US is 78yrs. 94% of deaths had co-morbidities. 78% of hospitalized people were obese. 40% of the population in the US is obese. Did the CDC mention once, the best way to fight this virus was a healthy lifestyle change? NO. It's much easier to push a quick cure with a shot and a promise. BigPharma has made billions of dollars off this viru$ with BigGovt. pushing on the American people. Not once was there a discussion, in this article, about "Choice". This is America, we are born with our God given freedoms. Informed consent is about a personal choice. It's everyone's personal decision. Those that create the Panic create the Cure. The continued narrative of take the Vax to get back to normal is just another theme on the same control variation. Don't ever stop asking WHY? Which is the glaring omission in this article. There is no greater good because whoever is saying that is making money and "Assumption is the mother of all fu*kups."

Expand full comment

Bari your article is great...the sane, calm approach one expects from you. Please don't succumb to the temptation to need to find crazies on Fox to match those on MSNBC...Tucker Calson is intelligent and does his homework...he also uses hyperbole, sarcasm and is facetious in his presentations. I think you know that, so to throw that in your piece as a serious counterpoint was kind of beneath your standards.

Expand full comment

I am so grateful to live in Montana- wide open spaces, definitely not crowded! I 'was' always polite and wore a mask when in a store and I followed the crazy insane rule for restaurants- you know, the one where you mask to enter but Covid somehow disappears when you sit at your table! (Such magical thinking!) Have I ever once masked outdoors? No. Have I avoided family and friends? No. I have zero risk factors aside from my age. I am 65. No diabetes, no obesity, no high blood pressure, on zero meds. I will be honest with you- I wasn't worried. In the beginning of the pandemic, yes, of course, we all felt concern. We didn't know what this virus was and yes, it can be very very deadly, especially for the elderly and the ill. My parents are 93 and 89 and vaccinated. Now... why do I say 'was'? I no longer mask for two reasons. First, because our governor has removed the mask mandate. Second, because three weeks before I planned to get the J&J vaccine- I was waiting for it to become available here as I am deathly allergic to certain components of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, I got covid. Not only am I grateful to live in Montana, I'm grateful to have had covid. Yes, I was sick- for two solid weeks. I'm still coughing. But my body is filled with lovely antibodies. I can't give it to you- didn't even give it to my husband and we never separated. And you can't give it to me. Look at it this way- I had chicken pox, mumps and measles as a child. Did I mask forever after? Of course not. I agree with Bari. If you can get vaccinated, do it. If you can't, hopefully herd immunity is on the way, and if you choose not to get any vaccine, I respect your choice. I'm still polite. But I'm done with masking. And I agree 100% with Karen Hunt below. Children should not be wearing masks. Especially not outside. This paranoia is causing terrible psychological damage in vulnerable kids.

Expand full comment
founding

Masking outside alone has become some kind of political obedience test rather than a science-based preventative. We need a campaign — get the vaccine, toss the mask.

Expand full comment

This Wuhan Virus is the most mild pandemic in human history. Its danger has been over-hyped in the extreme.

Expand full comment