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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 28, 2024

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Responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic clearly rests with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Consequently, The Epoch Times, founded by Chinese-Americans who fled communist oppression, maintains that we should be calling it the CCP virus. Reporter Tom Ozimek explained the rationale well in his May 13th Epoch Times article:

“…Chinese officials knew in early December 2019 that the virus had appeared in Wuhan, but they sat on the information for six weeks, arresting those who tried to warn of the danger and accusing them of spreading “rumors.” The regime’s rigorous censorship apparatus was deployed to prevent media coverage and to delete any mentions of the virus from social media.

“As with SARS, the first response was denial,” The Epoch Times editorial board wrote in a piece explaining why it opted to use the term ‘CCP virus’ in reference to the pathogen that causes the disease COVID-19.

“The name holds the CCP accountable for its wanton disregard of human life and consequent spawning of a pandemic that has put untold numbers in countries around the world at risk while creating widespread fear and devastating the economies of nations trying to cope with this disease,” the board wrote.”

The Shen Yun Performing Arts dance troop, founded by classically-trained Chinese artists from around the world, is also calling COVID-19 the CCP virus, explaining on their website:

“The name holds the CCP accountable for its cover-up and disregard for human life.”

Yet, Ozimek writes that some experts have criticized “COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic,” the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response report issued on May 12 “for failing to hold the WHO and others accountable for their actions, describing that as ‘an abdication of responsibility.’” He quotes Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University, who said that the panel:

“Fails to call out bad actors like China, perpetuating the dysfunctional WHO tradition of diplomacy over frankness, transparency, and accountability.”

Instead, Ozimek explained, the panel:

“Took a soft approach on China, praising clinicians in Wuhan for being ‘quick to spot unusual clusters of pneumonia of unknown origin in late December 2019,’ while making no mention of earlier regime efforts to suppress whistleblowers.”

This is clearly unacceptable. It’s about time we started assigning responsibility for the COVID-19 virus pandemic directly to the Communist Party of China. Henceforth, we will refer to it as the CCP virus. And, despite Syracuse University putting chemistry professor Jon Zubieta on administrative leave, for, as explained by the New York Post, “the horrific sin of . . . including the terms ‘Wuhan Flu’ and ‘Chinese Communist Party Virus’ on his course syllabus,” calling COVID-19 the CCP virus is not even remotely racist. The Chinese-Americans who founded the Epoch Times explained:

“This pandemic is not the fault of the Chinese people, but rather the fault of the Communist Party. The Chinese people have been victimized by the CCP’s handling of this pandemic. In differentiating the CCP from the Chinese people, we are truly standing up for the Chinese people, or Asian people generally. 

“It is actually the CCP and its propaganda that have intentionally conflated the Communist Party with China and its people, claiming that any criticism of its brutal regime is a criticism of the Chinese people. Media in the free world should not fall into the CCP’s trap and conflate its regime with the Chinese people.”

We wholeheartedly agree.

Responsibility should also be assigned directly to our own governments and indeed the population at large for grossly overreacting to the pandemic. If this past year has taught us anything, it’s that too many Americans and Canadians can be quickly manipulated to surrender their freedoms and liberties when sufficiently scared by their government; even those freedoms enshrined in our constitutions.

All that was required was for those with political authority to scare us into acquiescence by pretending that a virus that was far less lethal than the 1918 Spanish Flu marked the return of the Black Plague.

As most of our readers now know, the people who die from the CCP virus are usually older folks with weakened immune systems. However, to increase our fear, many who ultimately suffered terminally from pneumonia, the flu, heart disease, cancer or diabetes, and tested positive for the CCP virus, had his or her death attributed to the virus. That is how they managed to run up the death toll to 377,883 in the United States.

Shown below are all deaths in the U.S. in the year 2020 as listed in the Washington Times and obtained from the Centers for Disease Control.

Total Deaths, all causes  3,358,814
Deaths, all causes 65 & older  2,492,737
Deaths, all causes 24 & younger  63,641
Heart diseases deaths  690,882
Cancer deaths  598,932
Automobile accident deaths  42,060
Suicide deaths  44,834
Influenza and pneumonia deaths  53,495
COVID-19 deaths, total population  377,883
COVID-19 deaths 65 & older  305,477
COVID-19 deaths 24 & younger  721

On its own, we cannot know how many the CCP virus actually killed since the virus may have had little or no impact on those who died from other causes.

But if ever a treatment was worse than a disease, this was it. It was when it came to suicides, increased drug addiction and intoxication, domestic violence, and childhood depression, that the number of victims soared. According to the paper “COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink,” by Dr. Ari Joffe, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta, the harms of lockdowns are 10 times greater than their benefits. Joffe concluded, “lockdowns are far more harmful to public health than COVID-19 can be.”

And this is from an infectious disease expert who used to agree with the lockdowns.

Similarly, in “Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature,” an April 2021 paper by Professor Douglas W. Allen of the Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Dr. Allen concluded:

“An examination of over 80 Covid-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of lockdown. As a result, most of the early cost/benefit studies arrived at conclusions that were refuted later by data, and which rendered their cost/benefit findings incorrect. Research done over the past six months has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths. 

“… The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.” [our bold]

And, when you also consider the number of businesses that went bust and the number of people suddenly unemployed, you begin to get a true idea of the cost to our nations.

And all along, the mayors and governors were playing us like fools. They proved they didn’t take the threat seriously every time we caught them dining out, having their hair done, and getting on a plane to take a vacation. We even saw Dr. Anthony Fauci at a baseball game, sitting knee-to-knee between two people and not wearing his mask.

Today, after we’ve been told repeatedly that we all need to get vaccinated, Biden and his cabinet are telling us we still must don our masks and maintain our distance. In the meantime, too many schools are still shut down, as are many churches and synagogues. Baseball games are taking place, at least in the US, but with attendance capped at about 25% capacity.

It is bewildering trying to figure out what messages Biden is sending. He made a big deal of getting his two shots, but five months later, he’s still sporting the mask, even when he’s taking part in a Zoom call. And both he and Kamala Harris are still pretending that social distancing is required on all occasions.

It was a given that Biden was going to claim that corporations and the very wealthy would pick up the tab for his seven trillion-dollar ($7,000,000,000,000.00) wish list. But that can’t really be true. If you confiscated every last dime from America’s estimated 600 billionaires, you’d only come up with about four trillion dollars.

Although corporations make for a handy punching bag, especially now that most of the large ones have become so very woke, people never seem to grasp the four things that happen when you increase corporate taxes:

  • First, they fire employees.
  • Next, they cut dividends to all those widows and pensioners who own their stock.
  • Then they raise the price of their merchandise.
  • And, finally, if they determine that the tax bite is too severe, they move their factories to other countries; China is at the top of that list.

The nearly all wrongheaded thinking of the pandemic episode is sadly matched by a number of other conundrums, things that are puzzling and confusing.

  • America is said to be capitalist and greedy, and yet about half, our population is subsidized in some form by the government.
  • Even though half the population is subsidized, they tend to think of themselves as victims.
  • Despite the thinking of themselves as victims, their elected Representatives run the government.
  • Their Representatives run our government, but it appears the poor get poorer, or so we are told.
  • The poor keep getting poorer, yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
  • The poor have things that folks in other countries only dream of, yet they want America to be more like other countries.

Fortunately, in the mid-term election of 2022, Americans will have the opportunity to peacefully overthrow the current Democratic/socialist government that is failing our country so miserably. That is, provided by the Orwellian “For the People Act of 2021 (HR 1), the federal takeover of the election system from the states does not pass and is held up to constitutional scrutiny. We will be writing about that in future weeks.

Note: Burt Prelutsky, a California-based essayist, contributed to this article.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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