The tranche of emails for the Period May - July 2021 has been posted. Navigate to A Covid Diary. The area is password protected in the usual way.
Please note, the password has recently been updated. Check here for details.
Here is the Introduction:
In March 2023, Scott Atlas listed a few obvious epidemiological falsehoods about “Covid”. Things that have been known to be false for years or, in some cases, for generations. Here is his list (add to it if you wish):
1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.
2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.
3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.
8. Teachers are at especially high risk.
9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.
Atlas argues that all these assertions, albeit manifestly false, have been promoted by “public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics.”
These diary entries touch on the psychological consequences of this promotion. They cover the dog days of 2021. Do you remember what it was like? Something is wrong, we felt. Badly wrong. Wrong enough for a book entitled A State of Fear to find readers. Wrong enough for reports of suicide. Inevitably, we deployed what psychological defences we had, hoping to ward off the worst.
We are still deploying them. We shall be deploying them for a very long time to come. The Diary entry for 10 July 2021 suggests why.
I refer to an article by the medical journalist writing under the name “Elephant City”. It is worth reading because his experiences may echo yours; they certainly echo mine. Asked to face reality (dare I call it the truth of the matter?) his parents, siblings and friends reacted with incredulity and anger, rejecting him and refusing to discuss the matter. “No argument,” he says “however clever, and no data set, however telling, would change their minds.” If the price of facing the truth was “the theft of their most basic freedoms”, it was a price they were willing to pay. He laments the fact that only three of his closest friends resisted the Covid madness. “We’ve engaged in a running battle with our group about the latest abomination committed in the name of fighting Covid-19, but we’ve made no headway. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that they are beyond reach.”
You can feel his anguish. How, in God’s name, he seems to ask, can intelligent people believe something they know to be demonstrably false?
Well, I’m afraid the answer is all too easily, because minds are made that way and you are observing mechanisms of psychological defence deployed as never before. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," said T S Eliot, who had read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. It’s bad enough that the architects of all this insanity were so ill-educated in their own chosen domains that (by design or happenstance – it hardly matters) they got almost everything wrong - they will have to deal with that, and with their consciences, in God’s good time. Much worse is the fact that this bunch of biochemical idiots savants may inadvertently have saddled humanity with a psychological problem of unimaginable scale and gravity. Consider this. Many of us (perhaps a majority) know that COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection; we also know that they do no such thing. And if you think this is of no psychological consequence – just a “people thing” as one haughty medic said to me - then think again.
And believe me, it won’t solve itself. To quote the same Mr Eliot: "Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here."