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Kevin Bass, a 7-year MD/PhD student at a medical school in Texas, wrote a January 30 opinion piece for Newsweek in which he said some startling things we haven’t heard many in the medical community admit since the Wuhan pandemic started, and certainly not in publications like that. His conclusion: the decisions made by the federal government at the federal, state, and local levels actually led to unnecessary deaths:
As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.
I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
The damage that was caused by govt policy, censorship, propaganda and cowardice made the consequences of the pandemic far worse.
May this be a lesson for the future.
Its crazy how many people still cling to the false narratives.
— Sal Di Stefano (@mindpumpsal) February 7, 2023
Many of us, including most RedState readers, have known this for a long time, but it’s unusual to see a former hardcore believer turn on his COVID cohorts in crime. None of the alphabet agencies escape Bass’s criticism:
I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
Again, Kevin, not going to say “I told you so…” Well, yes, actually I am. We told you so.
But welcome to the party nonetheless.
Bass appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. Watch:
My segment with the great @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/Dl7bIwxnaG
— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) February 7, 2023
Bass believes the epic failure of the COVID know-it-alls led to an unknowable number of excess fatalities, writing:
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But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.
Often when I write about the spectacular failure of the pandemic response and the disturbing overreach of those in authority, I ask, “when is anyone going to admit they were wrong? And when do we get our apology?” Bass is one of the few who actually had the stones to do so, issuing a mea culpa in December 2022:
I was wrong about lockdowns and mandates. I was wrong and the reason I was wrong was my tribalism, my emotions, and my distorted understanding of human nature and of the virus. It doesn’t matter much, but I wanted to apologize for being wrong.
— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) December 13, 2022
His article continues:
It’s OK to be wrong and admit where one was wrong and what one learned. That’s a central part of the way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.
Bass makes some other excellent points—including how the “elites” prized “paternalism” and completely forgot about the interests of average Americans—I encourage you to read it. Roxanne Hoge (who I happen to be married to) tweeted:
Thanks Kevin Bass for admitting
“pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, & public health, who are highly educated & privileged.” https://t.co/9bP4EZrKuQ— Roxanne Hoge (@RoxanneHoge) January 31, 2023
Bass also rightly points out that any critics of the flawed information and policies emanating from said elites were canceled, censored, and humiliated even when they were correct in their criticisms:
Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.
I’m not going to call Bass “brave” or a “hero,” because he followed along with the crowd for an awfully long time—we’re almost at the three-year anniversary of the first of the devastating lockdowns in the U.S.
I will, however, give him credit for at least coming out now, and for powerfully telling the truth about what actually happened.
Unfortunately, some of it is still happening, but if enough voices like his speak up, perhaps we can put an end to the Cult of COVID once and for all.
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