Unmasked

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ianmsc.substack.comDr. Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health, the organization formerly run by Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. But Dr. Bhattacharya’s importance extends much further than “just” NIH. And his appointment there under the second Donald Trump administration marked a dramatic about-face for an organization that was instrumental in creating many of the issues and problems we faced as a society during the pandemic.Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. That paper contained a blueprint for focused protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of locking down all society, Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote, we should look to protect the most vulnerable. That’s been proven prophetic, as the harms from lockdowns far exceeded any benefits.He also conducted a study in Silicon Valley early on in the lockdowns that identified COVID was far more prevalent in the community than people realized. That meant the virus was also far less deadly than organizations like the World Health Organization had suggested. He was skeptical about the efficacy of cloth masks, advocated for opening schools, and participated in a roundtable hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 that illustrated how ineffectual the Anthony Fauci-doctrine had been. Around that same time, Bhattacharya also spoke out against vaccine mandates and other abuses, which decreased public confidence and trust in vaccines.In short, he was a voice of sanity in a sea of absurdity, proven right about nearly every pandemic-related policy. For his efforts, he was demonized, labeled, censored, and targeted by Collins and Fauci in emails. I had the exclusive opportunity to ask him about many of these issues, and what he’s bringing to NIH that his predecessors didn’t.Unmasked is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The latest podcast episode is a fascinating conversation with John Tierney from City Journal discussing his fantastic work documenting the lack of justification for vaccine mandates for kids, the failures of Dr. Fauci and Deborah Birx, and society's addiction to crisis.John's work at City Journal can be found here, and his excellent book "The Power of Bad" is available here."Unmasked" is available here, now in hardcover format as well.**Transcript isn’t available for this episode, unfortunately the software was not able to produce a usable one** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Laura Dodsworth, author of the fantastic book: "A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic" joins the show to discuss masks and how global governments used fear to ensure compliance with mandates. You can find Laura’s Substack here and her incredibly important book here. You can also follow her on Twitter here.The podcast is also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Full transcript is available from the web version of Substack.Ian Miller (00:00):Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We've got another very special guest today. Her name's Laura Dodsworth she's the author of the book, a state of fear, and she writes the Laura Dodsworth Substack. Everybody should go check that out. But so Laura, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.Laura Dodsworth (00:17):Oh, thank you for having me. I can't think of a better podcast really you know, fit wise for me. So it's fantastic. I loved your book.Ian Miller (00:26):Yeah. Well, thank you. And I, I really enjoyed speaking with you, so I'm glad we're getting to do this again. My, my first question for you was kind of about your initial reaction to it. And, and you wrote about it in the book that the virus you were initially seemingly were a little concern because it's something new you weren't familiar with and, but you kind of seemed a little bit more, fairly measured in your response, but then when Boris Johnson gave his speech saying everybody needs to stay home, we're locking down. That's you know, we're moving in that direction in terms of policy, it seemed like you kind of reacted a bit more viscerally. So why do you think it was that his speech in particular kind of do that way? Maybe even more so than the virus did?Laura Dodsworth (01:06):Mm, yeah, isn't it funny? I think that there was just a lot of fear in the air and really everybody was subjected to some fears. It's just which fears you yourself are susceptible to. Now, I did have some fear about the virus and, you know, I remember up on tined food, I'm a, a single parent. And I thought, well, if I'm, if I'm terribly ill, how will my children cook? Because we were being told we couldn't leave the house at all. Mm-Hmm . And so the sort of normal recourse to help like family and friends wouldn't be available. So I had some nerves and my children still tease me about the fact that I asked them to wash hands when they came indoors for the first couple of weeks. . But my my approach is often to sort of deep dive and research and, and look things up for myself.Laura Dodsworth (01:56):And from very early, I was reading up on different epidemiologists and scientists, views of the virus. So rather a lot of unknowns at the beginning, there were also very respected voices urging caution on the IFFR for instance professor Johnny and Artis and contextualizing epidemics and pandemics. And I don't think I had an out of scale fear of it. And you see here in the UK, the initial response was that we would cocoon the elderly and a certain amount of herd immunity would build up. And then there was this sudden U-turn and I think I found the U-turn discombobulating. I just couldn't believe the address to the nation. On the 23rd of March, it was very stern. It was really going for a wartime vibe, you know, war on a war, on a virus. And for some reason I fast forwarded mentally very quickly, not that night, but very quickly into what the consequences could be.Laura Dodsworth (03:06):And to be honest, watching those fears become fulfilled, you know, to see them on furl over time has been quite horrific. So the longer lot I went on it was, it was obvious that we would have high inflation because we were quantitative easing our way through this. I was surprised that people were so adamant that children were resilient and children would be okay, and shutting schools and masking children would be fine because clearly it hasn't been. And I felt very frightened about the consequences of the very extreme, absolutely unprecedented actions we were taking. I think what confounded that as well was, as soon as you stepped outside your, your daily allowed exercise, people were really different with each other, just, you know, where I live just semi country side. They would hop to the side of country lanes or pavements to avoid each other.Laura Dodsworth (04:06):And it, it created that additional fear in the air. So for me, the fear wasn't of the virus, I thought it was strange that people were so frightened of a virus out in the open. For me, the fear was how easily fear was communicated and how manipulated people could be and what the effect of lockdown would be. And I did, I did feel it viscerally that first night of the speech. I had that freeze response. I felt everything drained from my body. It was, it was a very, very wobbly, shaky feeling. I've always thought I've got the most useless fear response. this is not the first time this has happened to me, that I drain and become, become useless. And interestingly, there is a lot of shame with this fear response because you know, it's people feel like they should have been able to run away or, or to fight, I guess I'm a freezer.Ian Miller (05:03):Hmm. Did you also mentioned in the book about a section about his body language during that speech, and did you know, is that something that you noticed as well that he, it, you know, I think it was phrased something like that. It was almost like a hostage situation. Was that something that you noticed when you were watching it or was that something that just kind of came up with in conversations with people?Laura Dodsworth (05:24):No. The whole thing felt completely weird to me and it threw me and it is part of what scared me. His words about the virus did not scare me the extreme semi Churchillian and authoritarian language SC me. And it was that combined with this very staccato, peculiar body language, there was something about it that just felt off. And that's why I thought it would be a good place to start the book. So I consulted with forensic psychologists, somebody who interviews people who have lied to the authorities and tried to cover their traces and somebody who also works with body language to see what they made of it. And actually it's more that their professional opinions concurred with the feeling that I'd had that is his body language. Wasn't congruent with his words. There are parts when he's more relaxed, cause he, he appears to believe what he's saying. And there are parts where he's not comfortable with what he's saying at all, what that means exactly. Who knows whether he was lying, whether he just felt uncomfortable, maybe with delivering some very bad news to the nation. This is a man who likes to be liked and to deliver the news about lockdown would be a very difficult message for any statesman.Ian Miller (06:45):Yeah, it's interesting. And it's, it's one of those like important moments of history and, and it's really important I think, to kind of go back and look and see and what they were thinking and saying at the time and how they, how they were saying it. Another thing I think that we, we kind of both bring up a lot is what a poor job the media has done with with regards to COVID. And, and I know you wrote about it, how they kind of gave a lot of softball questions to, to Boris Johnson or to other health leaders which was definitely the case of the United States as well with certain governors that were not Ron DeSantis from Florida. So why do you think that that was a consistent feature across both countries? Like what, what was it about the journalism profession that was so ready and willing to go along with, with lockdowns and all these other policies?Laura Dodsworth (07:29):Oh, it was just so depressing. I had to stop watching the press briefings, cause I felt like shouting at the TV to, you know, tell the journalists off for not asking… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

David Zweig, author of the book "Invisibles" and frequent contributor to The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Wired and many others, joins the show to discuss his fantastic work on school masking, CDC flaws and how experts and politicians make decisionsA collection of David’s work is available through his website and his upcoming book on schools during the pandemic will be released next year. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack as well.His fantastic article on the CDC’s flawed justification for masking kids is available here.**Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Drew Holden, who does more than almost anyone on Twitter to hold pundits, media members and news organizations accountable for intellectual hypocrisy and inconsistency, joins the podcast to discuss the coverage of COVID, the failures of government communication and his favorite examples of the media’s rush to judgment.Follow Drew on Twitter and check out a list of his articles here.***Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble***Past episodes of the Podcast are available here on Substack, or also available on Spotify or Apple PodcastsFull transcript is below:Ian Miller:Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We have a very special guest today drew Holden, who is a a maker of threads and, and defender of intellectual consistency in those threads. He's also a freelance commentary writer who is written for a lot of major publications, New York times, Washington post Federalist Fox news, et cetera. So welcome drew. Thanks so much for doing this,Drew Holden:Ian. Pleasure's mine, sir. I appreciate you having me on.Ian Miller:Yeah. so I wanted to ask, and you might have answered this previously, but I'm curious what, what got you started making these threads? They're so, you know, brilliantly simple, but incredibly important. And to me, especially, what was it that made you start putting these together?Drew Holden:Well, I, I appreciate that. So the first time I remember the, that I ever put together a thread was it was, it was back around the time when general Soleimani, the, the Iranian general was killed. And the reason I had put it together was because I, I remember the coverage and I looked at a lot of it and I was like, man, this is, this is weird. And I don't know that we always get these honorifics for for, for these sorts of titles, but who knows, maybe, maybe there's some new trend where we're trying to be nicer to people when, when they die. So wash forward a couple weeks and Don, I miss the bomb throwing radio host, who famously made a, a racist comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team back probably about a decade ago. So he passed away a couple weeks later and just got slammed his obituaries, the, the headlines across all his corporate press were just really trashing this guy hours after he had died.Drew Holden:And I saw them and I was like, you know, I, I get it. People had issues with, I miss. Obviously he made some, some really indefensible comments, but there's no way on any sort of moral playing field. Is he worse than a guy who is the leader of a terrorist organization, right. Who has, who has an enormous amount of innocent blood on his hands? And so I went through for a bunch of different outlets and I posted the two side by side and I didn't even, I didn't think I even said anything, right. There was no real analysis. It was just the pictures. And I looked at them and they jumped off the page to me. And I was like, whatever, I'm, I'm gonna string six or seven of these together and see if folks like it. And you know, I got, I had a pretty good response. And then I started thinking about it and I was like, man, there's, there's definitely a lot to say here, and I should figure out how to do that. And then from that, that kind of moment, the, the thread, the at least as a concept was born. And then I've had to tinker and refine a little bit on the format to, to try and get the point across a little bit better. And I'm, I'm sure I'm still learning too.Ian Miller:Hmm. Do you have a, a favorite example of an issue? I mean, obviously that one kind of jumped out at you, but what, you know, after you started making them has been going down through this, through the process, was there something that came up where you're like, oh, this is, this is it. This is gonna be perfect. I've already got, I know, I already know the examples are coming for this one.Drew Holden:Yeah. So this, I think the one that, that comes to mind, it's not so much the side by side, but it's the the takes that were preposterous in the moment. And people didn't realize that until they saw the light a day, a little bit later. And it was the, the coverage around Michael Anot, I think was really, you know, what I end up doing is when, whenever I see something that just doesn't pass the sniff test for me, I end up going through and taking a whole bunch of screenshots. Sometimes they pan and, you know, whatever, whatever I thought was gonna happen happened, sometimes they don't, sometimes it's not close enough. And so they just kind of sit in, in my phone forever. But I remember during the heyday of Michael Ave, when CNN was speculating about what his primary strategy was going to be as a potential democratic nominee for president 2020, I was watching.Drew Holden:And I was like, man, the fever on this is, is just unbelievable. And eventually all of these people are going to regret these just really preposterous takes about Anot, not just in terms of his political future, but in terms of his intellect and his savvy and his morality and everything else. And I, I remember I just, I kept collecting and collecting and then, you know, the, the trial started and I was like, well, eventually these I think are gonna have to come back around. And so that, that to me was probably the most egregious example of, you know, the, during the Trump era. I think there were a lot of people who were made in the heroes for really no conceivable reason other than they were in opposition to Trump. But I think he was probably the most dramatic now in, in hindsight where I think he's in prison now. Right. Or if he's gone through his whole trial, yet he, he is either in or headed to prison.Ian Miller:Right. Yeah. You hit on a, a very important point though, which I think has become increasingly relevant over the past couple years with the, with the pandemic as well, which I I'll get into it later a bit. But so speaking of COVID, I, you know, I wanted to get your, you know, everybody comes out from a different, different point of view and, and so I was kind of curious what your initial reaction was to it. Were you concerned about COVID? Were you, what did you think of the policies lockdowns, all of that stuff as it rolled out?Drew Holden:Yeah. Good question. Good question. So I think when it first happened, I, I was pretty much your standard 20 something living a blue city who was, was definitely concerned and was handling the ambiguity of it as something where we should have a, a strong and urgent response. So, in retrospect, I remember, I think I put, I posted something on Facebook that I, I ended up coming to regret that that was about how all we need to do is, is just be quiet and trust the experts on this one. And so my knee jerk first couple of days, first couple weeks were, were very much that. And I remember part of that was, you know, my my, my girlfriend works on Capitol hill and she had gotten sick in the first couple of weeks. And we were like, oh, I mean, I'm sure it's not connected at all, but who knows maybe.Drew Holden:And then it turned out that, you know, the district she was working in was one of the first that that had cases. And so she might have been, you know, one of, one of the first cases here in DC of, of COVID. And so my first thought was, eh, you know, if it, if it's maybe already here, we should really kind of clamp down and, and be, and be, and be cautious with this. And I think that probably for the first week, week and a half, I, I stuck to that. And then that started eroding. I think, you know, when I, when I look back and I try and think through how I would've done it differently, I think I probably just wouldn't, I wouldn't have responded with a a level of fear that was inconsistent with what we knew at the time. And I think the time I really did do that is that I really, I really kind of jumped and got spooked and scared and, and was calling for policies that have had really, you kn… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Phil Kerpen goes into detail on the problems with listening to CDC guidance, the disastrous Fauci and Birx lockdowns, and the possibilities of indefinite masking in certain parts of the country.Follow Phil on Twitter.Ian Miller: (00:27)Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We've got a special guest today, Phil Kerpen the president of American commitment principal at the committee to unleash prosperity frequent Fox news contributor, and, and also a CDC critic. So we'll we'll get into that. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thanks so much for doing this.Phil Kerpen: (00:47)Hey, Ian, my pleasure. Great to be with you.Ian Miller: (00:49)Yeah. so I wanted to start with kind of where we we've started a lot with these conversations, which is, you know, what were your initial thoughts about COVID where you immediately skeptical about, I mean, how severe it was any of the policies we were doing or were you concerned, you know, what was, what was your response?Phil Kerpen: (01:08)Well, you know, I thought the it's interesting. I thought the most striking feature of the early data out of China was the extreme age skew in all of the data. And, you know, I remember telling my kids in like January and February of 2020, this really doesn't affect kids. It's nothing you have to worry about. It's not gonna ha have any effect on you. And of course I was incorrect only because of the way it was mediated by bad government policies. But you know, it became pretty clear pretty early on that the policy response was going to be, you know, catastrophically off course poorly targeted, poorly designed that it was being politicized in an extremely destructive way. And so, you know, normally I work on kind of economic issues, taxes, spending, regulation, that kind of stuff, but it was kind of obvious that all the usual stuff they care about was about to become largely irrelevant because we didn't have government, you know, forcibly shutting down people's businesses and schools and kind of destroying their lives. And so I've been on kind of this two year detour trying to fight all of this stuff and unfortunately with a lot less success than I would've liked, especially when Trump administration was in. Cause I had a lot of pretty good ties there and for the most part, they, they didn't listen to much of what I have to say. Unfortunately,Ian Miller: (02:33)That is, it's funny. You mentioned that, cause that was my next question for you. So you know, obviously you have a lot of contact with politicians and, and especially in the Trump white house early on. So what do you think, what is your opinion or, or what was your sense of what was going on inside the Trump white house with regards to COVID policy? Did they kind of unquestionably accept the, the Fauci Burke's lockdowns or was there concern that these would have other impacts or, you know, what, what did you think their sense was early on of what the policies were gonna do?Phil Kerpen: (03:03)Well, you know, I think the first of all, they had a team that was very poorly designed for dealing with this virus. And, and this has continued to this, to this very day, but I mean, they had people whose experience and expertise really was from fighting HIV and just a completely different type of virus, you know, for, for a sexually transmitted infection, you can actually do contact tracing and it has some value even, even for that, it it's you know, limited, but it has some value for a highly infectious respiratory virus it's completely absurd. And yet they took kind of this whole mentality, this whole model. And I think that the Burkes hire was kind of the key bad hire of the Trump administration because they took this, this sort of paradigm that really didn't fit at all. And they tried to use that as the foundation of everything that came after.Phil Kerpen: (03:55)And I actually think that Trump had some reasonably good instincts fairly early on. You might own, remember when he said, you know, everything's gonna open again by Easter, it's gonna be the greatest Easter ever. And he certainly had some people in the white house for, from sort of the more economic policy side that I think kind of got how incredibly destructive lockdowns were particularly Larry Kudlow at the national economic council. But you know, the president you know, president Trump was very susceptible to public opinion, an expert opinion. And he had cable news on all the time. And I just think that the onslaught was enough that it kind of got to him. He said, you know, I'm gonna get killed if I go outta my own and sort of disregard my own so-called experts. And you know, I don't, it goes against my and instincts, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with them. And I think that's essentially what he did.Ian Miller: (04:45)Yeah. And it's interesting because, and it it's related to something I wanted to ask you about as well. Was there anything that they, that he could have done to avoid the kind of media criticism? I, it feels like it was a no win situation for him because if it, if they just kept everything open and it never lockdowns never fought listen to Fauci or Burkes, they would've been crucified in the media, but they did lock downs. And, and obviously there was mask recommendations pretty early on and they still got crucified by the media. So, you know, was there anything they could have done that wouldn't have been criticized?Phil Kerpen: (05:17)No, I don't think so. I mean, I think that the, you know, the, the, the truck Trump was on track to be reelected. I think when COVID came along and the, you know, the entire establishment to a certain extent of both parties really disliked president Trump. And, you know, I think that this was their opportunity to disrupt him, to defeat him and you know, the anything he did would have been wrong in catastrophic and he would've been attacked for it. And, and given that reality you know, he should have done what was actually substantively, correct. He should have been concerned about the reaction, which was gonna inevitably be negative. And, you know, I, the other problem is, you know, when nobody kind of thought that a job like CDC director mattered. Okay. And if he had thought the job had been important, I think he would've hired someone much more competent.Phil Kerpen: (06:08)And you, so it's been same thing for surgeon general. So you have these jobs that are sort of afterthought kind of backwater type jobs in the hundreds of appointment that a president has to make. You know, he probably gave it 10 seconds of thought. But then once you're in sort of a crisis mode, now, if you fire someone, then that's a big, it's a big story that you fired them, even though maybe you hadn't even given much thought to hiring them in the first place. And so I think he was sort of a little bit just felt, felt a little bit constrained. And the other thing is, you know, he put the vice president in charge of that task force. And you know, I think vice president Pence did a really bad job of, you know, criticizing any of the inputs that he was being given.Phil Kerpen: (06:52)And so, you know, there's a lot of blame to go around. Ultimately, I think that you know, look, we would've had something pretty similar if the president had come out and said, we're, we're not shutting anything down, it's not worth it. We've gotta keep society functioning. We've gotta avoid panic. The blue states and cities still would've shut down. Yeah. And the mid states and cities for the most part would not have. And so you, you know, you, would've kind of, I think you would've ended up where you were by, you know, April or may from the big beginning, essentially. But I don't think it would've been that much different in terms of the way it played out.Ian Miller: (07:24)Yeah. do you think that that the Trump white house that they realized pretty early on that Fauci was gonna be kind of, I, I don't know the lack of a better word, an enemy in ter… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Adam Creighton, the Washington correspondent for The Australian and contributor to Sky News, discusses Australia's strict lockdowns and the long term policy implications, as well as the political climate in the US and his thoughts on the public opinion of COVID interventions. Follow Adam on Twitter here and check out his work at The Australian here.Listen to the Unmasked podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The book “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates” is available for purchase through Amazon and many other outlets.Full transcript of the interview is below:Ian Miller: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Unmasked Podcast. We've got a special guest today. Adam Creighton, who's the Washington correspondent for the Australian and also contributor to Sky News Australia, which is very exciting, Adam, thank you so much for doing this. Adam Creighton: Thanks very much for having me. Ian Miller: Yeah, first of all, I wanted to say thank you for your wonderful review of my book. It's it's been really, really great to see all the positive response to it. It helped dramatically help to get the get it into Australia and kind of awareness of it down there, which I hugely appreciate. Yeah so thank you for that.Adam Creighton: No, I hope lots of people read it. It was excellent. Ian Miller: I appreciate it. So my first question for you was when when COVID first started you know this was back March 2020. What were your kind of initial thoughts and reactions to it? Were you skeptical of the policies we were putting in? Were you supportive of them and has there been any kind of adjustments or changes in your thinking overtime?Adam Creighton: You know, certainly at the start I was actually very scared about the whole thing going back to March 2020 because I knew a bit of history. I knew about the Spanish flu. I knew how bad these things could be, and so I was kind of expecting the worst. I mean, I was so scared. I actually shifted my money out of a one of the smaller financial institutions that I was in and put it in a larger bank, but I was just worried about. You know what was gonna happen to the global economy? Uhm, of course, as it turned out, those those fears were, you know, were kind of ill founded at least as fast. As far as the virus went, and I guess because I was so concerned, I was checking everyday the publicly available statistics on worldometer and the various U.S. government websites, and it became pretty clear to me by the end of March at least, that we were massively overreacting to this thing, that there was a climate of hysteria. And I felt as though it was my responsibility as a journalist to point that out, but that was quite a risky move. But as I say, there was a climate of hysteria and it wasn't until the middle of April the 13th or 14th of April that I wrote in my weekly column in the Australian that we were over reacting to an unremarkable virus. And you can imagine how that went over. So because it really was that was kind of peak hysteria and I pointed out things like the number of deaths every year. You know, know, million odd every year that the numbers that the infection fatality ratios were likely very very low. Drawing on some of the work of John Ioannidis, very eminent professor in this field, and he made a lot of sense to me. So I you know, I quoted him. So yeah, so I, so I guess I changed my view pretty quickly and then I you know, I became a champion of that view really up until now and. In terms of how I changed my view at all, well, I mean I'm shocked how long this whole thing has gone on for I would never have, you know, never have thought that almost two years on would be talking about this. I think that's just extraordinary and I was wrong about the vaccines and how quickly that arrived. I guess I was skeptical based on history and based on. The conventional view that these vaccines would take many years to develop, but but as it as it turned out, they arrived much sooner and they appear to have had some effectiveness. Certainly in reducing illness. So I was wrong about that. But really, I haven't changed my view on anything else.Ian Miller: Yeah, that's a great point. I remember thinking to myself that what's going to happen here. If it takes five years to develop these things, can't we can't keep doing this for five years, can we? But I think a lot of politicians kind of got bailed out by how quickly. They arrived and were able to kind of say, OK well thatAdam Creighton: Yes, exactly that's the shift could justify what they've done by that too. They could say, well, you know the lockdowns make sense because we were just waiting for the vaccines and you know there is some internal logic to that. Even though I still think the lockdowns were very wrong and a grievous assault on human rights which would never have happened. And of course you know barely effective anyway as you know, but right? But even if they were effective, you know, even if they did work, so to speak, I still think there'd be a good case that they're wrong, and I'd probably still argue that case. I mean, the fact is that they haven't worked and it's extremely embarrassing for for proponents of them to try to make a coherent empirical argument that they have.Ian Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to get your thoughts on the early on in the United States. I mean, you're Australian, but you live here in the US. You're Washington correspondent. So how much do you think the political climate of the US played into the kind of early on the policies of COVID during the first year or so? Kind of specifically, would masks and and kind of these symbols of taking COVID seriously have maintained the same level of level of importance if there had been a different president? Adam Creighton: Yeah, look, it's a good question and I think the fact that Trump was president polarized the issue more because early on he expressed doubt about the effectiveness of lockdowns and masks. I know that I was actually living in Australia at the very start of it, but certainly the US is followed very closely in Australia. And we say back home, this thing called Trump Derangement syndrome. I assume it's a phrase here as well. But Oh yeah, it's kind of a joke that, you know, uh, lefties, vulnerable to this to this disease. And whenever Trump says something is good, they must say it's bad. And I think that was part of this extraordinary polarization that we have to. Champion these things that Trump. Didn't want and look it was in the UK as well and I know that's that's less of a focus in the US, but the Johnson government was in power too and. And Boris Johnson very early said similar things to Trump that look we should just not. You know, we should not overreact. These think must don't work. You know, lockdowns don't work. We don't want to do that. And of course, as you know, the British Government changed its tune in a few weeks. But but I think there was a similar phenomenon there as well, and so yes, to answer your question, yes, I think the US does play a huge role in how the Western world responds and also how they politically perceive the response as being a left or a right wing issue. Ian Miller: It's very interesting, and so one question that I I just kind of comes. It came up to me a second ago. We asked a lot of people. I've asked a lot of people I've been asked myself, why do you think the shift happened so much with with Boris Johnson and and Trump and all these governments kind of going back on what they were saying about masks and lockdowns early on. What do you think were the underlying reasons behind it? Adam Creighton: Yeah look, it's a really good question and we don't really know the answer. I mean, of course it was the Italian Government that was the 1st Western government to follow China down the lockdown path and as. As you will know, every pandemic plan that was written by a western country either explicitly ruled out lockdowns as in… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

A fascinating conversation with Clifton Duncan, who gives his thoughts on what's happened to New York City during COVID, the politics of masks and the personal consequences of speaking out against the prevailing narrative.You can find Clifton on Twitter, YouTube and through his Podcast.The podcast is now available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Gary Sidley, retired NHS psychologist, writer and founder of the UK’s Smile Project to end mask mandates joins the podcast to discuss the impacts on mental health from lockdowns, masks and the government messaging on COVID policy. Dr. Sidley is on Twitter, at Coronababble and has written for The Critic and The Spectator. He’s also one of the founders of the Smile Free campaign to permanently end mask mandates.This episode touches on some really important subjects and questions that we’ll all be dealing with for a very long time — what happened early on, why, and what happens next.With many restrictions coming to an end, can we be sure that they’ll be eliminated as a potential option down the road?Why did mask mandates start?What’s the justification for vaccine mandates and passports?What was the UK’s “nudge” unit about?It’s a fantastic conversation and I’m very appreciative to Dr. Sidley for taking the time to join.This episode and all free episodes are also available through Apple Podcasts.**I wasn’t able to get a usable transcript for this episode, unfortunately, but will hopefully be able to continue that with the next recording. Sorry for the inconvenience.** This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Scott’s work for Townhall is available here and you can follow him on Twitter here.His fantastic review of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates” can be found here, and the book is available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.The podcast is also available through the Apple Podcast platform.Previous episodes of the show are listed below:Episode 10Episode 9Episode 8Episode 7Episode 6Episode 5And an auto-generated transcript for the episode is below:Ian Miller:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Unmasked podcast. Today. We have a very special guest Scott Morefield from town hall. Well, first of all, thank you so much for doing this. Welcome to the show.Scott Morefield:Thanks for having me.Ian Miller:And I, before we kind of get into the questions, I just wanted to also say thank you for your, your excellent review of my book. You know, you really hit a lot of the important points I was trying to make with the data and kind of narrative of masking, and I'm really glad it came through and, and thank you for capturing it so well,Scott Morefield:Of course it was great. The book, it, it, it's just so important cuz we, we can see this stuff coming to an end. It seems like, but a lot of these assumptions are under the surface. So to have a book out there like this, that your work Barron's work I know Megan man mantel is coming out with a book. This stuff is just really important to hammer down the fact that it's just not, there's no science behind this nonsense and we can't let, 'em just get away with evading any sort of responsibility and pretending that their methods worked. And that's why they're now letting us free. So yeah, your book's really important to, to accomplish that.Ian Miller:Well, thank you. And I, I completely agree. That's the whole point is to try to destroy the kind of underlying arguments behind masking so that it, it can't ever be kind of brought back as some kind of semi permanent rolling measure down the road.Scott Morefield:Exactly.Ian Miller:So my first question for you just kind of early on, you know, what, what made you skeptical about the effectiveness of COVID policy? Was it something immediately you were skeptical of? Did it take some time? What was your kind of initial response to, to COVIDScott Morefield:Great question. My first town hall post critical of COVID measures to was released in March, 2020. It didn't take long to realize that all this, that they were just basically full of. And, and everything that they were trying to say. And the first thing that led me to that conclusion was the actual case fatality rate of the diamond princess outbreak initially. Because I, I remember following this some in January and February and you would see people you see these videos of people falling over and it was a little scary. I, I remember watching Tucker Carlson before the lockdowns, even before we knew that how, what this would be, he, he was saying, man, you know, there was, there may be no NCAA tournament. And I was like, you've gotta be kidding me, no NCAA tournament. Well, what is this?Scott Morefield:You know, and I was hoping maybe he was exaggerating and, and there were a lot of unknowns then, but just, just seeing the numbers come in and you could see if, if there were so even understanding the difference between case fatality rate and infection, fatality rate, and seeing that people who were logged as a case was a lot that that number was a lot lower than the amount of people actually getting infected. And they kept conflating that number early on and panicking people and making them think, man, I've got a 5% chance or a 3% chance of dying from this. And that's scary. I mean, regardless, I mean, we always knew the elderly were, were more susceptible when you start seeing these massive them using these high case, fatality rates and not even speaking to infection and the amount of people, the number of people who were actually infected it, it led me to think that there was more to this than what we were being told.Scott Morefield:So that's when I was like, this is, this is not why are they doing this? Because the best way, common sense logically the best way was always to protect the vulnerable and to let rib among the healthy population, because they were not gonna be susceptible. And it just seemed so common sensical. And this was obviously way for the great Barington declaration, but there were people saying this, even when I wrote that, I mean there were I remember seeing an interview from the Texas Lieutenant governor saying the same thing and he got a lot of flack for that, but yeah, it was pretty early. I could see through it pretty early.Ian Miller:Yeah. That's a great point. A lot of people forget that the initial numbers from like, like the world health organization, I think it was 3.4% or something was the fatality rate that they were, they were thrown out there.Scott Morefield:Terrifying. Yeah, exactly.Ian Miller:It's terrifying. It was totally incorrect, but it kind of set the tone for all the policies that came afterwards. Yeah.Scott Morefield:And now they'll admit that it's 0.2, what is it? Point oh two, you know, 0.2. They'll admit that now, but this is not what we were told at the beginning. Yeah. You know, that established this.Ian Miller:Exactly. so my next question is, is a little bit kind of going specifically into masks. At this point I think it's become pretty obvious to, to most people paying attention. We're, we're seeing that kind of more widely discussed. Now, there wasn't really any evidence or sign to suggest that mask wearing would work. And I've been asking a lot of people this, and I wanna get your opinion. What was it? Do you think that made them push it so hard? Why did they flip flop on this? Early on?Scott Morefield:Yeah, really the goal, I think, especially it, it may have been altruistic at the beginning. I think the goal was, people are panicking, really panicking, and we're gonna shut some things down. But as we open up, cuz this didn't have happened until may June that I, I never even thought that this would be an issue in March or April never even occurred to me. We were going in grocery stores with no masks. Everybody was, nobody was wearing a mask. It was not a concern. The virus goes down, they've gotta convince people to leave their basement. And, and so, all right, then I think the noble lie started that they call it, I would call it a noble. I, I wouldn't call it a noble lie, but in their minds, maybe that they, they say, oh, Fauci, the noble lie was, we were trying to save it for healthcare workers.Scott Morefield:No, the noble lie. He was telling the truth at the beginning. But the noble lie was, if you wear a mask, you'll be protected and you can come out. So I think that they were basically trying to get people to come out and engage in society and, and do conduct economic activity. And they knew they couldn't do that with out a security blanket. So I think that the mask were started as a security blanket to get economic activity going. And then they had to stick with that once they committed. So everything followed from that. So they had to ignore all the previous studies that you discussed in your book to ignore all that stuff and pretend this is something totally different, even though it's not, I mean, it is, but it's not, it's still a respiratory virus. It's still if it, if it doesn't work against the flu, it's not gonna work against, COVID never worked against the flu, doesn't work against COVID, but they had to convince. And then, and then I think as, as it went along, it became more and more about control about political politics, a political statement. So I think it it's morphed over the months and years, but, but I think it started off as kind of a noble lie.Ian Miller:Yeah. I, somebody asked me, but that, and mentioned noble I as like, I, I think it's better just to tell the truth there.Scott Morefield:Just tell the truth. That's a good… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe