If only I'd been wrong about all of it

If I'd been wrong, I could apologize and beg the bluechecks for forgiveness. But I was right, so they can't forgive me. Instead they ostracize me - while stealing everything I wrote.

Yesterday a longtime Team Reality member pointed me to an anti-lockdown piece in “The Dispatch,” a conservative newsletter that is supposedly one of Substack’s most popular (though I’d never heard anyone mention it before).

“You have been vindicated without ever mentioning your name,” he wrote.

I didn’t know what he meant.

Then I read the piece, which is called Our Failed COVID Response.

It explains that “even those who earnestly supported and complied with COVID measures have begun to wonder how much of it made sense - ” a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Then it laments the “values and principles we tossed aside, seemingly without scruple, in early 2020.”

For readers wondering how “we tossed aside” those values, the piece focuses on three drivers: the apparently successful lockdown in Wuhan, Italy’s panicked shutdown, and the report from Neil Ferguson and Imperial College on March 16 predicting millions of deaths and hospital collapse without an immediate and total lockdown.

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It was at this point in my reading I realized what my Team Reality friend had meant.

And my blood pressure started to go up.

Because if the article’s focus on those three points seems familiar to you, it should. Especially if you’ve read PANDEMIA, which makes exactly the same case.

The Dispatch article even includes this paragraph about Ferguson:

Professor Neil Ferguson from Imperial College later spoke of having copied China’s model in advocating for lockdowns… “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

Hmm.

Funnily enough, I wrote in PANDEMIA: “Even after the Chinese lockdown, SAGE [the scientists advising the British government] hadn’t thought Western countries would tolerate lockdowns. ‘Then Italy did it. And we realized we could.’”

Amazing that Virginia Hume, the author of the Dispatch piece, stumbled upon exactly this line from Ferguson. Which I have never seen mentioned anywhere else.

Just a coincidence, no doubt.

There are no coincidences.

(WHAT’S BELOW IS PAYWALLED FOR 72 HOURS.)