Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/10/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! And it promises to be a very busy day. Today’s roundup includes: pandemic retrospective on the anniversary of the day the Earth changed; far-left media publishes remarkable anti-expert article and new book offers hope for covid accountability; USAID meets inglorious end as vast majority of its projects are permanently shut down; kiddie loans further disgrace federal workforce; record-setting Alzheimer’s case raises bigger questions about expertise; and Utah blazes a new medical freedom trail.
🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖
I don’t mention it from narcissism or attention-seeking. For better or worse, my birthday has become a twisted anniversary. Thanks, covid. In 2020, the muted celebration marked the calm before the storm, the last day of normal pre-pandemic life— before everything changed. The next day, March 11, 2020, the WHO issued its infamous pandemic declaration, and two days later, President Trump declared a state of domestic emergency, triggering three painful years of anti-democratic executive fiat from the White House on down to the local health department.
Hopefully, you’ll forgive that I prefer to think of March 10th as a positive—sure, we were anxiously watching the Diamond Princess news and the crazy, fake-looking videos of military-aged Chinese men toppling over onto soft surfaces and bobbling around in inflatable Stay-Puft moon suits spraying exterminator misters randomly into the air. But on March 10th, nobody had even dreamed of the noxious nightmare that would become mass mail-in voting. The idea of extended lockdowns remained a laughable fantasy. Facebook jail was a distant dystopia. Washing groceries with bleach was still the punchline of a bad joke about obsessive-compulsive disorder.
On March 10th, Fauci was still telling the truth and emailing his friends not to bother since everybody knows masks don’t work.
And most of all, on March 10th, vaccine mandates were still inconceivably impossible. I’d even have argued with you about them. That could never happen, I would’ve said. Don’t be ridiculous, I would’ve argued. It’ll never work, I’d have insisted.
So I choose to mark today’s date as the anniversary of our life before. Tomorrow, March 11th, is the pandemic’s true anniversary, the date everyone would prefer to forget.
I’ve quoted Scottish journalist Charles Mackay’s 1841 book many times. In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Mackay famously penned, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
To commemorate the Last Day of Normal Life, I present you with the capstone to five years of madness as today’s first story. The Boston Globe is slowly recovering its senses.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Don’t get mad! Yesterday, the far-left Boston Globe ran an astonishing story headlined, “The case against Anthony Fauci.” To remove all doubt, the sub-headline explained, “On the fifth anniversary of the COVID outbreak, a new book examines where American science — and politics — went wrong.”
For a half-decade, we were mocked, gaslit, canceled, hounded, ostracized, and called every ridiculous name in the book by arrogant, birdbrained “science followers” who sneeringly ridiculed us for asking questions. Well, here we finally are. We were right. Conspiracy theory has gone mainstream.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology.
The article’s genesis was a new book penned by two blue-blooded and blue-voting Princeton University political scientists titled, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.” The book remains on pre-order, scheduled for release tomorrow, on the pandemic’s true anniversary.
The article begins with these remarkable paragraphs:
People like infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci were doing the best they could with the information they had. They were following the science. And we got to the other side in better shape than we might have.
But if there’s something comforting in this story — even a little triumphant — there’s just one problem: It’s almost completely wrong.
In the book’s telling, Fauci and his ilk didn’t follow the science, they betrayed it — pressing for lockdowns even though experts had warned for years that there was little evidence to support such a drastic intervention.
When they ran into dissent, they squelched it.
And the people who should have held them to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job.
The costs of the shutdowns were enormous: trillions of dollars in deficit spending to stave off economic ruin; massive learning loss, concentrated among the least advantaged children; the special pain of leaving loved ones to die alone in dreary nursing homes and emergency rooms; a further cleaving of our already divided society.
And despite all the sacrifice, the United States still had a much higher death rate than other wealthy nations.
At a critical moment, American science abandoned its most fundamental tenets. It forsook inquiry, it muzzled debate.
And American democracy did no better. Reasonable skepticism was cast as tinfoil-hat conspiracy mongering. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube were purged of heresy.
For authors Macedo and Lee, the story is clear: The pandemic was a monumental test of the American system — and the system failed.
In January 2020, after the Chinese outbreak and only two months before the WHO’s pandemic declaration, the international health agency published a cautionary report on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that designated several as “not recommended in any circumstances.” That tragically unheeded list included contact tracing, lockdowns, and border controls. It also warned that the evidence for masking’s effectiveness was scant.
The article described how then-NIH director Frances Collins orchestrated a “devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, the open letter published by three gold-standard health experts arguing against broad lockdowns and advocating for “focused protection” of our most vulnerable citizens. “Banishing the Declaration from the realm of acceptable debate,” the Globe admitted, “was a pretty stunning betrayal of scientific and democratic ideals.”
The banishment of any inquiry into the Wuhan lab origin of the virus, the Globe allowed, “not only clouded judgment on public policy, it also did enormous damage to public trust.”
Now they tell us.
This Globe article wasn’t the first acknowledgement in corporate media of elite failure during the pandemic. But three things stood out. First, it was the harshest, least apologetic takedown to date. Second, it appeared in one of the pandemic era’s most enthusiastic “science” defenders, the Boston Globe. And third, it disgracefully did so without any acknowledgement of the Globe’s own role as gatekeeper, enforcer, and cheerleader of the approved lie.
In other words, they haven’t learned their lesson yet.
In its tangible form, the pandemic is over. As this article evidences, all those NPIs that the elites leaned into are now being incrementally discredited, “one by one,” as Charles Mackay might have said. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they are being re-discredited.
But in another sense, the pandemic is not over. Trust in the institutions lies in ruin, where it belongs. The perpetrators of a historically destructive fraud have — so far — escaped punishment. While the media is starting to come around, the so-called experts — the architects of this disaster — are still clinging to their fictions, investing their ill-gotten pandemic proceeds, and hoping the public forgets before they’re ever held to account.
But we are not forgetting.
If “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us” is any sign at all, it is a sign that the long overdue accounting is rising over the horizon, like the distant sails of a yet-to-be-identified ship. Justice may be slow, but it’s sailing toward us.
Thanks, Boston Globe. Thanks, Princeton researchers. Happy Anniversary, everyone.
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This morning, Seeking Alpha ran a story headlined, “U.S. to cancel 83% of USAID programs, Marco Rubio says.” The final numbers are in. Early this morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 5,200 USAID contracts were cancelled, with only about 1,000 surviving DOGE scrutiny.
The “quasi-independent” USAID agency is done. The remaining “aid” contracts will now be administered directly by the State Department, where they will be subject to FOIA’s and normal government transparency.
Thanks, DOGE!
This story is much bigger than saving money, axing graft, and ditching wasteful, multi-million-dollar LGBTQ puppet shows and Indian sex-change clinics. USAID was, by its own charter, aimed at transforming the rest of the world into a progressive utopia— whether citizens of other countries wanted it or not. Canceling 83% of USAID is encouraging news for the rest of the world who might now get 83% more sanity and peace.
📉 In related news, Fox ran a story yesterday with the unlikely headline, “DOGE says $312M in loans were given to children during COVID pandemic.”
Yesterday, DOGE announced discovering that in 2020 and 2021, the SBA awarded over 5,600 forgivable loans (totaling $312 million dollars) to extraordinary borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the loan. Kiddie loans. Those immature borrowers also all used social security numbers with the wrong names, just saying.
On top of that, the efficiency agency also reported that the SBA issued 3,095 other loans ($333 million) to industrious borrowers over 115 years old. One wonders how many “small business owners” over 80 years old got forgivable SBA covid loans, and whether they even know it happened. Never mind the under 11s, how many were under 18?
Is there a single functioning neuron in the SBA? Were these freebie ‘loans’ to kiddies and grandpas approved by the same diligent, apolitical federal workers who can’t be troubled to report five weekly accomplishments? Is this why DOGE can’t be allowed to peek inside Treasury or Social Security?
Again, the story isn’t just about savings. This story is much bigger. It’s about what the Hades is going on? The same bureaucrats who rubber-stamped giveaway loans for toddlers and centenarians are the same ones now assuring us that our elections, our economy, and our institutions are in capable hands that cannot be questions.
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think they might not be 100% compos mentis.
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Last week, India Today ran a story with the baffling headline, “19-year-old youngest Alzheimer’s patient leaves doctors struggling for answers.” Thanks for nothing, experts.
The 19-year-old, a Chinese student, became the youngest person in history to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition that literally shrinks the brain, causing short and long-term memory loss and other dignity-shattering neurological symptoms. It re-defined the term “early onset.”
India Today called Alzheimer’s “among the fastest growing neurological disorders in the world.”
Although the researchers desperately wished to find the young man was “genetically predisposed” to Alzheimer’s, genetic testing failed to identify any suspect genes. “The patient had very early-onset AD with no clear pathogenic mutations,” neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues wrote in a study, “which suggests that its pathogenesis still needs to be explored.”
Useless experts were completely baffled. They knew everything there was to know about covid, as they repeatedly assured us (except where it actually came from, how to treat it, how fast it mutates, or what to do to protect populations). But this? The fastest growing neurological disorder in the world? They got nothing. They haven’t even started! “It still needs to be explored.”
The issue is becoming very personal to me. My only aunt just went into long-term memory care. Her husband is experiencing similar symptoms. We are trying to convince Mom to schedule an appointment because of her growing memory problems. But my grandmother —mom’s and my aunt’s mother — lived well into her 90’s and was still telling riveting stories about her childhood long after her body failed her.
The experts claim there is a crisis of trust in the institutions. But maybe the real emergency is a crisis of competence. We need better experts. Stat.
Something is happening and it’s bad. Chemtrails, food additives, vaccines, it doesn’t matter. They need to figure it out, and fast. Secretary Kennedy— you can’t possibly work fast enough.
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A sign of some progress appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Utah to Become First State to Ban Fluoride in Public Water.” I will admit I was a doubter but I have become convinced.
While Florida became the first state last year to recommend against county-level fluoridation, Utah is taking it one toothier step. Last week, Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) said he will sign a bill banning fluoride from public water systems. “It’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government,” Governor Cox told ABC4-Utah.
In other words— medical freedom.
Half of Utah already does not fluoridate their public drinking water. Governor Cox said dentists in those counties reported no higher levels of tooth decay than dentists in fluoridated counties. Grocery shelves are flooded with fluoridated toothpaste for anyone who wants it. So why force everyone to drink the chemical, which is not meant to be drunk anyway?
Last September, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued an 80-page ruling finding that the evidence — based on 72 different studies — supported a conclusion that fluoride was possibly a neurotoxin associated with IQ loss in children. The EPA, corporate media, and dental associations reflexively dismissed the finding as another conspiracy theory and have never looked back.
Meanwhile, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are surging at rates nobody can explain. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to take a harder look at all the things the experts have assured us are ‘safe and effective.’
It’s for your own good seems less and less like a compelling argument. Could this anti-fluoride trend, this no-mandate momentum, have happened without the pandemic’s forced medication policies? Is this a pandemic silver lining in the water pipes? Let me know what you think in the comments.
Have a magnificent Monday! Then get back here tomorrow morning for another healthy and fluoride-free roundup of essential news and commentary.
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
