Three months after Dr. Anthony Fauci declared, “I am the science,” the science begs to disagree. An explosive new study from Johns Hopkins has taken the world by storm, slamming the idea of mass lockdowns to fight COVID — and destroying whatever scrap of credibility Fauci had left. Not only did the lockdowns disrupt lives, but they also had “little to no effect” in saving them. They hurt us socially, economically, and mentally, the researchers concluded, “with devastating effects.” If the lockdowns benefited anyone, it turns out, it was the politicians — who used them to expand power they never should have had.

The meta-analysis, which took into account dozens and dozens of other studies on the subject, was so scathing that it concluded by saying lockdowns “should be rejected out of hand as pandemic policy.” Fauci, who insisted the idea “saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives,” was wrong again. The mortality rate in the United States and Europe dropped by a measly 0.2 percent — while other deaths, from suicide, overdoses, starvation, and lack of medical care, robbed the world of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The trio of scientists from America, Sweden, and Denmark pointed to the other, more destructive effects: reduced economic activity, rising unemployment, reduced schooling, political unrest, increased domestic violence, and — interestingly — undermining liberal democracy. Countries like Sweden that stayed open “fared well” because citizens “willingly took precautions without being ordered to do so.” As the authors wisely point out, mandates only regulate a fraction “of our potential contagious contacts and can hardly regulate nor enforce handwashing, coughing etiquette, distancing in supermarkets, etc.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of Medicine at Stanford University and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, has been arguing these points for two years. But he, like so many experts, wasn’t taken seriously, accused of “conspiracy theories” — or worse, censored by Big Tech and Fauci’s cabal. “When I co-wrote the vaccine declaration in 2020,” he explained on “Washington Watch,” “[we called] for a focused protection strategy. Four days after we wrote it, [former director of NIH] Francis Collins wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me a ‘fringe epidemiologist.’ And I know I work at Stanford, and I may or may not be right or wrong, but I don’t think I’m a fringe epidemiologist — although now, I put it on my business card just for fun. And then he called for a takedown [of my argument], which came in the form of a of an op-ed in Wired magazine — not a scientific takedown… This was the strategy they used to try to marginalize voices — scientific voices.”

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the doctor’s loudest critics, thinks one of the worst mistakes we made was shutting down speech and scientific dialogue. In the 14th century, he pointed out, the pope thought he could burn infection out of the air with candles. “It was a wrong-handed notion. It took a few centuries — really to the 19th century — to understand germ theory. Now we have lockdowns, which are not based in science [either]… I hope we’ll learn from this study — and our mistakes.”

His colleague, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kans.), another one of Congress’s doctors, hates that all of this “bad judgment” and “poor leadership” has given Americans “an unhealthy fear of COVID.” We need a new approach, he insisted — and “that new approach should not include Dr. Fauci.” Bhattacharya agrees. It’s one of the most dangerous conflicts of interest he’s ever seen. “You cannot have society run by a narrow class of scientists — and you certainly cannot have all that power in the hands of one man who controls the budgets of an enormous number of scientists. A lot of… qualified people stayed silent [on the lockdowns] because they feared that their reputations would be harmed. Their ability to get grants would be undercut because the person in charge of the lockdown policy was also in charge of scientific funding.”

He’s right. Not many scientists would be willing to put their grant money on the line to cross Fauci. If he’s the one signing your research checks, it’s all the more reason to keep unpopular opinions to yourself. That means a large swath of epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists were stifled or refused to challenge the wisdom of the man calling the shots. Now, with the Biden administration’s complete failure to stop COVID, more people have decided to speak up.

But more needs to be done, Bhattacharya warns. “[This was] probably the single worst public health mistake I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he shook his head. “We cannot have such a small, narrow group of people in charge of science. And we certainly should have a bright firewall between people who fund science and people who make health policy. It is now very clear that the level of power when you give a single person or a single set of small set of people both of those roles, you create an opportunity for corruption that I think most of us didn’t realize existed before the pandemic, but we do now. So if science is to be reformed, we need to reform that.”

Originally published here.

Freedom on Furlough: Biden Ousts Military’s Unvaxxed

Just how anti-freedom is the Biden administration? Even a military chaplain can’t get a religious exemption! In an astonishing story, a Navy reservist complained to Fox News that his vaccine accommodation was denied — even though he had his two commanders’ approval. “That they’re getting away with it just absolutely astounds me,” the chaplain said on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a kick in the gut for sure.”

Unfortunately, there have been a lot of “kicks in the gut” to our service members lately. Just Wednesday, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth announced that it was time to start discharging soldiers who haven’t gotten the vaccine — jeopardizing the careers of more than 3,300 service members who’ve refused the shots. “Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” she said. “Unvaccinated soldiers present a risk to the force and jeopardize readiness. We will begin involuntary separation proceedings for soldiers who refuse the vaccine order and are not pending a final decision on an exemption.”

Of course, as we all know now, the pending exemption racket is a sham. In the Army alone, 3,000 men and women have requested accommodations. Zero have been granted. Only three Marines have been lucky enough to see their exemptions through. (Given the odds they were up against, they should try their luck with Powerball.) The Navy chaplain, who stands to lose his 20 years of retirement benefits over the dispute, said, “I would have thought that if you grant one, you have to grant everyone — or else they are picking and choosing which religion is valid and whose constitutional rights under the First Amendment will be honored and whose will not. It’s offensive to me as someone who loves the Constitution.”

When he overcame the first two hurdles — his commander’s approval and that commander’s boss’s approval — the chaplain was optimistic. “I think the commanders on the ground, many of them, see this for what it is. But [their] hands are tied, and we have a lot of yes men at the top. It’s really bad.” When his rejection letter came through from Vice Admiral John Nowell, it looked identical to everyone else’s he’s seen. “You can hold each of these up to the light, and they look exactly like everyone else’s,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, even the service members who’ve won some legal relief — for now — are still experiencing harassment at the hands of their supervisors. A month after a federal court granted more than 30 Navy SEALs an injunction from the vaccine mandate, leadership has “continued to subject our clients to restrictions on the basis of their… religious accommodation [request],” First Liberty Institute’s Justin Butterfield explained. “We’ve had one client who needed medical treatment, and he was told he could not travel to get that medical treatment because of his request for religious accommodation. We had another client who’s been told that he cannot leave his base even to get groceries or gasoline without permission because he requested a religious accommodation to the vaccine. So, these are egregious things.”

The SEAL — who needed medical treatment for a traumatic brain injury — even offered to arrange and pay for the travel himself and was still denied, all because he asked for permission to follow his religious convictions. Others in the group have been sidelined from deployment or assigned menial tasks, instead of the elite warfighting they’ve been trained for. Butterfield says that’s triggered another round of legal action. “Unfortunately, we have to go back to court… and [ask]… ‘Why are you not abiding by the order [of the court]? We’ll see what the Navy says. But it’s unfortunate that they’re continuing to put Navy SEALs, who’ve given so much to this country, through the wringer…”

The message is simple: the Biden Pentagon doesn’t care about the religious freedom of their men and women in uniform. “It’s unfortunate that they’re more concerned with 100 percent vaccine compliance than they are with 100 percent Constitution compliance,” Butterfield lamented. That has to change. If it doesn’t, this president will have to answer to the people — and the courts.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.