Informational No Man’s Land
By David Thunder
Reposted from the author’s Substack
One of the remarkable features of these Covid years is the amount of misleading and downright false information emitted by “official” sources, most notably public health authorities, government-appointed regulators, and mainstream media. A part of me hankers after the times when I could trust my government and media in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.
As somone who turned on a daily basis to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for updates on the Covid outbreak in February and March 2020, I was especially shocked and disappointed by the abysmal failure of authoritative bodies to impartially report the evidence bearing on masking, vaccinations, lockdowns, PCR testing, and other aspects of pandemic policy. My whole faith in the political, media, and scientific establishment, limited as it was, was shaken to the core.
We have been betrayed by the people charged with sharing the best available data and information with us in a time of crisis. We have been lied to and deceived about matters of life and death, such as the risk-benefit tradeoffs of the Covid vaccines, not only by the pharmaceutical industry, but by the people who occupy leading positions of public authority in our society.
Our politicians have sold us “solutions” to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction.
Among the more egregious falsehoods that were either stated or implied by official authorities, and uncritically echoed by mainstream media, are the following:
The notion that community masking was supported by strong scientific evidence. It never was (here is the latest Cochrane review of evidence for mask efficacy).
The idea that it was critical that young and healthy people get vaccinated, if not for themselves, then for the sake of “granny and granddad.” This idea was empirically baseless, since we did not have any good evidence to show that these vaccines prevented transmission at the time these claims were made.
The idea that toddlers and young children and teenagers with no serious health issues could benefit from receiving a Covid vaccine. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that children’s risk from Covid is significant enough to warrant their exposure to a vaccine that has sparked a significant number of adverse events and whose long-term risks to children are still not well understood.
The idea that sheltering in place for months on end would effectively stop a respiratory virus from spreading through the community, rather than just deferring the inevitable and inflicting enormous social and human costs in the meantime. This was a dangerous and revolutionary proposition that had no strong empirical evidence to support it.
The idea that a person who tested positive in a PCR test, but had absolutely no clinical symptoms of Covid-related disease, should count as a Covid “case” or that the death of such a person was a “Covid” death.
I could go on, and talk about the use of a handful of cases of infant hospitalisation to push vaccines on children, the unnecessary and counterproductive closure of schools, the US government’s active role in encouraging private social media companies, behind the scenes, to censor their critics, or the infamous Hancock files, which uncover the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s plan to “scare the pants off everyone” with his announcement of the next “variant” of Covid-19.
Thoughtful citizens who notice these betrayals now have strong grounds for distrusting “official” sources to tell them the truth, or present the facts in a non-manipulative, impartial manner. For me, and many others, the old idea that you could depend on your government to inform you of the latest science or tell you the threat level of a disease is now dead in the water.
Put simply, we now live in an informational No Man’s Land, in which every man must fend for himself, to the best of his ability, without the backing of an impressive Official Source to do his thinking for him.
We each have to scrape together whatever information we can from unofficial sources that have gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc.
It puts many of us in the peculiar position of placing more weight on the words and recommendations of individual journalists and scientists whose character and intellect we trust, than the pronouncements of national governments, official regulators, or international bodies like the World Health Organisation.
Living in an informational No Man’s Land is demanding because you can’t just skip over to the CDC website to resolve your doubts. And it is uncomfortable because you do not enjoy anything like the level of faith the average citizen has in “Science” and “Officialdom.” You are sort of at sea, and you cling to whatever bits of information and insight you can scavenge from sources that are not living off the proceeds of vaccine sales or paid by governments to launch sophisticated campaigns of psychological warfare against their own citizens.
The painful truth is that official “experts” and government ministers have played god with our lives and repeatedly given dangerous and scientifically baseless advice.
Under these circumstances, those who do their own independent research, rather than uncritically swallowing whatever “official authorities” tell them, are not the “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” they are being made out to be, but citizens who actually understand the predicament they find themselves in, and have the courage to think for themselves, even when it draws down ridicule, censorship, and alienation from “respectable” society.
For all the truth that you write in this there is one truth, the most important truth of all that must be added. We have been given a gift by the revelation that all of the leaders, experts, official sources are lying about so much. We were never meant to be led in the first place. And to survive the Information Age it will necessary for us to lean into the most valuable gift of all we were given at our creation: discernment.
We all have it. But we all got lazy choosing not to use it. And we relied on official sources, experts, leaders to tell us what to do. If anyone still wishes to be led through an age of information saturation instead of leaning into their own discernment then they wish to be slaves. Being a slave is easy. You do what you're told and you are provided for. At some level of subsistence for as long as you are productive to your master. Maybe nicely, maybe inside the house, the mansion. Maybe meagerly, in the fieldhouse. But you won't have to bother thinking, figuring out truth, just do your work, avail yourself to the types of entertainment and distractions provided by your master. Easy-peasy.
It's actual the most natural state of man as evidenced by the long history of slavery on the planet, and the relative short history of freedom. Because freedom isn't free. Freedom is hard work. Freedom is not trusting authorities, not trusting experts, not trusting officials, not trusting anything but your own gift of discernment that God gave you.
Yes! F the experts! F the official sources! F the leaders! We were not meant to be led. Not as free people. We must stop indulging the fantasy that we can have a kind and benevolent government and society where we get to check out of thinking, just trust experts and do as we're told so we can get back to playing our video games, cheering our favorite teams, engaging in the frivolities of life. That's what got us, mankind in this predicament in the first place.
We must gather information, avail ourselves of all of the resources being presented to us. Sure, we take some sources more seriously than others, we give them more respect. But we still must measure everything we read and hear, even from like-minded friends. Sometimes friends will tell us untruths, sometimes foes will tell us truths. It is up to us to take it all in without blindly trusting friends or reflexively dismissing foes. Discernment.
God gave us each that gift. It's not very sharp in most who have never used it, who have always trusted. They will not make it very far in this Information Age. It becomes our own responsibility and burden to hone our discernment if we are out of practice. But it's there, for the taking, if we just lean into it, trust that God gave us all the same gift. Which will protect us from all harms. To do so we must first stop trusting experts, believing officials and authorities, and stop wishing to be led by other men. Not even clergy who supposedly are servants of God. They are men. Fallen. We are led by God, and God alone. Who speaks to us with through the gift of discernment he gave us that resides in us all.
The past three years have been a tremendous gift if you see it for what it has been. A painful lesson for most of us. A necessary lesson. Because we have strayed so far from God's original design for us by trusting man when we need have only trusted God's greatest gift of all.
I too was shocked by the depth of the deceit plus outright censorship of those who attempted to evidence the truth about all matter related to COVID. Particularly shocking was the abysmal failure of almost all medical "professionals". Their behavior, whether born of ignorance or cowardice, is unforgivable. They have destroyed their once substantial credibility, as have a great many so called "scientists".
However, the information needed to make sound choices was available to those who were willing to do a little research. As I recall within two months of the purported outbreak I was able to find infection fatality rate data which clearly indicated reasonably healthy people faced no meaningful risk of mortality from COVID. Needless to say when injections employing a radical new technology, with no medium or long term track record or testing, which had never been used as a vaccine (even in livestock) were offered the answer was - absolutely not. There was no need to wait to learn COVID injections were in fact horrifically dangerous in the short term, as was quickly evidenced by VAERS, and ineffective. Every government actor and doctor who pushed that toxic trash into vulnerable people should suffer severe civil, and in more than a few cases criminal, liability.
Despite incessant government deceit and comprehensive medical professional malpractice a little homework was all that was required to protect oneself from the political lunacy which prevailed, and those dreadfully dangerous and ineffective injections. We now know government, media, most medical professionals and most scientists are not worthy of our trust. This rabid politicization of our society is tragic beyond words.