Alex Berenson

2022-02-13 01:12:15 The death of the expert class, in two tweets

This foul-mouthed immunology professor wonders why no one cares (to paraphrase his NSFW language) what he thinks, why “some random person on social media” (hi!) has more credibility: Open / Comment

2022-02-12 23:25:47 We need receipts!

Stephane Bancel, the billionaire chief executive of Moderna, has deleted his Twitter account.

Why?

I’d love to know too.

The archive HAS to happen. In the meantime we have to screengrab every tweet from all the big (and medium-sized) players - from Albert Bourla to Jeremy Farrar to Peter Daszak (I know that’s been done). All the corporate pages too.

No one tweet will be dispositive, but together they form a vital evidence base and cannot be allowed to vanish. Open / Comment

2022-02-12 18:39:51 Berenson v Twitter: The Empire Strikes Back

Despite having about of half of Silicon Valley’s top law firm working on its answer to my lawsuit, Twitter almost missed its deadline yesterday. It snuck in its motion to dismiss around 10 p.m. Pacific.

It makes for an interesting read. For the moment I’ll just leave you with this nugget: apparently Twitter is not just not a “common carrier,” it’s now a nonprofit!

I believe that’s known as the theory of “throw it against the wall and hope it sticks.”

Lolcatz.

More to come though I will have to be careful in what I say. Wheels within wheels and all that.

The case, including Twitter’s response, is here:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/berenson-v-twitter-inc/

If you want to stand with me against Twitter, now is the time and this is the way: Open / Comment

2022-02-12 01:58:06 The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man: an occasional series

Oh.

This has been The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man: an occasional series. Open / Comment

2022-02-11 22:16:21 Pfizer is delaying its request for mRNA Covid shots for kids under 5


Reality is hitting harder by the day.

Remember: they only made the submission LAST WEEK.

Source: Pfizer PR Open / Comment

2022-02-11 20:50:05 The people who made Contagion were very proud of what they’d done and how accurate it was. They wanted us to know it was the future.

Sure enough they were right.

As they bragged when the future finally arrived, after any number of misses between 2011 and 2020.

How did they turn out so prescient?

That, friends, is a story for another day. Open / Comment

2022-02-11 20:49:21 Contagion does have one actual villain, though.

He’s a journalist, but really he’s just a blogger. Eww. When first we meet him he’s begging the San Francisco Chronicle to let him write an article.

And he’s a conspiracy theorist. And he’s a lying liar, he tells everyone that an extract from the forsythia plant will save them but he doesn’t believe it himself. Because bloggers, you know.

And he’s a grifter. He makes millions of dollars trading stocks in forsythia companies or something, that part isn’t totally clear either but he gets arrested for sure. And he lets his pregnant girlfriend - his pregnant girlfriend! - die from the virus instead of giving her the forsythia he knows doesn’t work to save her. Worst of all, he talks too fast and he runs in a really weird way when the FBI comes to arrest him for the securities fraud.

Yeah, he’s a bad guy. Even worse than Gwyneth Paltrow, who screws around on Matt Damon, poor sincere Matt Damon. (Though she works for a company that makes construction equipment to cut down trees. She pretty much deserves to die for causing global warming anyway.)

Yes, along with trust the bureaucrats, Contagion’s lesson is clear: the Internet is filled with liars! Open / Comment

2022-02-11 20:49:03 What is funny-not-funny about Contagion is how real it feels - and how false it turned out to be.

The movie puts its thumb on the scale in ways large and small. Its “MEV” virus has an incredibly high infection fatality rate, up to 30 percent. Thus three out of every 10 people who are infected with the virus die - young and old alike. They go from well to sick to dead in a couple of days, but for most of that time have only mild symptoms. Thus the seizures. And thus the very high R0.

Contagion is also weirdly obsessed with the idea of fomites - transmission by touch. (The bigger a problem fomite transmission represents, the more effective “reasonable” social distancing is likely to be.)

The most accurate part might be the vaccine development schedule.

It goes like so: a successful test in one monkey, followed by a test in one human (the brilliant CDC researcher who came up the shot), followed by distribution to eight billion people! More or less how Warp Speed went. Only those guys were wise enough not to try the miracle jabs on themselves first.

Also I missed the part in the movie where drug companies made $100 billion selling shots with liability-free guaranteed contracts. Open / Comment

2022-02-11 20:48:50 You will never guess who comes off amazingly well in Contagion.

Yep, the heroes are all either virologists or health bureaucrats. And not just any health bureaucrats. Health bureaucrats at the highest level, the ones who work for the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. Or both.

They tell the dumb state health department bureaucrats what to do! They get kidnapped by the Chinese but only for the best possible reason! They sacrifice themselves for the greater good!

Meanwhile the public steals food and riots. Even nurses don’t get a break. One of the movie’s plot points is that they go on strike because they’re too afraid to work. Open / Comment

2022-02-11 20:48:38 Focus now on just one point.

The new experts were frustrated with the public’s disinterest in (nonexistent) pandemics. This myopia made raising money for their work harder. And their work was expensive. They complained privately and publicly. “It is easy to forget about public health and the threat of emerging infectious diseases,” one wrote (in the Atlantic, inevitably).

How could they make the proles see what wasn’t there?

Contagion was part of the answer. It wasn’t just another thriller. It was a lavishly produced call to antiviral arms. With Matt Damon! Experts on virology and infectious disease, as well as the World Health Organization, even worked with the filmmakers to make sure the script was accurate.

SOURCE: United Nations Creative Community Outreach Initiative Open / Comment