COMMENT: Dear Mr Armstrong,
About your post “Fake News & Coronavirus Panic”, i wanna share my experience here in Italy, Venice.
In the last weeks i’ve been contacted by my abroad friends reading our apocalyptic news, wondering if i was already became a zombie. My answer was always the same: “i’m fine also my family, friends and all my contacts til the 4th grade. I read the news as you, but i’m still astonished by this kind of overreaction”.
With passing days the situation worsened, better say the reaction went to steroids. Because yes, the ill numbers are growing, but looking my very productive region entering in lockdown, like a christmas tree slowly turning off its lights, it became the real nightmare.
Our governor, once a balanced right-wing politician, actually screams that hospitals’ intensive care is close to be full; that he doesn’t permit to have careless casualties, even blaming people walking on the river banks or sending police controls to the companies for checking if they apply the health security rules.
Because Doctors said this is the only way to lower the casualty rate. Then Mr Armstrong, i agree with your rants on the media, but it’s not just that only. What it’s changed is that we consider science as a religion and scientists as priests, avoiding to balance their biased warnings with the old family father’s wise rules.
We don’t accept the death anymore, going to war for saving hundred patients, forgetting that famine kills the millions.
Best regards,
AF
REPLY: I have been in contact with some people who are on the Hill in Washington who are growing concerned that this may be an orchestrated grab for power. The CDC has long sought dictatorial powers and has been pushing legislation under the title of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act. It is a draft of model legislation to increase state powers to respond to bio-terrorism or other outbreaks of disease that the Centers for Disease Control and others want the states to pass into law. Although such legislation is needed, the current draft of the Model Act, unfortunately, is written in a way that doesn’t adequately protect citizens against the misuse of the tremendous powers that it would grant in an emergency.
The CDC seeks extraordinary emergency powers where there are no checks or balances. When you go to a doctor they always tell you to get a SECOND opinion. Public health authorities make mistakes. We all know that politicians abuse their powers and those in government’s deep state seek absolute rule for everyone is a potential enemy. Even take what they did to the Japanese during World War II. The government has a history of discriminatory abuse of power when it comes to the quarantines. The lack of checks and balances is always a major threat to civil liberty. They will always go too far.
This is becoming a power grab just as they used 9/11. There are no cases were I am. Nevertheless, they have panicked and imposed curfews. A lot of girls in college work as servers. Restaurants are closing and students who are already screwed by the system cannot go bankrupt on worthless degrees and cannot even earn money to live. This has gone way too far.
