If you have been following the online controversy surrounding Bret Weinstein and his position on lockdowns this post will be of interest.
He has come out against lockdowns and painstakingly clarified his position and posted a new Dark Horse episode setting it out in some detail.
In response I sent him this tweet a few moments ago and have repeated it below.
My tweet
I listened to part of your latest "Dream Team" The 207th Evolutionary Lens and grabbed a transcript from YouTube:
(relevant except starts at 52.00)
I hadn't previously quite appreciated how nuanced your thinking was and wanted to ask some questions. I've added these at the end of this post, but this is your point:
"....so maybe this is the point to talk about Lockdowns
uh what my current position is on lockdowns and uh what I regret and what I don't regret good my current position first of all I do not believe that given what SARS kovy to is that there was any potential to control certainly not control spread and my focus has been actually driving the pathogen to Extinction
so the reason that I will not just simply say lockdowns could never conceivably work under any circumstances against any pathogen is that there remember I'm a biologist here's what I'm focused on a novel pathogen that were to Jump by human meddling or some other mechanism into the human population from some animal source that therefore starts out at uh some low level but has significant virulence so I'm just painting a scenario here were there to be a novel pathogen that leap into people but had not yet become endemic to
humanity if one could drive it to Extinction in that early phase the value to humanity would be incalculably large
and I choose that that phrasing very carefully the reason that it would be incalculably large is that the alternative of allowing it to run its course and become endemic is for it to continue to inflict costs on humans for as long as humans continue to exist so there is a a value to taking a pathogen that there is still the potential to drive it extinct and doing so rather than running out the clock and letting it become endemic so you can disagree with me that that's something to be worth focusing on but you can't disagree with me that if one had the ability to drive a new human pathogen to Extinction that the value of doing so would be very high and would be worth a significant small a significant but small cost and that is why I have said short intense lockdowns
however so there's that I do not believe there is a government on Earth today at least not at any large scale whether a city government could have some uh alternative scenario I don't know but the idea that there's a national government or an international body on Earth today that could be trusted with this kind of power is preposterous nor do I expect to live to see a government worthy of trust in this regard
so going forward I would oppose any lockdown because I regard the people who would be issuing uh such an order to be illegitimate and very likely up to no good but um the point is when I have presented this idea I have said it as a brief intense lockdown accompanied by High quality testing and the idea is in this scenario a pathogen that spread and burned itself out in some short period of time and where in those rare cases where for some reason it was able to bounce around for long enough to escape that period of weeks you would be able to find it with the testing that would allow in principle some uh properly organized body to figure out how to drive a pathogen to Extinction and benefit Humanity tremendously
again I would oppose any lockdown that came uh with from normal Earth governments at the moment but I do not rule out the possibility that in the future you could face a pathogen that it would be worth doing what's more I would point this out the reason
so the folks who are attacking me have been very focused on the idea that I in some hypothetical scenario favor something like an intense lockdown and they've been very avoidant of why that is paired with short duration in other words if you're looking to paint me as a villain you would focus on the one thing and you would ignore the other which they have done they have also ignored the fact that I've said that absent good testing this would be pointless
I'm not arguing that this is a useful way to control the spread of a pathogen I'm arguing that in the brief period before something becomes endemic that it could be used to drive a pathogen to Extinction and that the disproportionate value of preventing a pathogen from becoming endemic is of a different sort and I would argue that reasonable people all understand that
although civil liberties are sacred and should be that there are circumstances in which you make a compromise so for example no reasonable person would argue that if you have an active shooter and they are wandering through a school that locking down the ation of that school is a violation of their civil liberties that we ought to complain about right giving the police the ability to have access to the shooter and keeping people safe from the shooter is a perfectly reasonable uh reason to have a lockdown is it an abridgment of people's civil liberties you bet it is but we all understand
why right um likewise if you presumably had somebody you know if somebody released small poox from one of the places where it is maintained uh under lock and key and some person had small smallpox and they were wandering around a hospital would it make sense to lock down the population of the hospital so that they didn't contact the person with small pox yes it would so the only reason I'm pointing this out is that even though civil liberties are sacred we can all understand that there are circumstances in which it makes sense to um prioritize something else briefly and that is an extension of the argument that I've been making that said
I am not favoring lockdowns I do not believe they were ever appropriate for SARS K2 nor was the rationale that we were given for those lockdowns the one that I'm pointing to the rationale we were given was some nonsense about flattening the curve and preventing the hospitals from being flooded which was apparently from the get-go the hospitals were largely empty so I'm not defending anything like lockdowns that we had and I'm not advocating that we should leave the door open to them in the future because there's no government that could be trusted with it but is there a reason to leave the concept open for some future scenario that we cannot imagine yes there is good okay"
My comments and questions
Your 'lockdown to drive to extinction' argument rests on the notion of perfect testing. This is not, and never will be in prospect. It is an insurmountable problem. I won't labour this point.
Next, we have never successfully driven a virus to extinction by testing and lockdowns. The one time we tried it was a disaster. Like communism, are you saying we just haven't done it properly yet?
If the virus springs from a zoonotic reservoir, would we need to lockdown the animals too? Otherwise, how could we eradicate it from humans? They would simply reinfect us post-lockdown, thus re-introducing endemicity.
Central to your argument for lockdowns, albeit in very special circumstances indeed, is that normal Earth governments couldn’t and shouldn’t enact them. What do you mean by "normal Earth government"?
I appreciate and am very pleased that you are against supranational or national governments having this power, but my immediate thought was that you mean that only non-earth-bound entities should have lockdown powers.
I want to be sure - Is this what you are saying?
Lastly you qualify this non-Earth government as currently existing "today" or "currently" and "at the moment".
What do you mean by this exactly?
I take it to mean there may be unusual circumstances in the future where we might have a non-Earth government that should have lockdown powers.
To me this sounds quite an incredible basis to make an argument for lockdowns.
Still, I do appreciate that you do not support lockdowns (except with the above qualifiers).
To me it's obvious that the "evolutionary biologist" was and remains clueless on the ramifications of lockdowns against a respiratory virus old or novel.
This is the reason I have been weary of "experts" for the last 4 years from the Western hemisphere.
Poor me was publicly speaking out as aloud as possible against lockdowns in India (as far back as March 2020) because they seemed pointless ( this did turn out to be the case) but worse did substantial fiscal damage to nation states, and immense psychological injury both to the young and old.
COVID Operation Executive Summary
The virus held no danger so to fix this flaw the script was flipped to ensure that all of the preventative measures were overflowing with harm:
The masks were designed to devitalize you mentally, physically, & spiritually.
The propaganda was programmed to wreck your mind and install the “virus”.
The lockdowns were enforced to eviscerate your economies, education, and autonomy.
The injections are intended to erase you.
All of this damage is by design: death by a thousand cuts. You're the carbon...
—https://tritorch.substack.com/p/the-gathering-darkness