Dear Stephanie,
I am writing to strongly protest the mask laws, and to react in horror at the idea that curfews would even be considered.
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If the Hippocratic Oath states, right up front, First, do no harm. then I would argue that – as a doctor – you are potentially doing harm. Harm to our health, harm to our children, and harm to our freedom.
First, there are the risks of bacterial pneumonia, e.g., see the paper from the NIH showing that most of the deaths in 1918 came from bacteria, not viruses and that there are growing concerns that mask wearing is contributing to increased bacterial infections. The consensus for mask wearing is not at all universal. Nor is the case for lockdowns and other restrictions a universal consensus. Nor is the case for mask-wearing in general.
Second, this is a virus whose overall survival rate is over 99.9%. Even if over 70 years old, the survival rate is over 94%:
A quick summary of COVID-19 survival rates is shown below. The summary is based on the CDC table provided at the end of this report.
CDC COVID-19 Survival Rates
- Age 0-19 — 99.997%
- Age 20-49 — 99.98%
- Age 50-69 — 99.5%
- Age 70+ — 94.6%
Not to mention there being highly effective treatment protocols.
Third, the psychological damage to children in particular may be long-lasting, if not lifetime-lasting. People evolved to see others’ faces. See the Still Face Experiment, as summarized in the video, which is taken from the article.
Still Face Experiment: Dr. Edward Tronick
https://youtu.be/apzXGEbZht0
We are raising children, particularly in their formative years, to not see faces and, thus, see people – but rather faceless things. Potentially Untermensch things.
Fourth, people are already harassing and even physically attacking those who don’t wear masks. People who don’t want to wear masks are already getting violently defensive of their not wanting to do so. People are already being killed over mask wearing disagreements.
Fifth, curfews? Seriously? Because Covid starts being more dangerous or more communicable at, say, 10:01 PM than 9:59 PM? What ever happened to Live Free Or Die? Or are we now the Cover Up and Cower state? The economic damage to businesses from lockdowns, and the about-to-happen impact on peoples’ abodes (and in parallel landlords going bankrupt because of an inability to pay the mortgages on their properties), is catastrophic. Not to mention the increased suicides and deaths from this in general.
As a fellow Jew, as a fellow congregant, I implore you to consider not just the precedents you’ve already set, but ones that you may well enact in the future. Tyranny approved by your conscience is still tyranny:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
~ C. S. Lewis
And given our mutual Jewish history, shouldn’t we be concerned at these creeping infringements? Doesn’t NEVER AGAIN mean anything? Quoting a famous Jew:
“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
~ Supreme Court Lewis Brandeis
If the sights of police enforcing stay-at-home orders, harassing businesses, people being encouraged to turn in their fellow citizens Stasi-style, and possibly turning children into informers on their parents, and other countries building enforced quarantine camps with rumors of calls for that domestically including forced sleep-overs at school for students, and many other clear-and-present danger warning signs do not arouse your survival instinct against tyranny, what would? “Papers please” does sound more exotic in the original German.
Saving lives is a good calling. But to quote one of my favorite writers:
In the trade-offs between the calling of saving lives, and the cost to freedom and damage being done particularly to children in the name of doing that good, I implore you to restore freedom. After all, we just passed the six-month anniversary of the two-week “flatten the curve” demand. Everywhere I go people with whom I speak understand this is a joke, and are getting angry. We no longer trust you. We no longer believe you. You think you are doing good. That’s when things done “in the name of doing good” become most dangerous.
In order for men to do great evil, they must first believe they are doing good.
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
And SHUT UP will not be accepted as a response.
Andrew Klavan: Shut Up
Yours sincerely,
David Hunt