Sunday was the 4th anniversary of the book that took the world by storm (teacup sized), smacked Experts silly, called for protection of the vulnerable before it was cool, and failed utterly in its mission to calm a world determined to grip onto idiotic panic.
Just wait for our next one!
The book was, and is, The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe. Here is a thread on the universal celebration that ensued from co-author Jay Richards:
Four years ago today, @FamedCelebrity, @DougAxe, and I published The Price of Panic–arguing that the lockdowns & hygiene theater were catastrophes that made no discernible difference in the spread of COVID-19, but would harm or kill millions of people.
We had a contract with @Regnery to write the book in late March 2020–just as the lockdowns started. Our planned title was “What Just Happened?” since we thought everyone would wake up in a few months and our book would be an after-action analysis.
But the summer came, and although we had solid data that the lockdowns made no difference, they continued in much of the country. Half the country continued to believe obvious lies, and most of the rest just went along (except the BLM rioters). [He links to our NRO (yes) article: “Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread.“]
So we came up with a different title. While writing the book, we watched search engines (especially Google) bury scientific articles that challenged the wisdom of the Biosecurity State. We watched our neighbors and fellow citizens turn into its willing accomplices.
Just before the book was released, the admirable @gbdeclaration came out, with @DrJBhattacharya, @MartinKulldorff and @SunetraGupta, advocating what we also suggested in the book–protecting high-risk people (the sick and elderly) but not locking down the population.
We were thankful for the air cover from these distinguished scientists, and thought that the madness might soon be over. But it was not to be. They were vilified, and soon, we would learn firsthand how the Big Tech platforms censored the debate.
When the book came out, we watched our radio and podcast interviews get pulled from YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, for spreading “disinformation” and “misinformation.” But nothing we said needed to be retracted. If anything, given what followed, our conclusions were mild.
E.g., I was quite certain the virus was the result of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but at the time, we didn’t have the evidence to show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it was the product of gain-of-function research funded in part by our own NIH.
And the catastrophe with the vaccine mandates was still to come. The culprits who brought us the virus and lockdowns have yet to receive justice or even apologize. Still, I’m thankful to the following people (a very partial list), who spoke out when it was costly to do so.
Long-time readers know I was calling for calm in January 2020, when a lunatic Nassim Taleb, shrieking like a teen girl having her cellphone taken away, was calling people “psychopaths” (his word) for not panicking.
In February 2020 I begin a weekly Coronadoom update, as well as posting hundreds of other articles over the next three years trying to reason people into calm. But you can’t reason people out of what they didn’t reason themselves into. People were determined, as I say, to panic. They wanted it, especially Experts and those in the “laptop class”. This was what they waited and longed for all their pitiful short lives.
You’d think the vex (Ann Cherry’s creative respelling to avoid the censors) would have me maddest, but no. You can just understand a panicked populace doing drugs every authority swore was good for them. But not masks. Masks were the supreme stupid act, given that we knew for a full century they were useless. Even the Fabulous Fauci said so, before he realized lying got him better press.
Mass worn by young men made me spitting mad. I am still spitting mad. I have to stop lest I say something indelicate.
During the panic our friend Eugyppius asked us to move over to Substack so that people could see the stats I was doing. I reasoned—you can see my batting average—“What’s the difference where I write? A click to get here is a click to get here?” Funny, right? Substack is now three times the size of the blog, and growing. I should have come over earlier.
Of course, I’m right on top of the latest tech wave, creating something called “videos”. See the Monday Class.
Speaking of the panic, I will be speaking of the panic at something called the True Grit Wellness Sumitt, Friday evening 1 November in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I don’t know yet if these talks will be online, but either way I’ll post the print speech after.
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Happy Anniversary. The Price of Panic was a fine and worthy effort. It might not have calmed the crazed masses but it certainly gave vital information and encouragement to more discerning readers. That book made a good moral profit. And it helps stiffens spines for the next crazy op the diabolical elite spring on us.
So you’re going to be speaking on “wellness”. Interesting topic. What constitutes wellness? Books could be written…
Well done on your efforts Briggs! Thank you! You deserve medals made from the skulls of THE SCIEN(tm)tists.
I too did a considerable article, published in the small press even, about the madness of hersteria and lunacy of everything that was. I shared it eagerly with friends and family. 50% who were on board, 50% who rolled down their sleeve, faces covered, and who wouldn’t let me speak to them past the front door.
90% of the total of them never finished reading it. And why? Was I simply a poor writer, lacking in charm, unmasked, unvexxed, and being very unserious and unscientific about the most deadly plague upon mankind that ever was?
No, it was simply too long… So many words to say the same thing that could’ve been shorter, but then also dismissed for lacking in citations and evidence and fact checks, which is why I went to such lengths to make it lengthy.
Upon realizing this, I took my mouse of the purchase button of the 30+ copies of ‘The Price of Panic’ I put in the cart and was hoping to gift them… Pearls before swine is what it would’ve been… “Mr. Briggs would refuse the money over this,” I reasoned…
I would’ve bought at least one copy for myself. But I wasn’t panicking… I was only ENRAGED. And so are many others! And that rage needs to go somewhere, and hopefully directed at the right sources. I hope to see that aftermath detailed in Professor Briggs and co.’s next outing – ‘THE PRICE OF RAGE : The discounting, fire-sale, and bankruptcy of Expertise, Big Tech and Government’ with a very detailed obituary of all their members and their just deserved ends as a supplementary companion book twice the size of the former while supplies last.
Congrats. Here’s your medal of valor, a purple heart. May your wounds be healed but your scars remain.
If only it had been merely a health crisis. If only it had been merely silly masks. The crisis was much deeper than that, of course, striking at vital organs of the non-physical variety. And the storm continues. The lightning still flashes. The thunder still rumbles. We still cower in our darkened basements, awaiting the bells that signal the bombing is over.
I was unaware of the book, so I just purchased it. Looking forward to reading it. Fortunately, with my minor scientific background and my past experience clerking in military intelligence (i.e. knowing the Federal government routinely lies to the populace for somebody’s profit), I didn’t fall at all for the BS of masking, distance, self-imprisonment, censorship, etc. People in the big cities hated me for it, but not in the small towns where people think for themselves.
The Panic was pure bullshit, and we know it, but there are many who long for those masked days and will jump at any opportunity to bring them back.
The book was how I found you.
I was well aware of Zelenko (RIP) at the time and was using his protocol, I have felt great ever since.
Thank God for a few brave people at the time.
JOHNNO YOU FOOL!
Why didn’t you share your article with me? I would have given you the most kind consideration, invited you into my gracious home, offered you vintage port, a fine cigar, perhaps a bowl of excellent tobacco, if you please, listened to your impassioned spiel. But did you do so? NO! You insist on battering your great blockhead against the impenetrable boneheads of… b-word… boneheads of blatherwort! — while neglecting sympathetic potential allies thirsty for the word. Or the Word. Pearls, swine. That’s on you. Next time knock on my door, you big dope. Cheezits, you’re as thick as Briggs sometimes. Not that I mean to insult our most excellent host. I appreciate his sense that the world should be better than it is, and that by instruction and admonishment it might be improved. Perhaps he is correct. But perhaps he is a utopian Protestant. Well, he is an American, and that’s about the same thing. Anyway, stop by my joint for port and cigars and a pipe and good conversation, when you get a moment. Dope.
Uncle Mike — it is a health crisis — a spiritual health crisis. The only true crisis.
On reflection, I should say, after implying that Briggs is a damned Protestant, on the basis of his irrationally benevolent expectations, that it may be the case that it is the Protestors, with their insistence on sole fidele, absent reason, that are irrational, and contrasted with Catholicism’s Aquinas, where reason and works are given due consideration, as opposed to the ridiculous Protestant dogma that you can just believe whatever and get a free ticket to paradise even while you’re an ass vacancy. Not that I’m saying Briggs is right, just considering the possibilities.
Hagfish,
This Briggs sounds like an amazing fellow.
He is amazing indeed. Wait’l you meet him.
Dear Professor Briggs,
As a long term agnostic of the great global warming scam and a more recent non conformist regarding the Wuhan Flu scam. and being a bad poet, plus being a Pure Blood (no jab, no mask, not much family left as they are paid up members of the herd) and then to cap it all, expecting to get ex communicated any day by our current believer Papa Francis for my sins of Emissions, I come here for shelter.
I have a drawer full of bad anti global warming and Wuflu and am wondering if you and yours would be interested in indulging me? try this for size.
EMASCULATED
If you really need to ask
Why I will not wear a mask,
Its because I’m one of those
Who Marxists laws oppose;
Which will have us all kowtow
To the nation of the Lao,
While our leaders lie supine
With space where was a spine;
They now bow down before the beast
Subjugated by the East,
Not a chance they’ll ever learn
To ignore the Comintern.
To me it is a puzzle
Why grown ups wear a muzzle,
We were told by Doctor Chu
That masks don’t stop a flu;
Which was some months ago
Now we’re told it isn’t so,
If you’re suffering and in pain
Lacking O2 to your brain,
From re-breathing Co2
Then your mask you must eschew,
The New World Ordered plan
Is to muzzle every man.
Patrick Healy
Ok ok there are many more (worse) where that came from.
Why not start a Bad Poetry section