Worth Your Time
Here on Authentic Medicine, we have sprayed a fair amount of digital ink over the past year regarding the COVID-19 experience (recently we had St. Patrick’s Day, the anniversary of our state closing down all bars at 5 pm for over a month, which to an Irishman is a cruel and ghastly obscenity, at the least. Slainte’!).
Pursuant to our founder and host’s vision, we have had divergent, freely expressed points of view on public health, masking, lockdowns, doctors’ rights (or the lack thereof), nurse practitioner opportunism, vaccines, and all the rest. Our writers have all been honest and passionate in their views, and I hope we have all elevated the conversation and added to what should be an ongoing, critical evaluation of this past year for many years to come.
To that end, I wish to recommend to you all Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns. The three booklets that make up this examination are concise, heavily footnoted, meaty, succinct, and very easy to read (you could knock one out over lunch). Berenson is popular novelist and until recently, a highly respected journalist late of the New York Times. He is an aberration and an anachronism, in that he is an actual journalist that pushes absolutely no politics in these booklets, and I have no idea which way he leans. Oddly, his first booklet last spring was blocked by Amazon on the eve of its publication, for the unspecified reason of his work being “in violation of our content guidelines.” Amazon/ Kindle never explained what that meant, and only backed off under pressure from Elon Musk, when the tech giant read some of Berenson’s social media statements.
Amazon tried it again later with his third booklet, and then backed off, again claiming that it had all (again) just been a mistake. There is no question that Amazon and Kindle were trying to block Berenson’s work from general public consumption, but why?
His first booklet deals with “Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.” The second discusses “Updates and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy.” The third deals with “Masks.” In all three, the author looks squarely at available data, considers unanswered questions or data that is incomplete, and observes contradictions published and broadcast by various public health bodies. If a strategy or pronouncement has not been supported by available data or previous studies, then Berenson says so, which may be the reason for Amazon’s discomfort.
Some of us have argued that public health and the medical community have done a great deal of good over the past year, and some of us have argued that those same have done a great deal of harm. The questions are open and ongoing, and we should all challenge ourselves to continue to think critically about the role we play and the advice we give. I hope you will include reading “Unreported Truths” as part of those efforts.
