For once, I am publishing on the actual anniversary (2026-03-15)—indeed, I find myself short on time to put together a quality text based on the keywords and shorter snippets that I have added in an unsystematic manner over the last few months. (And, no, I do not want to publish an anniversary text after the anniversary.)
Correspondingly, the result is a bit haphazard and poorly structured or might otherwise be suboptimal.
On the one hand, the wheels of “truth finding” are grinding and the viewpoints of the skeptics are increasingly validated over time, while those of the likes of Fauci are increasingly invalidated (outside areas where no major contention was present). Claims that brought a good cancellation just a few years ago are now increasingly mainstream, a few holdouts (I am looking at you, Wikipedia) notwithstanding.
On the other, things have not progressed anywhere near as far or fast as I might have hoped in the time since the release of the U.S. House report in December 2024 and/or last year’s anniversary text. The U.K. “COVID inquiry” (released November 2025) was a particular, if predictable, dud and might have set progress back.
Certainly, precious little has been done in terms of e.g. repercussions against the perpetrators of various misdeeds, ranging from bad science to deliberate lies, from bad politics to an unwarranted trampling of civil rights and an unnecessary wrecking of the economy, whatnot. Likewise, there is still too little acknowledgment that those who were right and spoke up against the propaganda actually were right—opinions have turned, but an “I apologize, [Jay Bhattacharya/Brownstone/Great-Barrington signers/whatnot]. You were right and I was wrong.” seems to be rare indeed. A particular issue is the idiocy of a “COVID amnesty”, which has not actually been awarded, but which, nevertheless, is following by default, because repercussions against the evil-doers and incompetents are far too rare, be they legal, professional, or otherwise. In the overlap, those who merely spoke common sense during the COVID-countermeasure era received worse repercussions for exercising their freedom of speech, even when they were right, than those who advocated and implemented destructive and unconscionable policies, those who trampled free speech and other civil rights, distorted science to fit their own agendas, whatnot.
To recall: In phase one, various evil-doers, incompetents, whatnot, were explicitly warned that this-or-that would be likely to do more harm than good, that this-and-that might wreck the economy, that this-and-that would have horrible repercussions on civil rights, that something else might be a better approach, and similar—upon which the evil-doers shouted down, denigrated, threatened, fired, cancelled, whatnot, the warning voices. In phase two, these warnings came true. In phase three, evil-doers demanded an “amnesty” with the absurd, utterly dishonest, and truly abominable argument that no-one could possible have foreseen all that went wrong—ergo, no-one should blame us for the fact that things did go wrong. (And never mind the many who did foresee these things and the many warnings that were spoken.)
Also keep in mind that repercussions against the evil-doers is not, ultimately, a matter of revenge. I do not in the slightest deny that I would take great satisfaction from seeing such repercussions; however, the main point is that repercussions now can reduce the risk of future repetitions of similar countermeasure mistakes and, more generally, give incentives to avoid certain types of misbehaviors.
To make matters worse, the likes of the WHO keep pushing an agenda of further surrender of sovereignty on the national level—not just on the level of the individual citizen. This could end very, very badly in the long term, especially, as it is just one piece in a larger puzzle of attempts to move control from citizens and countries to international organizations (bad enough) and Left-dominated such (even worse). The interesting question here is to what degree this continued pushing is a matter of ignorance, stupidity, and/or a failure to draw the right lessons from the COVID-countermeasure era—and to what degree just a deliberate abuse of remaining pandemic fears to further a purpose of such centralization of power into Left-dominated international organizations.
This is paralleled on a lesser scale by an on-going loss of control by physicians in favor of hospitals, hospitals in favor of insurance providers, and similar, going by a number of complaints that I have encountered on Brownstone. Consider e.g. a Brownstone texte that I encountered shortly before writing, which covers quite a bit of what went wrong in different regards during COVID and exemplifies loss of control by physicians. (Other texts are even better matches for loss of control, but I have not kept links and this one happened to fall into my lap. It is also helpful to illustrate some other points of my own text.)
A continual change of what is considered “official truth” and accepted opinion seems to be taking place well outside the area of COVID, e.g. concerning vaccines in general (on which I express no opinion) and that gender-surgery/whatnot on minors is viewed as a bad idea by some previously “pro” institutions (which I, with reservations for individual exceptions, welcome). The partial acceptance of nuclear power by formerly rabid “antis” is another example, mentioned repeatedly in the past, if, maybe, one that has lost its steam. At least in the case of COVID, however, there really does seem to be a 1984-style “we have always been at war with X” thing going on, where past mistakes are not acknowledged but different opinions are claimed as if they had never changed. It is a shame that I have not paid much attention to this area in the past, which makes it hard to tell whether this is something new or just history repeating it self.
To boot, an interesting question is to what degree such changes go back to a greater reliance on science and to what degree to the current political winds, with the likes of Trump, RFK Jr., and Jay Bhattacharya wielding political influence, which could strongly affect whether they will change again in the future, with the next Democrat administration—if so, most likely, for the worse.
Here, however, some differentiation must be made between “official truths” and official recommendations, the former being a matter of propaganda, narrative, opinion corridors, whatnot, and the latter of attempts to make recommendations. While the latter often coincides with the “official truth”, as with much COVID bullshit, they need not do so, they are often changing more slowly, and the fact that an opinion has been revised is more likely to be openly acknowledged. About the latter, I have had a greater awareness for a long time, and have written about it, e.g. in a text on bad advice from official sources.
A counterpoint is that the current establishment takes on COVID might fail to reach the bar of “official truth” in the manner that the old takes did—maybe, because the establishment, today relative then, is less strongly colored by the Left and its contempt for e.g. freedom of opinion. In particular, that frequent element of “or else”, in “X is the opinion that you should have—or else”, is missing.
This is another difference between “official truth” and official recommendations: For the better part, following or not following such recommendations is the prerogative of the citizen, and when the prerogative is weakened or disappears, it is often in combination with a move to “official truth”.
I also stress that I speak of changes that go beyond what might, in some sense, be a natural development of opinion over time. (My own opinions are certainly not static. Cf. below.)
For my own part, I have continually re-evaluated my opinions of what e.g. homeopaths say about the medical industry, medical science, whatnot. (Not new to the preceding year, by any means, but I have probably not mentioned it in the past.)
Now, homeopathy, by any reasonable standard, is a crock of shit (and on this point my opinion has not changed in the slightest), but I have made a mistake in assuming, in a blanket manner, that the criticisms by homeopaths against the medical industry/science/whatnot would equally be a crock of shit—just as when a self-proclaimed psychic blames the presence of skeptics for a failed demonstration. (Well, it is a half-truth in that the presence of skeptics, especially, investigative ones, might have prevented whatever cheating was needed to make the alleged psychic power “work”.) Sadly, large parts of the criticisms are actually warranted. The likely single most harmful group of problems involve “big med” influence on regulatory bodies, journals, research, whatnot.
Throwing a wider net (and leaving more homeopathic criticism behind): While medicine has come a long way from the days of bloodletting, unwashed hands, and whatnot, in terms of e.g. knowledge, harm reduction, and efficacy, parts still seem to move on a similar level of superstition or quasi-superstition, using treatments that are often superfluous, sometimes harmful, and very often costly. (Much like politics...) A key point to remember is that the convictions of physicians past that something was helpful to a patient were very often wrong—and that the mere conviction of the modern physician, then, cannot be a guarantee. (The more so, when that conviction might base on claims by sales reps and other dubious sources.) This while commercial industry interests do not necessarily align with the interests of the patient and while portions of the published research has problems with quality or, even, fraud.
While I will not here attempt a deeper discussion of the problems in medicine, one point might be particularly worth mentioning through often arising out of well-meaning and through paralleling a political problem-family: The wish of a physician to do something, be it out of a wish to not disappoint the patient, to give something a shot on a “might help; is unlikely to do harm” basis, to (more negatively) pad a bill, or for some other reason yet. This is the more a problem when the physician later takes credit for any improvement, or the patient gives credit to the physician for any improvement, even when there was no causality. (A factor, incidentally, behind some of the misperceived successes of homeopathy—but a factor that is not magically limited to homeopaths. I stress strongly, however, that while such issues might be relevant to everything homeopathic, they are by no means relevant to everything “allopathic”.)
The old cliché of a physician telling a patient to “take an aspirin and call me in the morning if you are not better” was the more honest version, although I suspect that even the aspirin was often exactly the physician just doing something. (I leave unstated how well the cliché matched reality in the past.) I am also reminded of the “Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann, and a physician’s consistent recommendation of “ein wenig Taube, ein wenig Franzbrot” whenever anyone was ailing. (Approximately, “a little pigeon, a little cinnamon roll”; cinnamon roll, going by the Internet, seemingly being the closest similar product widely known in English.)
Psychiatry certainly seems to be in a worse state than I had assumed. That large parts of the treatment-by-talking was unhelpful, or even harmful, I have long known, e.g. through seeing the quackery of psychoanalysis and one or two investigations that claim that “trauma counseling” does more harm than good—presumably, through getting in the way of natural recovery and forgetting, and forcing the counseled to stay focused on the traumatic (or, maybe, “traumatic”) event. (Generally, even with potentially more beneficial activities, I suspect a problem that if something works in the hand of the very skillful, it does not necessarily work when put in the hands of random practitioners.) However, from my readings in the last few years, it seems that the same often applies to medical psychiatric interventions, which I had long viewed as far better. I had also long been aware of an issue of over-diagnosis and/or over-treatment (beginning with hearing first claims of Ritalin over-prescriptions to unruly school-children in, maybe, the early 200xs); however, more recent readings and e.g. the accumulated developments around various “autism spectrum” diagnoses point to a problem that is far larger than I had expected. In particular, there seems to be a trend to try to define any and all human states short of some ideal as a “disorder” that would require treatment, as well as a tendency, as far as I can judge it from the outside, to have an “a pill for everything and everything for its pill” attitude.
All this even before factoring in the mess that is or has been trans-mania, where medicine (be it with regard to body or mind) has failed its patients horribly.
The above also raises the question who else might have been viewed more negatively than was fair by me. I have, e.g., long been very sceptical towards Tom Cruise through the trifecta of his limited acting, his association with Scientology, and his rejection of psychiatry—but, maybe, he was right, to some approximation, about psychiatry all along and, if so, what revisions of my view of him might be necessary? (The Scientology problem remains, of course, but his limited acting, based on good looks and a big smile, did make him one of the biggest movie stars, so why should he change what he was doing? And, maybe, he has greater depths in acting that he simply has not had the need to demonstrate in those of his works that I have seen.)
More generally, I have often erred in my takes on science in implicitly postulating that scientists strive to find the truth, even if it goes contrary to prior assumption, are strong critical thinkers, have generally agile, well formed and well informed minds (even outside a narrow speciality), etc. While many such scientists do exist, many others fail on these and similar criteria (very, very many, if we include e.g. social sciences) and I might well have been unfair to other critics of things related to science.
An interesting question is whether a similar naiveté might be a partial explanation for some oddities in takes of (non-political) scientists on politics, and other constellations. A physicist, e.g., might be used to most questions ultimately having a clear and objective answer (with a division mostly according to whether an answer is supposed to be known and with what degree of certainty any answer is associated), might expect claims to be made with an air of certainty only for sufficiently certain answers, assume that the same holds in fields where, however, such clear and objective answers are the exception, and take claims made with an air of certainty from such fields to be certain—while they are often un- or anti-scientific claims based on personal prejudice or ideological convictions. Similarly, he might be used to the objective progress over time in physics and fail to see that other fields can go through periods of regression or just the replacement of the one paradigm with the other without seeing any true progress. Similarly, he might over-estimate how common a “scientific mindset” is in a foreign field. Etc.
But then, I might just be projecting my own mentality, past errors, whatnot, on physicists, in a repetition of my own past errors.
(These are snippets from my pre-writing notes, taken over with just minor language improvements, with no attempt to expand, elaborate, whatnot—or cull, for that matter.)
Even loons can have some parts of the truth right. (As with homeopaths above.)
That the government, some special interest group, whatnot, says X does not make X true.
All too often, the aforementioned fail to be scientific and to look for the truth, in favor of attempting to prove or make plausible a preconceived message. (Including many who nominally are or claim to be scientists.)
Condemnation of dissenters with thought-terminating-cliches tells us more about the condemners than the dissenters.
Those who rely on censorship/whatnot over factual arguments are usually wrong on the question at hand.
Cheating and lies make it hard to tell when someone is truthful (boy who cried wolf) and/or what the truth is.
There is a systematic problem of dissenters being shouted down, censored, cancelled, whatnot Leftist style, rather than defeated by arguments.
Academia, by no means limited to medicine, is overrun with problems like publish-or-perish, scientists who put career success above science, and, of course, various infestations with Leftist ideology—nothing new there. However, there is a chance that the problem is unusually severe in medicine simply through the great amounts of money that are involved.
A particular issue around vaccines, going well beyond COVID, appears to be misleading comparisons, notably, in the form of double-blind trials that test the “full vaccine” only against a semi-placebo group that simply has not received the respective “active ingredient”—but has received e.g. aluminum adjuvants. The implied comparison is by no means wrong, as it isolates the effects of the active ingredient in terms of both positive and negative effects, and makes comparisons between different vaccines possible. However, the approach is not sufficient, because it fails to make a comparison against a true placebo and prevents informed choice on an “Am I better off taking or not taking [this/a] vaccine?” basis (as opposed to one of “Am I better of taking this vaccine instead of that vaccine?”; and note how the medical industry might find the “wrong” answer to the former question much more unprofitable than to the latter). A reasonable analogy could be to have a study compare the health effects of some energy-laden cocktail with and without alcohol, or of some triple-pump, double-cream, whatnot alleged coffee with regular or decaffeinated coffee as a minority ingredient, while failing to consider that other health aspects than those pertaining immediately to alcohol resp. caffeine could be of importance.
Here, a confounding factor is what problems go back to poor science and what to poor reporting, including deliberate misrepresentations by vaccine makers to understate the risks of a given vaccine by failing to include what might already be known about the, as it were, non-alcoholic parts of the cocktail.
Such problems could be solved by strictly requiring a three-group division of subjects, into those receiving the actual vaccine, the semi-placebo, and the full placebo, respectively. However, this could lead to a great amount of repeated coverings of known land, if the semi-placebo is sufficiently similar between different vaccines. This might be solvable by referring to prior research around the semi-placebo versus a full placebo, but only with the strict requirement that such results are republished throughout all relevant discussions of the vaccine, which might not be realistic. (And, of course, with the requirement that the semi-placebo at hand actually is sufficiently similar.)
A point where I cannot make up my mind at this stage is whether the criteria for approving medicines, vaccines, whatnot, are too strict or too lax, or whether they might be too lax specifically in combination with misleading research and/or reporting thereof. Certainly, the COVID vaccines were not subjected to anywhere near sufficient scrutiny (cf. some older writings and a number of Brownstone texts), in a manner that goes well beyond any risk from e.g. aluminum adjuvants. Certainly, the costs and delays associated with approval from e.g. the FDA can be enormous (and, in a twist, give incentives to cheat to get through the approval process faster, easier, more cheaply, at all, whatnot).
A reasonable way forward might be to allow market entry with a comparatively low hurdle, maybe even just a “we think that our new product will work well”, but with a strict grading of some sort to reflect prior testing, patient experiences, whatnot. Consider e.g. a 0-5 scale, where “0” implies only in-house testing, “5” reflects full FDA approval and a minimum of 10 years of positive practical experiences, and the intermediate numbers intermediate levels of testing and experiences. It is then up to the patient when he is willing to accept what number. (Note: “patient”, not e.g. “government” or “Fauci”, unless restricted to Fauci’s own use. The COVID vaccines might have realistically entered the market with a “0”, emergency approval would not have been needed, bullshit about “safe and effective” should have been cut as the bullshit that it was, and the man on the street should have been allowed to make up his own mind with an eye at exactly that “0”.)
The importance of personal choice/informed choice/informed consent extends far beyond COVID, both in medicine and in society at large. (I have a separate text on this in my backlog, and will, for reasons of time, not expand further here.)
Modeling is an interesting area of problems: Not only has the evidence of poor use of models accumulated (models are a good thing; poor use of them is not), be it in general, for COVID, or for climate predictions, including the wide-spread error of taking modeling predictions for the truth, but I am coming to believe that modeling is inherently too limited to be useful for more than simple purposes (illustration, attempts to gain a qualitative understanding, and similar) and/or where reality is “sufficiently simple”. The reason: Over-fitting.
With some over-simplification, this problem can be described as the risk that having too many variables (for brevity, I use “variable[s]” in a very wide sense, including parameters and other “degrees of freedom” of various kinds) when constructing a model to match known real data can make it fit the real data too closely, which can both lead to a naive over-confidence in the model and worsen later predictions.
At the same time, however, any model that should realistically describe reality must have many variables—and those that do not will simply not be nuanced enough. (But might still be very valuable for purposes like gaining a better understanding and testing simpler hypotheses.) In reality, I very strongly suspect, existing models will err on having too few variables, which, then, makes their practical relevance too low. Over-fitting would not be an issue, but the models would still be highly unsuitable for tasks like predicting numbers of deaths.
For instance, to have a model that could properly model something like COVID spread, some few of the factors that might need inclusions include age distributions (and associated factors like likelihood of various behaviors at various ages and strength of immune system), geographical distributions (and associated factors like likelihood of various behaviors in different places, e.g. based on surrounding population), and behavioral changes over time (including for different reasons, say, perceived threat level, amount of spare time available, presence/absence of income—all of which can change with an epidemic and, above all, countermeasures to that epidemic)—and each of these factors might require several to many individual variables.
To explain over-fitting to someone not already “in the know” and/or with some math background is tricky without taking a greater detour, but consider a high-school-ish example: The relationship between x and y is linear, with y = a*x + b, for some unknown a and b. If we are given some sample data to estimate the relationship, this sample data is likely to contain deviations from this linear form. (For a variety of potential reasons, like statistical fluctuations and measurement errors.) If we stick to a linear relationship, we can still find reasonable and “well-fitted” values for a and b, and the resulting formula of, hypothetically, y = 4x + 3 can be used to make predictions for the future. However, we might also try to fit something with more unknowns, say, y = a*x^3 + b*x^2 + c*x + d—and chances are that this will not result in y = 4x + 3 but, hypothetically, y = 0.1*x^3 + 0.3*x^2 + 3.5x + 3. When this longer form is used for predictions, it is likely to fare considerably worse than the shorter form, because the values of a/b/c/d are distorted through an attempt to fit the statistical fluctuations, measurement errors, and whatnots of the original sample—and these will not apply to later data, when predictions are attempted. (Later data will also have e.g. statistical fluctuations, but these will, by the nature of statistical fluctuations, be different from in the sample.) Even the y = 4x + 3 will, of course, be distorted, but in a different manner, because the shorter form will reflect the form of the “true” function and will not be over-fitted.
Off topic, other problems are relevant, including whether the model builders have predicted and properly modeled (a step that can be tough or even impossible) all relevant variables, whether the resulting model is sufficiently computationally cheap to be practically usable with the computers at hand, and whether various variables can actually be assigned in a reasonable manner, be it during model building or model use. (To the last, if the model cannot be fed the right values for its calculations, it might prove useless—and finding some values might be impossible beyond guess work.) A particular whopper is that what variables are at all reasonably relevant can change over time, from country to country, from disease to disease, etc. For instance, if a pre-COVID model did not contain variables to reflect various unprecedented countermeasures, it would not be the slightest bit surprising—and who can predict which of endless conceivable countermeasures might actually be used?
These, too, are likely to impose limits on the number of variables practically usable and, thereby, limit the importance of models for practical purposes.
From another angle, the fact that various modelers have, with the same model, often presented radically different scenarios, even at the same time, gives further evidence of problems with variables, be it too few variables, too unknown variable values, or something else yet. (What, e.g., if someone just assumes one variable value for one scenario, another for the next scenario, yet another one for the following, and so on? If the results vary greatly, the model is clearly not usable without having more information on what the, in some sense, correct value for the variable might be.)
Government-financed medicine poses a particular danger: As long as everything is kosher, this might protect against e.g. undue industry interests, but as soon as the area of kosher is left behind, things become worse, becomes control becomes so much greater, up to and including the risk of government-sanctioned censorship/whatnot. (And the area of kosher will be left behind, sooner or later, if prior experiences are to be believed—often sooner.)
I keep an original formulation of “government-financed medicine”, but admit to uncertainty about what my initial scope was. Contextually, with an eye at the overall page, my intent might have been mostly on government-financed medical research, but other interpretations are possible and problems elsewhere are very much present, including with policy setting in the field of medicine and the negative consequences of e.g. ObamaCare and the British NHS.
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