My Jimmy Dore Appearance: Breaking Down The L.A Times' Misinformed Hit-Piece

Talking to the irreverent and always-sharp political commentator about the L.A Times' anti-journalistic screed demonizing The Great Barrington Declaration.

Full 1-hour Jimmy Dore interview

As many readers of The Illusion of Consensus know, the lockdown-focused strategy urged by scientific bureaucrats – and implemented in nearly every country worldwide – failed to protect the world from Covid and caused devastating collateral harms to the poor, to children, and to the working class. Among the harms include years of learning loss from closed schools, inflation that has sapped the purchasing power of the poor (a consequence of pandemic-era stimulus packages), health crises induced by delayed health care, and poverty and malnutrition on a colossal scale.

The time has now come to assess the damage and take stock of pandemic-era decision-making so that we do not repeat the errors of pandemic management during this pandemic into the next one. In the Norfolk Group document, my colleagues and I have provided a detailed blueprint for the scientific and policy questions that any honest Covid commission should answer. Our goal is not to point fingers, though there is undoubtedly much to go around, but rather to guide a reasoned but unflinching evaluation of pandemic mistakes.

Unfortunately, not everyone is interested in soberly evaluating pandemic-era errors. Some who championed lockdowns are perhaps afraid of what an honest evaluation of pandemic policies would produce. After all, Sweden, which never closed schools for children under 16 and, for the most part, followed a focused protection strategy close in spirit to the Great Barrington Declaration, has among the world's lowest all-cause excess death numbers. The Swedish outcomes demonstrate that lockdowns and mandates were unnecessary to protect life and health during the pandemic.

Michael Hiltzik, a business columnist at the Los Angeles Times (a staunch proponent of lockdowns), wrote a screed entitled "These 'experts’ sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price.” Surprisingly, the target of his ire is not the pandemic-era leaders like Tony Fauci, Deborah Birx (the Trump-era White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator), or Rochelle Walensky (Biden’s CDC Director). Rather it is critics of lockdown policies such as, well, me. Though the critics lost the policy fight and many American states followed lockdown policies, Hiltzik somehow concludes that the failure lies at the feet of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document written in October 2020, long after the pandemic had started.

In a recent full-hour appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show, I had a chance to walk through Hiltzik’s column with Jimmy. I must confess that I don’t think much about Hiltzik’s column, and neither does Jimmy.

I hope you enjoy the discussion!

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