329 Comments

I can confirm what you said as my daughter is at Georgetown. This insanity has nothing to do with “science” and everything to do with centralized power, control and money. The chickens will eventually come home to roost. This is a mental health crisis and the victims will be a generation of lonely children who have been taught to be anxious, afraid and fearful of taking any risk. We are the majority and it is long overdue for us to stand up as parents and protectors of our children to push back against this tyranny. If anyone has suggestions on how we can organize to fight this together, please share.

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

Science has gone the way of common sense…

Imagine a healthcare system in which these same people are in-charge of all medical care that you and your loved ones can receive. Imagine THEY have to authorize your treatments - AND you are required to take whatever treatment they mandate. Do you really want healthcare under THEIR direction?

That’s the system they want. They have all the answers…your job is simply not to ask any questions - just say, baah…

I expect some lunatic will file charges against Dr. Makary for this article with the Maryland licensing board trying to get his medical license pulled. Think that that’s crazy? It’s happening across America to any doctor who is viewed as promoting “vaccine hesitancy”. They’re being investigated with the intent to terminate their license.

And just remember — this ain’t going to stop — you’re next!

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I am almost more worried about the level of compliance happening in these situations. The rules themselves are awful, but it seems like the students are bound to them and willing to turn on one another. Makes me feel physically ill.

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I'm a Georgetown Alum and I'm embarrassed for Georgetown. Groupthink dominates a university that once prided itself on open inquiry. I stopped giving in 2020 when they suspended school, and I told them why. It's obscene to deprive students of an in-person education when they're paying enormous tuition, and furthermore when Covid bares negligible risk to 99.99% of them, and those who have high risk can choose to stay away. Sadly, my classmates who have gone into medicine are for the most part obsessed with Covid fear. And when you cite things like infection fatality rates and hospitalization rates by age, they get philosophical, as if our public policy decisions are cost-free. Most of them will continue to get paid whether we lock schools down or not, or whether we allow people to continue operating their small businesses, bars, restaurants, etc. Likewise, they support vaccine passports, which are equally pointless as well as a scary precedent.

Mostly I am frustrated that all we have done is drag out the inevitable at extreme economic and psychological cost, in addition to the increases in suicides, overdoses, and other preventable deaths. We have not counted these deaths and we probably never will, because we thrived on the illusion of control. When Covid was discovered in blood samples in Washington from September 2019 (IIRC), everyone should have said "game over." There was no chance of containing this virus when there was no realistic vaccination strategy for places like poor areas of Africa and Asia. where the disease would proliferate, mutate, and eventually exploit the narrow targeting of mRNA vaccines. And sure enough, a prediction you could have made 2 years ago has come true. We have Omicron, a gift to herd immunity. Let's give it a hug.

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"She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.” As a real estate agent in Atlanta, my database is 90% leads from New York, New Jersey and California.

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I have been an employee of one of the above mentioned universities for over 20 years. Last summer our lab was tasked with developing and implementing the COVID testing technology (it's really not that different from what we normally do and we had a lot of the equipment and know-how already). After reading this I am completely undone. I had no idea what was being done to students who tested positive. I go through the data weekly and I can assure you that MANY of the positives have extremely high CT values (so high that they are not good enough to send to public testing authorities), but I highly doubt anyone knows what their CT values are for their positive test. We even fairly recently were asked to discover if we could tell if someone had actually swabbed (students trying to prove they were negative - good for you) by testing for human genes (BTW, we can).

The end of December we were given the booster mandate (January 21) which happens to be 2 days after I am even eligible to get a booster as I delayed getting vaccinated as long as possible - I have had the virus. I wasn't planning on getting the booster - don't know how keen they are on approving medical/religious exemptions, but now I don't think I even want to work there anymore. The information in your story is heartbreaking to me. I feel duped and complicit.

Anyone at a fine Jesuit institution should know what this means: And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

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Was it Hillary who said never let a good crisis go to waste? That's what they are doing. Covid was the campaign in 2020. It has been a godsend for the left, who are using it to increase government control of life across the country, something they'd otherwise not be able to do. Republicans should be hammering them on this topic, opposing mandates of all kinds. And any moderate sane Democrats who exist.

And it's unconscionable what they've done to children during this pandemic. Anytime I see a child having to wear a mask my blood boils. I cannot stand it. I'm in my 30's and can't stand wearing a mask. A kid who is not at risk should be able to live life freely and enjoy it. These hysterics are in effect destroying life in order to save it. And of course they're not even doing that.

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"So why are we imposing a kind of martial law on students to ever so slightly reduce the chance that they develop a mild illness?"

Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

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At Harvard, the testing “cadence” for vaccinated dorm residents must be tested 3 times a week. They must follow eating rules:

“Practice ‘Consume & Cover’ — Consume your meal and immediately mask up when done. Use the ‘Quick Sip Rule’ — When drinking, lower your mask, take a sip, and then promptly cover your mouth and nose. If you’re taking your time between bites and sips, put your mask back on.”

How do we push back? Most students just follow the rules in a half-assed passive aggressive way. From what I hear from my son, the “activist” type students (who like to protest against putting criminals in jails) actually support these measures because they feel safer.

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I work for a university... these policies have nothing at all to do with protecting students, they are driven by professors and instructors. Their unions (yes, professors have unions for collective bargaining!) continue to push for these insane policies, while administration continues to instruct classroom teachers to "provide academic accommodations" to support student mental health. It feels like satire.

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Dr. Makary has been a voice of reason through this whole drama. Meanwhile, college administrators at wealthy, elite colleges have not been voices of reason. And the kids have been scarily compliant through all of it. What happened? Where are the angry protests? Where are the signs and open rebellion? Oh yeah, progressive dogma runs rampant through these universities, which encourages this exact compliance and behavior.

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The seemingly intentional obfuscation from university administrations about the radically different risk profiles of their students says everything you need to know about the motives of our technocratic elites and how fragile and delicately constituted these people are - so scared of dying that they're afraid to actually live, a mentality made possible after having spent their entire lives coddled and indentured to creature comforts, bubbled from risk and real adversity.

Ordering double-vaxed-and-boosted students to submit to this kind of college lifestyle is borderline sociopathic, and this covid bureaucracy they've constructed under the guise of benevolence will not go away even in the event that a cure is discovered - they'll claim some asinine justification for keeping this vague coercive public health apparatus around for good.

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How heart-breaking and insane is this sentence: "I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face."

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These insane, ridiculous policies make me want to scream from the rooftops. If my local school district tries to go remote again, I'll be the first one out there protesting. Stupid shit like this is always about the money. My question is who is benefiting from these policies.

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founding

“People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water”

—————————————

I see Dr. Makary has resorted to plagiarizing Dante’s Inferno.

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My S is a freshmen at Penn. They were all required to have double vaccination to attend in the Fall. They had mandatory Covid testing every 2 weeks (you couldn't get in to classrooms/dorm if you didn't go submit to your test) and they were required to wear masks in all indoor settings. Despite this, he had a wonderful fall semester full of fun and social activities. The last couple of weeks before school let out in December, the positive tests started happening. His close friend tested positive (she had no symptoms) and was put in isolation for 10 days. She couldn't leave and all meals were brought to her. She never developed a single symptom. Truly, as a parent, this disgusted me and seemed like some psych-op experiment (e.g. how much will they tolerate before complaining/melting down)? There were kids who tested positive the day before going home and, as a result, spent Christmas in isolation in the Covid dorm. 10 days. Rarely a symptom. What are we doing and why, as parents, are we allowing this to continue? When my daughter left school, I believe the Penn Covid Statistics said there were 148 positive cases, all students and it represented 1.27% positivity. No hospitalizations. What are we doing?

I thank Dr. Makary for being one of the few who have spoken up during this time. Where are the doctors at the "prestigious" UPenn Medical School and Hospital? Why aren't they also saying "enough is enough?" These are young adults who have already sacrificed so much in the name of "the virus." At this point, we have significant data proving it is not harmful to this group of people. Please, listen to this physician and make better decisions so that the next generation doesn't hate us all for what we did to them? Those of us lucky enough to have attended college remember the fun that can happen. The experimentation, the socialization and the FREEDOM that we felt. I wish that I could bring the 80's to my son. It would blow his mind.

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