All right. So, today I'm going to talk about a topic that more or less everybody associates with me now or expects me to talk about. And it is the topic of the uh a book I never thought I would write because I thought I was out of the book bookw writing world as of 2014 because it's hard to write books and it's exhausting and I just didn't feel like doing it. I thought I have nothing more to prove. I've already written a dozen of them. I don't need to do anymore. But dog gone it, this thing was so hideous, I couldn't not write it. So, it's called Diary of a Psychosis. And this this style with the the black background, the white typewriter, and it's it's like like a 1950s typewriter, like somebody was writing was typing up your mental health diagnosis in an asylum somewhere. It looks like that. That was my idea. I said, "That's what I want this cover to look like." And the idea of the book is not that I'm going to have a chapter on what lockdowns did and a chapter on masks and a chapter on vaccines or any it's that's not how it's organized. It is organized in effect like a diary so that you recall or for people reading it well into the future hear about for the first time what it was like the texture of life during those years. Not just a sanitized well they did this then this then this and it had this result. It's kind of as it's happening. Well, now they're doing this and now they're saying that and here's the opposite of what they said the other day and they're putting that forward with a straight face and here's a chart that tells you the opposite story of what they're telling us. And it so it preserves some of the maybe some of the oddball details that you would tend to forget in a general survey, but I didn't forget because I was writing about this uh like a fanatic on a daily basis for for years because I was very interested in this subject because it it affected me directly and it affected many people who were in much more vulnerable positions than I was directly and many people were suffering for no good reason. And I just couldn't see how it was possible not to write about this or how it was possible for me to write my regular email newsletter about a topic other than this. This is the huge topic of the day. We have to discuss it. There's so much involved here. There's the corruption of this institution, corruption of that institution. There's there's the state and coercion. I there's so much to talk about here. And I will say there were other look I'm not trying to you I'm not trying to start fight here but there were other libertarian institutions let's say that would publish articles like the problem with civil asset forfeite. Now look I yield to no one in my opposition to civil asset forfeite but in June 2020 that ain't the time you know we like there are huge fish to be fried here and that ain't one of them. So, so I did this. Now, we all remember the origins of this and I'm fortunate that I lived in Florida during this time because my kids' lives were mostly normal, but not entirely because we did travel and they would see how odd things were and they would, you know, they would hear the news and I had to make sure and explain to them this is not normal. I don't want you growing up if thinking if they try this again, oh, I remember when they did that before. Or yeah, I guess we do that every once in a while. No, we don't. No, we don't. So, they all have a copy of the book. All five of my daughters, they all have a copy of signed copy of the book from dad. But in So, we we remember or at least I remember very distinctly late 2019 reading the headlines that this novel virus SARS cove 2 has appeared in China and it's gradually beginning to spread around the world. So I you I thought I'll keep an eye on that. I who knows what'll come of that. Nobody exactly knew how the governments of the world were going to react to that. But early on Dr. Anthony Fouchy, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was telling people that you shouldn't go around wearing a mask. That's silly and there's no reason for that. And that younger people in particular should continue to feel free to travel on cruise lines, carry on with their lives more or less as normal. Well, obviously we remember that that didn't last particularly long. Before we knew it, everything was being shut down. So, culture and the arts were just shuttered. Uh, people other than those who were deemed to have quote unquote essential jobs were ordered to stay in their homes. And as we know, some countries enforced that requirement with more savagery than others. But everything, gyms, restaurants, schools, retail stores, everything closed down. Although restaurants would serve you food to go and stores selling necessities remained open. If you had to be in public, you had to observe so-called social distancing. So, you keep six feet between yourself and another person. Uh they of course, as you know, they later admitted that six-foot rule was arbitrary, but they had to say something. So, they they said six feet. And so, by complying with these and a considerable array of other requirements, we could thereby quote unquote flatten the curve. And I I hate recalling all this dumb propaganda. Flatten the cur. Yeah, I hope some of you are familiar with the term midwit. A midwit is not a stupid person. A midwit is somebody with an IQ of about maybe 98 to 105. So somebody who's good at like regurgitating what the teacher says. Like that's a that's a midwit. Not like an outright and not a genius. A midw. So what happened was a lot of the folks let's say you know on one side of the bell curve were saying well this these requirements all seem kind of dumb and then we'd get to the midwit population. Well you see we have to flatten the curve which means we spread the infections out so as not to overrun the hospitals. Yeah, I know. I've heard that from every official outlet for the past two weeks in a row and and they think if they just repeat it to me, then I'll go along. But I've already heard it, you know. So, people on the other side of the bell curve are saying, "Yeah, this is all pretty stupid. Like this, I have a funny feeling this is pretty stupid, and I have a really good sense that I'm going to be vindicated on this." Well, 15 days to slow the spread then became the public health slogan. But that public health emergency would be officially in effect for over three years. And so during that time, if you questioned any of these policies, if you said that the their basis in science was dubious, if you noted the the horrendous and widespread collateral damage, well, you were demonized. Your voice was suppressed. you were accused of being being uh callous with respect to human life. Well, several months ago, I spoke at a Mises Institute event in Arizona, and that event was about bureaucracy. So, I thought I would reread Misa's 1944 book, Bureaucracy, and apply some of Misa's insights. bureaucracies as we know Mises says they're rigid and they prioritize compliance with the rules over adapting to new information. So Mises explains why that is so. I'm simply telling you that it is so. Bureaucracies always are looking to expand their scope and justify their existence. They often exaggerate problems or create new ones to maintain their relevance and power. Now that sounds familiar enough. I think Misa said this, "The bureaucrat's opportunity to derive profit from his activities is much greater than that of the average citizen. Every expansion of government activities increases his chances for promotion and power." All right. So, inflexibility, an obsession with rule following, and grasping for more power. That sounds a teensy wensy bit like what went on with the public health establishment during CO. I will never forget how angry Anthony Fouchy was that a federal judge had said that you don't have to wear masks on airplanes anymore. He was so angry. He said this is a matter for public health to decide, not the justice department. So I mean, so think about what he's saying. He's basically saying public health should be superior to the legal system and we ought to be able to make decisions that no one can challenge. That's grasping for more power. You know, that's I Mises is thinking of Anthony Fouchy in that description. But probably the most significant bureaucratic offense was the non-stop spread of propaganda. Even while at the same time it had the nerve to accuse other people of spreading misinformation. Mises said, "Propaganda is one of the worst evils of bureaucracy and socialism. Propaganda is always the propaganda of lies, fallacies, and superstitions." Indeed. And were we ever subjected to propaganda? In particular, we were subjected to this moralizing narrative that said that people in places that obey the so-called public health guidelines, so lockdowns, masks, capacity restrictions, and so on, they're going to have relatively good results. But the stupid and selfish science haters who disregard the guidelines are going to get what's coming to them. Well, this story the regime fed us does not survive a glance at the charts. And I brought some with me. I brought some charts with me. So, it was obvious from the very early contact tracing study in Iceland in the winter of 2020 that schools were no danger. And studies involving Google mobility data were finding no connection between health outcomes and mobility versus staying at home. But we'll start with a couple of outstanding examples. Now, I'm going to I'm going to use this screen in just a moment to share some of my charts. Um, I didn't make the charts, but I I found them and I know the people who did and and I like like Ian Miller, for example, in California was an absolute hero through this. And I I do want to share some of these with you. And I compiled these particular ones. I have hundreds of them. I compiled these particular ones for a debate I was supposed to do at the Soho Forum in New York City hosted by our friend Gene Epstein. Now, I debated Michael Malice, as you may know, on the subject of Alexander Hamilton 10 years ago. So, if you type in Malice Woods Hamilton on YouTube, you're going to be you're in for some real entertainment. But then after I beat him, and I beat him badly. Let's just be honest about it. That and and I don't mean that I have this subjective sense that I beat him. These are Oxford style debates where they pull the audience before and after. So, you have an objective measure of the winner. And I'm telling you, I was the winner. Then, I didn't I didn't do any more debating. And so, Gan called me the Bobby Fisher of debating. Now, none of you are going to get that, but Bobby Fischer was a the chess champion who didn't want to, you know, um who didn't want to defend his championship. He did come out of retirement finally defended his championship and then went went back. But anyway, so I finally did do a debate. So, I I assembled these and then the other debater didn't show up. But that was because he had a terrible personal tragedy. Honest to goodness. So, we still had the event like I read my he had his opening statement. Gene read it. I read my opening statement. Then we had an evening of of questions. But when I heard his opening statement, it was all fluff. There was a part of me that thought maybe I overlooked something and maybe I'm going to have the indignity of finding out just what I overlooked on a live stage being, you know, live streamed all over the world. That doesn't sound particularly appealing. So I sat there with a legal pad ready to take notes as I sat in the audience listening to what would have been my debater's opening statement. and I was ready to take notes and get ready to respond. Threearters of the way through I uncclllicked my pen and said, "This is not a problem. It was all fluff because and I thought, what could I have overlooked? I have all the evidence. I have all the charts. I have all the arguments. What could there be?" Answer: nothing. Apparently, nothing. I I couldn't believe it. But I didn't get a chance to debate the guy, unfortunately. But I'm going to share the slides um with you guys. But first, let's start with two outstanding examples that don't require charts. And that is March 2020 through let's the first few months after that. And uh Sweden. Now we all know like we're all tired of hearing about it that Sweden more or less proceeded as normal. But what some people don't realize is that they wound up having the best excess death numbers in Europe. Like lower than anybody's the best. They outperformed everyone. Now, if I had asked lockdowners in March 2020, suppose Sweden has such a less afair policy that you people spend months at a time screaming at them at the top of your lungs. Do you think they will wind up having the best results in all of Europe? They would have laughed at that, right? They would have laughed at it. But that's what happened. And yet, are any of them required to answer for this? Gee, I guess I had this as wrong as a person could possibly have anything wrong. No, of course not. And we don't have to speculate on what they would have said because we can just look at what they did say, you know, oh, Sweden will be an example of what not to do. It's going to be a bloodbath, a killing field, whatever. All right. Well, apparently these measures were not essential. If you could do that and you just carry on and you have the best record of anybody. Now, if this were a normal country, that'd be all that would have been all over the media, would have been everywhere. Like, how could the expert class have gotten this so wrong? And it's not even like this is debatable. They said X and not X occurred. I mean that's that's as cut and dried as it can be. But absolute silence. Now you and I were urged to listen to the experts. Now if you can utter the phrase listen to the experts without snickering today. You know you have a stronger stomach than I do. I c I certainly can't. The experts had no idea what was going on either. That's the thing. They didn't have any idea what was going on. So, you know, if you're afraid that you're going to blaspheme against our new priestly class, you know, which adorns itself in lab coats and clipboards instead of the cassich and the Beretta, uh, by wondering if these measures did any good. Well, rest assured, they they had no idea what was going on either. One of my proudest things about the past five years is something I didn't even do myself, but there is a video two or three minutes long that one of our great libertarian creators, Dan Smottz, created for me at at diaryofcoid.com. And and that is the best book promotion video I have ever seen. Made me want to go out and get it. And I wrote the thing. It it like the all I gave him was a couple of I said, "You use your imagination how you want to do this. I just need you to make sure that a couple of particular clips make it into this video. And so and and by the way, if you if you uh so at that site, I also sell the book at cost, but even if you get it at the Mises Institute, still go to diary ofco.com because because you can claim your bonuses. You get bonuses for getting the book. Get them at the website. Anyway, here's what I asked him to make sure went in that video. In early 2021, Andy Slavit, which is a name that will ring bells only to people who follow this very closely, he was a White House co adviser. I mean, if there is a lower than low title you could have, I don't know what it is, but he was on MSNBC of all places. MSNBC actually asked him a tough question for a chain. took them about a year, but eventually they asked a tough question and they said, "Look, why are the numbers in California and Florida so similar when their policies are so different? I mean, according to you, shouldn't Florida be like a a graveyard and California be a paradise?" And here here was his answer. And and and so I've captured this forever on the site in that video because he's probably thinking, "Well, nobody remembers this little clip from early 2021." But he is not counting on my fanaticism about this issue. So he said there's so much of this virus that we think we understand and we think we can predict that's just a little beyond our explanation. So his answer is I don't actually have an answer. We don't understand that either. But then he went on to say but we all know what works. And then he listed all the policies that by his own admission had not made any difference at all in these two states. even when you correct for the age difference between the states which is very a very important correction to make. So then somebody finally asked uh Anthony Fouchy a similar question they finally asked him took them about a year and a half and they said uh because because he had said he had said if you obey me you will get better results. Okay. So then Texas reopened and there weren't corpses at the side of the road. So they asked Fouchy, "What do you think's going on there?" And his answer, and again, this is at the site. This is in that video forever. He thinks, "Oh, people will forget that I said that." No, Woods is like an elephant in that way. You know, it's up here in the old noodle and now it's in that video. His answer was maybe they're doing things outdoors. like they took all of Texas and brought it outside was the best he could come up with, you know, and I've said this before. I know that we have contempt for these people, but on some level, you know, like they're not stupid. Like the point there are stupid people out there. These people aren't stupid, per se. You know, maybe they're sinister. They could be a lot of things. They're not stupid. So you think to yourself, well maybe if they were cornered with a question like this, maybe they have a very sophisticated response. Maybe they've got something. To see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears that they have nothing is is brutally refreshing. I don't know how else to describe that, but there it is. There it is. And and again, suppose I had asked in March 2020, suppose California adopts these policies and Florida adopts those. Uh what's going to happen? Well, of course, what we would have been told, Florida will be a blood bath. But again, with the excess deaths thing, Florida ended up doing better than California. Ended up doing better. Now, that should not that's not possible. According to what we're told, that's not possible. But that's what happened. And and yet and yet Ronda Santis, you can criticize him on numerous grounds, but only a dope would have called him death Santis, which is what they did. I lived in Florida. They called him Death Santis because of all the COVID deaths in Florida. And yet he did better than California. And it's not like death nu, you know, I mean, they don't even wouldn't even dawn on them to say that. Wouldn't even dawn on them. All right. What else do I want to say about this? All right. Well, let's maybe we can maybe we can start looking at some charts here now that I've wetted your appetite for some charts and I got the button all ready to go. All right. Here comes here comes chart number one. How about we plot the 25 most stringent states against the 25 least stringent states? So notice I have not indicated which one is which. I will in a second tell you which one is which. But in a way does it really matter? Because they're essentially for all intents and purposes identical. Now they they shouldn't be right. Right. I mean, if you're going to disrupt people's lives and ruin their livelihoods and decimate their savings and and compromise their health and and all these other things that were done and and destroy their dreams and everything, there damn well better be a pretty obvious difference in these two lines. Okay. So, these are the most stringent states. So, I just highlighted that. I mean, what like that? We did it for this like that. Now, how many Americans have seen a chart like that? probably roughly the number of people who were in this room because I don't I don't know if even Fox News was showed charts like this. But that tells you a story. But I've got a bunch more of these. I got a whole bunch more. I mean this this settles it in my opinion. But I am a sport, you know. I'm a sport. I'll keep going anyway. Mises Institute asked me to speak for a certain amount of time. I said, "Okay." So now, right now, right now, we're looking at 12 the 12 Midwestern states. And again, I have not indicated which one is which because for this, it doesn't strictly matter. But I want to see if we can find Thanksgiving on the chart because remember, you weren't supposed to have Thanksgiving with people or if you did, you know, you had to sit three states away and shout through a bullhorn or whatever. So, we should be able to see some spike on this graph that would help us identify where Thanksgiving is. Now, remember the wait two weeks thing, you know, so there would be a gathering and we'd say, "Huh, that's funny. The College Football National Championship just occurred and there's no result." And they'd say, "Well, you wait two weeks and then they'll get what's coming." These people were ghouls. They were ghouls. They'll get what's coming to them and then two weeks would come and go and nothing would happen. But they're already on to the next thing. All right. So, if it's true that you have to wait two weeks before you see the spike up, then maybe Thanksgiving is around here. Maybe like maybe like there. And then two weeks later, you get the big spike. All right, let's see where Thanksgiving actually is. All right, that was my guess. That's where Thanksgiving is when the numbers are actually on the decline. And then two weeks later would have been about there. Christmas is not even on this graph. You don't see any. There's no indication that Christmas occurred. Now, was there anybody saying, you know, dog gone it, maybe we just don't understand what's going on here. Maybe we should show a little humility. Nothing about the guidance changed as a result of this. All right, I'm dying to go on. Let's go on to another one then. Why not? Mask mandate states versus no mandate. Now, given the absolute hysteria surrounding maskearing, you would think there better there's going to be a huge difference between places that mandate masks and places that don't. And you know, there you go. And then, by the way, they all look like this. They they all look like this. And when they don't, when they don't, occasionally you get a little bit of variance. So, we had some early research done by that the CDC released, and it had to do with a couple of of counties in Kansas that were contiguous, but that had different masking policies. And the the county that did not require masks had a line that was higher than the one that did. And they said, "Well, there you go." And then and then they ended the study or they they ended the period that they were going to look at. Well, you know, some of us have access to all the data. So, we extended it out. And it turns out that the reason that they stopped it there was that a few days later, exactly the opposite trend occurs. But that's never mentioned. There was no follow-up. There was no nothing. So, you know, like it's not like they're just trying their best and they accidentally fall, you know, you know, fall down on the job. Like, that's just a liar. That's just flat out that's just a liar. All right. Here are a couple of states that I haven't labeled, but I'm going to tell you which which states they are, but not which line is which. So, we have here uh California, and Nevada. Now, California, Nevada, and Arizona. If we were to trace all three of those, they had similar trajectories the entire time. And yet, California was rigidly locked down. Nevada, a purple state, was more in the middle. and Arizona of those three was the least locked down. And yet the curves were were pretty much identical. So there's California, the um the blue, and there's Nevada that was less locked down. So, you know, I mean, we should be seeing very dramatic stories being told here that that back up the narrative, but we we just don't. The charts refuse to show them. Now, I want to say something about the state of Iowa. You may recall that the Washington Post called Iowa, quote, "a state that doesn't care if you live or die." They're really, they're super fair. Washington Post, a state that doesn't care. Why did they say that about Iowa? Because Iowa got rid of around February 2021 all the state level restrictions. And so, well, I mean, we know these restrictions have been working really, really awesomely well. So, Iowa is going to be an absolute bloodbath. Okay. Well, that didn't happen. That did not happen. So, Elaine Godfrey in in the Atlantic wrote in November 2020, "Public health experts predicted another big surge after the holidays, but it never came." I went back to those experts to find out why. See, that's what's wrong with American society. I went back to those experts who predicted something that didn't happen. I went back to them for some insight. No, you go back to them for some apologies and you go to the neglected people for the insights. All right. So, she wrote a follow-up article called because she figured out why it was that Iowa didn't have a big surge after all uh after the uh after the holidays and and the answer was Ians were scared into taking the virus seriously. She figured it out. She said, "The Iowa public health establishment scared the hell out of everybody and therefore everybody complied and stayed home and then we kept the numbers down." The problem with that is that there were simultaneous declines just like I in a whole bunch of places that hadn't changed their messaging at all. So, we're supposed to believe that the public health people in Iowa were so scary that they scared not just Iowa, but also North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Kansas. These are some scary sobs, right? Hulk Hogan may, God rest his soul, has nothing on them. So, they all had identical curves. So they also tried to claim that Iowa's November mask mandate had brought the numbers down. But again, this is special pleading. There were plenty of places that didn't have that mandate. They had the same decline. All right. So now Iowa though, after after February 2021, Iowa should really be an outlier among the Midwestern states, right? It numbers must have shot through the roof. So here are various Midwestern states. That green line shows when the restrictions were lifted in Iowa. So, which one of these is Iowa? Well, first of all, not really any of them is a particular outlier. Maybe that green one, but that's a really delayed outlier. Uh, there's Iowa like right in the middle. Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. That's the state that doesn't care if you live or die. Was anyone apologized to in Iowa for having such a horrifying thing said about well, these people? Apologies from these people. Forget it. Absolutely forget it. All right. How about uh let's let's see what else I got up here. Let's just let's just start going through them. Let's see what else I got up here. Germany and Sweden. All right. Very, you know, very similar curves, but you can see the American media like the Atlantic. Um trying its best to attribute the moves in Germany's numbers to masks and other interventions. But again, Sweden's getting the same numbers and it's it's not doing those things. But Sweden just does not get mentioned. Now that's Poland. Now there's their mask mandate. And so what was happening in in in um Western Europe and the United States was that that would happen and then you'd see it would be flat and people would say, you see, if we weren't all such dumb dums in America, you know, if we weren't all like king of the hill, you know, if we weren't all so stupid, we would have done what Poland did and what the Czech Republic did because look at the results they get. And then this happens and there's no follow-up report. There's nothing. Maybe we again, maybe we're oversimplifying this. Maybe we're making this into a cartoon. No mention. Uh, Czech Republic. Okay. Czech Republic has a life-saving lesson for America. Wear a face mask. Then the right hand part of the graph occurs. No mention, no followup, nothing. So you might start to get the impression these people are misleading you. you know, so then we would start to get um oh, we never said masks alone would solve the problem. Um but the thing is Robert Redfield uh who was um head of the CDC at the time, he was one of the experts we were told to trust. He said six to eight weeks of maskearing would do the trick. He said that that's one of the experts we were supposed to follow. And the thing is at the time masks were getting credit for for that flat line. So to then say, well, we didn't say masks would would solve the problem. But you you almost did when when we got these lines. You almost did say that. Practically did. All right. So I myself will admit to you that, you know, what do I know about any of this? Like I'm I'm I'm not I'm not in medicine. But obviously you don't have to be in medicine to read a chart, you know? Like they've got you thinking that you need a PhD or an MD in something to read a damn chart. No, you don't. I mean, some of these people got MDs. It's almost like they specialized in in not reading charts or anti-reading them or something. But I thought, well, I don't know. Maybe masks could work. What do I know? Maybe. So, I didn't I never said go out there and wear one. I thought, well, I don't know. I guess we'll wait and see. I don't know. But I'm all about the data. And when when these when these charts kept coming out showing no difference, I changed my mind. I said, "No, I guess I guess they don't matter. I guess they don't matter." The classic gold standard in all this is the Cochran Review, which went through all the research there is, found no benefit to masking. The chief researcher on that project, his name is oddly enough, Tom Jefferson said, quote, "It is irrational to mask." Al although let me correct myself here, the that somebody said that could there are two possible people who could have said that, but that was his that was his uh thesis was that it made no it was irrational. Made no sense because there's no benefit. There's no benefit to it. Now remember, Bavaria and Berlin actually mandated what I call the suffocation mask, you know, or the duck mask makes you look like a duck. So when I when I would see people walking by with those, I would quack at them because I was just tired of all the compliance. And my wife would elbow me, but I'd go as I see these. And and I was lectured to I was lectured to on Twitter by some libertarians who thought, well, it's voluntary, so you know, not every voluntary thing people do deserves respect. You know, it just because you don't punch them in the face for it doesn't mean you have to respect it. You can chuckle. You know, a free society also involves quacking when it's called for. Thank you, lone loan applaud. I appreciate that. [Applause] So they mandated those masks in Germany. Okay. So you plot Germany against specifically Bavaria and Berlin. No difference. No difference. All right. Now during this period there was plenty of competition for the George Orwell Award. But making at least my personal top 10 is the American Academy of Pediatrics. Without so much as an acknowledgment of the European experience where toddlers were not masked, the AAP had a case of absolute toddler mask fanaticism to the extent that they systematically removed from their website any article that had ever said that toddlers need to see human faces as part of their development. That just disappeared. They weren't disproven. There were no substitute papers. They're just gone. So, they used to have a page called FaceTime and emotional health, and it was a description of how adults can enrich infants as young as four or five months old. Um, and it repeatedly refers to facial cues and expressions. Try to find that. It's gone. That's not normal. That's not normal. Now, everything that happened during these years was put through the moralizing filter. So in October, November 2020, Lakers and Dodgers fans were blamed for a spike in cases that occurred in LA County, but the same spike occurred at the same time in San Diego. And in case you don't know anything about California sports, I can assure you people in San Diego were not out cheering for the Dodgers. The collateral effects on society of these radical interventions can probably never be fully calculated. And some of them like the way friends were pitted against each other and friendships were destroyed, families were pitted against themselves, you can't even quantify them. In some countries, two years went by with no education of any kind for children. Not Zoom school, not nothing. Two years of nothing. In Myanmar, we heard stories of people resorting to eating snakes and rats. what was done to Africa was a crime against humanity all its own. There's a book by a guy named Toby Green who's a leftist called the COVID consensus. And he means that in a in a in a macob sort of way. He's a leftist but he says that the lockdown policies were crimes against the poor and vulnerable which they obviously were. Kevin Bardosh did a a full comprehensive review of the lockdown harms and he and he concluded this. The promotion of lengthy social distancing restrictions by governments and scientific experts during the COVID crisis had severe consequences for hundreds of millions of people. Many original predictions are broadly supported by the cumulative research data presented above. A rise in non-COVID excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, large increases in debt, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, etc. Uh then we have the NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research, arguing that the lockdown unemployment shock, so they're talking about the tens of millions of people who were suddenly thrown out of work, uh was projected to result in between 840,000 and 1.22 million excess deaths over the next 15 to 20 years. The New York Times even reported that because of the lockdowns, uh in the coming years, there would be 1.4 4 million excess tuberculosis deaths, half a million excess HIV deaths, and another 385,000 excess malaria deaths. Now, none of this neglect of collateral effects would have surprised Mises. Mises explained all the way back in 1944 that it was in the nature of bureaucracy itself to neglect collateral effects and instead to focus obsessively on its area of immediate concern. So Mises wrote, "Governments encourage the specialists who limit their observations to a narrow field without bothering about the further consequences of a policy. The labor economist deals only with the immediate results of pro- labor policies. The farm economist only with the rise of agricultural prices. Today, in most countries, each department follows its own course, working against the endeavors of the other departments. The Department of Labor aims at higher wage rates and at lower living costs. But since nobody's looking at the whole picture, the same administration's Department of Agriculture aims at higher food prices. And the Department of Commerce tries to raise domestic commodity prices by tariffs. One department fights against monopoly, but other departments are eager to bring about by tariffs, patents, and other means the conditions required for the building of monopolistic restraint. And each department refers to the expert opinion of those specialized in their respective fields. Well, during the co years, we heard a lot of state propaganda about social distancing and masks and why your kid couldn't go to the playground. But what we did not hear were the stories of people who suffered under these restrictions. And there are more of those than you can possibly believe. But you were shamed if you criticized the policies because it showed you didn't you allegedly didn't care about human life. But of course, it was those people who didn't care about it because there are a lot of things that come together to make human life possible. And if human life was about nothing other than simply preserving a heartbeat, then we could all live isolated, each one of us, in a windowless room and somebody slipping us cans of navy beans through a slot in the door. But that's not really what human life is. And not to mention the things they did kill people. So there's there's nothing to be said for them at all. I used to get emails from people about these stories, telling me their stories because I write an email newsletter. And these were people had no one else to talk to because their families thought they were crazy. Their friends wouldn't talk to them. So they wrote to me, a stranger who sent them email newsletters because they thought at least I would listen. At least somebody would listen. So I actually compiled I with their permission I compiled some of their stories and I put it in one of the bonuses at diary ofcoid.com is you get a free copy of the the second book which is called Collateral Damage and and they tell their stories and yes they would like to see justice but at the very least they just want to be heard you know and not not accused of anything but just heard. And I've got two minutes according to this clock. So, here's how I'm going to here's how I'm going to use them. It's very startling to hear policymakers ever admit mistakes. They generally don't. Why would they? But we've now started to hear some of them admit it. I'll share just one. The absolutely loathsome Francis Collins who used to direct the National Institutes of Health, now directed by Jay Bodacharia, who wrote the forward to my book. Francis Collins said, "As a guy living inside the beltway, feeling a sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House, we weren't really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city. If you're a public health person and you're trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn't matter what else happens. So, you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered. This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and it was really unfortunate. It was another mistake we made. Well, thanks a lot for nothing, Francis Collins. Well, I'll I'll conclude with this. Um, the libertarian world, I would give it a C+ in how it handled this situation. This was our opportunity to shine. And I'll just say the Libertarian Party was a dark as an outright embarrassment during this period. Well, as long as maskearing is voluntary, we should like that is all you have to say in the wake of this. Get out of town. But I can tell you something. The Mises Institute was solid. The Mises Institute held its events. Everything went on as normal. We're all still here. There were regulations in town that said, um, any facility that is open to the public, there's a mask mandate. So, at the Mises Institute, what did they do? They plastered over all the doors, not open to the public. So, no masks. We had events, uh, we had fellowship. We uh we fought against this in all different ways through activism, through scholarship, through videos at a time when even some of our own people their own knees started to buckle. But one thing you can rely on is that the Mises Institute just ain't never going to buckle. And God bless it. Thank you very much. [Applause]