After more than two years of lockdowns, mandates, and draconian restrictions, the Centers for Disease Control last week finally relaxed its Covid-19 guidance. The CDC no longer requires individuals to quarantine after being exposed to the virus, and its “recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status.” The move comes after countless Americans lost their livelihoods for refusing to get the jab.

While businesses are open again and masks are (largely) gone, the effects of the past two-plus years linger in the collective psyche. And why wouldn’t they? You can’t shut down an entire society, praise rioters and condemn churchgoers, and expect everything to snap back to normal. Indeed, it's tough to remember just how different things were in the Before Times of 2019. Back then, you could listen to Lady Antebellum on your way to a Washington Redskins game. The NCAA national champion in women’s swimming was a woman. Mostly peaceful protests weren’t fiery.

We at TAC recently got our taste of this post-2020 “new normal.” A few weeks ago, we hosted our sixth annual Crony Capitalism conference. The previous five went off without a hitch. In past years, we’ve partnered with friends from across the broad right-of-center space to highlight government-business collusion in the tax code, Big Tech, the defense industry, and more.

This year, after more than two years of unprecedented restrictions on our civil liberties under the guise of Covid, we felt it was time to assess how we got here. The power centers in our society—government, media, tech—wielded complete control of both the Covid and vaccine narratives. Even in the aftermath of 9/11, when many at this magazine were maligned for questioning our utopian wars and the encroachment on civil liberties at home, the establishment was less able to enforce its orthodoxy than it is now on Covid vaccines. No matter one’s views on the jab, this coordinated display of power is concerning.

We gathered a panel of medical experts to present another point of view on the vaccines: Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Pierre Kory, and Dr. Peter McCollough. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a leader in the fight for a “second opinion” on Covid, gave the event’s opening remarks and moderated the panel.

I urge you all, no matter your views on the vaccine, to watch the discussion—especially because you can no longer find it on YouTube.

Just four days after the event, YouTube became the second Big Tech company to censor our event (the ticketing platform Eventbrite had already removed our event listing):

If the stakes weren’t so high—we are, after all, talking about an issue of life and death—the YouTube statement might be amusing: YouTube is refusing to allow experts, including the man who literally invented mRNA vaccines, to question “expert” consensus.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this year’s Crony Capitalism conference was by far the most well-received. We had an enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd in person in Washington. We had over 5,000 views on YouTube before the video was pulled. There is a growing sense that something is amiss with the Covid-jab regime.

The tragic part is the human cost to all of this. The doctors on our panel see patients dealing with vaccine-related complications every day. Their numbers may be small compared to the sheer number of vaccinated Americans with no complications. But we can’t ignore that some are experiencing real suffering from the jab. As Dr. McCollough said on the panel, any other medication with this rate of serious complications would be pulled immediately. Instead, we’re pushing ever-younger populations to take the shots.

For those who think this all sounds a bit too conspiratorial, listen to this conversation between a distraught father and a pharmacist. The man’s son received a Covid shot and is now in the hospital with myocarditis. He is, understandably, apoplectic. The pharmacist, for her part, gives the game away when the man asks why she didn’t warn his wife and son about the serious, albeit unlikely, side effects of the jab: “We might scare the parents and they won’t want to get the child vaccinated.”

Again, it’s one thing to recognize that serious complications from the Covid jab are rare. But it’s quite another to insist that they never happen. We’re running a worldwide medical experiment in which dissenting questions aren’t allowed. That is a recipe for disaster.

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YouTube, Eventbrite, and all the other power centers looking to shut down dissent won’t shut us down. We at TAC will continue to actually follow the science, as we have since we launched our “Taking the Mask Off” series last fall, and raise concern about the power of bigness wherever it occurs.

Start by watching the full discussion from last Wednesday’s conference, banned by YouTube, on Rumble here: