What I wrote about COVID and fear – in May of 2020
[NOTE: Here it is, and I think it holds up quite nicely]
I have gotten to the point where I no longer put any trust in the prognostications of scientists about COVID-19 and the comparison of various social policy tactics for dealing with it. These people have lost credibility – and I was already skeptical in the first place.
Some no doubt are well-intentioned and trying their best to do a good job. Others probably have a political agenda. But at this point I think even the first group simply doesn’t know. The country-by-country data gives us some information, to be sure – enough to bring me to the conclusion that there is no simple relationship between any of the rules and the outcomes claimed to be a result of those rules. But it doesn’t tell us what to do going forward.
Sweden is encouraging in terms of relaxing the rules, but the US is not Sweden. Georgia, likewise. But it still doesn’t tell us enough.
However, I also concluded a few weeks ago that we must go forward and open up the economy or the amount of human suffering as a result of the shutdown will be absolutely enormous, too. In fact, it already has been. Those at greater risk (like me) will have to make our own decisions about how and when we’ll venture forth. But the greater good requires that we end this stalemate.
I’m with Rand Paul who said this today to Dr. Fauci:
We need to uh, observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden, where the kids kept going to school. The mortality per capita in Sweden is actually less than France, less than Italy, less than Spain, less than Belgium, less than the Netherlands, about the same as Switzerland. But basically I don’t think there’s anybody arguing that what happened in Sweden is an unacceptable result. I think people are intrigued by it and we should be, I don’t think any of us are certain when we do all these modelings, there’ve been more people wrong with modeling than right. We’re opening up a lot of economies around the, around the U S and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, Oh, we can’t do this, there’s going to be, the surge will admit that they were wrong…
…We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy and the facts will bear this out.
About two months ago [that is: March, 2020] I wrote a post entitled “Gone are the days: assuming the risk.” In it I wrote:
Of course, I wasn’t around in 1918. I wasn’t around when smallpox and tuberculosis or the Black Death killed far far more of the people on earth than any of the plagues of my lifetime have come close to killing. I cannot even imagine how terrible those things were; I don’t even want to imagine. And I doubt that people took them in stride at all. And I think a good part of the dread and fear now is that in the back of our minds – or for some people, even the front of our minds – we know that such catastrophes are still possible. Human beings know they are intensely vulnerable.
But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.
And COVID-19 still isn’t shaping up to be that kind of event. We have a lot more information now. It seems, though, that people have become less able to assume any risks at all, and more demanding of total or nearly total safety. Meanwhile, to achieve that safety, many advocate the continuation of measures that are bound to sink this country – not to mention causing people to die of or suffer from other diseases or phenomena such as domestic abuse or suicide.
Of course, some who advocate continual shutdown have other motives than near-total safety. Some on the left would like the economy to sink and are merely using the fear sparked by COVID to achieve those aims. And there are plenty of people who would like to use all of it to destroy Trump’s and the GOP’s chances of victory in November.
The response of the Biden administration was more oppressive of the entire USA than the communist Chinese treatment of Wuhan residents. Plus the fact that Wuhanese were allowed to fly anywhere, but travel of them in the China interior was verboten; Wuhan’s is the world’s sixth busiest airport! The Wuhanese flew everywhere in those first days of the outbreak So the CCP deliberately facilitated worldwide dissemination of COVID by both symptomatic and asymptomatic virus carriers.
Bad people with bad motives did lots of bad things. Stupid, incompetent, and corrupt people with credentials did lots of stupid, incompetent and corrupt things. And all the others with credentials failed to speak out to correct the disastrous policies.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/15/the_plot_to_silence_a_fauci_critic_148866.html
Hard to believe that any sane, rational person in the future would pay the slightest attention to the credentialed “experts” with such a train wreck of a record.
Science is NOT a self-correcting discipline. Obviously.
the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.
The cynical pitch of our ‘news’ media made very sure that the fear level was maximized. And as Twitter and YouTube and their ‘social’ siblings did, said media suppressed the queries and arguments made by real scientists suggesting that most of the population had little to fear, and that imperial diktats to alter the behavior of the entire population were socially and economically and educationally detrimental.
And then to imagine that this was written before the “Summer of Love” took off. It’s completely clear that the political insurrection of 2020 wouldn’t have been nearly as severe if folks hadn’t been sitting at home in front of their TVs 24/7. The political unrest added to the economic devastation already inflicted, and we’re bound to get yet more political turmoil when the bill for our government’s profligate spending during the past few years comes due.
Historians will still marvel a thousand years from today about the folly that took hold of our collective mind in 2020 and beyond. I might add that a Truth and Reconciliation Committee would be warranted to get to the bottom of it all, but is there even a point?
And yet the CDC still wants masks for kids. Other Dems are still on the bandwagon on vaccines and masks.
Yes, I now do not trust anything that says “experts” were involved. I know I am not alone in this either.
My wife and I will take another booster. She had trouble with a lose of taste and smell.
Covid-19 is a very bad cold. Worse than a normal cold, worse than a mild case of influenza, but not as bad as some varieties of influenza this country has experienced – first wave of Asian flu damn near killed me, and I was a healthy, somewhat athletic high school student.
For every serious government official who had weighed the issues and come to an honest conclusion that drastic measures were required, there was a hair on fire karen and four or five cynical power hungry bureaucrats pushing those measures. Like gun control, where it’s not about guns, it’s about control, the required health actions weren’t about health, but unchecked and unaccountable power they could (and did) wield.
SHIREHOME-
As to the mechanism of mRNA “vaccines”: Those program the entire body to MAKE the COVID Spike Protein, as does the COVID virus. It takes 2 weeks for the immune system to begin making a new, specific anti-spike protein neutralizing antibody. The spike protein has an affinity for the linings of arteries, veins and the inner lining of the heart. Sticks there. Causes blood clots.That is not good, and has created cardiac cripples even out of high school and college athletes. Transient loss of taste and smell are inconsequential to those profound cardiovascular effects, wouldn’t you agree?
My comments to your March post hold up very well.
I’m sitting in a doctors office waiting right now with a mask on and they still checked my temperature. In 2023. Idiots.
Buddhaha, I’ve had COVID twice. The first was one of the earlier versions, and it was worse than a normal cold, although not by much. The second time was last September, and it was the omicron variant. It wasn’t near as bad as the last common cold I had. I’m not vax’ed or boosted.
Waidmann
We figured it out by that time also, Neo. We thought that we were at modestly elevated risk, but not high risk, and that younger people were at negligible risk. By that fall, sensible governors re-opened schools and allowed businesses to operate.
“I’m sitting in a doctors office waiting right now with a mask on and they still checked my temperature. In 2023. Idiots.”
The same at my dentist’s office yesterday. A mask in the waiting room, but then my mouth gaping wide open in the chair for half an hour. Makes so much sense!
“As to the mechanism of mRNA “vaccines”: Those program the entire body to MAKE the COVID Spike Protein, as does the COVID virus. It takes 2 weeks for the immune system to begin making a new, specific anti-spike protein neutralizing antibody. The spike protein has an affinity for the linings of arteries, veins and the inner lining of the heart. Sticks there. Causes blood clots.That is not good, and has created cardiac cripples even out of high school and college athletes. Transient loss of taste and smell are inconsequential to those profound cardiovascular effects, wouldn’t you agree?”
This is really the problem with the mRNA vaccines that Neo and I have debated here. Typical vaccines teach the immune memory to recognize pieces of a virus, so that when it is detected in the body, the immune system will rapidly respond. The mRNA vaccines do that with the Wuhan spike proteins on the first jab. The two weeks you are talking about is the immune system responding to is very likely the spike proteins that are still being produced by the long lived mRNA still in the system. It shouldn’t be a cause for celebration, but a harbinger of bad things that may follow. The immune reaction to the second jab of often seems much worse. There is little, if any, immune system learning to recognize the Wuhan spike proteins as being pathogens, since it already recognizes them as such. The purpose seems to be to get those anti-Wuhan spike antibodies up, and keep them there, so that the virus cannot get a foothold – often for a couple months. What I don’t think was factored in, was that the immune system, once it has detected those spike proteins, is programmed to kill most of the cells displaying them. If they end up in the heart muscles, you may end up with myocarditis, when the immune system attacks and kills those cells. Etc. So, yes, those long term elevated Wuhan variant spike antibodies may help prevent pre-Omicron SARS2 viruses from getting a foothold – BUT very likely at a cost of the side effects of the cells containing those spike proteins being killed off. And, another side effect was that the virus mutated around the vaccines, switching the spike proteins enough not to be recognized by the immune system (in the Omicron variant). At which time, these vaccines quit really being able to repel the virus. The good news though is that one of the dangerous aspects of the original variant is how tightly it attaches to human ACE2 receptors (one of the reasons that we know that the virus was not zoonotic in origin). That ability seems to have been affected by the mutation of the spike producing part of the virus. And one reason why Omicron was not nearly as deadly as the original variants.
So, why doesn’t the bivalent vaccines work? One theory is that it is due to Original Antigenic Sin, where the immune system memory imprints best on new viruses. The bivalent vaccines seem to not generate nearly the quantities of antibodies for the Omicron variants, that they do for the Wuhan variant. So, in response to the bivalent vaccines, the immune system continues to churn out quantities of Wuhan spike antibodies, with a much reduced response to the Omicron variant spikes, in the viruses that are actually being seen in this country. So, the next time you see a PSA telling you to keep up your antibodies by getting boosted, the question you need to ask is what antibodies are being kept up by the vaccines? And the answer is very likely the wrong ones – the ones targeting the spike proteins in the essentially extinct pre-Omicron variants.
It was deliberate and it was intentional–for both politcal & social reasons. Blame Trump at every opportunity & use COVID as something comparable to the
Vietnam War “body count” and to drive him from office & use it as a means to control people using fear as a template for future reasons such as climate change.
I too am right now waiting for a brief procedure wearing a mask…but walking through the medical practice is a 4-5 year old little girl coughing her lungs out all over the place without a mask.
If…big if… the medical establishment cared about my health the physically unwell and the otherwise healthy would be treated separately. But the mask kabuki continues.
It seems accepted that children don’t get or transmit Covid. Children are the chief target of teacher’s unions none the less. (sarc)
mRNA vaccines have also been “shown” to “turn me into a witch” and none are known to have ever “gotten better.” But maybe that shown science may turn out to be wrong, can’t be too careful. (sarc)
It doesn’t surprise me that the distrust most of us now have of the CDC and infectious disease “experts” in general following the COVID lockdowns has now spread to the EPA– witness the reactions of the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, to reassurances from federal officials that the town is now “safe” following the February 3 train derailment:
“Residents living near the site of the East Palestine train derailment are blasting the Biden Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for their response to the crisis. Local and federal officials have insisted tests show the air and water supply is safe to breathe and drink . . . but many residents are reporting negative effects to their health and remain skeptical. . . . Evacuation orders were lifted Feb. 8 and residents returned home but since that time people have reported feeling a burning sensation in their eyes, animals falling sick and a strong chemical odor looming over the town.”
https://nypost.com/2023/02/15/east-palestine-residents-blast-response-to-train-derailment/
I know that the usual suspects’ draconian overreactions to COVID have destroyed the trust I once had in public health agencies related to environmental as well as epidemiological matters– I don’t believe a damn thing the EPA says nowadays any more than I believe the NIH or the CDC.
“amount of human suffering as a result of the shutdown will be absolutely enormous, too.”
Boy, you got that right early, Neo. We are still seeing the effects of the mass psychosis that erupted. Look at the comments above about still having to wear masks. One my liberal friends posted today about his weekly senior bowling outing. He and two others were wearing masks….sigh…. He claims he is doing the “right thing” by still wearing a mask in indoor public setting. Totally brainwashed.
I know that the usual suspects’ draconian overreactions to COVID have destroyed the trust I once had in public health agencies related to environmental as well as epidemiological matters– I don’t believe a damn thing the EPA says nowadays any more than I believe the NIH or the CDC.
==
You have the structural problems inherent in public agency. Another problem you have is that in this country, our business sectors are productive and our public bureaucracies tend to be of comparatively low quality, made lower due to the escalating role of political patronage insisted on by the courts. Another problem you have is the secular decay in the character of the professional-managerial class. It’s amazing when you ponder what sort of ethical lapses made for public controversy in 1971-81. Our political elites are sh!ts, of course, but the mendacity and the gamesmanship you find just about everywhere nowadays.
Yes, the “elite” expert class is dishonest, incompetent and corrupt. They combine all the worst of government bureaucacy and rampant hubris. (see e.g. Fauci “I am science.”)
The biggest problem is that far too many people still trust and listen to them. And that includes most doctors. A big part of that is due to the dishonesty of the news media. And the criminal and unconstitutional censorship efforts of government and Big Tech.
Once the public understands that the vast majority of published science studies are wrong and the percentage gets even worse when the subject has political uses, we have a chance to return to more rational policy.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/02/15/30-more-young-people-dying-from-heart-attacks-n531026
Again, pshrinking from a distance is tricky, but I am certain I see a grim satisfaction in more than a few at the prospect of seeing others forced to do stupid stuff.
“many advocate the continuation of measures that are bound to sink this country – not to mention causing people to die of or suffer from other diseases or phenomena such as domestic abuse or suicide.”
To me the worst is what our “leaders” did to the elderly in nursing homes and other facilities.
In a couple of states they made it the law that nursing homes MUST take back in patients recently released from the hospital who were still COVID contagious; even if the facility had no reasonable way to protect other patients.
So, what most places did was to isolate everyone! How many of those elderly then died from loneliness? In their twilight years (months really) their only human contact was with staff wearing PPE. Some places family couldn’t visit; and then when family were allowed to visit it was only by wearing full PPE. This was no way to treat our elderly!
Before I brought her home to my house, my mother was in such a facility – she called me several times a week crying to come home. When I was allowed to visit I had to wear a gown, gloves, a cloth mask, an N95 mask and a face visor. No patients were allowed to leave their own rooms. Even though they had the common room decorated for Christmas I was not allowed to wheel my mother out to enjoy the change of scenery. She was stuck staring at the same four walls of her room.
Also, did the governments do anything to increase (or, at a bare minimum, keep) staffing at hospitals, nursing homes, etc.? Nope, they took actions which drove people out of the business. A report I read a few months ago (CNN I think it was on) stated that nurses, health aides, home health aides, etc. were 30 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels. Truthfully, I was surprised that it wasn’t lower than 30 precent – I feel like it is much lower than that.
On one occasion I snapped at a head staff member at the one facility when they were giving me a hard time about PPE – “you know COVID isn’t the only way to die!” I said. And, really, I don’t feel the least bit sorry for getting angry. Yes, I realize they were only trying to do their job. But, for Pete’s sake use some common sense and show some humanity. I snapped because I was in the hallway outside my mother’s room putting PPE on and was told to do so in her room! I still fail to see how putting PPE on when in the room is better than putting it on outside the room. Can someone tell me?
I said it at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown and I stand by it still – following Commie China and corrupt Italy as the role models for dealing with a pandemic is as stupid as one can get.
Don’t take advice from people who think the world is overpopulated. Nuff’ said
The Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantine, while unfortunate for those trapped and possibly sickened on it, was a very informative event. It was somewhat clear at that point that it wasn’t an absolute crisis and that children made out well.
But no, we were told by gov. officials that this virus was so new and novel that nothing could be assumed until the CDC spent 6 or 18 months studying it and then telling us what to think.
The most amusing/appalling propaganda was the endless official harping about the increased infectiousness of each new variant. But how severe is the infection caused by the new variant? Oh, we’ll have to study that aspect.
We now know that the pandemic was not that novel. Familiar trends common to other viral spreads held in this one too. The only really new wrinkle this time was the mRNA vaccine, and our other poorly thought out responses.
“It was deliberate and it was intentional–for both politcal & social reasons. Blame Trump at every opportunity & use COVID as something comparable to the
Vietnam War “body count” and to drive him from office….”
Well, yes, but that aspect wasn’t enough to drive him from office.
What enabled the Democrats to drive him from office was to use Covid to justify unprecedented, massive mail-in balloting, using the EXCUSE that because of Covid it was too dangerous or impractical to expect people to stand on line at voting stations. State laws were altered—illegally—to push through this measure “in defense of the vote and to defend democracy” so that the Democrats could perform the massive fraud that mail-in balloting can achieve, to manipulate the results in their favor.
BUT EVEN THIS WAS NOT ENOUGH to win in 2020.
Which is why they had to HALT ballot counting in the wee hours of the day after…and “creatively” (in a panic) create the votes, whether by trucking them in, running the same ballots through the ballot counter, or just creating more of those ever-useful mail-in ballot—no chain-of-custody! no signature matching!! no supervision!!! no mess, no spills!!!!—that Biden” needed to put DECENT JOE over the top…and make him “THE MOST POPULAR president EVUH elected in American history”….
To add to the above well-deserved pile-on-
One of the things that governments and bureaucracies do relatively well is making contingency plans. Freed of the oppressive need for efficiency, they can waste resources preparing for low-probability events. Like pandemics (not that the occurrence of a pandemic is low-probability, but its occurrence in any particular year is).
So, the CDC and WHO both had contingency plans for the next pandemic, which both knew would eventually occur. None of these plans included mass masking, or lockdowns, or closing beaches. Yet, when the SHTF, the existing plans were ignored and Get Smart KAOS took over.
The WuFlu was not a hoax- it did kill a lot of people, many old and debilitated, but some young and previously healthy. A governmental and societal response was appropriate and needed, but not the one that was imposed on us.
Bezos, et al., smile.
Will get fooled again.
I live in pragmatic SoMo where distrust of gov entities has always been high. We were especially quick to react to the flip-flops about covid that continue, cementing our opinion about the ‘recommendations’.
In my town the edicts were by and large ignored. We have a high percentage of older people, me included, and there hasn’t been an excessive die-off of them. Mostly, I believe, because we didn’t follow the rules and we live a great portion of our lives outdoors.
Like others here, I’ve had it twice – early on and not that long ago. In both instances it was like a flue bout. The first knocked me down for a couple of days and the second barely one.
Because the schools are influenced by state entities, we had and still have interference from ‘abroad’, but we also have a high percentage of home schooled.
Overall we’ve watched it sweep by with only a few people here diving into inanities like wiping off our shoes with hand wipes. In fact, one eatery lost a lot of regulars because they (we) didn’t want to play table carousel.
Related?
You can run but you can’t hide….
‘New memos unmask secret deal between US, Britain to hide COVID vaccine adverse events;
‘ “Why are we engaged in a secret deal to keep secret information about adverse events related to the vaccines?” Fitton asked.’—
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/judicial-watch-president-says-us-was-engaged-secret-deal-hide-info
I too am right now waiting for a brief procedure wearing a mask…but walking through the medical practice is a 4-5 year old little girl coughing her lungs out all over the place without a mask.
Pediatricians when I was in practice usually had two waiting rooms, one for sick kids. I wonder if that has changed?
My wife, who has chronic lung problems from asthma and smoking when she was young, had what was probably Covid in June 2020. She was pretty sick but never ICU level. Negative tests but it seemed to be consistent with the diagnosis. We are both well over 70. We took the first two jabs but no boosters. My younger son and his family never took the jabs and have done well. My older son, who is a lefty, had his two young daughters jabbed and probably has them fully boosted.
I read Scott Atlas’ book and he suggests that Kushner was insisting Trump not fire Fauci and Birx. They both refused to read any literature Atlas provided about the real epidemiologists work during the pandemic. Kushner also hired the campaign manager who spent all the money for 2020 by September, much of it on himself.
The poison is still in the system — not the vaccine, the political poison. My husband was very recently, for the first time in a long time, in the Bay Area. He had a cousin his age there, with whom he was formerly very close. Over the years, the relationship had weakened, but as she was about to retire abroad, perhaps never to be met again, he proposed seeing her.
She agreed, but as they were “moving in a month” he was not to come to the house. In fact, “due to Covid” they were to meet at an outdoor coffee place, masked. But my husband did want to see her and agreed — obviously not missing the coolness of the reception.
The day before, she added “I must request you be tested for Covid before seeing me.”
“Fine!” my husband emailed back, “Wouldn’t want either of us to give the other Covid, let us both test.”
Boom! How dare you! You haven’t taken the “precautions” we’ve taken! You’re dirty and a monster to suggest such a thing! The “I care about others and you don’t” facade shattered instantly.
Having barely communicated with us in many years, she had no idea of what he had or hadn’t done about Covid. By her reasoning, our precautions must have been pretty good, as neither of us has had it (although we credit luck). It was the pure division and fear so indefatigably promoted by the current regime.
It is really very unpleasant right now.
Nancy, fear and hysteria do funny things to people.**
Me, I blame Fauci and (his fabulously—filthy in this case?—rich, but morally impoverished) friends and colleagues…
**May have said this before…but I’ve decided that “people just do the best they can”…even if they…um, don’t really.
(Gets me through the day; and yes, it may be a cop-out, but I’ve decided it’s the best I can do…for the moment…and while I can always “cast stones” in my head, I try not to let them get expressed…not that I always succeed at that either, must confess…besides, body language has a tendency to be, almost always, the big giveaway, alas.)