How the Left and the Right Continue Pushing Covid Hysteria

[dlombard]

Throughout my life, I've met people who were twice my age and somehow half as clued in, and what I realized is that the reason that happens is that they learn incorrect lessons from their experiences.  The inevitable consequence of that is making mistakes repeatedly.  I find that's where we are with the discussion on Covid-19.  Three years later, both the political left and the political right have learned incorrect lessons, and this is very bad because that means that the next time the government and news outlets conspire to declare another "emergency" that necessitates the deprivation of your civil and human rights and eviscerate livelihoods again, there won't be very much to stop them.

The number one problem with the prevailing narrative on what went down in 2020 is the underlying premise that we were dealt a uniquely lethal set of circumstances heretofore unseen in human history.  This single misconception was and remains to be the single biggest factor driving all other aspects of this entire debacle.  Surveys had shown that most people around the world, particularly those on the political Left had and likely still overestimate their risk of death or injury from a SARS-CoV-2 infection by multiples of thousands of times.  Thanks to a widespread misconception that this virus is the most significant danger to face the world in over a generation, a lot of things were enabled:

1. Lockdowns.  The equivalent of using a .40-caliber handgun to remove an nuisance insect from one's own face, lockdowns were the proverbial nuclear bomb option as it resembled one of the worst civil and human rights infringement atrocities in more than one hundred years.   A never before attempted strategy for mitigating the spread of a respiratory virus, and the only reason anyone in the world ever dare attempt such an abhorrent thing was because people believed the fabrications created by the Communist Party of China; that their lockdowns successfully contained an outbreak in Wuhan.  Moreover, any Mayors or Governors that failed to institute and maintain these lockdowns were Viciously attacked on Twitter and other social media platforms by hundreds of thousands of accounts operated by an army of people part of the Chinese Communist Party as killers.
    And yet, from famine to delayed life-saving cancer screening and treatment to spousal and substance abuse and suicide, the lockdowns themselves proved more lethal to humanity than Covid itself.  Had people understood this virus was only marginally more severe than that of conventional influenza for almost all demographics, nobody ever would have went along with lockdowns.
2. Masking.  Decades of studies had proven these have never worked to stop or slow down the spread of an upper-respiratory virus in any real-world human population.  However, once again, there were claims from China that this, along with "social distancing" succeeded in stopping or at least slowing down infections and cases (i.e., hospitalizations), which never proved true anywhere in the world even once.  Furthermore, had people understood this virus was only marginally more severe than that of conventional influenza for almost all demographics, nobody ever would have went along with it.
3. Operation Warp Speed.  In saner times, the idea of using brand new, experimental medical technology that was tested on so few people you could only fill one-third of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena California for about three months before attempting to administer billions of injections to the world's populations would strike the ordinary person as madness.  The lunatic ravings of a mad scientist that had been long ostracized from the community of respected medical professionals.  The efficacy and moreover safety of any drug was so paramount that potentially life-saving treatments for things such as cancer have had to wait years before they could be approved by the United States Food & Drug Administration.  Even then, should the slightest evidence exist that such drugs could be dangerous, their withdraw from the market was swift and usually permanent.
        However, the safety and definitely the efficacy of these mRNA injections for Covid-19 had proven to be significantly far less than what was proselytized.  Yet, many are still taking victory laps in mid-2023, including former President Donald Trump, for Operation Warp Speed.  And at places such as several major American universities, there are Still mandates for proof of having been injected multiple times with this drug to be eligible for admission.  Were it not for the multiple lawsuits and a handful of brave, independent-thinking judges to push back, people would still be losing their jobs for choosing to avoid possible death or permanent injury due to this injection.  Nevertheless, all of this was found to be completely acceptable due to the idea that Covid-19 is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to the world in the history of humanity.  Thus all of a sudden, ignoring reverence for safety, efficacy, scientific and ethical rigor along with loss of individual liberty came to be seen as a small price to pay "for the greater good."
4. Lying to the public "for the greater good."  Donald Trump's coronavirus advisor, Deborah Brix wrote in her book that they knew they were lying about the promise of '15 days or 2 weeks to slow the spread' when evangelizing lockdown because they anticipated it would be easier to sell multiple short periods of time of "temporary tyranny" to the public.  Furthermore, there was a great deal of character assassination of once highly respected scientists such as Robert Malone or Peter McCullough for failure to adhere to Covid Orthodoxy, and espouse the agreed upon narratives.
        These are but two of many examples where public health officials were either lying through omission, misrepresentation or fabrication of information in order to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of the public, which in a free society is normally considered to be entirely unacceptable and absolutely unforgivable.  Unfortunately, for many people in the year 2023, despite the fact that these liars were proven to be lying, the idea that Covid-19 is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to the world in the history of humanity made all of this perfectly acceptable going forward.
5. Use of police and military force to suppress free speech and peaceable assembly throughout the world.  Before 2020, these were the kinds of abuses by governments not seen outside of Communist, Marxist and/or Islamic countries.  It is not unheard of to be detained, arrested, thrown in jail or kept in prison for years without trial in certain countries in the middle east, in central and south America even, or various countries of Africa, or-of course-China.  However, this time, the so-called "free world;" governments of supposedly Democratic nations flirted with the same level of tyranny as banana republics.  And whether it was Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland or even California, the "world's most dangerous threat to mankind in human history" was used to justify the arrest, brutalization and harassment at home of citizens.  A line was crossed in 2020, and not just once.  Images of Australian armed forces deploying to use rubber projectiles against protestors and Canadian police sending the SWAT team after a Pastor or equestrian units to brutalize elderly protestors in Ottawa will not be forgotten by those of us who were paying attention.

This was all bad.  But how did we get to the point of believing that Covid-19 was this existential threat to all of humanity justifying governments' disembowelments of human rights, grift and other corruption?  At least eleven extremely important narratives were responsible for that:

1. Death numbers.  Lying with statistics and misrepresenting the meaning of information through numbers is not hard to do.  Perhaps the most obvious example of this were the death numbers.  Whether reporting on infections, cases/hospitalizations or actual fatalities, it was very important to report Raw Integers rather than Percentages.  Numbers like 10,000 or 100,000 sound like a lot, because--on their own--they are big numbers.  If you had 100,000 books in your home, you would have no space to move.  But numbers are always relative.  Consider your body is made up of five trillion cells, for example.  So a number that sounds big like 500,000 may or may not matter depending on the context, doesn't it.  Indeed, as a percentage of 330 Million (the 2020 population of America), it equals 0.152%.  There is no way CNN could scare anyone into believing that we had a "deadly pandemic" if they showed a microscopic-looking number like 0.152% - it was very important to show big numbers like 500,000 or 600,000 instead.  By comparison, the #1 killer of Americans for years had been Heart Disease, which is over 800,000 people every year.  Another fact almost no one knows is that every year, roughly an average of 2.4 million Americans die from all causes.
2. Medical Theatrics.  CCP's videos of bodies keeling over in the streets.  Video of full ERs (including beds where mannequins in oxygen masks were used to simulate Covid patients).  Deploying hospital ships and triage tents in parking lots and convention centers.  News footage of people in hospital dressed like Intel cleanroom employees as if they were treating Ebola virus patients.  Masked politicians and public health officials whenever on camera.  "Full ICUs" while hiding that ICUs have always operated at 80-90% capacity because excess capacity in a hospital is like excess capacity in an airline, it costs them money; this was important because "ICU capacity" was one of the moving goal post metrics exploited by Los Angeles County Health director Barbara Ferrer to justify forever masking into early 2022.
3. Models by Lab Coat Hustlers.  A steady flow of usually Caucasian and Asian people with letters after their names on TV news, day in and day out in front of book cases and diplomas while wearing signature lab coats were all meant to project the air of authority and expertise.  It didn't matter what you saw with your own eyes, or what your own common sense was telling you.  "The Experts" were telling you that they have these models, and the models say tens of millions of people are going to die.
4. Anecdotes.  If you keep talking about something enough, people will think it happens all the time, like so-called "gun violence."  As rare as mass shootings actually are, the news works very hard to make sure you hear about every single time it happens, creating the perception that it happens as often as the sunrise.  If there was enough money to motivate such a thing, they could make people think cars are death traps by making sure to report on any traffic fatality that happens anywhere in the United States as BREAKING NEWS at the start of each hour, every single day...for months.  Similarly, anytime anyone self-reported testing positive for a coronavirus infection, it was well publicized, including and especially when they were celebrities.  This takes us to the next reason everyone thought this was the new plague.
5. Test Mania, Part 1--excessive testing.  Just like how this was a big money maker for face mask manufacturers (most of which were in China) and for pharmaceutical corporations, the test makers and laboratories that processed these tests were making billions of dollars from mostly contracts with state governments.  Before 2020, almost no one with flu-like symptoms were given a Polymerase chain reaction test to verify they had the flu.  An attending physician saying so in a clinical setting was almost always good enough in 99% of cases.  With the ubiquitous testing for a flu-like virus after 2020, it became possible to synthesize the illusion of an outbreak and lie with data.
6. Test Mania, Part 2--bad testing.   Polymerase chain reaction tests, a PCR test, is not a diagnostic tool.  Instead, it is a tool for detecting DNA sequences.  Even Coronamaniac's super hero Dr. Anthony Fauci explained that if the cycle count threshold is too high (say 40 instead of 15), then any positive result will be false because all it's doing is detecting dead nucleotides at that point.  At one point, someone swabbed a can of Coca-Cola sealed in plastic, and tested it for Covid-19 and it came back "positive."
7. Test Mania, Part 3--asymptomatic positive test results.  This was perhaps the most destructive component of the entire Covid-19 narrative, because it was the strongest excuse for forced masking of healthy people.  Helpfully, asymptomatic spread was the explanation for why all the positive test results in spite of the obvious lack of visibly sick people all over the place.  All coronaviruses have about a 22-hour incubation period where you can be sick before you start to show symptoms, caused by mucus membrane contact (i.e., eyes, nasopharynx) with an infected person's mucus as the transmission medium.  However, in order for that mucus to get there, you have to be around someone who is coughing and sneezing.  Statistically, 0.7% of all Covid infections could be actually linked to an asymptomatic person.  In 2020, we were presented with a strange dichotomy nonetheless: somehow Covid was so dangerous, it's the world's most lethal threat yet simultaneously so harmless, you can't even know you have it without testing, and it's easily defeated by home-made face masks.
8. Opportunistic Medical Coding.  Hospitals in several countries were financially incentivized by the government for each Covid patient and/or death coded to have been caused by a Covid-19 infection.  As a result, people reported as dying from Covid were many times killed by something else while having had a coronavirus infection.  After a while, it became impossible to cover up that this is what was going on, and so eventually, the distinction between "dying of Covid versus dying with Covid" was all of a sudden being newly discussed by 2021 in New York, by the likes of the CDC and so on.  Former Project Veritas chief James O'Keefe had done investigative reporting on this in early 2020 with funeral homes in New York where he had learned this had been going on all along.  How many people Really died of Covid-19 in one year?  Probably not the one million Americans dead like your favorite Democrat politician keeps repeating, that's for sure.  But that's what everyone (including Republicans) keep saying--even in 2023.
9. Unnecessary Mechanical Ventilation.  The theory here is that the problem with a SARS-CoV2 infection is that it turns into an advanced form of pneumonia requiring in almost every case immediate intubation on a mechanical ventilator.  Unfortunately, it has since been determined that had most patients not been put on a vent, almost all of them would have survived.  (To a lesser extent, the aggressive administration of Remdesivir was another contributing factor to unnecessary Covid death.)  This bad advice about using ventilators, by the way, also borrowed from "medical research" supplied by the CCP.
10. Origin Theory Obsession.  The theory of the appearance of impropriety is based on the philosophical understanding that perception influences judgement to a far greater extent than the facts, and that whether or not something wrong was actually done is less significant than the perception that something wrong is going on.  This is done often and in many ways.        
         Throughout history, show trials, for example, and other examples of mock justice will perform the character assassination of a targeted individual.  It is not necessary for the person to have actually done something wrong or illegal.  Just the mere fact that their name has been publicized as being the target of an investigation or that they are standing trial for criminal charges is damaging enough in the eyes of the public, regardless of the outcome.
         In this case, rather than a person being on trial, it's the coronavirus.
    
    In order to permanently cement in history for all time Covid-19's place in human chronology as the world's most lethal threat to ever face our species, there is a Federal, Congressional Investigation into the origins of this virus.  Otherwise, if this coronavirus wasn't the world's most lethal threat to ever face humanity, why would the United States Congress carry out an investigation and hold hearings?  The fact is, this virus is far from being anywhere near being a historically dangerous or deadly threat to the world.  However, perception influences judgement to a far greater extent than the facts.  Therefore, with this "show trial" to hunt for the origins of this "new" (?) coronavirus, we are (well, actually, Congressional Republicans) are assisting in permanently establishing the idea that Covid-19 was the worst existential threat to humanity in world history.
11. Miracle Cures.  You wouldn't spend $70 on a bottle of "immune system booster" gummies to keep from catching a cold, so if they're selling such a thing to keep from catching Covid-19, then Covid is probably pretty serious then--or at least, that's what the people selling $70 gummies hope you'll believe.

So what are the facts?

1. Again, "Asymptomatic spread" almost doesn't exist, accounting for maybe 0.7% of all cases
2. Eight or nine "waves" of population-wide infection over three years later, and Japan alone proved that masks don't work.  Full stop.  It is also worth noting that the protocol for dealing with legitimately lethal respiratory viruses such as tuberculosis looks quite different than the asinine health theater (masking, distancing, etc.) had looked.
3. And whether or not you get it doesn't even matter, because the actual infection-fatality ratio of the virus (which is real and quite possibly entirely organic in origin) among healthy adults at the average age of an adult in the United States is 0.0035%, with the IFR far lower for children
4. It is entirely illogical to believe all influenza virus strains magically disappeared and were replaced by Omicron, Delta or the O.G. Wuhan strain.  For one thing, never before in human history has influenza not infected humans
5. People who got the shot were not only getting sick and spreading the virus anyway, they were getting sicker, and more often than those who hadn't
6. The shots' safety record appears to be "iffy" at best.  Indeed most of the people dealing with prolonged symptoms (i.e., "long Covid") are more likely suffering from either vaccine injury or psychosomatic illness
7. All those people who "died of" Covid, almost certainly died of something else, including being killed by "the treatment" (ventilators, Remdesivir)
8. Hand washing, liver and kidney health as well as an adequate intake of vitamin D is all that had ever been necessary to reduce one's risk of contracting upper respiratory viruses such as influenza or coronaviruses
9. In the wake of a truly deadly set of circumstances, American politicians like Sheila Kuehl and Gavin Newsom would not have been dining out in groups at restaurants, usually in the first state to end its lockdown mandates--Florida--while describing these places as being "death traps" and locking them down in places like Portland, Chicago, New York and L.A.  Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and others wouldn't have been busted partying on 10 Downing Street while all of London was under curfew in one of the strictest Covid lockdowns in the entire world

All together, this all means a lot of things.  Here are just four examples out of many:

1. All those people, including children, that committed suicide due to Government-mandated lockdown and mask-driven depression died for no reason
2. The people who died trying to save themselves from a virus with a infection-fatality ratio statistically equal to seasonal influenza with these mRNA injections (often government mandated, such as in Los Angeles County), had died for no reason
3. Those that survived but lost their jobs either because the government locked down their business as "non-essential" or the company they owned went out of business lost their livelihoods (and in many cases life savings) for no reason
4. Police, fire fighters and paramedics, nurses and doctors as well as members of the United States Armed Forces dismissed for refusing to risk the mRNA injections led to a direct reduction in national security and the capacity for local first responders to save lives.  Those who ultimately died as a result of these Government-mandated capacity reductions, died for no reason

In short, people died (often for no reason) because of the Government, not a virus.  However, as long as people--regardless of political orientation--continue to demand investigations and "accountability" for a virus instead of the egregious and morally reprehensible actions of governments around the world, we all remain vulnerable to the next time governments and their 'public health' goon squads utter the ominous words, "stay safe; we're in this together."

And why wouldn't it happen again?  A lot of people got VERY rich because of what happened in 2020:

1. Whether it was Zoom, NetFlix, InstaCart, Doordash/GrubHub/UberEats or Disney+, a lot of corporations made billions from folks who were using Lysol on their grocery bags, driving alone or walking around outdoors alone in face shields and masks when not hiding at home from a bad cold.  The booze makers also got loaded since most people were binge eating and self-medicating due to the social isolation and inevitable emotional fall-out, with most Americans reporting an average of 30-35 lbs. of unwanted weight gain during the lockdowns
2. The mask makers got rich
3. The test makers got rich
4. The shot makers got rich
5. Anyone who had money in the stocks of those companies (including politicians, whether directly or indirectly) also made a lot of money
6. Profiting off the panic porn with high TV viewership ratings, news networks were able to charge tons of money to advertisers
7. A lot of books were sold by "Covid Super Heroes" like Peter Hotez
8. Covid Relief Funds were badly exploited

Not everyone on these two political sides engaged in such profiteering from hypochondria but you can't get rich when the people use fresh air, exercise, losing weight, inexpensive supplements and cheap off-the-shelf medicine to stay healthy.  The self-interested greed of those that seized upon the opportunity of a lifetime to portray a virus as an existential threat to humanity appears to be yet everlasting, which begs the question: who among us stand ready to tell the government and their co-conspirators in News Media, Academia, and Corporate America: "screw you, no" the next time they try this again?