Often Wrong, Never In Doubt
A Pandemic Dossier
What Changed?
Last Friday, the CDC revised its covid risk formula. Whereas before, 90% of the country was considered “high risk,” that’s now fallen to less than 30%.
So... what changed?
Because if we follow the same incendiary rhetoric and propaganda Democrats have used over the past two years to usher in the most disgusting, needlessly divisive excrement this country has seen since the Civil War, that “high risk” percentage shouldn’t go down. “The numbers,” as they say, have not gotten better; they’ve gotten much worse.
“Things changed; the information changed.”
What changed? If the “science changed,” that would obviously mean it’s not set in stone, that it’s dynamic and capable of evolving. But if that’s true — if that’s your argument — then WHY have people been censored and ridiculed and even banned from social media for expressing skepticism, asking questions, and challenging explanations? Why has the mainstream media — little more than the indentured slaves of the Democratic party at this point — refused to discuss the pandemic with any scientists and virologists and epidemiologists other than those parroting whatever dogma dressed as science Fauci and the CDC pass down?
More importantly, why have draconian, authoritarian policies been repeatedly sanctioned if the justifications for these edicts have been “answers” to questions that remained uncertainties until just recently?
It has long been known that societywide restrictions have severe socioeconomic costs and almost entirely speculative benefits, and yet our pandemic response was premised upon lockdowns.
One of the saddest truths about the modern world is that more people than ever before lack any basis for devotion other than self-interest; we tend to care about things only insofar as they affect us personally. And while self-interest is primal — inherently human — so is camaraderie.
Egocentric bias is why the burden of this pandemic was borne by the people least equipped to carry it. “The price is worth it,” said the people who didn't have to pay it.
A perfect example of this myopia is the “Zoom class”—the substratum of affluent, “very-online” liberals who’ve been able to live in their own little protective bubbles, cozied up in their jammies and ordering takeout 3x a day, tweeting hundreds of times a week about things like why all the folks coming out against the lockdowns and mandates and restrictions are just a bunch of MAGA-loving white supremacist troglodytes; the selfish thespians who excel most at moral posturing and sanctimonious preening, completely removed from the real world where millions of Americans lost businesses or were laid off or forced to quit jobs, resigned to eating through what little savings they’d managed to accrue over the years because all that's ever mattered during this pandemic is the calculus of the most risk-averse people—the ones protected in their polemical bunkers 24/7, away from all the dystopian and apocalyptic chaos CNN and friends dutifully report, exempt from the consequences they deemed “worth it” without ever pausing to conduct even the briefest of cost-benefit analyses.
Folks, the only thing that really changed was the politics of the pandemic:
Let’s Take A Stroll Down Memory Lane
“Hospitals are being overrun by the unvaccinated!”
Remember the hysteria about hospitals being overwhelmed and unable to provide care? Yeah, not true. Since the pandemic began, there has been one month with higher hospital admissions nationwide than in 2019.
Emergency rooms being overrun? Negative on that too, Ghost Rider. Since the beginning of the pandemic, monthly emergency room visits have been down an average of 14%.
So now, after Fauci and friends teamed up with media cronies to create a climate of fear and hysteria by inflating hospital numbers, the Biden administration is trying to “recalculate U.S. covid-19 hospitalizations.” It has been known since month zero that the numbers are insanely inaccurate—something I'll talk about in a future post.
Friendly reminder that covid-19 is a respiratory tract infection:
Child deaths from respiratory illnesses dropped 20% in 2020, even with covid running through America. Covid accounted for fewer than 1 out of 5 of those deaths.
I’ve brought up survival rates several times in the past, but this chart from an extensive Stockholm study is worth sharing.
The perverse popularity of parading around one’s personal risk from covid even when you fall under a demographic that has a miniscule chance of getting seriously ill, let alone dying, from the virus, is something I consider to be both a fascinating psychological phenomenon and a categorical indictment of our culture.
Ten thousand assault rifles were recently handed out to civilians in Ukraine. This war, which has suddenly turned everyone into foreign policy experts and international relations gurus, is a situation that most Americans can scarcely imagine; meanwhile, here in the states, an embarrassing swath of the population has spent the past two years abdicating the capacity to think rationally, apply perspective, and conduct their own research, and as a result, they’ve allowed fear to dictate their behavior—behavior that has indirectly led to severed friendships, an unprecedented mental health crisis in kids of all ages and years of learning loss, inflation and more than $30 trillion in national debt for the first time ever, developmental issues in children under the age of 5… the list is disturbingly long.
In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for covid were overweight or obese.
Until just recently, the picture above was the norm in many parts of the country (still happening in some places, like here in L.A.). Kids have been forced to mask while those at much greater risk of getting seriously ill from covid remain mask free. Makes sense.
But many parents are having their kids continue masking regardless.
The fact that these people think that a cloth mask is protecting their child — that they need protection at all — is such a colossal failure of public health messaging.
Of note: Two school systems in North Dakota located right next to each other did a mask study. The results? The school with the mask mandate (11,346 students) had more covid cases than the one that did not (12,298 students).
“…the vaccine offered almost no protection against infection, even just a month after full vaccination”
The effectiveness of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in 5- to 11-year-olds was only 12% after a 7-week period of observation. According to The New York Times, federal health officials have known this since early February.
Just a reminder that Pfizer requested and was granted by the FDA an Emergency Use Authorization for kids under age 5. This was in October.
A Blue Book Black List
We forget things too easily nowadays. We’re all adrift in a sea of stimuli and digital content specifically engineered to consume as much of our time as possible, all of it tailored to our individual tastes and preferences by algorithms in pursuit of dollar signs. The past decade has witnessed the evolution of an epidemic of distraction, the logical extreme of our society’s intensifying digital climate, which is now host to an ecosystem predicated upon the harvesting of human attention.
One of the most significant consequences of this rapid transformation, in my humble opinion, has been the shortening of memories. We can't keep up; the round-the-clock clip of modernity is disorienting, even overwhelming at times. Important things often slip away into that vague liminal space society shares for the recycling of mistakes and stupidity.
I don’t want that to happen to the two years just passed. I’m a student of American History, and I remain keenly aware of how fragile America really is. We can learn lessons through comparative study, by looking at other times and places in which dynamics similar to our own have been at work. But in order to derive some meaning, some lessons, from this shit show, certain things must be remembered. More specifically, I think it’d be unwise to allow our nominal “leaders” — be they politicians, public health officials, media luminaries, or even social media mavens, anyone with a platform, a large following, and reach — to memory hole all the acid they blithely poured over a country that was already deeply fractured and atomized pre-pandemic, and the selfish, megalomaniacal reasons why they did so.
I searched for and collected some things to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about. They might tickle your amygdala.
worth noting also that the Stockholm survival-probabilities-by-age table was published long before omicron; one would expect those probabilities to be higher now, for both categories of people considered.
Awesome curation of "progressive" hypocrisy!