The pandemic opened the curtain to expose the folly of expert worship. Experts are just as fallible and prone to biases, toxic groupthink and political influence as anyone else. This recognition might make people uneasy. However, it should also force a sense of responsibility to search for the truth despite what the experts might say, and that’s a good thing.
Another strange post-COVID symptom—dubbed COVID toes—gained notoriety when NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers joked about his broken toe being a result of his recent bout with COVID. Not surprisingly, media outlets took it seriously, with articles appearing all over U.S. media. Rodgers later had to clarify that it was only a broken toe, and not COVID-related.
Treatment of cholera nowadays is pretty simple, requiring antibiotics and intravenous electrolyte-balanced fluids until the patient stabilizes and the infection clears. But doctors in premodern London had no clue what they were dealing with. They didn’t know about dehydration, fecal-oral transmission, or even the germ theory of infectious disease.
If a permanent government employee broke a regulation, they could not be fired. There was no real way to punish them. But what could be done was make a new regulation that was more burdensome than the last. Punishing an individual is hard. Punishing everyone for an individual’s behavior is much easier.
Members of the U.S. Congress are conducting such an inquiry, and their efforts require the help of physicians, scientists and public health policy experts to identify key policy decisions and provide a rationale for investigating those policies and the officials and government agencies that devised and implemented them, with the ultimate goal of meaningful reform.
They’ve apologized for killing the mink, which is another interesting thing about Denmark, the apologies. Which I love, even though it’s a little bitter, because like a lot of these things they should have known from the beginning. They also apologized for the child vaccinations by saying, “you know, we were wrong.” Well, they said it, and I think that’s part of the reason trust is so high in Scandinavia, it’s like a partnership between public health and the people. ~ Tracy Beth Hoeg
Politically driven science at the CDC and other government health agencies was not limited to mask studies. Risks of severe or long COVID and benefits of COVID vaccines in children and healthy adults were also greatly exaggerated. Worst of all, basic tenets of immunology (e.g. infection-acquired immunity) were denied. Immunologists were expected to go along with it. Many did.
All one had to do was believe the illusion. Because of the absolute terror of the unknown and complete ignorance of the risks of severe disease and death, most people were more than willing to take comfort in CDC recommendations and subsequent government mandates without the slightest hint of skepticism or protest.
With two years of overreaction to and media obsession with the myriad of ways that COVID-19 can kill or permanently disable people, there’s reason to believe a major subset of the population that was faithfully adherent to public health edicts about non-pharmaceutical interventions will remain mentally scarred.
We can see the long arm of history reaching from the times of the Black Death to modern epidemics, where coercion and state control are accepted by a terrified public and conveniently deemed by a power-hungry elite to be the only acceptable way to combat natural disasters, even at the risk of tremendous and unnecessary collateral damage.
With two full years of hindsight, it’s clear that lockdowns were a disaster and that mandated measures caused more harm than benefit, yet this has not prevented leaders from declaring victory, crediting their own brave and resolute leadership for saving millions of lives and routing the viral enemy. However, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a real enemy—it doesn’t have an intention other than to exist and spread, and it won’t agree to an armistice. Instead, we will have to live with the virus forever in an endemic state, and skip the victory parades.
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