Ending this cycle of perpetual disinformation requires revamping our dysfunctional drug approval process. An independent board free of pharma industry conflicts must be established to oversee trials for re-purposed medicines. Recommendations should be based on trials designed by impartial experts and actual results, not the desired ones, and policymakers or prescribers who ignore the findings should be held accountable.
Very few people really want to live in a world in which the administrative state exercises the sort of unmitigated power that the CDC, the DOJ, and the Biden administration are now advocating as a continuation of how we’ve done public affairs for the better part of two years. That system has led to disaster. To continue it will lead to more disasters still.
The major conclusions drawn from this working paper are that lockdowns did very little if anything to help mitigate Covid-19 deaths, especially when you account for differences in demographics that give some states an advantage, and some a disadvantage.
The propaganda is powerful, but reality is still slowly intruding into this make-believe world. Increased food and fuel prices, general inflation, reducing services, and economic hardship cannot be painted over, and the limits of money printing have been reached. Such are the fruits in developed nations of the Great Covid Panic, just as famines are its fruits in poor countries.
China’s leaders visit as much hardship on their people as they want, whenever they want. The global COVID containment system, like the global communist system, is itself propaganda; though the brutality is real, individual human beings are mere set pieces in service to a narrative with a goal that was never obtainable.
What lockdowns and mandates have done to society is a painful truth, and one that we will be dealing with for many years. As much as we all just want it to go away, and as much as we all have great cause to celebrate this day, as much as the real of the mask mandate represents a symbolic end, no one should lose sight of the deeper problem: all of this happened to us, and not only to us but to billions of people the world over.
If this was only a China problem, surely, world leaders would be lining up to condemn the human rights crimes being committed against Shanghai citizens.
Bad ideas and poor thinking will always exist, and there are many, varied ways of being foolish and illogical. But what should trouble us all is when illogical people force others to participate in their delusion.
The last two years have confounded everyone who believed in the stability of American law, politics, public opinion, and the ideological attachments of both pundits and the general population. It’s all been turned upside down and inside out several times over. Anyone who thinks that we’ve all settled back into some mythical comfort bubbles of “liberals” vs “conservatives” is refusing to face post-pandemic politico-cultural realities.
Because of the gruesome spectacle in Shanghai, many who once supported lockdowns have gone silent. Indeed, these scenes are the logical conclusion of the Zero Covid cause, and serve as a grim reminder of the dystopia that could have been our own had they gotten their way.
It’s possible that at some point down the line, Chinese authorities became convinced that their Wuhan lockdown actually worked, and that an aggressive level of nationalistic superiority was the reason that China justifies its position as the only country in the world to “eliminate” the virus through lockdowns.
For two years, the elite journalists, scientists, politicians, and health officials who speak for our most prestigious institutions have been conspicuously and vehemently deferential to the integrity of China’s Covid data.
