COVID-19 and the Government Response
It has been over three years now since I was knocked flat on my back by a mysterious respiratory bug. This was after the emergence of COVID-19 as an international news item, but before it was officially here in North America. I still don't know what it was. This looming threat of a novel coronavirus soon led to "two weeks to flatten the curve" in March of 2020, followed by many weeks of continued shutdowns and slow return to any semblance of normalcy even in relatively light-handed states.
Since then, we have had ample opportunity to see the consequences of different response policies. Despite the proclamations of our prophets of doom in academia and the media, states with less strict mandates and enforcement did not suffer overwhelming death, and strict states did not see significant statistical improvements. Sure, many a snapshot has been claimed as proof that lockdowns worked, but aggregate data is far less convincing.
Remember this? Image credit
I am not in the camp of conspiracy theorists insisting viruses don't even exist or that COVID is a complete hoax. However, I do find it odd that the lockdowns were so effective that the seasonal flu and other viruses effectively vanished from all statistics nationwide, yet we were so reckless in disregarding those same lockdowns that we deliberately caused COVID-19 to proliferate unchecked.
Early on, the "COVID deniers" warned that the economic consequences of prolonged lockdowns would destroy the economy and bring long-term damage through delayed medical care, depression, and other social impacts. Additionally, they said the virus was likely to mutate faster than any vaccine could be adjusted to adapt, and the new MRNA technology was untested in efficacy and safety. Dissenting epidemiologists with serious credentials include the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration who advised a response tailored to protecting the vulnerable while allowing those at less risk to resume normalcy, taking whatever precautions they deemed appropriate. This was treated as "misinformation" to be silenced at all costs. Officials could make dire pronouncements without challenge, though. Remember when Joe Biden warned of, ["... winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm"?
State and federal governments of the US and many foreign countries imposed arbitrary restrictions which struck many of us as counterproductive. Dissenters were excoriated by officials, and social media corporations squelched people who refused to toe the line. People who refused the new vaccine were often fired. Economic policies boiled down to money supply inflation and massive handouts to corporate cronies resulting in the ongoing price inflation on top of supply chain issues still rippling through the economy today and disproportionately harming the working class along with anyone on a fixed income.
Now, the same sanctimonious authoritarians who demanded their critics be silenced are admitting what the "deniers" were saying all along. The numbers have been skewed from the start, and death tolls included suspected COVID cases and people dying with COVID instead of from COVID to inflate the numbers. While the vaccine may have been effective early on against the alpha variant, it certainly does not prevent infection or transmission of later variants as promised by officials and experts on many occasions. Claims that it prevents worse outcomes are dubious at best, because the predicted severity of outcomes tended to be wildly exaggerated in the first place. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence of MRNA vaccine risks continue to mount, although I hesitate to fully endorse such claims for now.
Based on both my philosophical preconceptions and the global records after the fact, liberty should have been the policy. Instead, we got economic chaos and a massive political wealth transfer to the politically-connected with a dusting of inflation and debt. People were divided based on how they accepted or challenged the constant deluge of fear porn from politicians and pundits. The disingenuous conflation of direct COVID consequences and the effects of political intervention in response continues to confuse most commentators.
Now, in 2023, the fear is mostly gone, but the new framework for expanded tyranny remains. I will not willingly comply with people who have been factually and morally wrong but never suffer the consequences for the harms they inflict. They claimed to have knowledge that proved untrue, and were absolutely certain of things that proved wrong, but the cost of their error is borne by others as always. I do not consent.
It's interesting to see these events described through your eyes, as it somewhat differs from what I experienced. It's not that you report events I don't recall, or miss those I do, but that how you view them differs.
There are several means by which medical interventions can provide relief from disease. Prophylaxis is an intervention after infection has occurred that kills pathogens, which reduces the impact of disease, such as antibiotics. Vaccination is not prophylaxis. Vaccination is activating the immune system to prior to infection and immunizes the subject, making prophylaxis unnecessary because the immune system prevents infection. Vaccination is said to provide immunization, which recovering from an infection does also.
The mRNA jabs did not provide immunity to SARS2, nor it's variants. When a subject is immunized from a disease, the subject's immune system is competent to tackle the target pathogen and kill it, preventing the pathogen from replicating and the subject from suffering disease. mRNA jabs never provided immunization, never prevented transmission of the SARS2 virus, and never reduced incidence of Covid19.
In fact, recently it has been shown that Pfizer not only never claimed their jabs reduced transmission, but instead acknowledged in their submissions to the FDA that people jabbed were more likely to catch SARS2 and suffer Covid19 as a result.
Their sole potential efficacy was to immunize people and prevent them from suffering infection with the pathogen SARS2, and it was known prior to the FDA issuing the EUA (emergency use authorization) that the jabs had negative efficacy, increased infections with the SARS2 pathogen, and increased the number of people dying as a result (claimed vaccine efficacy was ephemeral, at best, as that initial immune response progressively destroyed the immune system through a complex process nicotine disrupted). Claims being jabbed caused a prophylactic effect and reduced severity of Covid19 disease were similarly false. mRNA jabs cause our cells to produce spike proteins, which are the primary toxin that causes harm from Covid19 infection. Therefore being jabbed and catching Covid19 increased the harm over only one of those injuries).
This was not what we were told. We were told they reduced transmission, over and over, and that's what the touted efficacy rates claimed. 95% efficacy reduces transmission rates by 95%. The jabs never provided such efficacy. Those claims are lies.
It is true there are anecdotes indicating mRNA jabs causes severe adverse events and death. However there is clinical evidence of those adverse events that has always been part of the discussions of licensing bodies. What is not determined by peer reviewed research are the rates of such adverse events occurring in people subjected to mRNA jabs. This is because every effort is being made to push these jabs into people's arms, and research that quantified the risks, which are substantial, would be counterproductive to that effort.
Nonetheless Steve Kirsch and others have done a very good job estimating those risks from public data, denied access to proprietary data that would be available for research funded in order to undergo the peer review process. Those estimates are robust, and more than horrific enough to require these mRNA products to be withdrawn from use. Steve has several times offered prizes of up to $1M for folks that could disprove his claims, recently offering to pay 10x what someone was willing to bet that the harm he claimed wasn't being done (IIRC this was that the jabs caused mortality to increase, and all someone had to do to claim 10x their money was demonstrate the jabs reduced all cause mortality, rather than increase it).
This dislodges people from hesitancy. When folks that want $1m start actually figuring out how to get their hands on the offered prize, they are motivated to investigate Steve's assertions in order to be able to disprove them. When they do that they inevitably learn his claims aren't able to be falsified, and this dispels their uncertainty.
The recent public health advisory issued by Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo is unambiguous and not anecdotal. If you seek empirical evidence of the jabs causing adverse events I recommend you review both that public health advisory, and have a look at Steve Kirsch's substack, where he publishes his offers and claims.
Thanks!
I've been listening to Dr. Paul Thomas' podcast "With the Wind", and he has interviewed Steve Kirsch, along with many other professionals who aren't afraid to stand up for the truth. Very interesting information, and you summed up a great deal of it in one comment.
While it may be laughable that someone that produces walls of text says this, brevity is the soul of wit. I try to say all that's necessary to make my case in as few words as possible.
I'm pretty bad at brevity, so my posts aren't very funny.
Thanks!
Laughs and for what😂 because it didn't seem to help much where I am from... Neither did we have a lot of vaccinations and the numbers aren't really picking up..
Okay I know this was way off topic but yeah
Some parts of the US quickly dropped the lockdown regime. Others maintained restrictions for ages. Some people followed along in lockstep, others undermined the authoritarians. Where you lived mattered a lot. Still does.
Laughs.. Chaos in the "order"
I got not-covid when covid "wasn't here yet," too. And I had lingering not-covid symptoms for almost a year, including a cough and exercise-induced asthma and a weird, random, and sudden inability to swallow solid food that happened in fall and went away a month later just before I was finally able to get an appointment for a swallow-study! It was great.
Remember "Did you accidentally kill someone today?" I can't find that one on google but I remember it vividly and writing a raging comment on facebook that I was already under enough stress trying to do whatever the right thing was and why the hell were they making it worse. They kept "Don't accidentally kill someone," though. Ugh. STILL makes me mad. I almost moved to Canada over that. Except that Canada wasn't letting people move in anymore.
And then Canada upped the ante on COVID authoritarianism, followed by doubling down on it with unprecedented "emergency powers" claimed against protesters.
Yeaaaaahhhhh... I thought Canada was Utopia but turns out it's just another country populated and run by humans.
Grizzly Bear for Prime Minister!
Wriggley for President!
As a matter of interest, did you watch any coverage of the "Rage Against the War Machine" rally that took place this past weekend in Washington?
nope
You're missing out! Here, have some greatest hits:
Meanwhile, the legacy media either barely mentioned this event, or smeared it in the most disgusting manner possible.
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The world is yet to recover from the great blow of COVID, a lot went down then.
Great piece, i must confess @jacobtothe
Covid-19 was like a night mare, I never wanted have this night mare again in life, I don't know it was truly this much harmful or not, I even heard this was all drama. Don't know who to believe and who to no believe.
I don't mean to minimize the virus, but was the real disruption its fault, or the fault of authoritarians?
for me it was the fault of authorities.