Mistakes were made, fights were had. Now it’s good to see some recognition that many Covid-era claims made by scientists have been disproven by science. It’s a step forward with honesty from legacy media and I welcome it.
NYT – The Daily: Were the Covid lockdowns worth it?
Mask mandates never worked, there was no “winter of death,” etc. It’s a good listen.
Living in the fallout
The fear caused by the bug, and the fear caused by the response to the bug will be felt for decades to come. There is some crossover, but both extremes seem incapable of understanding the opposing extreme due to their own unique intellectual difficulties.
If restrictive Covid measures saved 1 million lives, but end up deleting 14 million of lives through politicians who win by pandering to latent fears originating from the response to Covid, did those measures actually protect life? The answer is “no.” If you should elect for your own sense of safety at the cost of 15 foreigners, I get that, it’s a natural inclination.
Obviously, the vaccines cause harm in a downwardly combatted number of cases. One of the more obscene change-ups I’ve seen over the past 15 years has been the change in acknowledgment of vaccine injury. Not long ago, the answer was “I acknowledge vaccines hurt some people, but they save more people than they harm.” Through this event, and since then, it’s “vaccines are safe” with hostility towards nuance.
Those people still get harmed. Now, with the Internet, they can find each other to coordinate and wield political force. They and those who sympathize have been pounding the stodgy credentialists in the eyes of the public since this particular outbreak started. For the sake of balance and stability, I hope those experts improve who they are as a people and perform as better public servants in the future.
In any case, this guy got 87 doses and he’s still kicking. Not a depopulation agent, or bioweapon. Predicating your right to reject medical mandates on dystopian hyperbole is unnecessary and rather annoying.
At some point, it was declared racist to wonder if a known gain-of-function research lab had leaked a virus due to some flaw or lapse in their safety precautions. It was not racist to conclude that it must have come from “those brown people cooking up new diseases in a wet market.” Someone capable of adhering to such a mental model has no place defining what is or is not racist, and thankfully their influence on the subject is waning – they had their day.
Only the Department of Energy seems to hold the lab leak theory. They’re not medical professionals, but they’re also not bound up in a protective bias towards medical research and development funding, research labs, etc.
We should never forget that it was perfectly “safe” to march in herds for an astroturfed cause that those “experts” either believed in or felt pressured to support. This whole thing really became wacky at that point. The lying was obvious, and now we’re living in the fallout.
