17 Jun The Pandemic Management Farce
The American people are moving toward open defiance of all aspects of covid lockdowns, and they ought to be. The whole pandemic episode reeks.
“We’re just following the science”, Americans were told.
So let’s review:
First, let’s get prepared for up to 2.2M deaths if we don’t act quickly and shut everything down. Oh wait…
Next, let’s use wartime powers and commandeer manufacturing capacity to make sure we can flood the nation’s hospitals with critical, life-saving ventilators. Oh wait…ventilators seem to make things worse for most covid patients.
Next, let’s follow the time-honored scientific practice of quarantining the healthy. Oh wait…quarantining the healthy has been prescribed nationally, uh, never.
Next, let’s understand—there’s no need for masks, but science says social distancing is a must. Oh wait, there is a need for masks, and masks are a good idea, but there is no science to back it up. Oh wait, America is racist, so everyone can protest and riot without masks and without social distancing. Oh wait…
Next, let’s follow the science of contact tracing programs which, rest assured all of you freedom-phobes, are purely voluntary. But they are invaluable in containing the spread, even if only a third of the people volunteer to participate. (Science, you see.)
And also, you rubes may not get it, but the most sophisticated among us can understand how a contact tracing program works in NYC where Mayor De Blasio has decreed that no one can even be asked if they were part of the alleged millions who protested without masks and without social distancing. But now it’s time for all to SUBMIT to the program for the sake of public health! This is scientific…
Next, get yourself thoroughly scared about the science showing rising numbers of coronavirus ‘cases’. Never mind that no one—who has been paying attention to the way deaths from v. deaths with covid skewed death counts—has any confidence whatsoever in the accuracy of any death count from covid. But that death count imprecision and a cluster of clashing motivations has no bearing on the count of ‘cases’, which is of course scientific. Except that the count of cases may reflect the fact that there is now more testing; and ‘cases’ may include people who don’t even know they have the virus (called ‘asymptomatic’). But be alarmed by rising numbers of cases, because science.
Next, understand that it is strictly science that compels Dr. Fauci and institutional health authorities to decry the use of hydroxychloroquine. Never mind that actual US doctors treating actual covid patients have shown actual, documented recovery from the use of hydroxychloroquine in hundreds if not thousands of cases all over the country. That is not science.
Science is as proclaimed by Dr. Fauci and WHO and The Lancet medical journal, which published a rock-solid scientific study showing the inefficacy of hydroxychloroquine. Oh wait…the scientific study was a fraud, and had to be completely withdrawn.
Pay no attention to the fact that the patent(s) on hydroxychloroquine long ago expired, such that the drug is now dirt cheap and widely available throughout the world. That fact has no bearing on the scientific judgment that only a new vaccine (driving the flow of billions of dollars into the pockets of those researching and manufacturing it) is the only possible remedy for covid.
And be prepared for the science that says a ‘second wave’ will require another US shutdown. Because clearly the science-based first shutdown prevented hundreds of millions of deaths. Or was it 2.2 million? Or was it 100,000?
And lest you be concerned about who the ‘scientists’ are who are driving all these decisions—rest assured they are esteemed names like Dr. Gavin Newsom, Dr. Eric Garcetti, Dr. Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Bill DeBlasio, and Dr. Gretchen Whitmer.
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Americans know it is possible to think several things at once:
- Covid-19 is a contagious disease that apparently spread to nearly 0.75% of the US population (total infections still less than 2.5 million in a nation of 320+ million), and every one of the deaths from or with Covid-19 is regrettable to society as a whole, and a matter of sincere grief to the individual families affected. They deserve society’s compassion.
- Honest medical researchers and practicing physicians do care about sick people and are exploring treatment alternatives and must of necessity deal with unknowns and uncertainties. Changing course as to medical advice isn’t per se proof of corruption; it can be evidence of intelligent adjustment.
- At the institutional level of US public health and elected officialdom, management of the pandemic has been first and foremost—and very possibly exclusively—a matter of politics and commercial interests, not medical science. And it is to this day.
There is great power and precariousness in the American notion of ‘consent of the governed’. When elected officials stay close to acting with consent of the governed—by being transparent, rational, demonstrably open to the consideration of alternative views, and occasionally changing those views in response to changing facts and conditions—they can get by with executive orders that are outside the normal law-making process, at least for awhile. But pandemic-related orders at every level have now lost credibility; they are not consistent or rational; and they are not even remotely tied to ‘settled science’.
The result is predictable and righteous: the American people are not going to obey further pandemic shutdown orders. They may or may not pay attention to suggestions from medical ‘experts’, but they are through assigning any abiding trust to the elected officials who have imposed this farce on everyone.
Elected officials had better take note: the people now see–the emperor(s) has no clothes.
Eric Georgatos blogs at America Can We Talk?