National Public Radio was in a frenzy this morning but it felt like the movie Groundhog Day: they were spreading tremendous alarm about the rise of Covid cases. We have to stop the spread, the announcer said, and that’s why masks are coming back to classrooms. However, they added, relief is on the way in the form of a new vaccine.
Rinse, repeat – as the shampoo bottles say.
This line of thinking – stop the spread to reduce strain on hospitals, mask up, and so on – is being echoed by all major media organs. Leading the way is of course the New York Times.
I’m a bit superstitious about stories in the New York Timesdesigned to drum up disease panic. It was February 28, 2020, when this paper threw out one hundred years of editorial policy on infectious disease to counsel panic over calm, thus paving the way for what would come two weeks later: the astonishing wreckage of Covid lockdowns and everything that entailed.
There was a reason the Times was chosen to be the first media outlet to take this line on Covid. It would be exceedingly naive to think that this was driven by an independent editorial judgment. Someone likely put them up to it.
Regardless, I knew that day that the darkness was falling, that this was likely the beginning of a grand experiment in public health that would not only fail to achieve its aims but also wreck American liberty and prosperity. After all, sectors of the ruling class had been gaming pandemics for twenty years. They needed to justify the endless hours and billions put into the grand project of pandemic planning.
The result was a calamity without precedent. We are nowhere near recovered. Substantial numbers of people today fear lockdowns far more than Covid, and for very good reasons. It was the crisis of our lives.
Even more striking, we’ve yet to have a reckoning. The people in charge today are the same people who did this or their direct successors. There have been no apologies but rather quite the reverse. They worked hard to codify lockdowns as the preferred policy for pandemics, and we have every reason to suspect that they will repeat the experience if they can get away with it.
That’s why my heart jumped a beat at the above-the-fold headline in the Times yesterday morning.
This happens at the same time we are getting more reports of new mask mandates, school closures, and the rollout of a new Covid vaccine invented by the usual suspects that President Biden has personally suggested that every American take. From all appearances, it does seem like another lockdown could be coming, or perhaps they are just trying to scare us into the reminder that they can do it if they want to.
Just this morning, the White House spokesman took to the lectern to warn Americans about ominous subvariant BA.2.86, not to be confused with all the other subvariants being tracked in a pseudoscientific track-and-trace operation being run by the usual suspects.
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