With the end of 2021 many are wondering if there is light at the end of this tunnel, or do we face an oncoming train. This post takes up the issue in three parts:  How Did We Get Here? What is keeping us here? What is the Way Out?

How Did We Get Here?

The best and briefest summary I’ve seen comes from C.J. Baker’s American Thinker article COVID-19 in 10 sentences.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

As we approach the end of annus horribilis 2 (also known as 2021 A.D.), it seems worthwhile to to look back and summarize the events that have brought us where we are in the COVID-19 saga.

Here, in ten sentences, is how we got here.

1. Since at least 2014, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), through Anthony Fauci’s NIAID division, have sent millions of U.S. tax dollars to communist China to fund research involving the genetic alteration of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

2. Around October 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began when a new coronavirus leaked out of the same Wuhan Institute of Virology and into the human population.

3. The Communist Chinese Party imposed a tight lockdown of its own population, while simultaneously allowing international travel to and from China, facilitating the virus’s worldwide spread.

4. As the pandemic unfolded, public health officials and the media used grossly overestimated death rates and false promises of self-limited measures (“two weeks to flatten the curve”) to promote unprecedented policies of prolonged, widespread quarantine of heathy populations, which continue to this day — two years later.

5. Simultaneously, in places such as New York State under former governor Andrew Cuomo, authorities knowingly put sick COVID-19 patients into close contact with highly vulnerable persons such as nursing home residents, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary and avoidable deaths.

6. Despite definitive evidence from the early stages of the pandemic that COVID-19 poses minimal risk of severe illness and statistically zero chance of death in children, and that children are not significant drivers of its spread, the Democrat party and the public teachers’ unions — with the help of health officials and the mainstream media — have forced schools to close for in-school learning for multiple school years, and continue to push for renewed school closures in many areas of the country.

7. As cheap, existing, and safe medications and treatments were identified that showed effectiveness in treating COVID-19, a systematic, worldwide movement to suppress and discredit such treatments was instigated by Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the mainstream media, Big Pharma, and social media corporations, to protect their financial interests in vaccines and other proprietary medicines they had in development, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

8. As COVID-19 vaccines became available in the U.S. through Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA, these extremely new treatments were heavily promoted by Fauci, Gates, the media, Big Pharma, and social media under knowingly false pretenses, including repeated false claims that the vaccines 1) would provide herd immunity, 2) were equal or even superior to natural immunity, 3) stopped contraction and transmission of the virus, and 4) were safe and effective for all ages.

9. Even as the COVID-19 vaccines have now been shown to 1) lose effectiveness in a matter of weeks; 2) be ineffective at stopping transmission and spread of the virus; and 3) be inferior to natural immunity, and even as more than 20,000 vaccine-related deaths have been reported in the CDC’s own Vaccine Emergency Reporting System (VAERS) — with a similar level of reports in EudraVigilance (the E.U.’s reporting system), the likes of Fauci, President Joe Biden, current New York governor Kathy Hochul, and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio continue to press ever harder for repeated doses of these same vaccines, including among young children.

10. Although the current dominant strain of COVID-19 — the omicron variant — has been demonstrated to be more transmissible and much less deadly than prior strains, as well as dramatically mutated from the original strain after which the vaccines were modeled, Fauci, the Biden administration, the Democrat Party, and the mainstream media are now employing a policy of endless boosters with the increasingly obsolete yet lucrative vaccines, alongside the systematic scapegoating of unvaccinated persons, rather than employing the focused protection of the vulnerable and promotion of normal life and natural immunity among the healthy that has already been successfully implemented in numerous “free” states.

What conclusions can we draw from this series of events? Here are a few:

First, the “health care industry” is largely a syndicate run by government bureaucrats like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, Big Pharma, and ultra-rich investor-influencers like Bill Gates.

Second, the mainstream media and major social media platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are diametrically opposed to freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas. In fact, their goal is the opposite: an Orwellian thought control of the population and the suppression of all dissenting voices.

Third, the Democrat party is utterly corrupt and power-hungry, while the Republican Party is hopelessly gutless and ineffective.

Lastly, the formula has been revealed for the permanent extinguishing of the civil liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights: declare an emergency, terrify the populace, control the message, stifle all dissent, and revoke the citizens’ freedoms indefinitely, all while grabbing and consolidating political power. Coming soon: the climate “emergency.”

What is Keeping Us Here?

There appear to be three principal obstacles to any pivot away from the Covid morass: Vested Interests, Addiction to Power, and Need to Save Face.

Vested Interests

Forbes reported in April 2021 Meet The 40 New Billionaires Who Got Rich Fighting Covid-19.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, markets collapsed and economies around the world plunged into recession. At the same time, hundreds of billionaires fell from the ranks of Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list, capturing a snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people.

One year later, things couldn’t be more different: a record 493 new billionaires joined the list this year, propelled by a red-hot stock market and unprecedented economic stimulus. Among those newcomers are at least 40 new entrants who draw their fortunes from companies involved in fighting Covid-19. Some, such as Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and BioNTech cofounder Uğur Şahin, have become household names thanks to the vaccines they helped develop. Others got rich making everything from personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests to antibody treatments and software that helps authorities schedule vaccination campaigns, which will be essential in reopening economies and returning to normal life.

So the pandemic has morphed into an industry whose prosperity depends on continuing fearful demand for its products and services.  It also boosted the wealth of the very richest moguls, like Amazon’s Bezos and Big Tech tycoons like Zuckerberg, because social lockdowns made their services essential.  As Jeffrey Tucker noted, lockdowns divided classes:

The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

Addiction to Power

Kit Knightly writes at Off-Guardian The Covid narrative is insane and illogical…and maybe that’s no accident.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even after you admit you’re lying, is the purest form of power.

We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.

Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.

But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.  You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.

To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.  Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.

Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.

The Need to Save Face

Let’s consider the plight of political leaders at local, state or province, and national agencies.  Most are not getting rich or getting off on the power from telling pandemic-stricken people what to do.  But they have gone along with the Covid narrative and instigated and enforced the crazy rules.  How can they walk back the controls they claimed as necessary?

Some of us remember the backlash from Catholics in the 1960s after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules, declaring that eating fish on Fridays was not strictly required any more.  It didn’t go down well that behavior considered bad enough to be confessed was now optional.

Laura Rosen Cohen writes at Newsweek Let Omicron Spell the End of the Pandemic—and the COVID Shaming.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested. See Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Cory Booker, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson for examples of the template.

Why the need to go into detail about never having sinned? Some are saying the quiet part aloud: “There is a strange feeling of shame and embarrassment around us getting covid,” as one person admitted. “We did everything we thought was right to avoid it- masks, tests, vaccines, boosters- and we still got it.”

“As an ultra-cautious, triple vaccinated, always-masker I was shocked and very afraid,” another tweeted. “To my surprise, I also felt ashamed. And embarrassed. How could *I* have let this happen? How could *I* have put my family at risk?”

These people want you to know they are the “good” Americans, those who wear two or three masks, didn’t see family, travel or socialize for two years, and didn’t leave their houses. “We did everything right,” followed all the rules, and still got it!

It’s the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. “Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned,” they cry out. And it’s not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It’s politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it’s really weird.

These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the “fight” against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn’t care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.

Since when in human history has someone’s vaccination status ever been included in an obituary? These obligatory COVID/Vaccine Acknowledgement Statements are like some kind of new Land Acknowledgements for the COVID Zero faithful. If only blue state liberals could acknowledge the truth: that no one should feel guilt or shame for getting a highly infectious disease.

After all, we don’t shame people for getting chickenpox or seasonal influenza or any number of other highly contagious respiratory viruses or diseases. It’s something many liberals actually know in other contexts; they would never shame someone for getting an illness that is even related to their behavior, like obesity, alcoholism and some forms of diabetes. Why is this a thing with COVID?

Now especially, as we hopefully transition to the endemic phase of COVID-19, the COVID shaming has got to stop. The only entities that should feel guilt, shame or be blamed for the spread of this virus are China and the Wuhan Virology Lab. The “Scarlet C” belongs squarely upon them.

If only liberals would relinquish it.

What is the Way Out?

Jennifer Jones writes:  As C.S. Lewis wrote in God In The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (a quotation many of us have read more than once this year), “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. …those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” After close to two years of decisions being made for our own good, his words could not be more poignant.

At this point in the pandemic, there are two distinct paths: (1) Continue down the government’s rabbit hole of lockdowns, vaccine passports, triple jabs, quadruple jabs, segregation, masking, isolation, and divisive rhetoric erroneously blaming one group of people for the woes of the pandemic or (2) common-sense risk acceptance predicated on the belief that medical autonomy based upon being an informed consumer is a God-given right.

Fortunately, there are numerous jurisdictions that mostly avoided the “rabbit hole” and provide examples for a balanced approach to managing the virus.  (Sweden, Japan, South Africa, Florida, Uttar Pradesh, etc.)

Clean Up the Dashboard

Recommendation:

Stop showing cumulative statistics all the way to beginning of 2020.  These are not informative, only serve to drive fear of numbers that can only rise.  The public needs to see what is the situation now.

Cease use of the categories “cases” and “hospitalizations”.  Both have been corrupted from original definitions and can no longer serve.  Instead report “inpatients” and “outpatients”.  These are people who are in a physician’s care for sickness following infection with SARS-CV2.

Inpatients are those admitted into hospital with a prior covid diagnosis, not anyone testing positive after entering hospital for some other reason. Outpatients are those undergoing a treatment protocol at home under the supervision of a doctor who determined an illness deriving from SARS-CV2 infection.

The only other statistics are “covid deaths” which must be defined as dying from Covid19 not dying with Covid19. This outcome is only valid for inpatients and outpatients (no others) within 28 days of first diagnosed with Covid19. “Recoveries” should be reported daily, meaning patients who survive after 28 days.

Empower Primary Care for the General Population

Over-the-counter medical products should be provided comparable to those to treat cold and flu infections. People with mild symptoms should have access to home tests as well as anti-viral medicines and nutritional supplements shown to be effective against SARS-CV2.

Stop Discrimination Against Persons Based on Vaccination Status or Mask Wearing

Those who are vaccinated are protected and do not threaten others.  Unvaccinated people are trusting their own immune systems.  Likewise, wearing masks is an individual protection choice based upon circumstances.

Outpatients need to self-isolate during treatment, and when symptoms are over, new testing is not required.  People who have contact with others who tested positive do not need to test or to self-isolate if they are without symptoms.

Basically, it is a return to common sense citizen responsibility for public health.  When you are sick, you seek care and medical advice and treatment and isolate until you are well.

Resources:

Israel Mulls ‘Herd Immunity’ Covid Strategy As Global ‘Pox Party’ Pivot Continues

The end of the pandemic will not be televised

The Zoom Class Gets Covid