BUS RIDES, BOXERS AND COVID MYTH BUSTERS

From 1982-1989, I lived in, and adjacent to, Newark, New Jersey. During those years, I traversed the city countless times on foot or on my steel blue 10 speed.

And sometimes on a bus. At twilight one winter Saturday evening, I was riding a New Jersey Transit bus toward my apartment. Of the ten or so passengers, I was, as usual, the only Caucasian. I sat near the bus’s center.

In the last two rows were four Black men in their early twenties, bundled in utilitarian cold weather attire. They were arguing, vigorously and at some length, about the skills of various professional boxers. Each demonstrated extensive knowledge regarding various fighters’ records, strengths and weaknesses, and techniques. At one point, one of the debaters peremptorily proclaimed, “Honeyghan a chump!” Another immediately, forcefully replied, “If you say Honeyghan a chump, you a chump!”

I knew Honeyghan was a boxer. But I had never seen him fight and thus, had no opinion regarding his skills. I suspected that if Honeyghan was famous enough to talk about in the back of a bus, he probably wasn’t a chump.

Hearing this lively discussion, a slightly built, slightly shorter than average, lighter skinned than the boxing analysts, cheek-bearded Black man around 45, wearing a stylish blazer, a turtleneck, a leather baseball cap and maybe one of those natty, long, woven, orange-intensive African scarves, rose from his seat near the bus’s front. In my memory, he looks vaguely like a younger Henry Louis Gates. He walked past me and stood in front of the back row discussants.

Sensing that Henry Louis had something to say, the boxing analysts suddenly became quiet. Loudly enough for me to hear—I wondered if that was half the reason for his intervention—the blazered man calmly opined, “If you young men devoted as much focus to your education as you do to watching boxing, we’d be much better off as a People.”

He pivoted and returned to his seat.

For two seconds, the young men were dumbstruck. Then they spontaneously, simultaneously and dismissively waved their hands at, and collectively derided Henry Louis, saying effectively, though more spicily, “Ah, get out of here, you old man!”

But the not-really-that-old head had made an important point, which applies more or less universally: we all misuse time focusing on/learning things that don’t help us to understand, appreciate or improve our world, or our lives.

The reaction to the Coronavirus has directly affected most Americans. Given its impact, you might think that Americans, with 24/7 Internet access, would have devoted abundant time to learning about the virus and the government’s response to it.

But most Americans haven’t done their homework. Throughout the past twenty-one months, most Americans have displayed distinct deficits of knowledge regarding the virus and attendant public policy. They’ve passively trusted profoundly biased news outlets—The New York Times, WaPo, CNN, NPR and PBS, which all pander to their ideologically monolithic paying subscribers—and/or Twitter, as well as insipid, middle-aged, misinformed, male late night male talk show hosts, and daytime panels of snippy, old, misinformed women, to misinform America.

For example, almost no one I know—including multiple graduates of prestigious colleges—knew that the PCR tests, which were commonly used to decide whether someone was infected, deliver 90% false positives. Thus, the vast majority of people said to have been infected, or to have died, from Coronavirus were functionally uninfected. The Italian Government recently reclassified 97% of its ostensible Covid deaths as having had other causes. American data support a similar conclusion, though our health officials consistently, conveniently ignore that the virus threatens only a clearly identifiable demographic. Very few people knew that over 99.8% of those under 65 survived infection, and that nearly all of the small fraction in this age group who died were immunocompromised or obese. Most people thought that schoolkids get, spread and die from SARS-CoV-2 infection; based on this false premise, most schools were closed for over a year. But children are at far greater risk from the seasonal flu than from Covid. Vaxx promoters doggedly—though incorrectly—asserted that the vaxxes stopped viral spread, and deemed the unvaxxed “ignorant” and “selfish.” And so on.

The mainstream media notion that all people were at serious risk from this virus would not have made sense to those who considered real life, directly observed data about how very few people they knew—or knew of—had died with this infection, or how old or unhealthy those who died already were. Passing your local hospital would not have revealed lines of people laying on stretchers on the sidewalk. People should have noticed that people they knew had tested positive without manifesting serious symptoms. Multiple recent infections among the “vaccinated” people they know should reveal that the vaxxes have been badly oversold.

Those who panicked based on media accounts and government pronouncements about Covid should have known better. If they had searched the Net as long as some do to find the just-right pair of boots, they would have found many, highly credentialed people, such as the Great Barrington Declaration signatories, Doctors Simone Gold, Scott Atlas, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Vladimir Zelenko and many other MDs, as well as data analysts, e.g., Alex Berenson, Dr. David Martin, Ethical Skeptic, Borigua Gato, IM, Jennifer Cabrera and Aaron Ginn, dispelling the myth that the virus put everyone at grave risk.

While Big Tech has intermittently de-platformed, or otherwise censored, multiple truth-telling Internet blogs and videos of the foregoing groups and people, many truth-tellers have remained accessible throughout. I’m far from tech savvy, and I’ve easily found an abundance of Net information that sensibly comports with what I see in real life: Coronavirus lethality has been greatly exaggerated.

Active knowledge seekers and independent thinkers also reject the Big Lie that lockdowns, masks and injections were needed to save humanity. The media and government labeled the shots “vaccines,” said that these would stop the spread, and that you could inject twice and be done with this nightmare; it isn’t, it didn’t and you aren’t. Those who had explored the data, thought even a little, and had some basic Biology background knew the injections would fail.

Henry Louis on the bus was right: if pacified, subsidized, locked down Americans spent less time watching Netflix series, following celebrities’ tweets, viewing and betting on sports, or Facebooking and Instagramming selfies, and instead spent more time learning facts, and detecting the lies the media has repeatedly told regarding the Coronavirus, we’d have been much better off as a Nation.