COVID "MITIGATION" CRUSHED THE POOR

During one of my trips to Nicaragua, the owner/cook of a small sidewalk restaurant befriended me. On the night before I had to fly home with my daughter, my new friend told me that he’d arrange a ride for us from the bright yellow cinderblock hostel across the street from the restaurant to the airport at 4 AM. As my daughter and I ate our night-time dinner—including iguana, which scampered around that barrio—my friend approached a diner whom he knew drove a taxi and talked to him. Following their short discussion, the driver smiled at me, signaled a thumb up, and left. I figured he was going home to catch some winks.

But when I left the restaurant a half hour later at 10 PM, and walked to the hostel, I passed the taxi driver. He was sleeping in an old, dented, black compact’s front seat.

When my daughter and I awoke at 4 AM, we splashed water on our faces, grabbed our packs and headed outside in the dark to wait for the cab. The cab was parked in the same spot, with the driver asleep. He’d spent the night there; the $4 fare meant that much to him.

I tapped on the window to awaken the taxista. After riding eight miles through Managua’s sprawling shantytowns, we arrived at the airport. Though it’s not customary to tip in Nicaragua, I gave the driver the rest of the cash I had, $7. He seemed surprised and smiled broadly.

A guy sleeps in his car for a $4 fare and shows delight about a $3 tip? People down there have so little that North Americans—even “poor” North Americans—can’t understand how it would be to live like that. Many Central Americans literally live from hand-to-mouth. Some don’t even do as well as that. They have nothing to put in their mouth.

When, pre-Scamdemic, I visited Latin America, I saw how hard people there work just to get by, e.g.: men who work fields in the scorching hot sun, seamstresses who sew shirts in the maquiladoras and women who sweat as they cook over smoky wood fires in 95-degree public markets or in tiny, dark homes. Latin Americans have much less of a government or charity safety net than in the US.

One also can’t help but notice that people in less affluent nations spend much more time face-to-face than do most Americans. Throughout the Scamdemic, I thought of Latin Americans whose livelihoods depended in some way on a vital international economy, including but not limited to the many who serve tourists, or who work in very tight quarters with the public in bustling markets or who sell home-fried snacks in the cheek-to-jowl aisles of the high-mileage former US schoolbuses that are the backbone of the transit system in nations where very few people own cars.

In The Covid Consensus, leftist historian Toby Green and Leftist economist Thomas Fazi explain that the Covid overreaction disproportionately hurt the poor, the young and women, both in the Third World and in wealthier nations. Those who, like me, had, from March, 2020 forward, predicted such disparate impact were dismissed as “non-experts” and “grandma killers.”

Spoiler alert: as the authors observe, grandmas and grandpas worldwide lived miserably during the Covid overreaction. Millions died after having been deprived of visitors and affection, masked and confined in a tiny room for the last months of their lives. Legions of the elderly just gave up and died deaths of despair.

In the first half of this 448 page book, the authors outline, and then debunk, the “Covid consensus,” i.e, the false, single narrative—or “doxa”—that governments, media, and Pharma collaborated to sell to a gullible public that, in turn, embraced an extremely destructive overreaction.

To wit, the Consensus fearmongers repeatedly, dishonestly asserted that Covid seriously threatened people of all ages, could be spread by the asymptomatic, lacked any effective treatment and could be controlled by lockdowns until the development and universal injection of an experimental vaccine. Spreading these keystone lies entailed deliberate statistical distortions and aggressive censorship to squelch informed and reasoned dissent, including “mitigation” criticism presented by highly-credentialed people. The perpetrators of this massive fraud characterized the various “mitigation” measures as a “war” and recited that “We’re all in this together.”

As the authors, and those whom they quote, observe, nothing could have been further from the truth. The Covid response clearly divided people in the US, and internationally, into winners and losers.

The Scamdemic further impoverished the First World poor and further enriched the rich: Big Tech, the financial sector and Pharma. Astra-Zeneca, Amazon, Black Rock, Course Hero, Moderna, Pfizer, Tesla, Vanguard, Zoom and other mega-companies cashed in, big-time, during the locked down/vaxxed up era. So did other CARES Act beneficiaries, such as Covid test makers and administrators. At least 50 new Med/Pharma billionaires were created using taxpayer-derived Covid subsidies.

In contrast, grocery store workers and other “essential” laborers worked hard for what they got and had their wages and savings effectively cut by 17% as Covid inflation devalued their already limited resources. During the Scamdemic, the wealth of pre-Covid billionaires increased at ten times the rate as it had during the past two decades; the past two decades had already given rise to record numbers of billionaires. Meanwhile, laptoppers and teachers skipped their commutes and missed no paychecks or meals. Poorer people, especially those in poorer countries, were multiple times more likely to lose jobs, deplete savings to pay basic bills or go hungry and, as did millions, die of malnutrition.

The authors observe that the opportunistic Covid overreaction was enabled by, and built upon, a combination of several contemporary technological forces or trends: concentration of wealth and media, computer screen workplaces replacing production of tangible goods (and an attendant lack of awareness that makers of material goods still existed), the increasing atomization/physical isolation of the Internet Era, emergence of both surveillance and excessively medicalized societies, the revolving door between the government and private/Med/Pharma sector, a multi-decade, a media-induced public mindset of overlapping crises and a generalized death phobia. With these elements in place, Covid propaganda was easy to sell, to a gullible public, lockdowns/school closures, the mask/test/quarantine and mRNA injections.

Green and Fazi spend the book’s second half enumerating the many harms caused by the mitigation policies, which they see as having been driven by anti-Trump politics and money-making motivations of the already-rich, such as Gates and the Tech/Pharma juggernauts. The authors cite many statistics to show that the interventions not only failed but caused tremendous harm, especially to low-income families, whose parents—mostly mothers—lost their jobs, had little or no savings, lived in cramped dwellings that were not meant to be continuously occupied and who suffered from domestic abuse. Pregnancies among home-bound teens also increased.

The authors point out, as many had predicted, that the mitigation caused far more health damage than it prevented. Locking down and closing public places lessened physical activity and sun exposure. Thus, hundreds of millions of people gained weight and generated much less immune-boosting Vitamin D. Lockdowns also deterred many from having routine examinations that would have diagnosed cancers, heart ailments or other problems that, untreated, worsened and killed people.

Importantly, while the authors cite many statistics regarding bad health outcomes, impoverishment and income and educational stratification, they keep it human. They specifically describe scenarios that caused billions of flesh and blood people to suffer.

They write, for example, about the practical, daily effects on those, such as street and market vendors and those who lost work in the arts, the hospitality, garment, travel, beauty and wedding industries and tens of millions of small-scale entrepreneurs and countless members of the informal economy, all of whose livelihoods depended on humans gathering.

They also write about the sharp drops in “remittances” sent, in normal times, by US workers to their underemployed, low-income families in other nations. Predictably, as immigrants to the US and Europe lost their jobs, remittances to those in Africa dropped 25%. One would suspect that this trend extended to much of Latin America, the Caribbean and less prosperous parts of Asia. If you don’t make money in the US, you can’t send it home.

The authors discuss the learning losses sustained, worldwide, by “remote learning” schoolkids whose families lacked computers—and the lifelong impairment of income/socioeconomic mobility after falling behind educationally, special-ed kids who couldn’t get the in-person attention they needed, kids kept inside for months—ostensibly for their safety—the many youths who committed or considered suicide, and more. They quote a Tweet posted, on his last day of work, by a doctor who worked with American children during the Scamdemic: “All I have to say is that we have broken young people socioeconomically, mentally, biologically and spiritually. We will see the repercussions of our actions for years to come.”

The “vaxxes” sold by the government and media did even more than cause many injuries and deaths among injectors, while these unneeded shots simultaneously failed to protect them. Governments in the US and abroad have paid hundreds of billions to be vaxx-scammed. The consummately evil Gates, and his ilk, continue to strive to make vaxxes the central element of poor nations’ public health strategies. The vaxx boondoggle/scandal ignores that the lack of adequate food, clean water and sanitation are infinitely bigger problems in developing nations than are respiratory viruses. Allocating limited public resources to vaxxes instead of food, water and sanitation inefficiently and cruelly further shifts wealth from the poor to the rich.

In addition to economic and safety losses, Green and Fazi discuss the grave losses of basic rights and freedoms, interpersonal relationships and social institutions in the United States and abroad.

The authors observe, for example, that South Africans have traditionally spent much energy and percentages of their modest incomes to pay proper tribute to the deceased because their lives have been so challenging. Thus, depriving the poor of the opportunity to gather and send their beloved into the next realm took from South Africans one of their few opportunities to live with dignity. Instead of caring for the decedent’s body and dressing the deceased in splendid attire, many dead Africans were hauled away unceremoniously in plastic bags.

Green and Fazi properly and unequivocally point out that all of these problems were foreseeable from the outset. In so doing, they expressly reject the revisionist, exculpatory notion that those who pushed these measures “couldn’t have known” that things would turn out this badly. Those who predicted such poor outcomes were deprived of audiences or platforms.

The authors summarize the past three years thusly, “Essentially, the world’s poor paid with their livelihoods and futures for the attempt to control a disease which for them was a minor risk in their daily lives.”

The self-described Leftist authors’ scathing critique of the Covid interventions echoes the criticisms offered by most on the Right over the past three years. Green and Fazi ream the materially and politically privileged “neo-authoritarian” Left for supporting the Covid interventions and thus, wrecking the lives of the poor about whom they profess to care.

This criticism applies both to Leftist political leaders and their Democrat, Socialist and Green Party constituents. As Thomas Frank observed in Listen, Liberal (2016), today’s American Leftists are affluent, de facto segregated laptoppers who affirmatively abandoned the working class over three decades ago; Frank cites an early 1980s DNC memo declaring this Party policy shift. Democrats threw over blue-collar “deplorables” in favor of a college-pedigreed, monied donor class devoted to culture wars that stick thumbs in the eyes of their former base. For political gain, both the New Left’s leaders and their faithful followers fervently and disgracefully supported Coronamania’s economic dislocation, lockdowns and school closures.

Given the structural problems and political and economic opportunism that led to the terrible social and economic outcomes of the past 39 months, and how passively and badly people reacted to the government and media misinformation campaigns during that time, the authors foresee a dark future of egregious government/corporate misconduct that will heap much more of what the novelist Junot Diaz called “Fuku” on the growing ranks of the poor. And on the shrinking middle-class, as well.

In the Introduction of his bestselling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie told readers that his book’s lessons were so important that people should reread that book every year. The lockdown/school closers/maskers/vaxxers of the world and the politicians, public health experts and media who conned them should be required to do the same with The Covid Consensus. They deserve detailed, lifelong reminders of the deep suffering they caused via their strident support for the failed, disingenuous mitigation measures.