THE CORONA OVERREACTION HAS BEEN THE MEANEST PRANK EVER

I like clever pranks. I’ve had some pulled on me and had to take my hat off to the perpetrators. And I’ve played some on other people. All were intended in good fun. I would never intentionally injure someone or mock them, and no prankster has hurt or mocked me. Nor would I give someone bad news and later tell them it was a lie. Life is hard enough without inducing undue alarm.

But after the past two years, you would know that.

At least three times I’ve convinced people they had won some prize or award when they really hadn’t. I figure that the prank target got to feel like they won and that having that feeling was probably nearly as good as the actual experience of winning would have been. Feel free to disagree with me. You won’t be the first.

Once, the deception was unintentional.

Without providing excessive detail, I had a college friend, Anne, who told me that she was trying to win some award that she admitted was kind of silly. We joked about—and both denigrated—the award throughout the week before the decision date.

When she learned that she hadn’t won, Anne told me, with apparent equanimity, that losing didn’t bother her.

As a way of making light of the award’s unimportance, I decided to write a handwritten note saying that “due to computer error” Anne had been mistakenly informed that she had not won, and that she really had won. This was well before computers were a part of daily life; computers could not possibly have been used in the award evaluation process. The note also contained several—what I thought were obvious—private jokes indicating that the note wasn’t serious and that only I could have written it.

I was also friendly with Anne’s roommate, Adria. When I told Adria about the note’s content, Adria laughed. I slipped the note under Anne and Adria’s door later that day.

A few hours after I passed the note, Adria found me in the dorm’s study room and alarmedly told me that Anne had seen, and believed, the note and was going to the awarding organization’s building to claim her award. Adria told me I had to talk with Anne immediately, or Anne would go to campus and be humiliated.

I thought Adria was pulling my leg; that my prank had engendered a reciprocal prank stacked on a prank, in which I would have to nervously apologize to Anne and then she and Adria would laugh at me. Ha! Good one! You go, girls!

But Adria seemed serious. I gave her two chances to admit she was joshing me. Each time, she swore she wasn’t. I thought that either Adria was a good actress or, increasingly likely, that I had created a thorny situation. Uh oh.

At that moment, Anne abruptly entered the study room, smiling from ear-to-ear and proudly announced, “Mark, I won!”

Like Adria, Anne also seemed serious. They were either really good actresses or I was in trouble.

I was stunned for a few seconds. Then I said, “Anne, I have to tell you something. I wrote that note. I thought you would know it was from me….”

She quickly laughed off my comment.

“No,” I replied, “I really wrote it. I thought that…”

Still skeptical, she said, “No you didn’t. What did it say?”

I began, “Due to computer error…”

Anne turned, burst into tears and burst out of the room.

If this was still acting, it was excellent; while Anne didn’t win the underlying school award, she would have deserved an Oscar. But I could not but conclude that she was serious. I felt very bad about what I had done.

News of the prank spread faster through our dorm than any virus. Reaction was mixed. A few people—all women—asked me how I could be so mean. But the majority—mostly men—thought it was very funny, especially the “computer error” part. Men are more used to pranks. They came to my room and laughed uproariously. I was embarrassed.

I apologized to Anne. She forgave me. Eventually. Sort of. I think.

This experience reminded me that if you want to believe something, you’ll overlook some very obvious evidence that what you want to believe isn’t true.

For 25 months, I’ve wondered how people believed so strongly that SARS-CoV-2 presented a universal, lethal threat and that lockdowns, masks, tests and vaccines would save us.

Regarding the extent of the ostensible crisis, why didn’t people ask themselves, in March, 2020:

Aren’t all viruses to some extent “novel?”

Doesn’t that Chinese guy on TV lying in the street scissoring his legs like a robot seem fake?

Aren’t the people said to be dying from the virus almost exclusively old, sick or overweight?

Don’t many thousands of old, sick and/or obese Americans die every day?

Who are these bureaucrats, Fauci and Birx, and what had they done to deserve such deference?

How many hospitals are really being overrun? If hospitals are being overrun, why do staff at those in my “high-Covid” area say the hospitals are quieter than usual and why are governments financially bailing out quiet hospitals?

How can you trust official death tolls when federal legislation has incentivized hospitals and families to categorize deaths as having been caused by Covid?

Why, given that viruses pass through the population every year, would the most lethal virus of all time arrive during an election year?

Won’t locking people down and closing schools cause extreme, lasting harm to hundreds of millions of people?

And, as the weeks passed:

Why isn’t anyone I know sick?

And how many people that you know of under 80 and not very sick or obese have died from Covid-19?

The begrudging answer I heard from others was always the same as mine: zero.

Regarding the lockdowns and social distancing, they should have asked:

When, in human history, have healthy people ever been quarantined?

Can the world be made microbe-free?

Don’t our immune systems quell infections?

How does it make sense to close small businesses while leaving large ones open?

Does it really help to walk in one direction in supermarket aisles?

Why ban interstate travel when states’ infection rates were nearly equal?

Why do the most locked down, masked up states have the highest Covid death rates?

Why can you stand in very long Walmart lines but not in Election Day lines?

Do photos of celebrities and politicians on vacations or maskless at gatherings during this time of ostensible crisis make you wonder how insincere they are about the importance of staying home and masking?

Among an ever-growing series of arbitrary rules, how does it make sense to return to restaurants, theaters and stadiums at 25%, rather than 50, 75 or 100% of capacity?

Why are most American public schools closed for over a year when very few kids were becoming infected, and next to zero kids were dying with the virus, while European public schools and many American private schools had been fully open since September, 2020 without measurable harm?

Why aren’t death tolls spiking after BLM street protests, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, Trump rallies or college football games, as “experts” predicted?

Why is the two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve” dragging on for many months after the curve had flattened?

Regarding masks, they should have queried:

Aren’t masks plainly leaky?

If masks block viruses, why do mask wearers care if others don’t wear them?

Why, while dining out, must you wear a mask while reading a menu when you can remove it for an hour-long meal?

Two masks? Seriously?

Plexiglas barriers? Seriously?

Regarding testing, a reasonable person might have wondered:

If people were sick, wouldn’t they know it?

Didn’t Fauci previously say that asymptomatic people don’t spread respiratory viruses?

Weren’t the 40 cycle PCR tests almost completely unreliable, delivering 70-90% false positives?

With the lag times between testing and results, how would testing allow asymptomatic people to timely know they should stay home?

How well does test-and-trace work for respiratory viruses, the transmission of which is quite different from the transmission of STDs?

Who got the multi-billion-dollar contracts for the plainly ineffective testing crusade?

And later, regarding “vaccines,” people should have asked:

Why is it necessary to “vaccinate” everyone against a disease that threatened only a small, identifiable slice of the population?

How could researchers develop, in six months, an mRNA vaxx for a respiratory virus when they had previously tried, and failed, to do so for decades?

“98% effective?” Effective in what way? For how long?

How could the shots be deemed “safe and effective” when there had been no time to study long-term safety or effectiveness?

Why are governments giving away free doughnuts, beer, lottery tickets, and $100 gift cards, or holding college scholarship sweepstakes, to coax people to jab?

Why are many vaxxed young people sustaining cardiovascular injury and many other people dying mysteriously?

Why doesn’t it matter to the government what brand of vaxx your get, as long as you submit to a shot, i.e., are all the shots really of equal quality?

Why, if you vaxx, do you still have to wear a mask; and why, if you wear a mask, do you still have to vaxx?

Why are so many vaxxed celebrities, and vaxxed people I know, getting infected?

How could, as many asserted, the unvaxxed be infecting the vaxxed?

Why did Pfizer try to seal vaxx trial data for 75 years?

Why should you believe a President and Vice President who told you during the campaign that they wouldn’t take “the Trump Vaxx” when they later hectored you to take it?

Why would you believe a President who told you he wouldn’t mandate the vaxx, but later did so, and in the most plainly unconstitutional manner?

Why are hundreds of thousands of migrants allowed to enter the US without being injected?

Why is a large segment of the medical community choosing not to be injected?

What have Biden, Fauci or Walensky said since January, 2020 that has demonstrated any special, useful knowledge about the Coronavirus and how to react to it in an effective, socially constructive manner; and haven’t they often changed their minds?

Why do governments still hype and mandate vaxxes when these shots have clearly failed to stop either infection or spread, as Biden, Fauci and MSNBC, et al., promised?

Instead of endlessly hyping the shots, why have the government and media suppressed information regarding various preventive and therapeutic measures that were used against other viruses?

Might the shots cause the virus to evolve, as antibiotics have done to bacteria?

Might the shots damage injectees’ immune systems?

What happened to “Two shots—or one J & J shot— and you’re done?”

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Unfortunately, most people didn’t ask any questions. After decades of widely expressed cynicism regarding governments and media, why did Americans do a 180 during Coronamania and consider governments the source of truth and wisdom, and trusted paragons of competence? Did they forget that the media sensationalizes stories to build audience? The turnaround was astounding.

Anyone who thought about the situation even a little would have seen—in March, 2020—that the interventions simply didn’t add up. In the ensuing months, as the interventions serially broadened and failed, the government and media nonetheless told you to do more of each one. Most people zealously complied. It’s felt like a two-year-long episode of Punk’d. One can easily imagine CDC officials and politicians saying, behind closed doors, “If they believed that, then how about this? LOL! ”

Until recently, I was still in touch with some friends from my upper echelon university. Notably, some who laughed the hardest about my Anne-award-prank nonetheless bought the Corona overreaction, hook, line and sinker. Those from the biggest name colleges were among the Corona-wrongest of all. This “elite” cohort has led the societal race to the bottom from Day 1. At least Anne’s naivete was understandable; the desire for affirmation can blind people to plainly visible facts.

Why did the Coronamaniacs want so strongly to believe the sky was falling, when it clearly wasn’t? Because they consume too much TV/NPR, NYT/WaPo and Twitter, because they’re politically tribalistic and baseline fearful, because they lack a scientific framework and critical thinking skills, and because they’re highly susceptible to peer pressure. Further, the Scamdemic imbued many with a purpose in their otherwise purpose-deficient lives; they loved the drama. During Coronamania, the lockdowners/maskers/testers/vaxxers told themselves they were saving the world.

They disregarded that their Covid compliance put tens of millions out of work, stole youth from the young, and sharply increased overdose and alcohol-related deaths and mental illness, as well as impoverishing inflation at home and hunger abroad. This, and much more, harm is irreparable.

The last 25 months of governmental and media overreaction have been very weird and very dark. The deeply dishonest have pulled the biggest, meanest, most Machiavellian prank ever on the very many gullible. Except that this prank was not in good fun. And the perpetrators aren’t apologizing for all the destruction they’ve caused.

Terrorists never do.