YOU MAKE ME SICK

In the 1960s, a man named Curt Flood played baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the top teams of that era.

Flood told a story about being a 1950s minor leaguer. After the games, the players would throw their sweat-soaked, dirty uniforms onto a pile in the middle of the locker room floor. The equipment manager would grab the jerseys and pants and throw them into a bin that he would then roll into the laundry room and wash.

Flood was the team’s only black player. When the equipment manager got to Flood’s uniform, and in the presence of his teammates, the equipment guy picked up Flood’s jersey with a stick and dropped it into the bin without touching it.

This story would make most people cringe. Adults marginalizing a person or a group of people as unclean is cruel. The idea that some people are, simply by being, contaminated and dangerous to others is repugnant. Beyond basic principles of common decency and general respect, inferiorizing a teammate adds another layer of unthinkability. If team sports are based on the concept of “us against them,” how can a team treat a member as an outsider?

Deeming others unclean is also un-American. Americans ridicule East Indians for labeling some members of their societies as “untouchables.” Americans express contempt for those who fear lepers or AIDS patients. “Cooties” is mocked as a game that first graders play. Or at least used to play.

Yet, those Americans who see themselves as the most educated, open-minded and inclusive were the most insistent and persistent supporters and practitioners of superstitious Covid Apartheid and the attendant game of Multi-Phasic Viral Mitigation Pretend. The ostracizers made pariahs of the unmasked and unvaxxed who refused to play along.

This shunning occurred even though those who were shunned neither felt nor showed signs of illness. Applying a groundless, Coronamanic form of the Napoleonic Code, the masker/vaxxers presumed that all non-masker/vaxxers were infected. Seeing people like me approaching on the sidewalk, they crossed the street so as to avoid my infectious, exhaled microbial cloud. They saw me, and others, as unclean: viral Pigpens from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip.

But scientifically, what were the odds of an asymptomatic person being infected with The Virus at any given time? What were the odds of them being contagious? How extremely unlikely was it that a reasonably healthy person would die from Covid?

All of the widespread fear and physical marginalization of others was based on purported risks to fractions of a percent; too small to count, much less to fret about.

Moreover, regarding the overall Covid concept, were ostensible, unspecific Covid symptoms ever definitively linked to SARS-CoV-2? Was that specific virus shown to be dangerous? Why did so many people test positive but show no symptoms? Without knowing the answers to these questions, people irrationally considered other people hazardous, and shunned them. Doing so was psychosis, exhibited on a mass scale.

Treating others as unclean is inhuman because it disregards the basic reality that, from time to time, people get sick. Coronamania’s abiding ethic of fear of others was a radical departure from historical social practices. Before 2020, we’d all gotten colds and flus without blaming anyone. Getting sick was considered a normal, though only remotely possible, consequence of human interaction.

We understood and accepted that we might unwittingly be infected by—or that we, ourselves, might unintentionally infect—others just by riding alongside them on a bus, train or plane or sitting next to them in a theater or an arena; heaven forbid while playing a contact sport against them or dancing cheek-to-cheek! Historically, only hypochondriacs with OCD gave others’ infective capability a second thought. Social life entailed some tiny risk of illness that was easily worth all of the benefits of being face-to-face with others.

Suddenly, in March, 2020, potentially spreading a virus entailed culpability. People started calling those who might infect others “homicidal.” In reading for this post, I came across a page of “Covid Quotes.” One individual, thinking he was being insightful, wrote: “If you go outside without a mask, you’re a walking cesspool.”

Seeing other people as viral vectors is deeply divisive and socially destructive. Mentally healthy, cohesive societies can’t accommodate the notion that those who surround us are unclean.

Yet, governments and the media sowed fear and hatred of others who simply wanted to be among other people with their faces exposed. Bureaucrats and influencers encouraged the population-at-large to vilify the unfearful for asking questions about confining healthy people, closing public spaces, masking, testing and injecting mRNA, much less for disobeying such edicts.

For a while, others would earnestly or fretfully ask the rare person who contracted the vaunted virus, “Where did you get it?!” Asking this question implied that this latest virus was far worse than any that had come before. It also suggested that either that the person who got sick, or the person who infected them, had been careless and deserved his illness.

Throughout the Scamdemic, people have felt obliged, after coughing or sneezing to apologize and say, “I promise I don’t have Covid. It’s only a dry throat or an allergy.”

Neither feeling, nor imposing, the stigma of vectordom was any way to live.

Governments superstitiously disinfected subway cars and buses. Face coverings and Plexiglass barriers were ubiquitous. People disinfected groceries. Governors enacted travel bans, ostensibly because residents of some states were unclean. Even crediting the very dubious “case” statistics derived from bogus testing regimes, infection rates never varied significantly between states. The travel bans and quarantines were blatant political theater; any official who supported these should be permanently discredited, not only for scientific malpractice and violating the federal constitution but for stigmatizing human beings for political or economic gain.

Various jurisdictions passed laws in order to shield businesses from liability if some person got sick from being on their premises. How would a customer have proven that he was were infected at Abe’s Deli or, instead, Joe’s Hardware? When had governments ever closed, or when did people sue, pick-up bars, bathhouses, hook-up websites or hourly-rate hotels when patrons contracted STDs in those settings? If you entered public settings, you assumed infection risks. You didn’t give it a second thought.

As recently as May 2023, the CDC posted this guidance about what to do if someone with Covid-19 had been in your dwelling:

Let in air from outside to clear the air in your home.
Open doors to let in air from outside.
Open windows to let in air from outside.
Use fans to clear the air in your home.
Use a portable air cleaner to help filter the air in your home.
The best portable air cleaners are called “HEPA” cleaners.

To all of the above: Sheesh! Get a grip!

In the 1980s, TV news portrayed a boy with a failed immune system who lived in a plastic bubble to try to wall himself of from viruses. Paul Simon did a song about him. I saw a film clip of the forlorn boy. Within a few years, the bubble failed and the boy died. It was pathetic that, during Coronamania, much of society needlessly made themselves boys and girls in a bubble.

For most of the past four years, the government and the media promoted the notion that the people around us are toxic. For much of the time, many have bought into this fretful, hostile view of others. It’s been very weird, really stupid and cruelly inhuman.