THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

During peak Vaxxmania, my wife, Ellen, made a solo trip to a friend’s house, an hour away. During her visit, her friend and her friend’s husband, both engineers, conducted an unbidden intervention with Ellen, emotionally explaining why she needed to inject.

Ellen is about the nicest person you could meet. She’s also smart and broadly well-informed. According to her account of the re-education session, she stood her ground, calmly supplying facts and applying reason.

The conversation would have been somewhat different if I had been there, and I wished that I had. I’m not as nice as Ellen and I know more details about this topic than she does. I would have asked questions about the differences between relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction and about some of the vaxx promoters’ other data distortions, such as how they sneakily mis-defined who was vaxxed and who wasn’t.

I would also have asked what they knew about the shots’ long-term effects. That question always stumped the vaxx proselytizers. As did “If your shot protects you, why do you care if I inject?”

Same Q for masks.

And lockdowns. “If you stay home, why shouldn’t I go out and be among others who, like me, aren’t afraid?”

It’s still hard to believe that people who couldn’t answer such questions thought they were smarter than those who refused to vaxx, mask or stay home. Saying stuff like “Then go ahead and kill yourself and grandma!” doesn’t count as a serious answer.

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Regardless, after the intervention, both members of the jabsplaining couple became distinctly sick “with Covid.” I think this happened to them twice. Seemingly all injectors I know became sick, typically two or more times.

Many months later, during her next visit, Ellen couldn’t help but notify her friend—nicely—that she, i.e., Ellen and I had been fine throughout, unjabbed.

Her friend only obliquely acknowledged that the shots weren’t all they’d been cracked up to be. Then, offering no apology for having been both prescriptive and wrong, her friend breezily said, “Well, isn’t it good that we all know so much more now?”

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Who is “we all?” And why did it take until now— it was, by then, late 2022— to learn that the Covid overreaction and universal injections were wrong from the beginning?

It astounded me that, beginning with the March, 2020 lockdowns and continuing through Vaxxfest, people obeyed their governments as if government officials were benevolent truth-tellers. It’s even harder to believe that, given the lockdowns’ vast damage and the shots’ clear failure and injury record, more people aren’t bitter or outraged about how badly their governments and media have abused them.

Many Americans can’t accommodate the notion that their governments would lie to them. Maybe they’ve said the Pledge of Allegiance too often, have watched too many tearful US athletes on Olympic medal stands with hands over their hearts as the National Anthem played, have heard too many platitude-intensive political speeches and have seen too many doctor shows and golden sunlit Pharma ads to question either American government or medicine. Decades of indoctrination have washed away their sense of reason.

It scares many people to think that dishonest others control big parts of their lives. Further, many don’t want to take responsibility for their own health by taking better care of themselves. They’re much more comfortable perceiving their governments as virtuous matriarchs or patriarchs, believing that drug companies and hospitals care about people, not profits, and seeing newscasters as smart, truthful and reliable.

No matter how independent they consider themselves, people need to believe in someone or something. It’s hard to function psychologically without a trusted source of truth. Accordingly, just as some people make excuses for abusive mates, people subjected to the Covid overreaction make excuses for their government and media captors: Stockholm Syndrome.

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Thus, I’ve repeatedly heard that “We know now that the lockdowns were a bad idea. And that the vaxxes don’t work. But we couldn’t have known that then.” Or its corollary, “We did the best we could, knowing what we knew at the time.”

It’s hard for me to understand why anyone ever bought what seemed to me like an obvious scam from the outset.

Putting a nation of 330 million on house arrest? When had healthy people ever been locked down? Over a respiratory virus that was linked to deaths of a tiny fraction of old, overweight Italians and Spaniards but to functionally zero deaths among healthy people under 65?

Over a hokey video of some Chinese guy lying on a sidewalk scissoring his legs? Since when did we see Chinese Communists as straight dealers? By 2020, people should have known enough about China’s extreme oppression of its workforce, its persecution of Uyghurs and various forms of CCP espionage and industrial and commercial chicanery that they should have disbelieved any news coming from that corner of the world.

In March 2020, before freaking out and shutting down a society, an open-minded person would also have asked what made this virus consequentially “novel?” And why the worst virus in history would suddenly emerge.

Why did people uncritically believe the news media? Hadn’t they previously seen much media sensationalism, agenda selling and half-truth? Were they seeing mass viral death with their own eyes in the real world, or was this something they saw only on a TV screen?

In various years preceding 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans had died from conventional strains of the flu. We had never shut down society in response. We also had never required people walk in one direction down supermarket aisles. (If, while in the produce section, I’d mistakenly walked ten feet past the radishes, did I have to do whole ‘nother lap to get them?) If you didn’t already see a Scam in progress, weren’t those aisle arrows an obvious tell? How about the restaurant mask-up, mask-down protocol?

There are many more examples. They were pranking people, who gullibly obeyed. 

Moreover, those who supported locking down failed to consider its costs. It should have been clear that closing most places of human interaction would deeply damage what remained of social life in the internet age, especially for young people; that students would lose chunks of their education, as well as time with peers and activities that created both near-term happiness and lasting memories—same with adults; that lockdowns would kill businesses and jobs; that the stress caused by earning shortfalls would itself cause physical and mental pathologies; that younger people would struggle to launch careers and build families with the world in an artificially-induced coma; that spending trillions on Covid giveaways would shift vast amounts of wealth from the middle class to the rich and cause major, intractable inflation.

Any thinking person should have foreseen all of this dislocation. Given the very low ostensible death rates in Southern Europe, it made no sense to wreck life for the 99.98% who were surviving February-March 2020 infections.

The most charitable characterization is that, regarding lockdowns, public officials “shot first and asked questions later.” The more realistic explanation is that officials disingenuously incited and exploited panic before opposition could be organized. To ensure they squelched dissent, they banned public gatherings.

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People expect other people to exercise good early-stage judgment in order to avoid bad outcomes. They criticize others—either expressly or implicitly—who exhibit lack of forethought. There are countless behaviors that any adult is expected to know, in advance, are unwise and destructive, just by basic observation, life experience and logic. If people do foreseeably foolish stuff, others mock them. We’ve all heard many true stories that elicited the following reaction:

“Wow! How stupid could he have been to do that?!”

Those who supported the initial lockdowns greased the skids for all of the ensuing damage. The two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve” was the Trojan Horse for all the other unlegislated, arbitrary and ridiculous measures that followed. And lasted.

If you supported locking down, even for two weeks, can you explain why?

I never understood why anyone thought any lockdown was worth the problems it would plainly cause. I watched very little TV during the Scamdemic’s onset and thus, neither saw nor heard much fearmongering. I saw a little March, 2020 TV coverage at my parents’ house and knew that watching more fearmongering would only make me angry.

But even if I’d watched more TV, I’d still have had the same questions listed above. Presumptively, because a functional society requires abundant, direct human interaction, we have to live among others unless it’s proven that human contact is extremely dangerous.

Such proof was never supplied; mathematical models aren’t proof. They can be easily manipulated via any number of bad assumptions.

Either during March 2020, or thereafter, did you know of any non-old, basically healthy person killed by this virus? I didn’t. Four years later, I still don’t. Nor does anyone I know. I’ve asked. Extrapolating February-March 2020 data trends from Italy and Spain, the subsequent absence of such deaths in other settings among the baseline non-old healthy was plainly foreseeable.

Strident vaxx support was similarly naive. Why were people so sure that Pharma was telling the truth about vaxx efficacy and safety? Didn’t they know about Vioxx or Oxycontin and the Sacklers? Why did they think the non-old were at such risk that they should be required to inject a substance with no long-term safety record? Don’t they listen to those long lists of side effects for Pharma’s TV ads? Haven’t they experienced such effects from various medications or known others who have?

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Anyone who has openly, correctly predicted anything deserves to tell people that they “told them so.” I’ve had many chances to do this over the past three years and I do so at every opportunity. I’m not finished. The only thing that stops me from telling-ya-so more often is that people who know that I called out the Scam from Day 1 avoid me and block my emails.

Still, I wear my “I SURVIVED CORONAMANIA: UNMASKED, UNINJECTED AND UNAFRAID” shirt every time I’m among many people. I have three of these, so one is always clean.

Nothing makes me angrier these days than hearing people say they “couldn’t have known” the virus was overhyped and that the reaction to it would cause so much harm. This was clearly knowable since mid-March 2020. Anyone who didn’t know, didn’t think. They did all of the talking and none of the listening.