Is a modicum of sanity about to reassert itself regarding the Wuhan Flu? Are the people finally exhausted by their panic over the Fauci-altered coronavirus? Remember those little bulletins that Mike Pence carried around, enjoining us all to to take “fifteen days to stop the spread”? I think we’re at about day 750 now.
New York restaurants and many cultural emporia demand that you produce your papiers (it sounds better in German) — identification plus an image attesting to your “vaccination status” — in order to enter. Some are even requiring proof that you’ve had a “booster” jab. Pfizer likes that.
Back in March 2020, I noted the alarming twofold dialectic operating in tandem with the panic sweeping the country: the “sheep-like passivity of the public, on the one hand, and the eager exercise, at every level, of state power on the other.” We’ve been living with that for two years. A sense of exhaustion and, with it, a sense of impatience, is creeping in everywhere one looks. I discern little flares of chagrin as well.
Still, you are required by federal law to wear a mask while riding on public transportation. Why? Most masks do nothing except make it hard and uncomfortable to breath. They are badges. They accomplish nothing medically. But they do serve to announce one’s compliance, and therefore one’s virtue. They say to the world “I care,” even though the emotion is spurious.
Is that about to change? Maybe. A recent report from Johns Hopkins University shows what anyone not smitten by the Covid insanity knew from the beginning: lockdowns did essentially nothing to lower mortality from the Chinese flu. They did, however, have huge negative economic, psychological and medical effects.
For the first time in history, governments across the globe attempted to quarantine not the sick but the healthy. The results were dire. “While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects,” the report concludes, “they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.” Conclusion? “[L]lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
I have pinned up in my study an “Attestation de déplacement dérogatoire” from a friend who lives in Paris. Back in 2020, anyone venturing outside had to fill out one of these forms and present it to the police on demand. You were only allowed to venture a kilometer from your place of residence and only for short periods and for prescribed purposes. Did those draconian restrictions do anything?
Yes. They made the epidemic worse. Such proscriptions, the Hopkins study concludes, “may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness.” Moreover, “lockdowns have limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places.”
And so on. Of course, this is all common sense. But common sense turns out to be one of the least common attributes, at least among the elites who govern us. I am happy to see that the Hopkins study is getting attention. The fact that it hasn’t been ignored or censored may be a welcome sign that sanity is returning not only to the populace at large but also to the elites: the politicians and the self-appointed experts who lord it over us.
That’s the benign interpretation. A more cynical reading is that those bureaucrats are terrified at the anger and impatience they sense building in the population. In response, they have begun rolling back the various Covid restrictions in order tranquilize the people and encourage them to forget. It is true that people have short memories. But I suspect that there will be some condign retribution meted out once people absorb just how malicious, preemptory and incompetent our rulers have been.
