More accurately: some people hope your memory is shot.
This is as good a recitation of the b.s. that we've been fed under the guise that it was good for us as one is likely to find.Yuck.
From Tablet Magazine, January 30:
Masks have never worked. Testing has always been problematic. Kids were never high-risk. The past has never been altered. Welcome to the COVID consensus, circa midterms 2022.
When anti-lockdown protests began in the spring of 2020, national media outlets were quick to label the protesters far-right white supremacists whose concerns were the product of “ignorance, privilege, and anti-Black racism.” During this time, playgrounds and beaches were closed, park benches were taped off, and thousands of small businesses permanently shut down. As lockdowns dragged on, drug overdoses rose sharply, schoolchildren were cut off from basic services, and 1 in 4 young people reported suicidal thoughts. Hospital patients died alone, police broke up religious services, and funerals were restricted. Those who believed the costs of lockdowns outweighed any benefits were called “covidiots” and the civil liberties they appealed to were labeled “freedumbs.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which had previously argued against coercive public health measures, was nowhere to be found. The American left, with which I’d always identified because of its claims to uphold workers’ rights and principles of bodily autonomy, now explicitly advocated for forced quarantines of healthy people and for policies that dramatically increased the wealth of the world’s richest at the expense of the working class. After spending four years checking every perceived authoritarian impulse from Donald Trump, the media suddenly called for strict enforcement of government decrees, denounced the noncompliant, punished dissenters, and advocated for Big Tech clampdowns on speech. On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, users were censored and banned for expressing viewpoints that contradicted the ever-changing messaging from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control. The simple act of sharing official data on the COVID survival rate among different age groups was considered an act of harm that could lead to thousands if not millions of deaths.
By January 2022, however, the failure of the previous two years of U.S. COVID policies has become undeniable. Vaccinated people were once promised that they would be “dead ends” for the virus, but 80% of the first omicron cases in the United States were double vaccinated and one-third had received a booster. Many cities that implemented mask mandates and vaccine passports are seeing some of their highest case counts of the pandemic. As a result, the original justifications for COVID restrictions are now being openly contradicted by the same people who once argued for them—but without acknowledging the pivot. With the 2022 midterms in sight, the narrative is simply shifting without apology, and many of the arguments once made by “covidiots” are now being backed by Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and the familiar cast of journalists and experts.
It was never social media “misinformation” that harmed people, but rather a coordinated attempt by public health officials and reporters to limit open discussion and skew coverage of COVID. This campaign manipulated the public into acquiescing to measures with catastrophic second-order effects but little epidemiological value. Now that the damage has been done, the old arbiters of truth and morality will not get back the trust or credibility they’ve squandered....
....MUCH MORE
