What To Do Now? Hindsight is 2020

As the fearmongers are trying to dial up the fear factor over Covid once again, this time over the new BA.5 Omicron subvariant, most sane people two and a half years in would be tempted to respond to all this with a resounding (yawn).  But clearly we must still remain on guard--against tyranny, that is.  That may sound like we are boxing ghosts or strawmen, but we must never, EVER forget just how the easily March 2020 madness started, and how easily it is to slip back into it if we so foolishly allow it.  We simply cannot meet tyranny or insanity in the middle, and if we give them an inch they take a mile every time.  We must oppose them from the very first new or reimposed restriction, mandate, or the slightest attempt at coercion, period.  And we must counteract fearmongering with honesty and truth.

One restriction clearly leads to another, until We the People finally push back.  In March 2020, under the influence of 24/7 fearmongering, it started with "reasonable" sounding restrictions, which quickly got tighter by the day.  Lockdowns, closures, and the milder versions thereof that precededed it, led to mask mandates ostensibly as a way to avoid having to go back to lockdown.  But the places that imposed mask mandates were in fact the places that were MORE likely to return to second and even third lockdowns later.  And both mask mandates and the threat of lockdowns and closures independently and synergistically led to the vaccine mandates and passports that followed.  And all of it was for naught, as many studies and even the most casual glance at excess death rates have shown globally.

In fact, a very strong case can be made that doing nothing, or rather adopting the time-honored "flu strategy," would have been better than what was done.  At best, all that the restrictions did (or could do) was delay the inevitable, drag it out, and make it far more painful than it had to be, at very great social, economic, and health cost.  Once the virus was already "in the wild" in early 2020 in much of the world, if not even earlier, the "therapeutic window" for restrictive NPIs was permanently closed.  Notably, many countries, including the USA, UK, Australia, NZ, and others, all had pandemic playbooks that explicitly did NOT include and even discouraged these sorts of largely unprecedented restrictions, even if we were to face another "Category 5" pandemic like the infamous 1918 one.  Such playbooks were actually based on hard science, that is, what we have learned empirically (often the hard way) over the past couple of centuries.  But then suddenly in mid-March 2020, the powers that be had panicked and threw the wisdom of the ages out the window like so much garbage, and as they say, the rest is history.

Fortunately, most people simply don't have the appetite for more restrictions now.  Not only are people tired of it all, but also they see things like inflation, crime, the economy, etc. as being far more salient concerns than the virus today.  But that is not something we can automatically take for granted either.  Hindsight is 2020, in more ways than one.

P.S.  Apparently "flurona", or co-infection of flu and coronavirus, doesn't exactly seem to be the threat the fearmongers claim it is either.  New research finds that an influenza virus infection actually somewhat mitigates a Covid infection if the flu infection occurs first, and co-infection with both viruses does not seem to make the combo worse.  So as our old frenemy inevitably returns, that is one less thing to fear.

Oh, and you're probably wondering why the phrase "protect the vulnerable" was not anywhere in this article.  That is because that once-noble phrase, which would normally go without saying in a civilized society, has sadly become a meaningless platitude once it had been thoroughly appropriated by the lockdown and mask zealots, who twisted it into making the perfect the enemy of the (reasonably) good.  And it had become a very handy excuse for not only draconian restrictions, but also cruelty and callousness towards the very same vulnerable people they claimed to "protect", often at the expense of other vulnerable people in other ways as well.