1/ In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggesting the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness. This article was based on a single case report.
2/ Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article.
3/ So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born.
4/ On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid.
5/ That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others.
6/ WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later. Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out.
7/ Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.
8/ But the damage was already done. The media ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.
9/ We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick.
10/ If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.
11/ It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us.
12/ People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control. A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society.
13/ Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.
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1/ From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, covid represents the first time in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.
2/ While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics.
3/ These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them.
1/ "The unholy welding of digital technologies, public health, and police power is leading to unprecedented invasions on our privacy and intrusive methods of monitoring and authoritarian control. aaronkheriaty.substack.com/p/resisting-th…
2/ "In this framework, citizens are no longer viewed as persons with inherent dignity, but as fungible elements of an undifferentiated “mass,” to be shaped by supposedly benevolent health and safety experts.
3/ "I predict that if these trends do not meet more robust resistance in 2022, this new paradigm of governance will demand increasingly intrusive and burdensome interventions into the lives, and bodies, of individuals.
1/ In addition to the mass formation theory, the insights of Rene Girard on mimetic contagion and the scapegoating mechanism are essential to understand this phenomenon. Girard saw that we imitate not only one another's behaviors, but one another's desires.
2/ We end up wanting the same thing(s), e.g., "I need to be first in line for the vaccine, which will let me get my life back." This can lead to mimetic rivalry and increase social tension and conflict. The mechanism that societies use to resolve this conflict is scapegoating.
3/ The social tension (amplified during lockdowns and with the fear-based propaganda) is attributed to a person or class of person, with the proposal that if we can only rid ourselves of the [fill in the blank "unclean" member(s) of society] the social tension will resolve.
"The hour is later than we think; twilight is near. Continued compliance with manifestly unjust and often absurd mandates will not return us to a normal functioning society.
"Every good-faith or selfless act of compliance on the part of citizens has only resulted in more illogical pandemic “countermeasures” that further erode our civil liberties, harm our overall health, and undermine human flourishing.
Helpful analysis of the data (cases, hospitalizations, deaths) from Israel, controlling for recent increase in testing. Recommend reading to the end. boriquagato.substack.com/p/are-aggressi…
Cases, (all data adjusted for testing rates), 2020 vs. 2021.
British press attempts an answer to my questions yesterday about Israel’s record numbers of daily Covid deaths.
The “answer” is (1) handwaving about the data accuracy without specifics, and… wait for it… “not enough people have gotten the fourth shot.” telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…
“The uptake of the fourth vaccine dose to combat this waning [vaccine efficacy] has also been poor. ‘Israel was the first country to authorize a fourth dose… but only half of those eligible took it, in part because early reports about its effectiveness were mixed,’ said Raveh.”
If at first you don’t succeed, try a fourth time. This is the sunk cost fallacy on full display. You need to be able to walk away from the card table when you are losing so as not to continue digging yourself onto an even deeper hole.