Reading this Atlantic article I feel much as Boris Yeltsin did when he saw supermarkets in the USA for the first time.
In two previous posts, Faces are nice and numbers are boring and the earlier Fear Pornography, I looked at how governments around the world, and our government in particular, would only start slacking off on their Chinese Lung Rot restrictions when polls began to turn against them.
despite, you know, the “science” and scientists still demanding them – the government would start declaring victory and moving on.
That’s because sooner or later, the very numbers that had helped them, would start hurting them. That started happening when Ardern stopped fronting the podium each day with case numbers, followed by not having any government figure fronting them, the usual MOH press release being sufficient.
However, there is a certain chunk of the population who are addicted to this stuff, and when they get told that it is time to move on, they’re not happy, as the responses to this article in the Lefty mouthpiece The Atlantic, showed, Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID:
Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.
Ouch! That’s brutal for the Believers. But the writer really rubs it in:
Indeed, in my case, when I say for a long while, I mean for nearly two years, from almost the very beginning. In 2020, I took part in two weddings, traveled extensively, took family vacations with my children, spent hundreds of hours in bars and restaurants, all without wearing a mask. This year my wife and I welcomed our fourth child. Over the course of her pregnancy, from the first phone call to the midwife a few months after getting a positive pregnancy test until after delivery, the subject of the virus was never raised by any health-care professional, including her doula, a dear friend from New York.
Reading this Atlantic article I feel much as Boris Yeltsin did when he saw supermarkets in the USA for the first time.
He makes two points: One about the bizarre spectacle of outdoor masking, something you only see in Blue cities, which he finds especially strange as people put on their masks to go outside after not wearing them indoors at a restaurant.
Another good point is about the absurdity of “public health authorities,” who make pronouncements that no one takes seriously like “having one unit of alcohol per day” is dangerous to your health. He points out that almost all adults are capable of dismissing this crap as pure CYA bureaucrat busywork bullshit.
Except in the singular case of Chinese Xi Snot – where Blue State progressives take every similar hypercautious, ultra-alarmist claim about the perils of jogging maskless perfectly seriously and perfectly gravely.
One John Ekdahl tracked the Faithful reacting violently to the Science Priests issuing these new heresies. Here’s just some samples:
I mean, thanks for keeping us informed that people are still huge pieces of shit who will keep this pandemic going for far longer than it ever had to. What an utter “common man” fuckwit.
…
Please get this fake bible thumper moron off my timeline. He lives in a little uncaring bubble, good for him. Next.
…
What is this garbage? I expect articles like this in Redneck MAGA fan weekly, not The Atlantic. Seriously rethinking my subscription. Ew.
…
And this is precisely the type of BS garbage article why I don’t bother subscribing to this magazine. Its like those so-called antivaxxer conspiracy FB friends/acquaintances I’ve blocked & got rid of. Good F*@kg riddance.
Anyone who brags about blocking “friends” on FaceBook as one of his major accomplishments is totally Winning At Life.
Do better Atlantic. Publishing this Rightwing AstroTurf cult-driven propaganda only harms the vast majority of REAL Americans trying to save lives and mitigate mass death, at 800K dead and counting. Please take this down.
…
People just keep dying when you publish irresponsible, badly thought-out, badly written pieces like this from people who already have their own outlet. You should be ashamed of this kind of article. It’s beneath you. It’s dangerous.
…
Why the f*ck did you publish this drivel? Seriously, why?
…
Shame on @theatlantic for publishing this anti-science screed.
…
How the fuck can you publish incredibly insightful and clear-eyed pieces on COVID from the likes of James Hamblin and Ed Yong … and then run THIS wildly insulting and irresponsible take?
Note the ever-reliable justification for censorship and the stifling of debate: “It’s dangerous.” It “causes harm.” It makes people “feel unsafe.” In which case this NYT article must have been the killer blow.
Six months ago it would have been unthinkable that either MSM source would have published stuff like this. But in the wake of the New Jersey and Virginia elections, and with polls showing the Republicans with generic leads of 9-10% (in the 1994 and 2010 Red Waves they were polling about even with the Democrats), the terror is growing in Progressive circles of the coming electoral carnage of 2022, especially if the Democrats go to the polls with more Lockdowns Forever, Masks For Toddlers and Vaccine Mandate messaging.
Some Democrat politicians seem to be realising this. The New Jersey governor talked candidly about the reasons for his shockingly thin victory in a Deep Blue state, saying that it reflected that people had had enough of the restrictions. Colorado’s Democrat governor Jared Polis says he won’t mandate masks, because “the emergency is over.” Even the Michigan nasty, Gretchen Whitmer is now… criticising Biden’s vaccine mandates.
But judging by those reactions to the Atlantic piece it’s going to be tough to de-program their own cultists, and that’s true across the Western world, especially when you’ve got headlines like this, NSW records highest daily Covid-19 cases ever and one death:
NSW has recorded its highest Covid-19 daily cases ever with 2213 infections and one death in the 24 hours to 8pm yesterday.
There are 215 people in hospital, including 24 in intensive care.
As of last night, 94.8 percent of people aged 16 and over have had one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 93.3 percent of the same age group have had two doses.
…
NSW Health believes transmission is being driven by the Omicron variant.
Oh noes! To normal people this will produce a shrug of the shoulders about the already known high infection rate and low sickness/death rate of Omicron, plus the vaccine saving most of the vulnerable (the old and sick) from sickness and death.
But that’s not how the vaccines were sold. To the low-information crowd they were sold like Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket to Freedom. Except, as this Lancet paper reveals:
High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing.
…
In Germany, the rate of symptomatic COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated (“breakthrough infections”) is reported weekly since 21. July 2021 and was 16.9% at that time among patients of 60 years and older [[2]]. This proportion is increasing week by week and was 58.9% on 27. October 2021 (Figure 1) providing clear evidence of the increasing relevance of the fully vaccinated as a possible source of transmission.
Bugger! Back to those Atlantic and NYT articles: we’re going to have to learn to live with Covid – and that doesn’t mean living with lockdowns, masks, or the hamster wheel of endless booster shots.
I’ve no doubt the porn merchants will continue to push the forecasts of models:
This weekend, under their most gloomy appraisal, LSHTM forecasters suggested the country could be hit by 492,000 hospitalisations and around 75,000 deaths by the end of April. This was based on the Omicron virus having ‘high immune escape’ – ie evading existing immunity to earlier Covid-19 variants – and a lower effectiveness of boosters. Under their most favourable estimate, there will 175,000 hospitalisations and 24,700 deaths.Doomsters’ prediction of 75,000 Omicron deaths by May,
– Daily Mail, 12 December 2021
Frankly they should have been ignored since the original models hysteria in early 2020 proved so wrong, with their tales of 2 million dead (USA), 500,000 (UK) and NZ (80,000). But some people just can’t let go, as the predictions for the Northern summer of 2021 show:
When making similar estimates in April as to how the country might suffer when lockdown restrictions were lifted in the summer, the school was the most negative forecaster in the UK, only to be proven wrong. They warned against lifting restrictions and predicted there would be ‘a resurgence in admissions and deaths comparable to the magnitude of the second wave in January’, when there were more than 1,000 deaths a day. As Freedom Day in July neared, the LSHTM significantly scaled back their forecast as more accurate data became available. Then, under their more ‘realistic scenario’, they predicted 1,000 hospital admissions and fewer than 200 deaths per day. On July 19 when lockdown was finally lifted, deaths numbered just 71 in England.
So, they predicted 110,000 deaths, then revised the prediction by reducing it 80 percent, and they were STILL off by 99.68 percent. Their original calculation predicted 1,549.3 deaths for every one that actually occurred.
This nonsense, pushed by the MSM, will continue with Omicron and whatever variant follows. But a combination of public weariness and politicians increasingly fearful that their helpful monster is about to turn on them at the ballot box, hopefull will see them ignored.
No Minister 
Leave a Reply