The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings

The MSM

The MSM deserve a whole post of their own on the fear-mongering they helped spread, aided by the likes of Birx:

In particular, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta was a key component of my strategy…

Journalist and writer Helen Andrews referred to it all as Mass Madness At Three, focusing on the stories reported by the MSM,

Headlines gave the impression of a rolling catastrophe. The problem is that this coverage was highly selective. Young Mother, 36, Dies of Covid Hours After Giving Birth. Sad to say, pregnant women die of the flu in normal years, too, just as teenage athletes sometimes had heart problems before the vaccine came along. It may be a pattern, it may not. You can’t base your sense of reality on anecdotes.

But you’ll notice the difference in the treatment of those anecdotes: teenage athletes suddenly dropping dead is a conspiracy theory to frighten you into not getting the “jab”; a young mother dying of covid after giving birth was not a conspiracy theory designed to make you panic and abide by the lockdowns. Andrews lists a number of these, including the most famous one about Trump and “drinking fish-tank cleaner”, which the wife talked about to a reporter, resulting in global coverage aimed at Trump and hydroxychloroquine:

It turned out the wife was a longtime Democratic donor who had previously been arrested for domestic violence against her husband. Friends said the wife was unhappy in the marriage and doubted whether the deceased, a retired mechanical engineer, would have done something so irrational and impulsive. Nevertheless, journalist Lawrence Wright, who has a Pulitzer Prize, repeated the story uncritically in his book The Plague Year.

By 2021 they were still at it, with countless stories of unvaccinated people gasping their last in sorrow at not having got the jab:

No follow-up on how many of these stories were bullshit! And look at all these “civilised people” in action on TV.

And then in 2022 it all changed – just like the news in Nineteen Eighty Four, as professor Eric Weinstein observed:

And then there’s the fact that the US government poured huge sums of money into promoting its positions on lockdowns, masks and the vaccines – a very modern form of propaganda:

In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.

The entire media apparatus of the United States basically became the Voice of America for the C-19 vaccines, with Congress appropriating $1 billion to buy the ads and obtain the placements of “influencer” personalities to appear in the media to sell the program. That, plus the censorship of “misinformation” via the CDC and other Federal agencies working closely with Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets.

As a local example, about the only stuff written about the New Zealand C-19 responses that I’ve found was published in the Australian Spectator in October 2022 and focuses mainly on the vaccine programme of ’21-’22: what the NZ government knew and did not know, and what it did.

The Medical Authorities

Meantime over in America the health institutions are not doing well, Too little, too late: Disband the CDC now:

But most important, the agency has finally faced some truths about the vaccine that it should have long ago. “CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur.” And it’s admitted that “persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

Cities across the country fired teachers, firefighters, health care staffers, police officers, sanitation workers and so many others because they refused to get vaccinated. Many of these people had worked through the early days of the pandemic — and contracted COVID many times over — while we baked banana bread and patted ourselves on the back for ordering from Uber Eats. Now the CDC acknowledges this was the wrong thing to do. Whoopsie!

The new guidance is all fine and good, sane even, but it’s August 2022 and fully absurd that the CDC is only now recognizing that people aren’t staying six feet apart and that a previous COVID-19 infection offers a layer of protection similar to the vaccine.

In other words, firing people won’t work. The institution itself is garbage and needs to be replaced, or re-formed from bottom-to-top, which is effectively the same thing.

But the private sector hospitals may not be in better shape. And again, the problems were there right from the start:

Tens of thousands of Americans died after being placed on mechanical ventilators in spring 2020. It’s long past time we got real answers as to how many were killed this way. Early COVID data from China had suggested that ventilators would need to be used widely in the treatment of COVID patients, and this led to a major rush by politicians and hospitals to procure tens of thousands of ventilators. 

However, it soon became clear that ventilators were being vastly overused. Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell acted as an early whistleblower, sounding the alarm in a widely-shared video. In interviews with major media outlets, several practitioners later disclosed that patients had often been put on ventilators not for their own benefit, but in order to protect hospital staff and stop the virus from spreading.

A study in JAMA later revealed a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 put on mechanical ventilators. Patients over age 65 were more than 26 times as likely to survive if they were NOT placed on mechanical ventilators.

That sound you hear is merely the embarrassed shuffling of feet. I’ve found no evidence that anybody in the public or private sectors has been fired or even admonished for this mistake. Admittedly, the medical community did at least turn around on this issue fairly early, a stark contrast to other hospital C-19 responses.

The ritual progresses in predictable stages: first, the patient is isolated from family, who are unable to advocate for their loved one or monitor what’s happening. Next, the patient is diagnosed with Covid-19 or Covid pneumonia, even if they came to the hospital because of a broken arm. Then, they’re bullied into getting remdesivir, a highly toxic drug which killed 53 percent of Ebola patients who had the misfortune to take it. Next, according to the California lawsuit, “They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe. Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.”
…
As the patients writhe in agony, psychiatrists are brought in to diagnose them with agitation and sedate them. Now, shot up with remdesivir, sedated with drugs that make it tough to breathe against the BiPap ventilator, and strapped down in restraints, the victims are denied food and sometimes even water. Should they try to summon help, they may find the hospital played a vicious trick on them, placing their phone and call button for the nurse out of reach.

I guess lawsuits will work even if nothing else does. Monetary payouts focus minds and is entirely appropriate in this case because it was money (read the article to see the line-item payments) and regulations driving the above:

According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), the answer is quite simple: money. The federal government incentivized this protocol with massive payouts to the hospitals. AAPS writes, “Our formerly trusted medical community of hospitals and hospital-employed medical staff have effectively become “bounty hunters” for your life.”
…
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) granted waivers to hospitals allowing them to remove critical patient rights. Your ability to give informed consent, receive visitors, and be free from solitary confinement – gone! Vanished, obliterated with a single magical government “waiver.”

After that article went viral, doctors themselves responded, as recorded in this article that is also a monument to the massive amount of anger generated against the hospitals and their “protocols” in the wake of this (anger confined to Social Media like the newly freed X-Twitter):

“It is exactly as the article describes. I lived it with my patients. It was organized homicide. Hospitals were being paid per death, not per life saved. The incentives were backwards and upside down. Once someone was admitted, the family lost contact and the patients were basically tortured to death and given no rights.”

Canada was the same despite being a near 100% State hospital system, and it seems their hospitals went even further, even after the pandemic had subsided: No organ for you, unvaxxed scum.

And then there were the Covid patients forced into nursing homes by the likes of panicked politicians such as New York’s Andrew Quomo, immediately killing thousands of frail victims and terrifying the public with the skyrocketing death count.

One aspect of the aftermath is that the suffering and damage have continued far beyond the official end of the C-19 pandemic:

By early 2023 the statistics could no longer be denied:

Or this one on the sudden rise in disabilities from 2021 on:

What’s interesting is that the trend was heading downward in 2020. It wasn’t until 2021 that the disability numbers took a significant turn for the worse — increasing by 10%. “That was a three standard deviation event, which in geekspeak, happens point 0.3% of the time — rapid increase.”

Now I don’t think this is all due to the vaccines, as Doud does. How much of these stats are due to the effects of people not getting good medical care through 2020-2022 due to lockdowns, isolation and sheer fear, is something that’s going to be difficult to disentangle.

Having said that, most public health authorities now admit that, at a minimum, the health risks to young people, especially young men, from myocarditis and pericarditis, slim as they might be, vastly outweighed the costs of catching Covid-19. Accordingly in 2022 most nations began to (quietly) back off vaccinating youngsters for C-19.

As far as whole population excess deaths are concerned, that’s also an ongoing problem:

That article does not attempt an analysis of reasons, noting that before Covid-19 American deaths clocked along at about 50,000 deaths per week in the summer, rising to 58,000 per week in January during a bad flu season – until Covid-19:

If you compare how many people died in America during the COVID era to how many people would normally have died based on six years of prior year CDC data on deaths from all causes, the excess deaths are 25 percent over normal. Twenty five percent. With the sole exception of the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago, there has never been a die-off in the United States on this scale.

Putting that percentage into numbers yields sobering totals. During the 12-month period from April 2020 through March 2021, a total of 3,527,041 Americans died. During the next 12 months, from April 2021 through March 2022, a total of 3,455,176 Americans died. On average, adjusting for population growth, during those same 12-month periods over the previous six years, only 2,789,994 Americans died.

Numbers like that are the reason that people claim it would have been even worse had it not been for lockdowns and such, but the article is determined not to be so simple-minded:

We may never know how many of these excess deaths were from COVID, from deferred treatment for other ailments, from elevated numbers of people committing suicide, or from adverse reactions to the vaccines.
…
But what is indisputable is this: In just over two years, over 1.5 million people are dead in America who in normal times would have been alive today. Even now, based on the most recent data available, deaths from all causes in America are still not quite 15 percent above normal. 

A mass die-off is still happening in America and reportedly around the world as well, and we have no idea what’s coming next.

That’s where control cases become important – like Sweden:

But even the research, supposedly far removed from politics, policy and daily fear and panic, has suffered, Unfollow the Science:

More than 300 COVID-19-related articles have been retracted — long after they’d done their damage — due to a lack of scientific truthfulness and ethical guidelines, according to Retraction Watch, a website that monitors retractions of science-related articles. A total of 330 COVID-related papers have been retracted thus far. According to Gunnveig Grødeland, a senior researcher at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Oslo, many researchers took ethical shortcuts when writing their essays.

Does the following report therefore come as any surprise?:

Since COVID-19 began 3 years ago, trust in medical authorities has declined. According to Pew Research, “29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020.”

The suicide of expertise. Which makes Dr Birx’s response to proposed CDC reforms a sick joke:

Sure, she’s correct about this – but she is one of the key players who contributed to the steady loss of public trust. You can’t claim to be a proponent of transparency months after you admitted you were deliberately not transparent about your motivations and actions during your time in public office.  I’d rather listen to one of her opponents, who led the charge against the likes of Fauci and Birx with the Great Barrington Declaration, and paid for it with public smearing:

The Culture

But how is it that all these institutions failed so badly? It seems systemic? And behind it all are ordinary people:

For me, the most lasting harm from lockdowns is knowing what people are capable of. As a pregnant woman, I was shooed off park benches by police when I sat down to catch my breath. A police car parked outside our church at Easter to make sure no one went inside to worship the Lord
…
arresting people for planning protests; police rummaging through shopping carts to make sure buyers didn’t have any “non-essential” items; neighbors calling the cops on a church service; pastors thrown in jail for gathering with their congregations. My sense of America as a free country was based on beliefs about what people would put up with that turned out to be erroneous. And the people who did all these things still have their jobs.

Writing in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr writes of how this panic affected freedom of choice, not just in the usual sense of having choices restricted or eliminated, but even in the basic idea that one should have freedom of choice – and once again not because of medical science but politics:

In Pennsylvania, the state was putting out death stats by counties, and when a newspaper called a couple of the local coroners, they were told no one in their jurisdictions had in fact died of the Red Chinese flu. The Democrats, namely Dr. Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, had just made up the numbers out of whole cloth.

But the lies and hysteria served the purposes of The Party. The inflated numbers – the “grim milestones” – hurt Donald Trump. As Jane Fonda said at the time, COVID was God’s gift to the left.
…
Nothing to see here folks, move along. Like the Russian collusion hoax, COVID served its purpose. As Harry Reid once said of another Republican, “He didn’t win, did he?”

And the politics was personal, just as the New Left of the 1960’s had always demanded, as this writer observed about one Facebook forum, consisting of female lawyers with kids, the “Law Mamas”:

Krista describes herself as a “liberal Democrat”, but she had a dark secret. One of her children went into anaphylactic shock some years ago after being vaccinated (not for Covid). That didn’t turn her into an anti-vaxxer but did lead her to weigh benefits versus risks. When the topic of Covid vaccines for very young children arose on Law Mamas, she offered her opinion:

I’m obviously in the minority here. But I’m not even remotely interested in my 2/4/5 year olds getting a covid vaccine. The relative/absolute risk is so low for this group I couldn’t justify it. I’m pretty crunchy generally, but especially with stuff like this. Totally respect everyone’s choice and Glad it’s our choice to make. It’s all so hard.

Note the defensive tone. Perhaps she had already gained some insight into what a Law Mama is really like. The backlash came quickly. One of the group’s moderators replied:

“This was unnecessary and triggering. You know you are in the vast minority in this group and it’s not a hard decision for most of us. … This is not the group to provide your opinion on this much more deny the statistics.”

What “statistics” was Krista denying? According to 2020 World Health Organization data for the world as a whole, children under five years old accounted for about two million Covid-19 cases and fewer than 2,000 Covid deaths.

So as much as it was Fauci and Birx and Siouxsie and Baker and Ashley and Ardern, it was also about all of us and the society we’ve created: our culture and what it has become. Over at the Samizdata blog, one possible reason for all this insanity was suggested, provided courtesy of a ten year old post by one of their contributors, Ten years ago, Brian Mickelthwait predicted the response to Covid-19:

An unfree society may be great at imposing immediate unanimity, but what if what it immediately imposes unanimously is panic and indecision? (Think Stalin when Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941.) And what if it then imposes a wrong decision about what needs to be done? A collectivity that is hastily assembled by freer and more independent persons is just as likely to act in a timely manner, and is far more likely to have a proper argument about what must be done, and hence to arrive at a better decision about that.

Besides which, what is often needed in a crisis is not so much collective action, but rather individual action for the benefit of the collective. That is a very different thing, and clearly a society which cultivates individuality will prepare individuals far better for such heroism than will societies where everyone is in the habit only of doing as they are told.

There could scarcely be a better description of the response of almost the entire “free” Western world as a whole to Covid-19: “Masks are useless! Cancel that, masks are compulsory! Herd immunity! Cancel that, vaccines are compulsory! Lockdown! Cancel that, ‘Eat Out to Help Out’, er, cancel that, back to lockdown!”

I’m sorry to say that we’re not going to learn a damned thing from this episode, aside from minor technical lessons re medical treatment – and even that’s a big maybe. Shakespeare nailed it:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings