What Was COVID?

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared.

This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came up completely empty. "No matches for your search," no matter how I tried to word things. Apparently the algorithm says this never happened.

Anyhow, Berenson's latest post is working toward a summing up, and while I think this is premature, he makes some worthwhile points:

I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 - a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.

We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)

And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.

But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.

No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.

But was any of this deliberate? Was it all cooked up, say, by Big Pharma to prop up their bottom lines? I don't think so. I think the whole episode was accidental, and the various government responses were adventitious, made up as they went along, and the remedies adopted were almost exclusively bad. If the unspoken motto was Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste, the responses of those charged with not wasting the crisis depended on what each group saw as its particular interest.

I agree with Berenson that one part of the threat was "scientific", but only insofar as a particular interest group bases its claims to authority on "science". As Dr Fauci put it, "Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on Science". But "science" as he and his supporters defined it was secularist materialism, and the accidental crisis allowed a particular influential group of public materialists to pursue a specifically anti-religious agenda, insisting that "science" required closing houses of worship for the indefinite duration, or failing that specifically, strict liturgical limitations on singing, congregation size, serving food, shaking hands, and so forth.

I don't think the goal was ever fully articulated or even fully thought through, because the whole crisis, while manufactured from the start (remember the scary expanding red circles on all the news shows from February 2020 onward?) never had the bvenefit of a central plan or overall objective. Big Pharma got on board only several months in when somebody thought maybe there could be vaccines, and then someone else thought the government should maybe be the one to buy them and make everyone get a shot.

Although the US legal system proved fairly robust in ending the most extreme restrictions on churches, they still aren't completely back. People have been slow to return, and of those returning, some number continue to feel the need to wear masks, which were never effective. There's much less shaking hands at the exchange of peace, and the Los Angeles archdiocese still hasn't returned to distributing wine with the sacrament, even though the alcohol content never made it unsafe.

Although Alex Berenson is a COVID skeptic, he also seems to be a secularist at heart, so he sees the aggrandizement of the public health establishment in the name of "science" as the worst effect of the crisis. But because there was no single agenda behind it -- it was seized on independently by separate opportunistic interests -- some effects will last longer than others. The footprints and calibrations on the floors and sidewalks are already mostly gone, but companies and governments are still havintg a hard time getting people back to the office.