Month: February 2022

We all need to stand down and chill out about Covid.

Those unvaccinated people who are old or have comorbidities – many, many more are going to die unnecessarily over the next several months. This cannot be prevented without vaccinating people against their will.

In the end, this pandemic will have claimed the lives of a million Americans. More than half of these people could have avoided dying if they had availed themselves of the free vaccine, but they refused the vaccine and that was their fatal choice.

For the rest of us – those of us who have survived – we need to figure out why our Covid response as a country was such a failure. And it clearly has been a failure – no other country will have lost one out of every 330 of its citizens to Covid-19.

We need an independent commission of experienced medical scientists, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, immunologists, accountants, etc., to conduct a thorough review of our Covid-19 response. This cannot be left up to our partisan politicians.

Beyond our excessive death rate, we will have spent and wasted an incredible amount of money, caused developmental damage to our children, exacerbated the economic inequity in our society, irreparably harmed many of our small businesses, and unnecessarily created an even more polarized country.

There are many questions that we need answers to:

• How did the Federal government lose the trust and respect of so many Americans when it came to disseminating information about the virus and making recommendations regarding our response to it?
• To what extent did scientists purposely mislead the public about the probable source of the Covid-19 virus, and why?
• What is the purpose of the gain-of-function research being conducted in the two laboratories located in the United States? Were these laboratories involved in the development of vaccines? Are their safety procedures sufficient to prevent accidental virus transmission?
• How did we allow our Covid-19 response to become such a politically polarizing issue instead of remaining a straightforward public health emergency?
• Why did so many Americans believe that it was more patriotic to exercise their individual “right” to refuse to be vaccinated instead of simply getting vaccinated and supporting our country’s collective effort to control and eradicate the Covid-19 virus?
• Did shutting down the country accomplish anything statistically significant with respect to reducing the number of hospitalizations and deaths?
• Do N95 masks prevent transmission of the virus, or are N95 masks ineffective?
• Why is natural immunity not considered to be the equivalent of vaccination if the same level of antibodies is being produced?
• Why were stimulus checks sent to families who remained employed and did not suffer economic loss due to Covid-19 instead of being selectively sent only to families that were?
• How much of the money intended to support small businesses and their employees actually went to small businesses and their employees? Where did the rest of the money go?
• Why were larger big-box stores allowed to remain open while smaller local stores were made to close?
• Why have renters and homeowners with mortgages been able to avoid paying their financial obligations when they have had the financial means to do so?
• How much of the money that was distributed to improve the ventilation systems in our schools was actually spent to improve ventilation systems? Where did the rest of the money go?
• Are Pfizer and Moderna realizing extraordinary profits from the sale of their vaccines? If so, why is this being allowed when the Federal government paid for the R & D to develop the vaccines and when the vaccines are being provided for free?
• Does this country have sufficient domestic sources of personal protective equipment to address our needs for future pandemics? If not, are there measures being taken to address this?
• Does this country have sufficient domestic sources of the basic raw materials, vials, syringes, etc. required to produce and deliver the vaccines needed for future pandemics? If not, are there measures being taken to address this?
• Why did nurses refuse to get vaccinated despite their medical training and understanding of the importance of vaccines in preventing the spread of disease?
• Why did police officers, fire fighters, and EMT personnel refuse to get vaccinated when being vaccinated is an important means of protecting the public from Covid-19 infection?
• Why did public school teachers avoid in-person learning and insist on remote learning when there has been increasingly conclusive evidence that remote learning is ineffective and damaging to the social development of children?
• Is there a significant statistical difference in Covid-19 infections between private school students and teachers who practiced in-person learning when compared to public school students and teachers who practiced remote learning?
• What were the most effective and what were the least effective aspects of the differing responses taken by individual states to the Covid-19 pandemic?

These are important questions to answer, but whether this type of serious evaluation will occur is highly questionable. The urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic has greatly lessened as fewer and fewer people feel threatened by the Covid-19 virus. Being better prepared for future pandemics will become less and less of a priority as time goes on.

Soon the pandemic will start becoming a distant memory to many. Only the families of the dead and those with long-term Covid-related disabilities will remember it. The rest of us will simply go back to our pre-Covid lives.

What should be concerning to all of us is the extent to which so many of us refused to acknowledge our social responsibility to care about other people, which was to become vaccinated and in doing so minimize the pathways for the Covid-19 virus to spread. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved if everyone had been vaccinated in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, learning from our mistakes, let alone acknowledging them, is not something that most people do very well. It is much easier, more entertaining, and more profitable to blame others, to be self-righteous, and to proudly display our own ignorance and hypocrisy for all to see.  

We need to get past this Covid craziness and take a long, sober look at who we are. There is little to be proud of.

If the world wants to see what living in a totalitarian society will be like, it has only to observe the Olympic Games currently being held in China.

So far, this seems like the most joyless Olympics ever. The facilities themselves look to be world-class, but venues with man-made snow surrounded by barren snowless landscapes are a depressing metaphor for the soullessness of totalitarianism and its thin veneer of humanity.

Reports of journalists being forcefully moved by Chinese security forces shows how oppressive a totalitarian society can be.

Athletes resorting to the use of burner phones to avoid the monitoring of their conversations by Chinese security is a perfect illustration of how a totalitarian society threatens personal freedom.

Stories of the poor living conditions provided to athletes who fail the Chinese Covid testing protocols and who are isolated in Covid internment camps provide evidence of the impersonal and uncaring nature of totalitarian regimes towards those who fall out of favor.

The absence of any spectators other than a select group of Chinese creates an eerie atmosphere that in a way underlines the inhospitable nature of contemporary China towards anyone who is not Chinese.

The fact that the U.S. Speaker of the House feels compelled to tell American athletes to keep their mouths shut to avoid retribution by the Chinese government makes it clear just how much China has successfully intimidated the rest of the world.

The pictures of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping cozying up together reinforces the point that these Olympic Games are less about sports than they are about global politics. Their unified focus on retaining totalitarian power has stolen the humanity and history of their rich cultures from their own people as well as from the rest of the world.

This is likely to prove to be a soulless, heartless Olympics that does nothing to relieve the geopolitical tensions created by China and Russia but instead serves to reinforce them.

The fact that this is the second Olympics hosted by China in less than 15 years confirms the suspicion that the International Olympic Committee has somehow fallen under the sphere of Chinese influence in the same way as has the World Health Organization.

I feel sorry for the athletes who have diligently trained through the limitations imposed by Covid to compete in the Olympic Games. They deserve more recognition, attention, and appreciation than they are likely to receive.

Part of this has to do with the fact that this is China’s Olympics. The abuse, the lies, the theft, the weaponization of a virus – all the self-serving actions of the Chinese government over the past decades have cast a pall over the Olympics that even the temporary closure of polluting Chinese factories cannot eliminate.

Part of this has to do with the depressing willingness of American businesses and their associates to ignore Chinese immorality and sell out American interests to realize profits from the Chinese market.  

Part of this has to do with the suspicion that the Democratic party leadership is somehow indebted to China and will not speak up on behalf of democratic freedom, let alone take action to counter the insidious nature of totalitarianism.

No one believes anymore in the Olympic ideal of bringing about global unity through competition, except perhaps the athletes themselves.

China’s Olympics may end up revealing the true nature of China to the world despite all the efforts being made by the Chinese Communist Party to glorify its system and obscure its failures. This could prove to be more important than the number of gold medals won if we are not too afraid to face the truth.