(Note: this moron will be traveling this week so there won’t be any new content before next weekend.)
It was three years ago this weekend that we embarked upon what will eventually be looked back upon as one of the most catastrophic social experiments in modern history. For the better part of two years, the mostly free people of the western world ceded virtually all of their freedoms—speech, assembly, movement—to minimize the impact of a disease that was only a deadly threat to the very old, the very fat, and the very sick.
It doesn’t require a medical education or any understanding of virology to understand statistics like those presented in the chart below. The comparison to the 1918 flu is interesting but irrelevant: just make a note of the age distribution.
Statistically speaking, virtually nobody under the age of 55 was dying from the virus. In the 55-74 age group, its mortality rate was lower than that of most seasonal flus. For those aged 75-85 the mortality rates were comparable to those of a severe seasonal flu, like the one that caused the deaths of 2500 Danes between October 2017 and April 2018.
It's worth noting that even at the height of the pandemic in Denmark, the virus never reached the lethality of that 2017-2018 flu. And yet that flu season didn't get any media attention and most Danes remain unaware that it was anything out of the ordinary—it was just another winter.
The mortality rate for those aged 85 and older was very high. According to the CDC, during the 2019-2020 flu season in America, the estimated overall flu-associated mortality rate for Americans aged 85 and older was was about 528 per 100,000 population. For the same age group in Denmark, the mortality rate during the 2017-2018 flu season was 3,935 per 100,000. So take 500-4000 per 100,000 as the “normal” range of flu mortality among the very old and give that chart another long, hard look.
Instead of aiming our resources at the protection of the citizens most at risk, who were very easy to identify, we shut our whole world down. It was a civilizational suicide attempt.
Suicide attempts are generally interpreted as a cry for help.
The west’s pandemic response was not the response of a confident, robust, vigorous civilization eager to keep its engines firing on every cylinder: it was rooted in fear, insecurity, doubt, and above all hopelessness. It was an act of collective despair.
At the government level, this wasn’t a right-left thing. After all, Donald Trump’s America didn’t react much differently than Mette Frederiksen’s Denmark, Boris Johnson’s UK, or Shinzo Abe’s Japan.
Alone in the developed western world, Sweden carried on as usual and let the pandemic sweep through its population. Their decision to do so does not appear to have saved them any lives, but neither does it appear to have cost them any. Which suggests that the draconian measures implemented everywhere else were superfluous.
Sweden’s response should give us all hope: there were at least pockets of western civilization where despair was not triumphant. (Their sudden interest in joining NATO after years of neutrality also suggests an awakened national sense of vigor.)
It’s going to be a long time before everyone is willing to face up to the painful truth that most of our efforts to contain or mitigate the virus were wasted. We could do it right now, of course, but too many people are still too heavily invested in defending their actions and our civilization is so weak that their defenses are still too difficult to overcome: they are still running the institutions that inflicted this upon us.
Only many years from now, when the men and women most responsible for those appalling decisions are finally entirely out of power—and probably dead and buried—will we be able to examine the facts openly and honestly.
Look at this way: it took almost three years just to get our civilizational gatekeepers to acknowledge that it was reasonable to hypothesize—not assert as truth, but merely hypothesize—that the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan might have escaped from the biological laboratory in Wuhan where experiments were being performed on novel coronaviruses.
Three years, and resistance to the legitimacy of that mere hypothesis is still strong.
How long until they’re willing to acknowledge the proven facts that masking was largely useless, that the vaccines underperformed expectations (and may have had significant side effects), and that an entire generation of children has been seriously harmed—we hope not irreparably—not by the pandemic, but by our reactions to it?
How long until they’re willing to acknowledge that credible people with appropriate credentials (as well as uncredentialed people like this moron) were warning about all of these things in the very first weeks of the pandemic, only to be publicly ostracized for presuming to contradict the “experts?”
We’ll see.
But on this anniversary of the first western lockdowns, it seems as good a time as any to reflect on the larger implications of how the west reacted to the pandemic.
We can ignore the first few weeks of the pandemic, in which everyone was scrambling to understand it. Maybe even a month or two. No one knew what we were up against and most governments were just scrambling to avoid the harrowing scenes like those we’d all seen in Wuhan, where people were literally dropping dead in the streets. (A phenomenon we never saw anywhere else at any time during the pandemic.)
Cast your eye once more over the chart above from June of 2020. It reflects trends that had been accumulating for three months. Trends that every health care worker had been seeing with their own eyes every single day. Trends that the people who look at these kinds of numbers daily—hospital administrators, public health professionals, actuaries, data geeks—couldn’t have avoided noticing. Trends that public officials responsible for public health had to know.
And yet we continued to shut down our schools, our businesses, our cultural institutions. We prohibited travel, and shopping, and public gatherings including church worship. We applauded censorship and nodded approvingly as police harassed people for walking their dogs, or jogging in parks, or swimming alone at a public beach.
Even in relatively free countries like Denmark, where outdoor activity was encouraged, signs went up all over instructing people how and where and in what directions movement was permissible; private businesses plastered their floors with markers and arrows; masks were required anywhere people congregated.
All for a disease that we knew by then posed an elevated threat only to people aged 75 and older.
Why?
The political left offers no answers because the political left continues to reject the premise that anyone did anything wrong.
A popular explanation on the political right is that it was all just a big leftist power grab, an experiment to see what western populations would be willing to submit to in the name of a global “emergency”—a laying down of the groundwork for future “climate emergencies” to come.
Even if that were true, however, it only addresses the motives of our governing class and is therefore irrelevant to the larger question: why did we put up with it?
Why did so many western people surrender so many freedoms so willingly? Whatever your answer (fear, powerlessness, gullibility, stupidity, even misplaced altruism), the fact remains that the episode puts the lie to any ideas we might have had about the hardy resilience of a free people.
A civilization built up from the foundational notion of individual sovereignty obviously requires citizens who understand their own individual sovereignty, value it, and defend it. A citizenry that cries out for government solutions to every challenge that comes along is inviting totalitarianism—and usually gets it.
Our governments may or may have not learned anything from their reaction to the pandemic. At the moment, signs point to not.
Fortunately that’s a matter of total indifference if we the people have learned the appropriate lessons.
But have we?