Well, it’s not like
we didn’t have big plans.
Our
buddy Jane was going to spend Christmas Eve with us, sleep over, then awaken on
Christmas morning and open all her fake-poop and fart-joke presents. Then there was to be a big beefy dinner with
my favorite brother-in-law, and then another feast, somewhere, with Sandy’s
mother. Then our son Tex, his wife
Carrie, and two of our friends were flying in a couple days later for a belated
Christmas and a New Year’s celebration.
The refrigerator and freezer were full of ribs and roasts and fruits and
chowder and smoked fishes. I had even
started cleaning the bathrooms and trimming the jibsheet and swabbing the
fo’c’sle.
And
then, on the morning of the 23rd, as I was heading out the door for
my last day of work in 2021, Sandy shoved a swab up her nose and came up
positive for the ‘rona.
And
that, as they say, was that.
She had been
complaining of a sore throat for a couple days, and had even talked the family doc
into a script of penicillin for strep throat, but that night she had awakened
at 3AM in a pool of night-sweat, and this oddball symptom, she informed me, was
a particular marker for the new omicron version of the ‘rona. Hence the need for a test, and hence the
result.
The
first communique, of course, was to the family doc again, to report the test
result and ask for something to treat her with.
Sandy sent this:
Hi, I talked to Dr. Lewis yesterday and together we thought I
had strep or the flu. However, last night I had some Covid symptoms and took a
test this morning which came back positive. Is there anything I can take like
ivermectic or regeneron? I'm currently taking penicillin. I am vaxed.
Not surprisingly, this was his response:
No,
The omicron strain is the
dominant strain in the US now and is not sensitive to monoclonal antibodies
like regeneron. Ivermectin is for intestinal worms and has never had any effect
on COVID. Rest, fluids and tylenol or
ibuprofen for the fever or pain is all you can do. If you have been triple
vaccinated you are more likely to be struck by lightening than to have a severe
course requiring hospitalization.
Take care,
DL
This, of course, is what our medical
profession has been doing for the past twenty months---refusing to treat
patients who get COVID, or even see them.
Stay home, don’t infect anybody else, and put this oxygen thingie on
your finger so that when you’re about to stop breathing we can put you in a
hospital on a ventilator and you can die there.
BECAUSE THERE IS NO TREATMENT FOR COVID!!!!
But of course
there are treatments for COVID and there always have been, and even if there
were no obvious treatments at first, that is not an excuse for doctors refusing
to search for them and refusing to see their patients.
What do
clinicians do for a living, anyway? A
patient presents himself with an illness or injury, and the clinician (e.g.,
your family doctor), picks the situation apart, looks at the pieces and the
evidence, and tries to reason his way through it. Maybe this drug will do X. Maybe that other drug will help with Y. Will rest help? Will exercise? Vitamins?
And when they share their results, knowledge advances, and a few sick
people start to get better. This is what
doctors have done since doctors first existed.
Until now.
Of the million or
so doctors in the United States, there may be two or three hundred who tried to
treat patients with COVID early, so they would not become hospitalized or dead. The rest were too afraid, or perhaps they
were too accustomed to following “guidelines” from the government or from
insurance companies. Fauci and his ilk
ran point on this initiative, threatening doctors who dared to prescribe
hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin (the two most prescribed drugs in the world
for COVID), discouraging the use of monoclonal antibodies and making them
impossible to get, and pointing everyone toward vaccines and more vaccines and vaccines only.
The refusal to treat early COVID extends to virtually all the
hospitals and medical schools in the country. Mayo Clinic?
Nothing. Harvard? Nothing.
Johns Hopkins? Nothing. You will look in vain for treatment protocols
from these institutions for patients in the early stages of the ‘rona. None of these institutions developed such
protocols because none of them ever treated a ‘rona patient. Instead, people were told to stay home until
they were near death, then we’ll put you on a ventilator. And, oh yeah…we’re gonna slap this Do Not Resuscitate
order in your chart. OKAY???
My cousin and his
wife got the same treatment---nothing---from their family doctor when they came
down with COVID (and were quite sick), eight months ago. Stay home, measure your oxygen levels, and
hope for the best. There’s nothing anybody
can do.
The few doctors
brave enough, or conscientious enough, to buck the system found ways of
treating patients and making them better. This was pre-vaccine and
pre-monoclonal-antibodies, but the results being published by responsible
clinicians were simply ignored by the public health establishment.
Clinical outcomes after early ambulatory multidrug therapy
for high-risk SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection was published in late December of 2020 and can be found at https://imrpress.com/journal/RCM/21/4/10.31083/j.rcm.2020.04.260/htm
It is not the only study of its kind but I cite it because 1) it
was among the first reports on what was possible, 2) it reported a huge
reduction in hospitalizations and death, and 3) it coined the phrase
“therapeutic nihilism” to describe what was happening in hospitals, medical
schools and clinics across America:
“The rates of death in
our study indicate that early multidrug therapy is associated with >>90%
reduction in mortality among the high risk compared to community rates of death
associated with therapeutic nihilism in ambulatory patients who are
subsequently hospitalized.”
All of
this was because Fauci and Trump and their helpers decided we were going to put
all our eggs in the basket of mass vaccination, and that any form of treatment
had to be mocked and disparaged by the doctors who might otherwise try to help
people. Fear was the tool they chose to
make people line up for the shots. This
was a conscious policy decision. Drugs
like hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin had to be treated like pure madness and
quackery. Doctors who prescribed them
could lose their licenses.
A final note on
this topic. I get the impression, and
it’s only an impression, that there are a lot of nurses and medical tech
workers who know what is going on in the practice of medicine at the moment,
and they don’t like it. Doctors
themselves, however, present an almost united front of cowardice and
incompetence.
*
Sandy was truly
sick. Her throat was on fire, she had an
ugly cough at all hours of the day and night, and she was carrying a coffee cup
around the premises and hocking disgusting loogies into it. This is not something I am accustomed to
seeing. I can’t say I was ever truly
worried about her survival, but I watched her for any signs of breathing
difficulty or fever. And at night, even
though she would probably have been more comfortable in a bed by herself, we
slept together just so I would be there in case of an emergency.
Another odd
symptom became apparent as time went on.
This was the COVID brain fog you may have read about. While Sandy and I are not complete geezers,
we both have moments when we misplace the car keys or forget why we went into a
room. But this was different. She simply could not hold a thought in her
head for any length of time, and her short-term memory just stopped operating
at times. At one point, there was a
small bag of Christmas presents sitting on the bed and we discussed what they
were, who they were for, how we might get them delivered, and so on. Then, about an hour later, she noticed the
bag again and asked me what they were.
There were several other incidents like this over the course of 48
hours.
But the worst of
it was finished by Christmas, just two days after she had tested positive. That was when it became possible for her to
get some food down her throat. She was
still sick, still dropping off for long naps, still coughing, but it was
obvious she was getting better. The
following day, we went out and took a walk around the block.
Today, December
30, exactly one week after her positive test, she tested negative.
*
Being stuck in
the house for a while is not necessarily unpleasant. In fact, the German word “sturmfrei” (meaning
“storm-free”) describes the carefree state of being home with no roommate or no
parents around, perhaps lying on the couch in your underwear, watching a movie,
with a drink in your hand. Isolation
with a dreaded disease, however, is something else. When none of your friends want you around and
will have nothing to do with you, you start to think you are diseased subhuman
scum and a bit of depression sets in. The
diseased-subhuman-scum treatment was new to Sandy, and though it will be
temporary for her, she didn’t like it.
At this
point, I’m used to it. Once it became
apparent from my blog and other sources that I had no plans to get vaccinated,
almost all my family and friends began to shun me. There was never any discussion of this, it
simply happened. I am not included in
any of their plans, not even family events like birthdays or holiday
gatherings. Friends who used to go out
to dinner with us now do not accept invitations. There is no excuse offered, or a “rain check”
suggested---the invitation is merely declined without explanation. After one or two such incidents, you get the
message. I don’t offer invitations
anymore, except to those few who are still willing to interact with me.
I will
accept certain limitations on the way I will interact with people who will
still see me. Most of these make no
sense whatsoever, but if it makes them comfortable…. For example, there are some who will go to a
bar or restaurant with me, or have a conversation with me on the street, but
will not come into my house. Fine. I can live with that.
I have
my limits, however. I will not stand
outside in 30 degree weather and have a conversation of more than a sentence or
two, and I will NOT wear a mask to accommodate an acquaintance’s fears or their
need to signal their obedience to the New Normal. I won’t even sit there with them if only THEY
are wearing a mask. For one thing, it
makes me distinctly uncomfortable to interact with people who believe I am
somehow a danger to them, and for another, I get a sense of participating in
something dirty. Consenting to the mask
ritual feels like being a “good German” even though I am not personally
smashing the windows of Jewish businesses.
The
rules that people keep in their heads cannot be fit into any rational pattern,
and since they won’t usually discuss them, I am left to guess what they
are. Last summer, I played golf with a
buddy several times, sat in the same golf-cart, talked maskless, etc. I later visited him in the hospital and even
wore a mask since it was a hospital rule, but when he went home for an extended
rehabilitation, it was made clear to me I was not welcome. I don’t know if this was his rule or his
girlfriend’s edict since nobody ever told me, but the new protocol is
unmistakable. I haven’t seen him for six
weeks and I don’t know when I ever will.
Where
masks are concerned, I tried for many months to adopt an attitude of “you do
your thing and I’ll do mine,” but the time has run out on that one. The ‘rona has been here almost two years and
there has never been a time when a fair, truth-seeking, rational investigator
could examine the data and conclude that mask-wearing had any effect on the
transmission of respiratory viruses. I
say that because I was that
investigator. Beginning on April 4,
2020, I read everything there was to read about the usefulness of masks, starting
with the previous twenty-five years of peer-reviewed studies on the topic. You cannot spend the dozens of hours I spent
doing this and come away with the belief that masks do any damn good at all.
Yet the
need to strap a diaper to your face is now a matter of unshakeable faith for
the faithful. Not only do they believe
it, they have literally no doubt about the importance of masking, so that even
a suggestion of doubt can send them into a rage. Beyond that, on-line discussion of the
pointlessness of masking is regularly suppressed and censored. The mask issue is extremely telling. The only thing the believers have done so far
is swallow what they are told on TV---there is literally no other basis for
their belief---and until they stop doing that, I don’t see how I can take them
seriously about anything related to
COVID.
So I push
back. What can I do other than push
back? If my attitude is “let’s all do
our own thing,” and yours is “do what we tell you or you will be crushed,” I’m
going to wind up in the prison camp face down in the mud. Totalitarians, like bullies, cannot be
appeased. And with mask mandates in
effect in towns and cities and states and nations all over the world, I have
only two options: sign up with the New Normals or fight them. It does not appear they will ever leave me
alone to make my own decisions and live my own life. I must be demonized. I must be segregated. I must be barred from polite society until I
embrace their ideology and their superstitions.
*
Over
the past week, one of the first questions we are asked on the phone is whether
I am also sick. When we tell them I’m in
perfect health, the typical reaction is laughter, but a few people conveyed the
impression they were annoyed that Sandy (who is vaxxed) got sick but I
(unvaxxed) did not. Nobody has actually
come out and said, “Why didn’t YOU get sick, ya bastard?” but that seemed to be
the sentence that got caught in their throats.
A couple people asked me if I had been tested, on the theory that I might
have COVID but be asymptomatic. (Almost
everybody I know thinks this happens regularly.
It’s an essential part of the system of beliefs and obedience rituals. Without asymptomatic COVID, there would be no
possible justification for masks, lockdowns, etc.)
Since
the Diamond Princess cruise ship incident in Yokohama in February 2020 (and
other similar events), we have known that about 85% of humanity are immune to
COVID, and based on my more-or-less constant interaction with people of all
ages, sexes, races, national origins, religions, ethnic groups, vaccination
status, and patterns of bodily hygiene, it has been obvious that I am one of
those 85%. I have told everyone I am
immune because I have been exposed to the virus hundreds of times and never
gotten sick. It’s the only rational
conclusion from the available evidence. I’ve
been saying it for almost two years now, though no one believes me. It’s why my friends and family treat me like
diseased subhuman scum even though I am actually the safest person they could
hang out with.
But
though I have been immune, I am now starting to wonder whether I still am, or
will continue to be. The initial 85%
number was confirmed in late 2020 by the CDC’s survey on what it called
“secondary household infections.” This
was a count of the people who lived in a house where somebody living there
(your wife, your kid, grandma, somebody), caught the ‘rona, and it turned out
that only about 15% of the other people in the house would get the damn thing.
Now,
however, with the omicron version spreading, you have to wonder whether 85% of
us are still immune. This is what
happens with viruses, of course. They
become less dangerous but easier to catch.
It’s a very good thing when this happens even if the Faucis and the
Anderson Coopers and the Snoop Dogs are still telling everybody to freak
out. It’s a very good thing when people
get a sniffle but don’t go on a ventilator or die.
On
December 30, NYC reported 44,000 new ‘rona cases. This is an amazing number, and set some kind
of record for new cases in a place that has a lot of people in it. Since the vast majority of these people will
get no more than a cough, and will now be immune from COVID, this appears to be
great news.
In
addition to the decline in bad or lethal outcomes, the omicron surge in New
York is wonderful for another, even more important, reason. Three quarters of NYC is vaccinated, a lot of
them have one or even two booster shots, they wear masks everywhere, they have
dinner in Plexiglas bubbles, and what has happened? The hundreds of thousands of new cases over
the past week are overwhelmingly those who got all the shots and followed all
the rules, but they are STILL getting the virus. The justification for vaccine mandates, which
was never able to withstand much scrutiny to begin with, is evaporating before
our eyes. What is the point of all the
lockdowns and masks and segregation and vaccines if all the people who are
locked down and masked and segregated and vaxxed are spreading the virus to
each other at record-breaking speed?
So I am
encouraged. The precautions and safety
protocols have never appeared more absurd and pointless than they do now, and I
am hopeful that some percentage of the true believers will realize that. The counter-argument I have heard is that the
believers have been presented with lies and propaganda from the beginning and
they have never done anything but believe them, so why would they change their
minds now? And it is true they were never
really persuaded in the first place,
and that their acceptance of the New Normal ideology was never a rational
process. It was more akin to the way
cult members are recruited, through fear and constant repetition of the basic precepts. So how can the believers be made to see that the
COVID madness doesn’t make sense now? It
never made sense before, but that hasn’t seemed to matter.
I hear
the argument, and it is troubling, but I remain optimistic. That is because I do not need ALL the New
Normals to abandon ship at once. All I
need is for a few of them to lose their zeal for the new totalitarian state. If that happens, the entire edifice may
crumble. That is because those who are
pushing this are far from their ultimate victory. Yes, there are places where the unvaxxed
cannot work, ride a bus or buy food in a market, and there are places where the
disobedient are thrown into quarantine camps without legal process, but mere segregation
and demonization is not enough to create a fully locked down, unfree
society. This is only a transitional
period. Every totalitarian movement in
the 20th Century had to purge the
refuseniks by killing them, putting them in prison indefinitely, or so
thoroughly terrifying them that resistance vanished. We are seeing this process play out in
Australia and Germany and Canada and Austria and a dozen other countries, and
it is frightening, but my hope and belief is that it will be more difficult to
accomplish in the United States.
Diversity
is our strength, remember? That’s what
the woke tell us all the time. Well, in
this case they may be right.
The
medico-authoritarian state has not advanced in the U.S. nearly as far or as quickly
as it has in other countries, and there are states like Florida and Idaho and
South Dakota where it has barely advanced at all. Federalism and state sovereignty are powerful
safeguards for liberty precisely because they make it difficult for an
all-powerful central government to take over everything, everywhere, all at
once. And this is not the first time
federalism has protected us by preserving liberty in some places when it was
under attack throughout the land. Jim
Crow, which existed in much of America for seventy years, is a perfect example. There were times when a majority of Americans
would have supported the separation of races (or at least would not have
opposed it), and southern Democrats were eager to extend segregation as far as
they could. There were always states
like Vermont and Michigan, however, which would not tolerate it, and it is the
existence of such outposts that can keep freedom alive until the rest of the
nation comes to its senses. The COVID
madness in America is not found everywhere, and as long as there are islands of
sanity, there is hope for all of us.
Copyright2022MichaelKubacki
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