“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― 1984
We have
now seen two years of madness and lies, and virtually everyone who had anything
to do with COVID policy, at any level of government, has something to be
ashamed of. And so begins the
revisionist history. None of our rulers,
or their “scientists,” want us to remember the foolish and lethal things they
said and did, so we are now being told a vastly different version of what
happened only a year or two ago.
At the moment,
the most glaring example is the sudden forgetfulness about what we were told
about the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines.
They would stop transmission, we were told. Get the shots and you’re safe forever, we
were told. The path of the virus just
stops, they said. Biden said it. Fauci said it. Numerous talking heads in the state-run media
said it. But now that our betters wish
to inject all of us with new vaccines and boosters, seemingly forever, we are
told they never said those things.
In
September, 2021, the CDC definition of “vaccination” was changed from:
“The act of
introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease”
To
“The act of
introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a
specific disease.”
I
believe they called it a “clarification.”
There
are many other examples of COVID history that is now being erased, massaged, and
disappeared in order to protect the reputations, the jobs, and the liberty of
those who led us down this path and now wish to escape any responsibility for
the deaths and destruction they have wrought.
Here is my partial list of things I am writing down so I don’t forget
them.
**********
April 3, 2020---the Mask Flip
As the
initial reports of COVID were unfolding, in January, February and March of
2020, we were told repeatedly by all the important public health authorities
that wearing masks in public would not protect us from the transmission of a
respiratory virus like this emerging coronavirus. Fauci said this. Jerome Adams, the US Surgeon General, said it
too (and cited some medical research papers to support his position). Both the CDC and the WHO maintained an
official position that masking was inadvisable and might even increase
transmission and worsen the situation. One
reason these authorities were asked about masking was that those of us in the
West were seeing pictures from Asia with ordinary people wearing paper and
cloth masks as they went about their business.
We had actually been seeing pictures like this for years because many
Asians believe masks protected them during winter flu season, so some Americans
decided they should wear masks too.
There
is a racism angle to all this, or perhaps it should be called anti-racism. I was told by more than one person that they
were wearing a mask because “Asians are smart” and if Japanese or Koreans wear
masks to prevent infection, maybe there’s something to it. I would point out there was no reason to
think Asians were unusually intelligent, and that in many Asian countries,
there were societal values that encouraged conformity rather than independent
thinking, so that if you saw people wearing masks during flu season, you might
wear one too just so nobody would view you as a rebel. We remember the Tiananmen Square photo of one
man confronting a tank largely because it is so uncharacteristic of the
Chinese.
For
some reason, none of my friends took off their masks when I presented this
argument.
And
then, on April 3, 2020, after telling us all for months NOT to wear masks,
Fauci, Adams and the CDC all changed their positions. Not only was mask-wearing an appropriate
safety measure against the spread of COVID, they said, it should be made
mandatory wherever a COVID outbreak occurred.
(The WHO maintained their anti-mask position until June 8, when they too
reversed it.)
This
was truly puzzling. None of the high-profile
public health authorities cited any new study or scientific findings that might
justify such a reversal. They just all,
apparently independently, and on the same day, changed their minds.
At the
same time, it was becoming apparent that COVID policy had a decidedly political
element to it, and that red states and blue states had very different views on
what should be done. If COVID policy
were being crafted based on current scientific knowledge, authorities in South
Dakota and New York would presumably come to the same conclusions, but they
were not doing so. The eagerness of Democratic governors to impose lockdowns
and mandates suggested that COVID was being used to bring down Trump. The
prevailing political analysis at the time, seven months from the 2020
presidential election, was that America’s booming economy would return Trump to
the White House, and that only an economic crash could prevent his reelection. Governments in blue states seemed much more
willing to adopt policies that would bring about that crash.
So on
April 4, 2020, I started researching the state of medical knowledge on the
subject of masks and respiratory viruses.
I assumed there would be paywalls everywhere that would limit my access
to medical journals, but there were not.
The research was somewhat time-consuming, but surprisingly easy to do,
and after about six hours of work, I had reviewed all the serious peer-reviewed
studies on the topic that had been published over the past twenty-five
years. I read everything I could, and
not just the Conclusions or the Abstract sections, because I was not trying to
construct an argument or gather ammunition to support a particular point of
view. I knew nothing about the subject,
but by the end of my study, I knew everything there was to know.
There
was nothing ambiguous about the weight of the evidence. The answer to the question of whether public
masking could prevent the spread of respiratory viruses was quite clear. What Fauci and all the rest had been saying
in February of 2020 accurately reflected the state of medical knowledge---there
was no reason to think masking would stop transmission, and there was some
evidence to suggest masking would make matters worse. The reason for the April 3 about-face was a
complete mystery. No studies and no data
had appeared that would cast doubt on the past 25 years of research. Slapping masks on the general public was
pointless.
I’m not
going to review that 25 years of research here.
(If you are curious, you can perform the same search I did, and you will
come to the same conclusions.) But I
will summarize it this way: there was very little that was directly on point. There
were articles speculating on improvements in mask design and on the best
materials. There were discussions of the
possible dangers in wearing masks for prolonged periods. There were comparisons between cloth masks
and N-95 masks.
The one
study that was on point, the only
rigorous experimental effort, came from a group of regional hospitals in
Vietnam, and was published in 2015. There
were three groups of people among the 4862 participants: 1) those who wore
medical masks at all times for four weeks, 2) those who wore cloth masks at all
times, and 3) a control group of people who wore masks in the hospital when
they would normally wear masks but would take them off at other times. Everyone was then evaluated for clinical
respiratory illness, flu-like illness, or a viral respiratory infection (which
would be confirmed by a PCR test).
The
only statistically significant result came in the comparison between the
control group and the people who wore cloth masks. Those workers who wore cloth masks at all
times had more infections than those
who only wore them sometimes.
This
was not a very welcome finding for those who want all of us to wear masks. The CDC has attacked the study for various
(silly) reasons, but it seems to be the only
randomized control trial (RCT) study done on mask-wearing, and RCT is regarded
as the “gold standard” in methodology.
Since COVID hit, there have been no mask studies performed with a real
control group because they are now considered unethical. Since public health “experts” believe masks
protect people, it would be morally wrong (they believe), to have a control
group of people who didn’t wear masks.
This means that the 2015 study in Vietnamese regional hospitals remains
the best study we have on the efficacy of masks. And it found that wearing a mask made you more likely to get a respiratory
infection.
Since
April of 2020, there have been dozens and dozens of studies on the
effectiveness of masks in lowering the incidence of respiratory infection. I read everything that came out until about
September of that year, and then I decided there was no longer any point to it.
For one
thing, none of them were peer-reviewed (because they were released on an
“emergency basis”), most did not even attempt to identify a control group, and
the vast majority were published by “Associations” I had never heard of. In these pro-mask studies (that was almost
always the conclusion), the methodology ranged from the flawed to the
laughable, but there was nothing that could withstand any reasonable
scrutiny. Eventually, these articles
made me angry. People were dying. We needed some serious scientific inquiry. Yet all we seemed to be getting were these
publications pushing a partisan conclusion that had been ordained long before
the article had been written, or even imagined.
There
has never been a time when anyone familiar with the literature could honestly
argue that masking the general public would do anything to protect anyone or reduce
the transmission of COVID. Yet now, the
effectiveness of masks is settled. It
can never be questioned or discussed. The
relentless repetition of the lie has made it an accepted truth.
********
April 22, 2020---“Too Soon”
Trump
is largely responsible for the two years of COVID madness we have endured. He never saw it coming, and he never figured
out what was happening because he would never do his homework. Since he doesn’t read or study, he was forced
to believe what he was being told by the CDC and Fauci and the globalists who hated him and wanted him out of office.
He
should have fired Fauci. He should have
replaced the leftist political staff at the CDC with real scientists. He should have used the Justice Department to
fight Democratic governors in their desire to crash his booming economy.
After
the lockdowns went into effect in late March of 2020 (“15 days to slow the
spread”), Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was the first to dare reopen businesses
in his state in April. For this, he was crucified
by the press across the country. Trump’s
comment at the time was “Too soon.”
I will
never forget (or forgive), Trump for refusing to fight and refusing to even try to learn what was being done to
America by the radical Left.
********
Ridiculous Chinese COVID videos
In January and February of 2020,
Chinese propaganda videos began to appear, purporting to show people keeling
over and dying on the streets in Wuhan.
(Punch “ridiculous Chinese COVID videos” into your browser for samples.) These were displayed on the internet and on
TV around the world as part of the fear campaign launched at the very beginning
of the COVID madness. Many have been
taken down because they are so silly,
and now expose the amateurism displayed in the initial attempts to terrorize
us.
As the
quality of propaganda improved, less and less of it was visual. As we become more technologically
sophisticated, visual lies don’t work as well.
There are too many people familiar with video editing, photo-shopping
and the like, and are eager to expose it.
Today, using words on a page or a talking head on TV to excite our own
imaginations is much more effective for the spreading of fear. That’s why we never saw the elderly people in nursing homes, dying in isolation, or the
people in ICUs, on ventilators. It would
be ugly, of course, but what we conjured up in our own minds was even uglier.
********
Asymptomatic Spread
On
January 20, 2020, a letter from a dozen doctors in Munich was published in the
New England Journal of Medicine. They
reported that a woman had recently flown from Shanghai with no symptoms, met
with people in Germany who later got sick, then flew back to China and only then exhibited any symptoms of
COVID. This incident was the basis for
the theory of “asymptomatic spread” that was accepted worldwide.
Later,
researchers from the Robert Koch Institute (part of the German equivalent of
the CDC), spoke to the woman. She said
she had had some possible symptoms when she got on the plane for Germany, but
was afraid to admit it at the time.
The
effect of this panicked response to a single anecdote was to reverse centuries
of public health treatment of infectious disease. In the past, if something was “going around”
and you woke up with a sniffle, you would stay home rather than risk infecting
your friends or colleagues or elderly family members. We have all done that, many times. In the past, people were assumed to be
healthy unless they exhibited signs of sickness. Now, suddenly, every healthy person was
potentially dangerous. “Asymptomatic
spread” was the justification for quarantining the healthy, for closing businesses
and schools, for isolating all of us, for forced masking policies, and banning
normal human interaction.
“Even
if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in the entire history of
respiratory viruses of any kind, asymptomatic transmission has never been the
cause of outbreaks. The cause of
epidemic outbreaks is a person with symptoms.
Even if there is the rare case that an asymptomatic person is
contagious, epidemics are not driven by those carriers.”
---Fauci,
January 28, 2020 Press Conference
The
COVID madness of the last two years has been driven by a number of myths,
superstitions, and lies. Asymptomatic
transmission has been the most destructive of them all.
********
Safety Protocols, PPEs, etc.
We all
have our favorite bits of absurdity in this category. When I ask people about this, there are two
practices mentioned more often than any others.
First
is the custom that developed of masked customers entering a bar or restaurant,
removing their masks for the duration of their stay, and then re-masking before
walking the twenty feet to leave the place.
The practice seemed especially poignant and ridiculous when in addition,
all the employees in the joint were required to remain masked at all
times. It always reminded me of those
pictures you would see of Kamala and Uncle Joe and Pelosi and Gavin Newsom and
thirty other big politicos sitting around a big table unmasked while the masked
wait-staff stood over them dispensing another bit of foie gras or a drop of
pinot noir. (You don’t see those
pictures anymore since the muckety-mucks figured out that pictures like that
made them all look like Marie Antoinette.)
The
other protective measure that often gets mentioned is the directional arrows on
the floor in supermarkets and such. One
can see the logic behind this, of course.
It costs the store almost nothing to implement and lets us all know they
care about our safety. Undoubtedly, it
saved zillions of lives.
My son
and I discovered we had different reactions to the arrows. He would always push his cart in the wrong
direction and wait to be scolded for doing so.
I preferred to treat the place like the 24-hour GTE race at Le Mans, so
I followed the arrows and graded myself on the number of carts I could pass as
I wove my way through the store and zoomed past the little old ladies.
My
personal favorite, though, is still being practiced everywhere, and it seems
clear it will continue indefinitely, regardless of virus levels, mandates, or
anything else. I speak here of the
wiping down and disinfecting of surfaces.
In my
big-box, there are hand sanitizer stations throughout the store where customers
stick a hand under an electric-eye (NO TOUCHING!) Purell dispenser and get a
gob of virus-killing goo. In addition,
the janitor who cleans the bathrooms and floor spills also has the job of
wiping down every handle in the store every three hours. He has been doing this for more than two
years, and continues doing it to this day.
In the food area, with all the refrigerated and frozen cases, there are
103 such handles.
I don’t
think there has ever been a time when this obsessive surface-cleaning made any
sense. COVID-19 is, after all, a
respiratory virus, and transmission occurs when somebody launches it into the
air with their nose or mouth. Originally
(two years ago), there was some speculation that it might remain on surfaces
for a period of time, and this fear quickly became part of the COVID
madness. Purell made millions. Store shelves of alcohol and bleach and
rubbing alcohol and wipes were empty for weeks.
We
quickly learned that getting COVID from a doorknob or a shopping cart was
something that just didn’t happen. On
July 3, 2020, an article in the Lancet entitled “Exaggerated Risk of
Transmission of COVID-19 by Fomites” should have shut down this particular
mania, but as we have seen so many times, once a bit of folklore gets embedded
by fear into the public consciousness, reason and science no longer matter.
Subsequent
research also had no effect on the true believers. In February 2021, Nature summarized recent
findings in an editorial: “[T]he evidence is now clear. Catching the virus from surfaces---though
plausible---seems to be rare.” A long
article in the Atlantic that same month said the same thing. Then on April 19, Vincent Hill of the CDC
announced that disinfecting surfaces was not effective against COVID. Yet a year later, it is hard to find a
grocery store or big-box or airport or public building that does not offer wipes to sterilize your
shopping cart or a goo dispenser for your hands.
These
programs are extremely expensive.
Transit systems around the country have spent hundreds of millions
treating buses and subway cars and stations with antimicrobial sprays. And in addition to the cost, there is also
the lunacy of it all. If you check
recent news on SEPTA, the Philly transit authority, the last twenty articles
will be reports of murders and rapes on El trains, homeless people living in
the trains and stations, public defecation, garbage and litter, drug addicts
injecting themselves, and the like. The
basic complaint seems to be that SEPTA is doing nothing to stop any of
this. It is, however, still disinfecting
surfaces on a regular schedule.
********
Phrases that will always make me reach for
my revolver
“Alone
together.”
“My
mask protects you! Your mask protects
me!”
“Social
distancing.”
“Stay
safe!”
“Pandemic
of the unvaccinated.”
“Minor
and rare.”
“PPE.”
“We’re
all in this together.”
“The
new normal.”
“Essential
workers.”
“We
live in trying times.”
********
The Unforgiven
The
COVID madness has been characterized, in large part, by people who should have
known better, should have looked a little deeper, or should have performed a
minute or two of actual thought rather than blindly following the instructions
they were given by those with political and other agendas.
That is
far from everyone. Most people are not
going to dig any deeper than a headline in the newspaper or the “top story” on Action
News. Most people are not going to read
peer-reviewed studies in the Lancet.
Critical thinking skills are not taught in schools and haven’t been for
decades. Since the Left took over most
of the educational system in the 1960s, children have been taught not to
question authority. Those children are
now in their fifties.
But I
cannot forgive those who had a responsibility to the rest of us, and ignored
that responsibility.
I have
written at length already about the medical profession’s refusal to treat COVID
patients. On instructions from
politicians and public health authorities, and contrary to the oaths they took
as doctors, clinicians told patients in the early stages of COVID to stay home
and isolate themselves. There was no
treatment acceptable to the bureaucrats, so physicians
would not even examine their patients.
A week later, many of these poor souls would be unable to breathe, so
they would finally be admitted to a hospital and put on a ventilator, but many
would be too far gone at that point to recover.
Tens of thousands of people died this way, because their doctors would
not attempt to treat them in the early stages.
Doctors
were told not to treat their patients because the federal government had
decided to go all-in on a mass vaccination campaign. Since it would take years for such a vaccine
to be properly studied and obtain FDA approval, the only option was to obtain a
quickie Emergency Use Authorization (an “EUA”), something that had never been
done before for a vaccine. And in order
to obtain an EUA, regulations provided that there must be no alternate method
of treatment. That is why doctors were told not to treat COVID patients in the
early stages---because if treatment worked, no EUA could be issued, and
approval for a vaccine would have to go through the usual years-long process.
But
that only explains why doctors were told not
to treat patients. It doesn’t explain
why they, in fact, didn’t. The answer
there is simple. They were cowards, and
they would not exercise any independent judgment on the matter. To a large extent, that is what doctors do
today. They have become so accustomed to
following “guidelines” from government agencies and insurers and pharmaceutical
companies and public health bureaucrats and the hospitals or medical-service
companies they work for, they are little more than government functionaries
themselves. Across the country, it is
estimated there were no more than 200 or 300 doctors who took their professional
obligations seriously and tried to treat early COVID. And of course, those dedicated physicians
saved a number of lives.
It will
be a long time before America’s doctors are forgiven for abandoning their
responsibility as clinicians and passively accepting demands from public health
officialdom that they refuse to treat their patients.
But
America’s doctors were not the only people who shunned their duties in the face
of mass panic and government overreach.
The
very first clause in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution reads:
“Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof;”
As
many have pointed out, there is no “pandemic” exception. There’s no addendum that says, “unless the
government says you can’t hold services because of a disease.”
And
yet…. When Cuomo or Newsom or some other
governor tells churches to stop singing hymns or only allow 25% of parishioners
in, or close, what do the churches do?
They obey. Yes, there was some
pushback in terms of lawsuits over the most draconian, anti-religious edicts,
but for the most part, the response was obedience. Hymn-singing stopped because, you know,
singing causes COVID to appear in healthy people attending church
services. On Ash Wednesday in 2021,
Catholic dioceses across America banned the symbolic rubbing of ashes on the foreheads
of parishioners because, well, who the hell knows why?
Some
regulation of religious practices has always been permitted, but those cases have
always been on the edge, at the extremes.
Occasionally, Christian Scientists will be ordered by a court to take
their sick child to a medical doctor before he dies. There has been litigation over animal
sacrifices and hallucinogenic drugs.
There is a vast body of case law on employment discrimination where the
question is whether an employer may fire an employee for their religious
beliefs of practices. (One of my
favorites was a case from California where a school district was permitted to
terminate a school bus driver because his cult espoused the religious sacrifice
of children.) But the shutting down of
routine religious practices and rituals is something that has not been
permitted, and which the de Blasios of America would never have attempted
before.
To be
sure, there was some rebellion among the faithful. When police tried to stop a thousand orthodox
Jews in the Williamsburg section of New York from attending a rabbi’s funeral,
the Jewish mourners refused to disperse until force was used. Both de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot
Shea defended the use of violence to break up the funeral.
A month
later, as Leftists filled the streets in NYC to protest the killing of George
Floyd, the city made no attempt to discourage the demonstrations until police
were attacked and rioting began.
All of
which brings me to the next group that owes all of us an apology—the cops.
Those
who are given a monopoly on the legal use of violence bear a tremendous
responsibility to use that power thoughtfully and within the bounds under which
that power is granted. Because the circumstances
under which violence may be appropriate can arise suddenly, cannot be predicted,
and may involve danger to the officers, I always give cops the benefit of every
doubt.
But
that doesn’t mean there are no limits.
When civil authorities in cities and states across the country exceed
the authority they possess and order police to stop constitutionally-protected routine
religious practices like Sabbath services or funerals, it is the duty of
policemen to ignore those orders. “I was
just following orders” is never a legitimate excuse for the misuse of power.
I have
heard the argument made that police are in no position to decide issues involving
complex legal issues, but there is nothing complicated about this. While mayors and governors may have some
traditional emergency powers that might be triggered by a virus outbreak,
activities related to “religion…and the free exercise thereof…” are exempt from
the government’s reach. If a rabbi says Jews
should stop doing funerals for a while, fine. If an archbishop says he’s
locking the church doors, so be it. But
if Andrew Cuomo or de Blasio try to shut down the practice of religion, they
are violating the law, and so are any policemen who follow their commands.
The
frightening aspect of police behavior during the COVID madness was not that many
cops chose to obey the officials who run our towns and cities, it’s that there
was ZERO resistance by the police to the enforcement of orders that were
clearly illegal. One could understand
the plight of law enforcers who might be unsure of their professional
responsibilities, but the complete absence of any concern for the rights of citizens
in this republic must make all of us wonder about their motives. I used to view cops as the first line of
defense for my basic freedoms in America.
Now I wonder whether they are actually a threat to that freedom.
********
Official Lies, and the End of Journalism
I will
not forget the lies I have been told every single day by governments, medical
professionals, bureaucrats, and their lackeys in the media. Denial of the lies is now part of the
campaign to revise the history of the last two years. “Mistakes were made.” “We didn’t realize at the beginning that old
people were more at risk.” “For various
reasons, we miscalculated the fatality rates.”
No. They were not mistaken. I knew the truth, and thousands of scientists
around the world were trying to get the truth in the newspapers and on television,
but they were silenced by the globalist Left that was pushing the COVID madness
on all of us for reasons that had nothing to do with safety or public health.
When
forced to address the lies, the liars will sometimes claim we were lied to “for
our own good.” This infuriating
explanation was offered after the April 3, 2020 mask flip by Fauci and the US
government public health establishment.
Fauci himself said that we had been told not to wear masks because there
was a mask shortage and the existing supply was needed for hospital workers. Of course, there was no medical research
suggesting a reason to wear masks,
either before or after April 3, 2020, but let’s not spend too much time
thinking about that. Just accept that he
was lying but now he’s telling the truth, and all of it was strictly for our
benefit. Get it?
We all
have a tendency to believe, or at least we want
to believe, the people who are in positions of power and supposedly have
our best interests at heart. What
happens though, after all the fibs about masks and fatality rates and the
seasonality of the virus, and how COVID deaths are measured, is that now I
cannot believe anything the government says.
Even if the lies were “for our own good,” (and I don’t believe that),
there is now no way a rational person can believe anything he is told by
official sources, the government-run news media, and the like.
For
example, there is a story out there in the ether that mRNA vaccines have caused
AIDS. This may be a crackpot idea. To me, it sounds like a crackpot idea. The problem, however, is that we know what
the CDC and the WHO and CNN and NBC and Fauci and Walensky will say about it
before they say it: it’s a conspiracy theory and there’s no truth to it
whatsoever. They will say it is “disinformation.”
And
there will never be any ambiguity or nuance to their pronouncements. That is how you know they are lying, because
there is room for ambiguity and nuance in almost any story. There is probably some confused finding of a vaccine/AIDS
link in a published study somewhere, but no one in government or the media will
track it down and explain it. Instead,
they will only tell us the official position.
They will never acknowledge there may be some basis for the story, even
if it is easily debunked, because they do not view it as their job to report
the truth. They will only tell us what
to think.
Copyright2022MichaelKubacki
Posts
