On the current science on Covid, the failed eradication and containment policies, and the cultish reaction of American liberals

In historical terms, the Covid pandemic was never much of a much. We know now that the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is 0.89% for the most virulent strains(source: Centers for Disease Control), with a mortality rate which is an order of magnitude lower than that. For vaccinated people, the numbers are far less.

In contrast, the Black Death in Europe killed anywhere from 25 to 60% of the population, and the smallpox epidemic in the Western Hemisphere killed an estimated 90% of the indigenous population before the first Englishman set foot in North America.

Keeping those facts in mind, what the World Health Organization(WHO) announced about Covid in September 2021 is significant. The WHO said that the Covid virus, like all other coronaviruses usually referred to as “the common cold,” has become endemic. Everyone on the planet has either already been infected or will be infected, Covid cannot and will not be eradicated by vaccines, and the virus will continue to mutate into more infectious and less symptomatic strains.

This is already happening. The Omicron variant, or as the obviously cognitively declining Joe Biden called it, the Omnicron variant, has spread to every continent with symptoms so mild the South African virologist who discovered the thing called all the “hullaballoo” about it, said hullaballoo including an American travel ban on Africa, a “tempest in a tea cup.”

The liberal Democrats in America, and I include Joe Biden and many Democratic governors and mayors in that description, and most especially their online and TV supporters who have been telling us they “believe in science” since at least the 2020 election campaign, now find themselves defending very unscientific policies.

Those policies include vaccine mandates, mask requirements, school and business closings, and social distancing rules. Let’s take a brief look at these same liberal policies from the time Biden took office.

Remember what they told us back then. If only everyone would get vaccinated, then we could eradicate the Covid virus and everything could go back to normal, whatever that means. Liberals got onto their moral high horses and proclaimed that anyone who questioned the need for vaccines, or masks or school closures or any other Covid measure, were selfish, ignorant, privileged Karens who deserved humiliation, ridicule, and segregation from the rest of civilized society because their behavior could kill us all!

Liberal social media was awash with gleeful reports of Covid deniers or unvaccinated people who got sick and even died after attending “super-spreader” events. Liberal schadenfreude was oh-so-delicious to so many patting themselves on their backs behind the safety of their laptops and smart phones, and they proudly changed their Facebook pictures to let everyone know they were responsible enough to wear their fashionable masks, unlike those ignorant hick Trumpers.

The few journalists who reported on scientific dissent from that liberal narrative, such as Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate’, were mocked as crazy people who had somehow become right-wing Trumper fanatics when they helped debunk Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate conspiracy in the first place, appeared on unapproved news channels in the second place and therefore were already outcast unclean, and now were saying that all those gun-totin’ white people who had protested Covid restrictions shutting down their livelihoods last year had been right all along.

Then came the Delta variant. The liberal Covid alarmists, who Aaron Mate’ called “laptop liberals” or “lockdown liberals” who seldom left their homes even before the pandemic so they wouldn’t have to deal with their Republican relatives and neighbors in their upper middle class suburbs and exurbs, launched calls for renewed lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates.

They either ignored the Australian concentration camps for the unvaxxed or thought the Australians hadn’t gone far enough. They admired French President Macron’s vaccine passports to get into public businesses, and called for them here. They screamed in panic about the Delta variant’s infection rate and the raw numbers of the sick and hospitalized, blaming the unvaccinated as the cause of this new wave of suffering.

They conveniently ignored actual death and hospitalization rates, as well as the fact that most Americans don’t have affordable access to good health care because capitalism. It’s not unvaccinated people’s fault that the health insurance industry closed 124 rural hospitals in 2020 because they weren’t profitable enough, or that there are no mandated sick days for workers in this country.

Unfortunately for the liberals, vaccinated people such as myself are quite capable of getting infected and spreading Covid, even when we and 99% of the people we infect have zero to very mild symptoms. As the WHO says, Covid will never be eradicated, so what’s the point in mandates, masks, closures, and social distancing? Clearly, none of that stuff ever really worked and never will work. So why do it at all? Why keep doing it going forward?

Part of it is ego. The liberals, who love to trumpet their intellectual and moral superiority over their knuckle-dragging conservative opponents, don’t want to admit that they were just flat-out wrong about public policy in relation to this particular pandemic. If the WHO is correct, it would make more sense to encourage the spread of the mild Omicron variant so it has a better chance of supplanting the more symptomatic strains.

Part of it is manipulation. Scared people are easier to control. The more people who are terrified of risking public contact with strangers, or even their own friends and relatives, the less likely they are to go to a demonstration to protest, say, the Democrats’ utter failure to enact a public option, a $15/hour federal minimum wage, stop the caging of refugee children in Texas, crack down on killer cops, or, oh, I don’t know, have a sane foreign policy where a shooting war with Russia or China is acknowledged to be an Unacceptable Option.

Part of it is that American liberals have been behaving in a very cultish manner for at least the last few years, and isolation is a proven way of keeping a cult going. A good liberal Democrat will never believe anything that is reported in a conservative, Russian, or (gasp!) crazy anti-capitalist leftist news source like Democracy at Work or the Gravel Institute. If it’s not on NPR or The Atlantic or The Economist, or BBC or CNN or MSNBC or the right newspaper that has Post or Times in its name then it’s insidious misinformation and Must Not Be Believed.

Silicon Valley should be censoring all of that crap that doesn’t fit their narrative because it’s unscientific and dangerous. As Hillary Clinton recently said on Rachel Maddow, “We need more gatekeepers of information” in order to inform the public of the real facts.

For liberals, those real facts no longer include the WHO or the African doctors who have actually treated people who had the exceedingly mild Omicron variant. It is an article of faith for them that Covid is a deadly dangerous disease(it isn’t) that can only be contained by eradicating it by vaccines(it can’t be eradicated), vaccine booster shots not recommended by the WHO, the British National Health Service, or the Mexican Ministry of Health, and mask and social distancing mandates that have demonstrably failed to contain its spread.

Clearly, liberals are defending Covid policy positions which are not supported by the science, are not popular, are inconvenient at best and economically devastating at worst; not to mention infuriating to the vast majority of the American working class who are increasingly ignoring restrictions in general and scolding laptop liberals in particular.

On the bright side, populist American skepticism towards cultish self-proclaimed intellectuals of any political stripe seems to be alive and well in late 2021. That skepticism towards liberals will only grow stronger if the latter don’t admit that they just got their facts wrong and keep pushing for more authoritarian measures to contain a virus that never was the threat they said it was, and really is becoming less dangerous by the month.

That path is the path to political irrelevance, which would be fine by me. You see, I’m one of those nasty socialists who will never, ever vote for a Democrat or send one money again anyway. My reasons why are another story. Thank you for reading and have a good day or night.