The Curtain Finally Falls On The Pandemic Panic Narrative
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The Curtain Finally Falls On The Pandemic Panic Narrative
Not With A Bang, And Certainly Not With A Major COVID Win
After more than three years of propaganda, politics, and Pfizer poison, President Asterisk is finally calling “time” on the COVID emergency (aka, the “pandemic” that never was).
President Joe Biden informed Congress on Monday that he will end the twin national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 on May 11, as most of the world has returned closer to normalcy nearly three years after they were first declared.
The move to end the national emergency and public health emergency declarations would formally restructure the federal coronavirus response to treat the virus as an endemic threat to public health that can be managed through agencies’ normal authorities.
Unfortunately, the ending of the national and public health emergency declarations does not come with any “mea culpa” or acknowledgement that they were colossal errors and stand as twin titans of fascistic government overreach.
The closest we seem likely to get to anything resembling that is a virtue-signalling confessional appearing in Newsweek by one Kevin Bass, a 7th-year MD/PhD student at an unnamed university in Texas.
As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.
I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
(Hint: whenever someone arrogates to himself the power to speak on behalf of an entire group, whatever follows is highly likely to resemble bovine excrement.)
Intriguingly, Kevin Bass is also here on Substack, although his mea culpa on behalf of scientists everywhere does not appear there.
Yet Kevin’s Newsweek Op-Ed, as well as the White House decision to end the COVID emergency declarations, are noteworthy less for what they say and more for how they show the extent to which the Pandemic Panic Narrative has degenerated into conflicting cross-currents of politicking and pandering, with very little attention paid to any substantive data. They show how completely the Pandemic Panic Narrative has fallen apart even as they seek to defend (or at least excuse) the institutional parts of that narrative.
Worse, neither the White House decision to end the emergency declarations nor Kevin Bass’ Newsweek confessional addresses the unavoidable reality that, time and again, the “experts”, the “leaders”, and Kevin’s sainted “scientific community” of the CDC and the FDA, demonstrably lied about the mRNA inoculations.
The “scientific community” as well as the corporate media also demonstrably lied about COVID—the latest example of which has been the nonsensical hyping of recombinant variant XBB.1.5, which should have been nicknamed “Ingrid” rather than “Kraken” on account of the media gaslighting which has surrounded it.
The “scientific community” is still lying about XBB.1.5, still arguing that it is dangerous and deadly when the data shows its the exact opposite.
In short, yes, another wave of infections is possible. XBB.1.5 is already dominant in parts of the U.S., and many of those places have also seen a rise in infections and hospitalizations. There is no reason to believe it will fall short in making its way across the country, causing a surge in infections, illness, hospitalization and death.
When we look once more at the case counts and hospitalization data from the CDC for Kings County, New York (the most populous county in New York City), we see immediately that cases have been trending down since mid-December, 2022.
While deaths have ticked up recently, the up-and-down nature of that metric makes it difficult to describe the rise as a “surge”, while the timing makes it impossible to correlate the rise with XBB.1.5.
Hospitalizations have likewise been trending down.
More importantly, the timing of these declines—from mid-December to early January—shows that XBB.1.5 could not possibly be a controlling factor, for the simple reason that XBB.1.5’s rise to dominance in HHS Region 2 (where New York sits) aligns with the decrease in cases and hospitalizations.
By the time cases were peaking in New York in December, XBB.1.5 accounted for roughly 30% of cases. Once XBB.1.5 accounted for the majority of cases in New York, hospitalizations declined. That is not a trend that is reconcilable in any fashion to a narrative of XBB.1.5 causing a “surge” of sick people.
Nor is New York an isolated instance of this. Boston, the other epicenter for XBB.1.5 in this country, shows similar patterns both for cases…
…as well as hospitalizations.
As XBB.1.5 became more dominant in the Northeast, cases declined—which means that XBB.1.5 is not “taking over” as much as other variants (especially BQ.1.1) are fading from the scene.
Predicting a “surge” of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths given the actual trajectory of the epidemiological data is either unbelievable ignorance or outrageous deception. The “scientific community” can either be stupid and not know what the virus is actually doing, or it can be malicious and is simply lying about it to sex up and sell the mRNA inoculations.
Kevin Bass disingenuously attempts to softpedal such duplicity.
I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
However, an error such as presenting XBB.1.5 as dangerous and deadly is not any sort of “scientific mistake”, but outright deception. The CDC’s advisory boards claiming to be looking at the safety signals in VAERS regarding the mRNA inoculations at a time when the signals were not even being computed is not a “scientific mistake”, but a shameless lie.
Where Kevin’s confessional falls short is that he presents the errors as largely “innocent”—the product of arrogant hubris—without mentioning the clear malevolence, echoing a sentiment he tweeted late last week:
Actually, the “opposing” perspective on pandemic policy was and remains considerably more right than the establishment perspective. The “opposing” perspective actually used the real-world data to show that the policies were not merely ineffective, but counter-productive—which the real-world data showed from the very beginning.
Portraying the defects of the Pandemic Panic Narrative as simply differences in policy and perspective is about as honest as the White House rationale for a slow ending to the COVID emergency declarations (i.e., not at all):
“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system — for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.
Ending the emergency declarations means ending the Emergency Use Authorizations for the dangerous and toxic mRNA inoculations as well as the ineffectual PAXLOVID therapeutic from Pfizer. Ending the emergency declarations means ending Pfizer’s feeding at the public trough to push these poisons on people.
The only place that will cause chaos and uncertainty is on Pfizer’s quarterly income statement (which is already taking a beating as people correctly turn their backs on their snake-oil). That is the one place where a little chaos and uncertainty is nothing less than a fitting karmic consequence.
What Kevin Bass fails to realize is that “scientific mistakes” are largely forgivable. They are the errors that can be easily admitted in the face of new data. They are the mistakes that I have made more than once in writing about the pandemic.
When I first wrote about the COVID pandemic, I and others speculated that COVID might be as deadly or even deadlier than the Spanish Influenza.
In hindsight, that speculation was way wide of the mark. Assessing the COVID outbreak as a global pandemic was way wide of the mark. Yet at the time, those assessments were not unreasonable. Over time, the data showed otherwise, and reasonable people moderated their positions on the disease accordingly.
What was unreasonable was the unreasoning response from government and the “scientific community” to that global pandemic. Actively seeking to destroy society in the name of saving society is nothing short of psychopathy, something plainly obvious even in 2020.
It was cold comfort last August to have Kevin Bass’ “scientific community” confirm that I was right about the lunacy of the pandemic policies.
Neither Kevin Bass nor the White House are willing to admit that the establishment voices ignored the data and allowed Pfizer and Moderna to manufacture clinical test results for the mRNA inoculations which never matched the real-world data.
Nor does Kevin Bass show any understanding of the consequences of the “scientific community” choosing to dive headfirst into the cesspool of pharmaceutical authoritarianism.
Yet that was the choice the “scientific community” made. That was the choice the political leaders of presumptively democratic governments the world over made. When presented with the opportunity to play God not merely with viruses but with people’s lives, these “experts” eagerly embraced the moment, cast aside any notion of ethics, of morality, of legality, and even of simple decency in a mad rush to claim power to which they had neither legal nor moral right.
Although the White House is right to finally end the emergency declarations, it has yet to admit those declarations were a mistake from the beginning, and that the CDC and FDA were not merely wrong about both COVID and the mRNA inoculations, but willfully, intentionally, and maliciously deceptive. Kevin Bass is willing to state that the CDC and FDA were wrong, but glosses over all the ways in which they were willfully, intentionally, maliciously deceptive. Neither the White House nor Kevin Bass are saying anything that calls out or seeks to end this foundational mendacity upon which the Pandemic Panic Narrative was built.
Both ignore the reality that the lies continue to be told even as the Pandemic Panic Narrative collapses everywhere. By glossing over the ongoing deceptions by the “scientific community” over COVID, they are concocting yet another lie—that the policies promoted by the Pandemic Panic Narrative were ever legitimate or rational. Those policies were never legitimate nor rational, but rather irrational and fascistic in the extreme. Those policies were the shameless power grabs of a shameless entrenched scientific and healthcare bureaucracy.
For their sin of hoping to wield the power of a dictator over the lives of ordinary people, both the “scientific community” and the “experts” within that entrenched scientific and healthcare bureaucracy have forever forfeited any credibility or legitimacy regarding their views on public health policy. They have disqualified themselves from wielding any sort of power or influence over public health policy. They must never again be allowed to wield such power over people’s lives.
That is the admission we need to hear from both the White House and the likes of Kevin Bass—and it is the one admission we are not going to get from either of them.
The Curtain Finally Falls On The Pandemic Panic Narrative
This is a great, fair piece thank you. I'm not an American and, I suppose it applies
to everywhere else but, how can they push the "medicine" still so strongly
when it is Emergency Authorisation only and there is (and really never had been) no emergency. This is what I can not understand in a logic of covidians , it looks like many have "progressed" in their paranoid fear to think that the "inoculation" will keep them safe no matter what.
It looks like ending the emergency is not going to affect EUA of the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, though: "Uh Oh. EUA law just changed with that omnibus spending bill from December that no one read"
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/uh-oh-eua-law-just-changed-with-that