The mainstream press is, inevitably, publishing pandemic retrospectives to instruct us on how to think about the most catastrophic “public health” policies in living memory. You won’t be surprised at the message: yes, mistakes were made but we did our best overall and promise to do better next time.
A point-by-point would be tedious so let’s just zero in on the core. He claims that he is going to adjudicate and transcend the “forever war between lockdowners and let-it-rippers.” See how it works? The writer gets to set up the game in such a way that he wins hands down. As for the lockdowners, he assures us that the U.S. “American restrictions were remarkably light” especially when you consider “the global context.”
Hence: because some governments in the world brutalized human rights for months and years and still do, the United States should be seen as quite reasonable. After all, “Roads were open without checkpoints, streets were free to walk, and stores that remained open were, well, open, for anyone to visit.”
Ah blessed freedom! No checkpoints and you can walk the streets with a mask! Actually, there were checkpoints. They were digital. Even as late as the winter of 2020, travelers from New York to Massachusetts received texts and phone calls from the Sheriff demanding that they quarantine for two weeks in both directions. Plus, people who arrived at airports were met with contact tracers who threatened them to cough up information about where they were going and staying.
True story. So this is just a flat-out lie.
Also he fails to mention that the stores that remained open were the big-box stores while small businesses by the millions closed. As for “anyone to visit,” that was not true in New York City where the mayor turned all public accommodations into “vaccinated only” segregation, which this article fails to mention. It fails to mention many things!
Really, I’m absolutely not going to pick through this deeply dishonest piece of commentary simply because the point of the piece is not to be truthful, sincere, open, frank, accurate, or anything like that. The point of the piece is to instruct readers in various fantasies so that they can adopt the right attitudes.
That said, we just cannot let pass this passing swipe at the “let-it-rippers.” I’ve been deeply involved in this debate now for three years—even 16 years!—and not once in that time have I heard a single person who opposed lockdowns advocate for “let-it-rip.”
Not once have I heard that phrase from any traditional public health advocate. Never. The only people I’ve heard use that phrase are the people who push lockdowns, such as NIH’s Francis Collins who plotted with Anthony Fauci to demonize anyone who disagreed with the soul-crushing pandemic response. It was they who said “let-it-rip” not us.
Ironically, it was the lockdowners who pushed “let-it-rip” policies among two main groups: the elderly and the working classes. Governors in several Northeast states, and New York in particular—despite recent denials—absolutely pushed COVID-infected patients into nursing homes despite protests from the homes themselves.
I’m just quoting, not interpreting! This was the let-it-rip policy of the lockdowners themselves. And rip it did, right through the most vulnerable population groups, who made up 40 percent of the deaths in the early months of the pandemic.
Another group in which they pushed for let-it-rip policies was for “essential workers” who were never allowed to leave the factories or the big-box stores or the mining crews or hospital staff or the construction and repair crews. People who worked with their hands and did things that our masters called “essential” were shoved out in front of the virus with zero concern for their well-being.
It was a pure case of egregious classism: New York Times writers get to stay home and order food and groceries online, while the working classes face the infection bravely. This was particularly outrageous for nurses. They faced the virus because that’s what they do and everyone cheered their bravery. They gained natural immunity. Then only a few months later, governments demanded that they get vaccinated and fired them if they did not!
Nothing about any of this in Mr. Wallace-Wells’s article of course.
Let’s leave this aside and look more broadly at the idea that traditional public health practice—what every civilized society did for the last 100 years until 2020—amounts to “let-it-rip.” It’s simply not true. Every elderly person has long been schooled to stay away from messy crowds during the flu season. For generations, magazines have told this population to do that. In fact, our whole calendar ritual instructs them in this sense: Winter is a time for staying home and being around those you love. Save the frolicking for the Spring and Summer when infectious disease is not such a pressing problem.
It’s just astounding. Can you imagine how much better it would have been had public health taken a different course? For example, we could have learned of the need to lose weight, eat healthy, get some sunshine, do some exercise, cut it out with substance abuse. Instead, they closed the gyms, locked people inside, restricted our breathing with pointless masks, and drove people to drink and use drugs. The results: more obesity and more ill health!
The message of the authorities concerning ill health was nothing short of: let it rip!
Meanwhile, the people who objected to all of this were yelling from the beginning that this was a disastrous path. They did not advocate letting the virus rip through the population. They advocated for better health, better science, better medicine, plus freedom and human rights so that society and markets would not fall apart and so that children could get education and people’s jobs and businesses would not be destroyed.
It was the lockdowners who said with regard to bankruptcy, ill-health, ignorance, demoralization, and despotism: let them all rip!
A policy that respects people’s intelligence and volition, plus the ability of nursing homes to manage their own institutions, is what is consistent with proper management of pandemics. The scandal that our masters in so many bureaucracies overrode all of this with their own plans is for the ages. It’s no wonder that people are extremely upset about it too, and there is nothing that the New York Times says now that is going to calm this public anger.
Well, when I read this piece this morning, I had decided to let it go and say nothing. But the crack about “let it rip” is really too much. It reveals the underlying truth that we are no closer now than we were two years ago to getting some truth from the venues that pushed lockdowns on us and thus bear huge responsibility for the resulting calamity.
They know it. We know it. Everyone knows it. It’s only a matter now of getting the venues to admit it.
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